Neil Bernstein’s work on Nero’s second wife, Poppaea Sabina, is a recent instalment in Oxford University Press’ Women in Antiquity series, which aims to provide ‘compact and accessible introductions to the life and historical times of women from the ancient world’. In many ways, Bernstein’s work fulfils this goal well. It is a highly readable, clear and succinct account of a complex period of Roman history, which also reflects on the primary sources and scholarly tradition surrounding Poppaea. While there are a few inexplicable errors, parts of it should be very useful as a teaching resource for undergraduates.
As with virtually all women in the ancient world, the major challenge for the historian researching Poppaea is the lack of primary sources detailing her life, and the complete absence of any account told from her own perspective. However, in common with other writers in the Women in Antiquity series, Bernstein makes a virtue from necessity. The gaps in history demand creativity and lateral thinking from scholars, forcing them to use a wide variety of other sources to flesh out the sketchy fragments that have survived of women’s lives in ancient Rome. So, for example, Bernstein considers the possible relationship between Poppaea and her nurse in the light of literary tropes around nurse figures and explores how her wedding to Nero fitted with Roman marriage customs. The work thus provides a good introduction, not only to Poppaea herself, but also to the wider political, social and cultural context in which she lived.
As Bernstein progresses through Poppaea’s life, he also interrogates the history of scholarship on the empress. He exposes, for instance, how antisemitism entwined with misogyny in Edward Gibbon’s interpretation of the story that Poppaea interceded with Nero on behalf of Jewish priests, as recorded in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities. Generally, Bernstein does well in elucidating issues with interpreting ancient sources more broadly, often clearly setting out the problems inherent in certain claims and the limits of what it is possible for us to know as ‘fact’. This is a particular strength of the work, as it introduces students to the process of historical research and interpretation more generally, as well as to the specific history of Poppaea’s life and times.
However, investigating in depth the difficulties of interpreting certain aspects of the ancient sources can itself cause difficulties. It can make it seem that any part of the narrative which is not investigated in this way is, by contrast, trustworthy and to be taken at face value. Of course, the usual caveats on the unreliability of all ancient evidence are given in the introduction, but with Bernstein’s authoritative narrative voice it is hard to avoid giving the impression of a factual, reliable account, whenever the sources used are not explicitly interrogated. This is perhaps an inevitable problem with any account of ancient history, but it can have unfortunate consequences. For example, Bernstein states that ‘Messalina, the emperor’s wife at the time, included adultery with the Elder Poppaea among the charges against Asiaticus’ (p.17). While he goes on to interrogate the motives that Tacitus and Cassius Dio ascribed to the empress, the initial charge that Messalina was directly responsible for the death of Poppaea’s mother goes unquestioned—and indeed is repeated later when dating Poppaea’s first marriage to ‘most likely before 47, when Messalina condemned her mother’ (p.23). While the series’ aim to be ‘compact and accessible’ naturally prevents detailed investigation of every single source, an extra ‘supposedly’, or similarly brief rephrasing, would have been valuable here and in several other places, to avoid unintentionally depicting some of the ancient historians’ claims as solid fact.[1]
The final quarter of the book turns to Poppaea’s afterlife, briefly surveying significant receptions of Poppaea in later music, literature and film. Most space is given, with good reason, to the pseudo-Senecan drama Octavia, Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea and Sienkiewicz’s 1896 novel Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, subsequently adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster in 1951. In his summaries of these works, Bernstein brings out how certain elements of Poppaea’s representation—most notably her great beauty—have remained constant, while others have been adapted from century to century to address the concerns of each age. He also introduces readers to the innately political nature of classical reception, again with a particular focus on how antisemitism and misogyny have influenced the later depiction of Poppaea. On this latter point, it is to Bernstein’s particular credit that, alongside his focus on these canonical depictions of Poppaea, he also highlights several lesser-known works by female writers, namely Julien Gordan’s 1895 novel Poppaea,[2] and Stephanie Fleischmann’s libretto for the 2019 opera, also titled Poppaea.
In any brief, introductory work of this kind, it is easy for scholars to disagree on what constitutes a necessary generalisation versus a problematic oversimplification. For example, in discussing the risks inherent in Otho, Poppaea and Nero’s ‘love triangle’, Bernstein uses some earlier examples of adultery trials to support his arguments. While the parallels he draws here are convincing, less convincing in my view is the unnecessarily sweeping statement he makes that, while American sexual mores have changed much in recent decades, ‘no such changes occurred for the Romans. They did not change their restrictive patriarchal code during spans of several centuries’ (p.37). Such a broad claim ignores some extremely dramatic changes in the legal and institutional framework for Roman sexual cultural during the late Republic and early principate, such as the shift from so-called cum manu to sine manu marriages, Augustus’ unprecedented Julian marriage laws, the later supplementary Lex Papia-Poppaea, and Claudius’ introduction of uncle-niece marriage.[3] While Bernstein does discuss the Lex Papia-Poppaea, as it was sponsored by one of Poppaea’s ancestors (pp.22-3, 85), other such changes are not touched upon (it seems particularly odd never to mention that Agrippina was Claudius’ niece as well as his wife).
While there were a few such instances of what seemed to me to be unnecessary oversimplification, more puzzling were several mistakes made in describing Julio-Claudian genealogies. Augustus did not take Livia from her husband ‘while she was pregnant with the future emperor Tiberius’ (p.50), but when she was pregnant with Tiberius’ younger brother Drusus. Marcellus was not ‘Augustus’s biological son’ (p.46), but his nephew (and Bernstein does briefly mention later (p.73) that he was the son of Augustus’ sister Octavia). Nero’s father, whom Bernstein refers to as Gaius Domitius Ahenobarbus rather than Gnaeus, was not ‘the son of Augustus’s sister Octavia and her second husband Mark Antony’ (p.47), but their grandson, via the maternal line. Furthermore, Bernstein refers several times to Agrippina providing Nero’s strongest connection to imperial rule, but only as the wife of Claudius and sister of Caligula. While he acknowledges that Agrippina was popular as the daughter of the Germanicus, nowhere does he explain that Germanicus was the grandson of Octavia and Mark Antony on one side, and the empress Livia on the other. Equally unexplained is the fact that Agrippina had a direct biological connection to Augustus through her mother, who was Augustus’ granddaughter—an extremely important factor in promoting Nero’s claim to the throne. These omissions and errors combine to give an inaccurate picture of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and one that—ironically, given the series’ focus on women—underplays the importance of the female line in the construction of imperial succession during the early principate.
In the grand scheme of things, the errors I spotted are relatively small and no doubt simply a case of ‘Homer nodding’. However, in this sort of book, when so many generalising statements are made without footnotes, being able to trust the author’s word is of the highest importance. It is a shame that these inaccuracies undermine what is otherwise a good, undergraduate-level introduction to Poppaea’s life, times and afterlife.
The production quality is of a high standard throughout, with no obvious typographical errors. Sources are given only in English translation, with the exception of a short quotation from the libretto for Monteverdi’s opera, which is also given in Italian (p.136). While undoubtedly a matter of house style for the series, including Latin and Greek quotations alongside their English translations would have added to the value of the work for students of the Classics. There is also a short appendix which surveys the main literary sources for Poppaea’s life (although Bernstein does also use a small number of coins and other visual sources in his investigation). While this appendix does not expand greatly on the information offered within the main body of the work, it is nevertheless useful to have these brief summaries of each source grouped together in chronological order.
Works Cited
Boatwright, M. T. 2021. Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context, Oxford University Press.
Edwards, C. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome, Cambridge University Press.
Severy, B. 2003. Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire, Routledge.
Treggiari, S. 1991. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian, Oxford University Press.
Notes
[1] Boatwright’s recent monograph, which Bernstein frequently references, provides an admirable counter-example of how more nuanced language can be used to discuss the malicious interference in trials attributed to Messalina and other imperial women (Boatwright 2021: esp. 20, 72-3).
[2] Julien Gordan was the pen name of American writer Julia Grinnell Storrow Cruger.
[3] See e.g., Edwards 1993: 34–62; Severy 2003; Treggiari 1991: 13–36.