"This enthralling fresh study of Messalina, Emperor Claudius’ third wife, presents a powerfully erudite evaluation of an often underestimated, misjudged woman."
Revealing the need to contextualise and revaluate commonly-held understandings of historic figures — especially women, whose stories are often distorted by the cloudy lens of patriarchy — Honor Cargill-Martin’s Messalina - A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery is history at its most vital and engaging. In this case, the female figure in question is Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius, a woman whose reputation as a cruel, sexually insatiable conniver comes courtesy of how she was first written about by Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius.
As Cargill-Martin explains in her introduction, “Messalina’s legacy in Western cultural consciousness is hardly surprising given her treatment in the ancient sources”. In the years following her execution, and snowballing through the centuries, she became seen as “the archetypal ‘bad woman’, a monstrous personification of the intersection between male fantasy and male fear”.
Given the extent of the “destruction and bastardisation of her history”, it’s difficult to establish many facts about Messalina’s life, which is exactly the point of this book. Through meticulous research and peeling back one-sided patriarchal gloss, this book reveals Messalina to be a political force, as well as a sexual one. As empress, she was “the most powerful woman in the world”. She “shaped the political landscape of her day and pioneered new methods of court politics”.
Enlightening as it unpicks and redresses prejudiced accounts of Messalina’s life, this is also highly readable and often exhilarating.
| Primary Genre | History |
| Other Genres: |
This is the story of Messalina - third wife of Emperor Claudius and one of the most notorious women to have inhabited the Roman world.
The scandalous image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless and sexually insatiable schemer, derived from the work of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, has taken deep root in the Western imagination. The stories they told about her included nightly visits to a brothel and a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute. Tales like these have defined the empress's legacy, but her real story is much more complex.
In her new life of Messalina, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin reappraises one of the most slandered and underestimated female figures of ancient history. Looking beyond the salacious anecdotes, she finds a woman battling to assert her position in the overwhelmingly male world of imperial Roman politics - and succeeding. Intelligent, passionate, and ruthless when she needed to be, Messalina's story encapsulates the cut-throat political manoeuvring and unimaginable luxury of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in its heyday.
Cargill-Martin sets out not to 'salvage' Messalina's reputation, but to look at her life in the context of her time. Above all, she seeks to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously circumscribed by currents of high politics and patriarchy.
Messalina A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery features in the following genres: History, Biographies & Autobiographies, Ancient history, Biography: historical, political and military, Biography: royalty, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Biography: general, History and Archaeology
Messalina A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery is available in Hardback
Messalina A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery was written by Honor Cargill-Martin and published by Apollo an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Messalina A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery has 352 pages
