"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 |
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