Hello! It's been a little while so I thought I'd better update you all on where we are. I am waiting for the proofs right now as all the copy edits are done, but most excitingly I have picked a cover! There's some tweaking and fiddling before I can show it to you but hopefully it will be soon! I am terribly impatient and I am getting more impatient as I get more excited/nervous about the whole thing.
So that's where we are and as it's basically "some stuff is happening over there and hopefully will be done soon but *shrug emoji*", I thought I'd give you a little thing to thank you all for your patience.
For the cover design process, I was asked to send an extract of the book to the designer Mark Ecob so he could get a feel for the book. Obviously, this was like picking which of my baby's arms to send so I made my partner read the whole book and pick a section and this is the bit he chose.
Until you can read the rest, you can tune into the podcast I do with Within The Wires's Janina Matthewson, History is Sexy which my mum describes as "very funny!" And who can argue with my mum.
For context, this is the beginning of Chapter Three. Agrippina has spent a year in exile on a tiny island, during which time her husband has died and her brother, sister in law and niece have been assassinated. Her weird uncle Claudius has taken the throne and has recalled Agrippina and her last remaining sibling from exile. She is returning to Rome.
"The fact of her return must have been a huge relief for Agrippina as there were several days of chaos following Caligula’s death and there were several ways that the situation could have ended in Agrippina being politely murdered on her island instead of being pardoned. This was what had happened to both her grandmother Julia the Elder and her great-uncle Agrippa Posthumous when Tiberius took the throne, so there was precedent. But luckily for her, the world fell in the right order and she was recalled to Rome with her property reinstated and everyone was terribly sorry that she got exiled because of that plot thing and, as it turned out, they all agreed that her brother was a right bastard.
***
When Agrippina stepped back on Roman soil, she was about 25 years old and Nero was four. He had been living with his paternal aunt for a year, since his father’s death, and hadn’t seen his mother in maybe two years. Obviously, no source says a thing about reunion, but I hope it was lovely. Agrippina should have come back to Rome cowed and vulnerable, ready for a quiet life and perhaps chastened by her experience, but instead she came swaggering back like Liam Gallagher. She got off the boat from Pontia ready to swing for anyone who came near her. Her first act, in collaboration with her sister Livilla, was a massive middle finger to the senate and to Claudius’s palace. She exhumed the half-cremated, half-buried remains of Gaius from the gardens where he had been left, and held a proper full cremation and funeral for him which ended with his interment in the imperial Mausoleum of Augustus. This seems, to a lot of historians, to be a totally baffling move, partly because Gaius had literally just been brutally murdered and replaced for being a nightmare, which would suggest that people probably didn’t want to think about him, and partly because Agrippina and Livilla had both been exiled by him. So why on earth were they making a big show of demonstrating their loyalty to an assassinated tyrant? Why were they antagonising Claudius like this? They could have just had a small, private funeral, or not done it at all. They could have interred Gaius in any other mausoleum or burial place that wasn’t a huge monument in the centre of Rome. But they went as big and swaggering and public as possible. There is a selection of possible reasons for the sisters to make this their first action. My personal favourite is the idea that they did it to stop Gaius’s ghost from haunting both the gardens where he was buried and the palace in which he was murdered.
This idea comes from a throwaway line in Suetonius, right at the end of his biography and in the same breath as the description of the murder of Gaius’s wife and infant daughter, that Gaius’s ghost haunted the gardens in which he was half buried until his sisters completed the interment, and that ‘something horrible appeared’ in the palace in which he was murdered until it eventually burned down.[1] This is a useful glimpse at how enormously superstitious the Romans were. Ghosts and spirits of the dead creep through an awful lot of their religious practices, and Gaius wasn’t even the only emperor ghost. Suetonius also has a good story about Augustus’s ghost haunting his childhood nursery and beating up anyone who entered it without first being properly purified.[2] Which, to me, says an awful lot about dead Augustus’s ego. But even at the more average level of society, there was a general cultural fear of evil spirits that needed to be pacified, and good spirits who should be commemorated in various religious festivals during the year. The idea of malevolent ghosts and spirits is not necessarily a left-field one for the Romans, and maybe the sisters were doing the Romans a favour by purging the angry spirit of Caligula.
There were also familial reasons why properly burying their murdered brother was a good move for Agrippina and Livilla: it was good pietas. Pietas was a uniquely Roman concept and is untranslatable into English. At its most base level, it meant duty to one’s family and one’s country. But this simple definition strips pietas of its depth and makes it sound a lot more optional than it was. Pietas also referred to various flavours of love, religious devotion, obligation, justice, gratitude, respect, compassion and friendship. Pietas also contained a strong sense of natural law and natural justice, as in concepts which were perceived to be entirely fundamental to human behaviour. To act in a manner which undermined pietas, therefore, meant to act unnaturally. In this context, as the only living members of the family, Agrippina and Livilla had a strong obligation in both a religious, civic and familial sense (so far as those things could be separated) to lay their brother to rest properly with the correct rites and rituals. Failure to do this demonstrated not just a lack of familial duty and compassion for their brother but also a personal duty to Rome. It’s quite possible that the idea of leaving their brother unburied was genuinely upsetting to Agrippina and Livilla, regardless of how they felt about his personality.
The other possibility, and the most likely one from a boringly rational perspective, is that it was good optics to bury Gaius because it’s pretty clear from a bunch of sources that even though the Praetorian Guard and senate absolutely loathed Gaius to his bones, the people and armies of Rome thought he was quite, quite wonderful. This is an underlying theme in almost all the surviving sources about Gaius’s reign. Even Suetonius allows 20 paragraphs of his biography to record the good things that Gaius did and how popular he was among the plebeians. There is a slightly earlier source which covers the assassination of Gaius in enormous detail and that’s Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities.[3] Josephus describes Gaius showering the Roman people with gold and silver coins. And Gaius walking happily and comfortably among the people of Rome. And he also lets slip this little gem when describing the assassination: ‘it was no small danger they had occurred by killing an emperor who was honoured and loved by the madness of the people, especially when the soldiers were likely to make a bloody enquiry after his murderers.’[4] His narrative goes on to describe a private bodyguard and a citizenry who were appalled and incensed by the behaviour of a small group of senators. Josephus literally writes these people off as women, children, slaves and Germans (the worst barbarians), who were too stupid to know what was good for them. And so, the people and the soldiers formed a lynch mob and started hunting down and murdering people they thought were involved the assassination. A lot of people died. It took two days to sort everything out. All this happened just a few months before Agrippina and Livilla arrived back in Rome, and there was no way they were unaware of their brother’s popularity with the army and people of Rome. Their decision to give Gaius a proper burial and inter him in the Mausoleum of Augustus alongside their glorious parents, their murdered brothers and their tragic sister can only be a reminder to Gaius’s remaining fans that his family lived on. It was a reminder to the Roman world that they were still the children of Agrippina and Germanicus, still the great-grandchildren of Augustus and still the sisters of an emperor. It was a clear reinstatement of their power as Julians."
[1] Suetonius, Caligula, 59.
[2] Suetonius, Augustus, 6.
[3] Josephus was a Jewish scholar who was captured by the emperors Vespasian and Trajan when they broke the siege of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple of the Jews. He was born Joseph ben Matityahu, but, like all great colonialists, the Romans didn’t handle non-Latin names very well so they renamed him Titus Flavius Josephus. Now Josephus knew which side his bread was buttered and managed to save his own life when he was captured by telling Vespasian that the Messianic prophecies of the Torah (you know, the ones that predict the coming of a Messiah, the ones that form the fundamental foundation of Christianity) spoke of Vespasian himself coming from the east (Jerusalem) to conquer Rome and become emperor. Vespasian was apparently deeply susceptible to flattery and went for it, taking Josephus back to Rome with him. He became emperor and kept Josephus around forever. Josephus instituted himself as a semi-formal explainer of Judaism to the Romans and wrote a series of books about Jewish history for elite Roman readers. One of which was the Jewish Antiquities.
[4] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 19.115.