Today, we are covering the story of Agrippina the Younger, Nero's mum (who you will remember from Episode 2). History, as they say, is written by the victors and also by the male victors. So it's a miracle that we know anything about Agrippina at all! She was one of the last of the Julio-Claudians, so close to power as the sister to an Emperor, the wife/niece of the next Emperor, and the mother of the Emperor who had her killed. It is, as usual, a wild ride! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: doomedtofailpod@gmail.com
Today, we are covering the story of Agrippina the Younger, Nero's mum (who you will remember from Episode 2). History, as they say, is written by the victors and also by the male victors. So it's a miracle that we know anything about Agrippina at all! She was one of the last of the Julio-Claudians, so close to power as the sister to an Emperor, the wife/niece of the next Emperor, and the mother of the Emperor who had her killed.
It is, as usual, a wild ride!
Pics via the CC and #AI
Main source - Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World: 9781643130781: Southon, Emma: Books
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Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
[Music] in a matter of the people of State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my fellow
Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you we're back on
Wednesday Taylor how you doing good how are you are you awake now yes I put my D Coke in this martini
glass so I look cooler I did see you drink out of the
martini glass earlier and was like man Taylor uh did not hold her not drinking
before going to the grocery store Spidey too seriously sometimes to keep I did
sometimes to keep myself amused during the day I will drink seler water out of
different glasses that's fun much more fun to drink salzer water
out of a martini glass than it is to just drink it out of the can so yes that's why I had a martini glass at my desk yes absolutely um well we're back
on Wednesday we are doomed to fail we're going to be covering today Taylor story which is I
assume historic and probably not Wulan Vulcan volcano related no we're not
doing a volcano today what are we doing are you ready okay great
um I'm like oh is it my turn um cool so wait did you do an intro oh yeah sorry
we are welcome to d a fail I'm fars join here by Taylor we cover two stories a week one about True Crime one about
history and or volcanoes and or engineering disasters we don't know because the format of our show is like the weather it changes constantly uh and
I'm joining here by Taylor and I'm fars she's Taylor She's a future corpse I'm not um I have a couple clarifying points
the shirt says future corpse which I love two I think that like so when I we
talked about Oklahoma in the last episode that the musical like it came out 1943 but it's like about the 1800s Oklahoma you know it's about like
Frontier Oklahoma if I I wanted to clarify that I feel like that was important um also important is that
Patrick Wilson played curle the main character at Oklahoma on Broadway which is unbelievable you love Patrick Wilson
what is what is your thing with Patrick Wilson he's just a very very handsome
man he's so generic looking he looks like every man he could be a fireman he could be a dad he could be a teacher he
could be a sex offender I don't like he could be anyone one of those characters like
he's so generic looking he's not a sex Fender but I
think but I I don't I'm pretty sure he's not um yeah I don't know I like him I like him in The Conjuring movies I like
him in Oklahoma I just like the guy hey have you seen a Five Nights at Freddy's is what it is no it's fun it's on
peacock if youall haven't seen it watch it it's actually a really fun movie oh fine I will sounds good seg
right unrelated like okay here we go I said I was going far back this time to Ancient Ancient Ancient Ancient times
again which is lovely and I know I called Mary Shelly the mother of the monster when I talked about her because
she wrote Frankenstein obviously um but I want to talk about another mother of a
monster agina who's Nero's mother whoa cool right so we talked about Nero in
episode two I just relistened to it it's the one where I say a lot of ums just kidding I say a lot of Ms and all of
them but it's also the one where I say South Korea a bunch when I met North Korea and I will never forgive myself for it or you for not telling me so um
but you that to hear about nuro no I shouldn't be forgiven absolutely not
so my main source for this is by this this woman Dr em Emma souin who also
wrote the book a fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that I used in my Naro episode she wrote a book called
agripina the most extra extraordinary woman of the Roman World hilariously yesterday I wasn't even drunk when I did
this I was in the morning I Instagram messaged the author to ask her a question I know she saw it because she
has read receipts on her Instagram messages but she did not reply which I do not blame her for and please don't block
me you are so good with these reaching out to authors thing I think it's not the first time
I've been like hello and she just like doesn't answer me and I'm like that is fine and totally but um anyway so if you recall Nero was
the last Julio claudian emperor of Rome he was a very mean guy got a lot of
people killed he wasn't in town when Rome burned but he did return to Rome and built a huge Golden Palace in the
ashes people were like unamused he was a tyrant they they like the rumor is that
he's the ant like if when the Antichrist comes back or comes the first time or whatever he will look like Nero because
that's how bad Nero was and is remembered as um you'll also remember that in the St yeah in his statues he
has a neck beard so like and he's kind of chubby so you're like that's the statues you know so he probably had more
neck beard in real life and um another fun thing he did he was in our Pompei
episode for a second because remember when Pompei got like their uh right to
have Gladiators taken away because they couldn't handle it because they kept having riots yeah which is kind of funny
um his wife was from there um all those things but um oh he's also the one that won all those musical competitions cuz
he was like the number one Fiddler or the there weren't fiddles but you know what I mean like the number one everything and he was an actor and like
all these things he probably didn't want to be Emperor really he was just like kind of a rich kid who who had a lot of
power but he became emperor because of his mother because his mother like put
him in the positions and made some sacrifices and did these things to make sure that he was the one who would be emperor
he Taylor yeah this isn't a neck beard it
is like this is not like a gas station neck beard this is like literally he
only grew a beard on his neck right yeah if I shaved all of this
and just had this it's it looks like the um the underside of like a like a helmet
or something like the strap of a helmet oh like he has a strap on yes oh my God okay so I don't want to Yu people's yums
but yuck too yes definitely yuck facial hair um so one thing about history that
I talk about a lot that I'm sure you've heard me talk about is there's so much stuff we don't know right and history is
written by The Victors which means we don't know a lot about people who lost things you know and it's also written by
the male Victors women just don't write things down because they haven't been able to you know they've been like put
in positions where you know they're a mother they die early in child child birth they're not the scholars um even though I'm certain they want wanted to
be or had inclinations to do so they weren't so the fact that we know anything about agripina is really
remarkable because we know very little about the women of ancient times like we know like what they did is like what you
know what women did we don't know about like specific women as much as we know about Agri because she was that special
that we hear about her makes sense so it's like interesting that we even know about her because being a woman sucks is
a sentence I wrote I wrote um the thing that I messag Meed Emma the author Dr
souan about is um was she like Hillary Clinton like why are there so glass ceilings and I was like really like riled up that's probably also why she
didn't reply so there's that wait what did you ask CU like I was like well is
it like a Hillary Clinton situation where like she should have been president or like you know but like she
couldn't because she was a woman even like in 2016 cuz like there are women in the US like first ladies like Nelly Taft
and elanar Roosevelt Hillary Clinton who like could and should have been president you know like they were like
really good at things and they could have done it it's just because there were women that either like wouldn't
have even thought about it or like didn't get it and then there's like Michelle Obama who's like too smart to want to do it she's like could you
imagine no thank you uh noely so our first point of contention here Hillary's
not president not because she's a woman she's not president she didn't [ __ ] campaign in Blue Dog Democratic
states she literally assumed that the union vote would go to her and that's
exactly the vote that she did not get which was 100,000 people across three
states right but a whole bunch of stuff happened because she was a woman I agree she should have gone to Florida she
didn't but no [ __ ] Florida Florida's gone Florida's every whatever like the amount of money being dropped that's
done that is a done State like it's not that's not it is definitely not swinging now but in Hillary's case if she'
actually campaigned for the union vote in Blue Dog Democratic states in the
rust spell quote unquote like she would be president she literally campaigned wrong and I'm sure she would have
probably had more more you know votes if she wasn't a woman but she also [ __ ] that
up it's on her no totally but she also was a woman it's on her for sure but
also like it's out of the people who worked for her but being a woman didn't help her like being Amanda for some
reason okay so we gotway again again we agreed ultimately we agree
yeah no I I definitely like um yeah there were a lot of assumptions
made and she should have tried harder but she she tried so hard her people should have done have better strategy
but also she was in charge of them so whatever also okay so if we're really going to get into weeds but Bill also [ __ ] her like she did get [ __ ] over
by Bill like being associated with Bill did not help
so whatever this is not this is not a retro on the 2016 let's move on we've
talked about him before okay so anyway let's go let's stop talking about 2016
let's talk about about this well I am riled up about it but
that's not what we're talking about talking about agripina she was born Julia agrina egina the younger on
November 6th 15 the year 15 in Cologne Germany it wasn't called cologne at the
time but that's where she was born clone is gorgeous I went there one time um at
After High School it's so beautiful there's so many beautiful like Cathedrals it wasn't totally like
destroyed like Dres in was a lot of like German cities were totally destroyed during World War II um but it it wasn't
and it's very very pretty um but she was born there she was one of the most prominent women in the Julio claudian
Dynasty because she's Rel directly related to like Julius Caesar and Claudius the people who like started
Rome those are the people that she's a part of she's like part of that like the Empire family she was the daughter of
the the Roman general germanicus and agripina the Elder she was the granddaughter of Augustus who's one of
the first Roman emperors and her father was when she was at the time she was
born her father was the nephew and air parent of the second Emperor tiberias so
she was like total royalty her dad was going to be Emperor um Augustus is also kind of a
demigod like she thinks she's part god so she has this idea in her head this
whole time that like this Godly blood flows through her veins she is part of like the rightful people
who should rule Rome all of that you know what I mean um not really it's just
like what she was always told like that's like she like truly believes that just how like people in like a lot of
people like believe that God made them King you know oh yeah hey doesn't help your your narcissism I just think exists
was was was Rome just a country tree back then Rome is an Empire what do you mean
like it's Italy it's like okay so right now Rome is a city in
Italy so back then what was
Rome Rome was like Italy wasn't a word it was like Rome the Roman Empire ruled
over the place that like was Italy up through the rest of Europe all the way
up to Britain it's like about to go over to Britain and then it goes like East into like turkey and like Mesopotamia
and then it also goes south into like the top of Africa and Egypt because this is when like Cleopatra and Mark Anthony
are going to like be around this time as well so it's like all that like Middle East all of Europe it's a huge thing and
it's all the Roman Empire so it's like a country you know yes sort of it's hard to imagine
because like Germany because so she was born in Cologne or that is now her dad's
name is germanicus because he like conquered a lot of that like German land but the word Germany didn't exist it was
like the German people in Latin or whatever um like the country of Germany
didn't exist until like this is I don't know late 1800s early 1900s before that it was just like
a bunch of different small like principalities and kingdoms and things and then it got together to be one country so there's no really like idea
of like a country and like right now because it's just like there's little people that rule all over the
place and then they're going to get folded into this Empire and you're in the Roman Empire when Rome brings you
things like aqueducts and Roads so when the Roman Empire was in Britain they were like technically under this
tyrannical rule but also did really well and when Rome left Britain because they
needed to go and try to save things in in Italy and further south um Britain
crumbled because no one could could take care of anything anymore you know BR all this stuff use it but it's here so I
think I think I think the idea of a country is not really a thing yet right the way
we think about it borders are not really a thing yeah yeah or they're like
everywhere you know because you're like all of a sudden you're in this person's land and this person's land or whatever like and as a as a regular dude you're
like I don't know man who am I paying taxes too today you know you're trying to like not die and and and who knows
but um yeah so she was born in Germany that her dad was like a really big General people really really liked him
um there's a lot of nicknames in this story in this family there's tons of people named Nero agripina Agrippa Julia
Claudius Lucius like there's just these same names over and over again um but I
think it's also a really distinctly Roman ancient Roman thing to know a lot about your ancestry so the Dan Carlin
where he talks about the Roman Empire he opens talking about Julius Caesar and
how Julius Caesar's house had a room with like statues and death masks and
like basically heads like statue heads of his ancestors going back Generations like they would and they would be like
these are the people are going to be disappointed in you if you like don't do this and like aren't successful and all that so there was like a lot of like you
knew who your family was if you were Rich going back a really long time and you were like I come from Warriors I
come from Emperors I come from Kings so like you like they know that now with like the royal family but like my family I know my great great grandma but like
that's it you know I didn't know that they I don't even know that far that far back yeah so that was that was a big
part of it too um so agena was part of this like Royal Line she was expected to
be successful but be successful at being a woman you know like have a lot of babies you know have boys things like
that that was what an expectation of her her mother agripina the Elder had a ton
of babies she had nine kids um like before she was 30 like really fast and
loose with the babies and um her dad was kind of traveling around Europe
Conquering the little principalities everybody loved him everybody thought he was going to be Emperor she was like
things were good unfortunately her dad dies in Turkey uh probably of some
disease that was killing everyone you know everyone dies disease and everyone everyone was so sad her mother made a
huge show of like bringing his ashes into Rome to be in tuned um all the people in the story are are cremated so
she has his ashes and and it's you know a big deal um he was only 33 so he's 33 he had nine children and he was like
going to be emperor when he died so now agripinaa and her siblings are in Rome
they great uncle tiberias who was the uncle of their dad is now the emperor so they have like good stuff going on
they're like doing well you know what I mean yeah they're like minor Prince and
princesses or whatever Mari glasses my Coke out of my mar glass
not that Mari glasses are easy to drink out of they really I was going to say because every time you do it you gota like move the like half your headset I
know it's like I'm like shaking um okay so now agripina is in Rome she's Rich
she's expected now to become a wife and a mother and do all that so she gets married when she's 13 to a guy named Gas
domu abair bear oh my God abaris it's call him ganas it was terrible anob
barbas anob barbus and um hey did you see the Tik Tac I made where I
pronounced the name of your last episode no I looked it up and I like I put it on
Instagram and I looked it up but I think I said it right but now I can't remember what it is but um anyway the very Russian so also if anyone speaks Latin
and wants to give us these pron pronunciations you're welcome to but so when she's 13 she gets married in the
year 28 he's is not great he's like twice our age so he's like almost 30 and
no one likes him so one one historian describes him as a man who was in every
aspect of his life detestable so this guy sucks Jesus and um something about
Roman weddings um when she got married the the way that it would work is she would start at her home and she would
get all dressed up and she' put on a veil and like you know wear all these jewels and then she would walk to his house and someone would carry her over
the threshold and they did that because you like accidentally tripped because
you couldn't really see because you had a veil over your face if you accidentally tripped walking into your new home that was a bad Omen so they just wanted to take that out of the
equation and lift you up over the husband didn't necessarily have to even be there he wasn't really seem to be
like a part of it so you could have a wedding ceremony without him and he would come home and be like I have a wife now I was out shopping or whatever
so well easy going who knows if he was there or not but they're married um she
there's some bad rumors about him um he was just he just was not a very nice person um he killed a he killed someone
one time at a party CU they didn't drink as much as he wanted them to he was like trying to get them to drink and they didn't so he killed them he ran over a
child playing with a doll in the street he pulled poked someone's eye out because they made fun of him like at at
an event he was charged in many different ways with adultery incest
treason gambling cheating a lot of things he was just like not a good guy and he was also Nero's dad so Nero was
born in 37 was which is actually a lot later than they got married it was like
you know 10 years later when they when they had Nero which is weird because her mom was so fertile like you would think
that she would have had more babies with him but maybe they just like tried to avoid each other because he was so awful
was she was 25 yeah
okay I think so yeah um so he's her only child um the when they asked asked his
dad what he thought about having a son he said quote I don't think anything produced by me and egara could possibly
be good for the state or the people wow it's not very nice and sounds like they fought all the time they named him
Lucius and araras he was totally right right maybe that's not true because he
was so right but yeah they said that so it was also a thing when you had a baby um the they would take the baby and they
would put it on the floor and then the dad would have to accept it or not he would accept it by picking the baby up
and then like taking it as his own so they so he he picked him up and and he
you know took him into his family how um how do you not
accept I mean like if you think that your wife was like potentially having an affair and it could be someone else's
baby you know then you look at it and you're like oh you know I don't think it's mine or maybe it like has a
deformity and you're like I don't want it so you don't pick it up and you just like walk away from it and then you don't have to deal with anything because
you just can like get rid of it because you never it was never yours you know um Nero was also born breach which
means that he was either like foot first or butt first which is like really hard
if you have a breach baby now they'll do a a a a C-section but in that case obviously they couldn't so it was like a
really really difficult birth and we know about it because agrina wrote about it in her memoirs so she actually wrote
down like a lot about her life and she had put this in here kind of like a battle story like I went through this really terrible thing like having this
breach baby and um and I survived and he survived and we don't have her memoirs
anymore like they no longer exist but we know that she wrote them because plenty the Elder wrote about it this guy was
everywhere and why is he in every story yeah and so I'm like he was everywhere but I guess he's the one that wrote
everything so that's why he's everywhere you know you just know you got to call Plenty when something
happens yeah like I don't know what a life that like you we are still reading your book you know 2,000 years later and
you died in Pompei and like all the stuff that we know about you like that's pretty pretty wild I don't know yeah um do you
remember what Nero did after he killed his his wife from the really bad thing that he
did he married that he created a castrated unic boy as his lover mhm
yes and he like pretended that he was the dead wife um for he and he married
that boy so terrible and after Nero had done that someone said They wish
that it's not I mean he really loved I'm so sorry that I kicked you he kicked her to death
and then he married a castrated boy and pretended that it was her for the for the rest of
his life okay maybe it's not that romantic I romantic is the right word but um
but later people would say that they wish that Nero's dad had buried a castrated boy instead of agripina
because then Nero never would have been born so kind of funny we they just don't like any of
these people so anyway that her first husband dies in 41 of Edema which is
when your body like bloats and like retains a lot of fluids and you basically die so he died from that and
during this time agren's brother become comes the
emperor and there's like a lot of stuff that happens like yada y her brother is now the emperor his name is Caligula and
incidentally Caligula means little boots it's like a cute little nickname you'd give to a
kid this G be cute because his parents loved him it's kind of cute he hated it his name was guas but he like people
called him cul he didn't like he's like I'm in charge now don't call me that you know but he got it because when his dad
was you know going around Germany and all these things he loved they loved Gaia so much that they would bring him
to all the battles and give him like a little baby like armor roman armor thing
and like a little baby roman armor hat and like little shoes and they'd be like oh come with little
boots that's why he's called Caligula which is cute and he didn't like it obviously he got older um but you know I
think I'm GNA say Caligula because it's more fun to say than gas who knows but this is agra's first real taste of power
and it's shown in two ways um first she's given the honors of the Vestal virgins do you know who the Vestal
virgins were no they're like these women and you're
supposed you're supposed to be a Vestal Virgin for like you know Decades of your of your life if you given this honor and
they keep the fire of Rome lit like a literal fire they just have to like tend
to this fire and they're given all these privileges like they can go places without an escort they can they don't
have to like ask man's permission to do things like they're given a lot of power so her and her sisters were given those
those things that the vessel virgins had which is a really big deal that she was able to do stuff without having like a man with her well they're not virgins
makes sense well she isn't because she has a baby right and her sisters probably
aren't either but um and who knows the vessel virgins were really virgins yes
honors of the vessel virgins got it I mean the vessel virgins were supposed to not be married so technically I think
they were supposed to be virgins but who knows it really happened them um
so this is the one thing that I said I would tell you last week about the
atmology of the word fascism remember I mentioned that last week so one of the things that she would do um when she was
uh you know at this point she could go into town but she would have like um guards and people like you know with her
to make sure that no one hurt her and the guards would hold um these bundles
of sticks so the word bundle in Italian is fasio and they would hold these
bundles of sticks and they kind of walk in front of her and um they would carry
it and act like they were just like carrying this wood and like everything was fine no big deal but in the wood was an axe so they could at any point kill
you which is the idea that like they're pretending everything is fine but at any point you can be axed to death is where
the fascism comes from interesting okay yeah um we
you would think it would be more like directly TI you would think like Nero would be like the reason why the name ex
you know there's other things there were other problems in Rome to name it after than a bundle of
sticks with an ax inside of it whatever totally but I think it's the fact that it was like hidden and that like you're
pretending that everything was okay and then like really anyone killed at any time right and N definitely did that
like of course if you pissed Nero off he would kill you um so the other thing that gave her a lot of
power is she was put on a coin with her sisters so ciga Cula is on the front and
her and her two sisters are on the back and they're the first living women on coins it's like a really big deal there's a whole bunch of coins in this
um so some people are like that's great others are like we don't love this we don't love him being around with his
sister so much and they accuse Caligula of having this like complicated incest
plot with his sisters and his sister dilla's husband lepidus people were like
they're just having like a sexy incest thing and like accusing them of this over and over again um to like I don't
know to like talk [ __ ] about Caligula okay and and um but one thing
that is is true is that he loved his sister Drusilla the most he just loved her he just like he was obsessed with
her when she died he was so depressed they started to be terrible at ruling so agripina worked with lepidus her
sister's widower to kill Caligula her brother and
it doesn't work they get caught and lepidus gets um gets executed
and agina and her other sister levilla have to go to an island to be
exiled for a while and Nero is taken away from her he's gone somewhere else no so it also reminds me at one point um
Kila had been exiled before he was Emperor I can't remember exactly how this happens but when he was a teen
exile to Capri and he with tiberias the emperor and they sort of kept him as a child when he should have been growing
up so he definitely didn't have like the emotional maturity other people had because he hadn't done a lot of things because he had been like locked up for a
while but like on Capri like I don't know crummy River I don't know what Capri
is it's a beautiful island in Italy is it that's that's it it's gorgeous yes I've been there and it's beautiful um
it's and also like the the island that ago was exiled to was called ponza it's
a volcanic island so it's beautiful as you know um and obviously like she wasn't like put on the beach with like
nothing you know there were like she had tons of like enslaved people to take care of her it wasn't like she was by
herself I don't understand like if I I'm looking at Capri now and like dude if
this was my life and I'm looking at the food there just like why are you even fighting why are you doing anything and
it was just like that for him like he had tons of stuff he wasn't like yeah he wasn't poor he was like Rich exiled to
an island like food looks so simple like it's just like tomatoes olive oil
parsley pasta like shrimp freshly caught obvious like just like dud just do that
you don't need to yeah wear a crown like just hang out yeah totally so I know um this is
also for our audience not for you but there's a book um called cersi about cersi who was the the goddess who is in
the in like The Iliad where um odyss like stays with her on her Island for a
while but like her backstory is that like she was exiled to this island by like the gods but in the island in the
book seriously that came out a couple years ago she like lives in this like cool cavernous Castle on the island by
herself with lions so she has like cats around and then she spends all day just
like weaving and like doing crafts and then when she's hungry she opens up this magic cabinet and inside of it there's
always bread and wine and cheese and I'm like that sounds amazing yeah I by
myself and do crafts all day and eat wine and cheese and bread nap whatever you want yeah like okay sure whatever so
anyway she just exiled and then she ends up coming back um but there's a lot of like exiling people instead of killing
them and all of that um eventually Cula gets assassinated and there's some other
things that happen it's possibly there a plot against him by agina to keep Nero in the line which makes sense cuz it's
everything that she lived for like she wanted her her son to be to be Emperor but also like it was her brother so kind
of who cares but I guess she tried to kill him before so she obviously didn't really care so she um her husband dies
while she's in Exile and she's trying to find a new husband and space for Nero she goes um she ends up going back to
Rome because her brother gets assassinated and now Claudius who is agren's Uncle her father's brother
becomes Emperor so he's the uncle to Caligula the Emperor who just got got assassinated and to agina got it yes
it's there's a complicated Family Tree in this that I'm not going to write down
so she's the only person um left from her family now her her family has all
been killed in certain different ways um Claudius has a wife named Melina and she
has agripina sisters killed for some reason so there's all sorts of things and agripina is trying to like inch her
way back into Power she ends up marrying a dude named chrispus who's rich but a little weird he died and he left her a
lot of money so people think that she may have killed him or like had him poisoned because to get all the money to be inherited but also like he's weird
there's a weird story that plenty the Elder wrote where like Crispus like fell
in love with the tree and he like loved this tree and he would like poor in it
and kiss it and like pretend that he was like hanging out with it he sounds like he has a slight mental defect that went
undiagnosed yeah so it's not great so she's married to that that rich guy he died however he died she end up with a lot of money she's just like living her
life and like getting near her already to potentially be emperor in the meantime Claudius is married to Melina
and they have a son named britannicus so britannicus we talked about him in the Neo episode we'll get back to him he's
younger than Nero he'll always be a child to history because he never grows up um claudus also has a bunch of
daughters but who cares because they're girls and um so in a bid to help her son
be Emperor Melina conspires against Claudius and she gets killed so now Claudius is
single and still Emperor egina is around hanging out with people there's like she's obviously like sleeping with
people and hanging out but like whatever um there's some like some of the stories that we have about her are like about
her sex life and like I think I mentioned this back in the very beginning with cathine the great like
that's not the most interesting thing about you but it's what we have written down so it's like what we have about her and who knows what's true and what isn't
but something you know now like the Julio claan Empire kind of like hanging in a hanging in a balance um and they
decide that agripina will marry Claudius who is the Emperor who is her uncle and
that is illegal amazingly that is that is bad when like all these like first cousins
of are getting married Mar your uncle is bad so they have to change the law to be able to get married so she's married
he's like a lot older than her obviously he's like her dad's brother but they get married and he um oh I put okay so it's
against the law and they get the law changed but not after he said this he says he calls her in one of his speeches
my daughter and foster child born and bred in my lap so to speak marries her
yeah I know it's it's exactly what happens in the Game of Thrones dragon show like the
uncle and the niece get married and it's awful like they see like we're super happy and you're like are you it's gross
see Cole so now she's buried to the emperor she's Empress so she's on coins
again this is her second time on coins things are going going well one of claudius's kids is a a woman named
Octavia and ago wants Octavia to marry Nero to make him more po more
um like more popular More in line so poor Octavia had been married to someone
and agripina demanded that she married Nero so they accused her fiance of incest with his sister which is like
okay you just married your uncle you're going to start like throwing the incest card around or other people like kind of
not the time but she does that that is worse though brother and sister's
worse okay Uncle incest beats out
brother sister and incest and brother sister incest beats out parent child
incest opposite not beat the this is worst yeah
yeah I'm going I'm going from worst wait I'm going from best to worst versions of in it's all bad yeah so unfortunately
poor um octavia's First Love dies by suicide after all his accusations so that's sucks to be him um
so okay claudius's daughter is
Octavia Claudius adopts Nero because he's married to Nero's mom SL his niece
Aina that's when they give him the name Nero is when he's adopted by the emperor codus has to disown Octavia so that Nero
won't marry his sister because otherwise they would they technically be like step siblings so he
has to disown Octavia so she's like a different person but she's also like his cousin she's not like not related to him
but first cousins are fine so he marries his cousin SL
stepsister okay this the family tree here is like it's like when you read the
Bible and it's like this guy's related to that guy and that guy's the son of that guy and it's like Jesus like just it's all politically motivated
exactly exactly um so just some like fun little stories that happened during this time so Nero is like a teenager but he's
married to Octavia if you'll remember everybody really liked her she was like she was like okay I'll just I'll be a good wife you know all all the things
eventually Nero does have her has her killed and people are really sad about it um he Nero kind of like is like it's
exactly like Game of Thrones dragon version what is that show called life of the
Dragon I don't I don't know you're not gonna be surprised to hear that I've never seen that show Dragon anyway
exactly like that because he like snakes out and like you know goes to bars in the middle of the night he probably has a bunch of illegitimate kids you know
he's just like a like a teenager just going out there even though he's married to Octavia some fun things that happened
to agino while she's Empress so she um they turn cologne the city that she was
born in into a little colony called Colonia Claudia ARA agenus or agreenium
um and it's like a little Colony for veterans to go and like live their lives
and do crafts and they become glass manufacturers and that's why a lot of like beautiful glass comes from that part of Germany is cool it's the first
colony ever to be named after a Roman woman which is cool um she was given a
really fancy Carriage that was reserved for priests um so she was really like
becoming like powerful in her own right she became like the head of some like factions of the petorian guards of like
the armies um she would also sometimes wear wear clothes that were kind of like stepping over some boundaries so she'
wear like a cloak that she shouldn't wear or a color she shouldn't wear just like be a little bit more powerful than maybe she should have been as a woman so
she's kind of like starting to step into these spaces um a fun thing that's another aside is she was friends with a
dude named nures so like everyone has the same name I don't know he was an engineer so actually I thought about this when you were talking about
engineering disasters because I got one for you they decided to drain the Fine
Lake in Italy because they needed that land for farming and they need to divert the water so to drain the lake they
built these massive underground tunnels they built them like by hand like there was no Dynamite there were no power
tools like by hand built these huge underground tunnels and then they had
this big party and they had this fake battle in the lake with 20,000 people
and like all these boats pretending to have this mock battle doing all these things at the end of the battle they like hit a button and the the lake was
supposed to drain and it didn't nothing happened and everybody was like really embarrassed and then a couple months
later they tried it again and it drained too fast and everyone almost drowned
Jesus battle Yeah so
stupid yeah it's like a big spectacle you know and then the second time they didn't have the battle they just had
like some people on the water and then they they were like eating at like a banquet table and then the water like
rushed in and everybody almost drowned so that's fun she also somehow met um
King Herod like of the Bible the guy who killed all the babies but I can't really remember figure out exactly how they met
but this is It's Bible times during this time um so you'll remember from episode
two that her and Nero conspired to kill Claudius her husband Uncle theemperor
probably with poison remember they had that witch in the basement yeah yeah does that famar so this witch in the
basement who like poisons people and they give Claudius poison and he doesn't
die cuz he's like a big fat guy who loves eating and drinking so he's used
to having like a ton of like food and all these different things and then he ends up like and he ends up throwing up
because he drank like a barrel of wine so he didn't get poisoned that's when drinking can save a life hilarious
exactly so he like that guy in the Titanic remember that story like that cook on the Titanic who um was like yeah
every five minutes I'll go back to my room and just like drink more whiskey and then in the end there were like his like blood temperature like never went
down because he was so drunk he was so smart good for him yeah something to go out
um so um so and eventually they do they do
kill Claudius with poison um Wikipedia counts 12 people who died directly because of agripina whether or not she
like had them killed or killed them directly um it's probably more with like political decisions and things that she
made but when he died um when Claudius died she really wanted to control the narrative um she wanted Nero to become
emperor Nero had already drowned Banus his step brother so like he was already gone he was he was the one to do it um
but right away you can tell that people were whispering to Nero like your mom is trying to do something like she's trying
to take your power she's trying to do things and so she was on coins for the third time she was around um she was
always behind the scenes um but never actually like allowed in allowed into the Senate she couldn't actually do those things because she was still a
woman she tried one time to like kind of go in and he wouldn't let her and it was embarrassing so like you know she's a
little bit like there starting to kind of separate their intentions her and
Nero um he was young but he was like Roman royalty young like he'd been through a lot um it's possible that
agripinaa was trying to get britannicus to be in power and then Nero had him drowned so now he tries to kill her do
you remember how he tries to kill his mom you don't have to remember this I do
not he stages a shipwreck and tries to get
the ship to crash and have her die and have her drown in that shipwreck
essentially like who cares about everybody on the ship let's deliberately sink the ship so that my mom drowns and
no one knows that I did it this seems needlessly complicated push her have
someone push her downstairs like that is much easier yeah they said that before she
died um like years before she died she went to see a psychic and the psychic said um her son will be Emperor but he
will kill her and she said let him kill me provided he becomes Emperor so she that's probably not true but you know
that's like the thing that she has eventually um there's a lot of different stories about how she died but he sent a
slave to stab her for him and so the slave stabbed her like in a palace somewhere they had had like a really
nice night of like hanging out and then he put her on this boat that like almost crashed and she got home and she was like traumatized and then he had someone
come and stab her so it took a while to kill her he probably tried to poison her too but she was probably one of those
people like everyone should be at this time where you like try to make yourself IM immune to different poisons you know
you should have just tried the homeless guy stabbing her in the first place I
know so yeah anyway much easier that's how she dies she wasn't the first women
woman that Nero killed um but you know she got what she wanted her son became emperor um she died in 59 she was only
44 so she had been married three times all three of her husbands had died and
her son ended up killing her um in in a really weird way and then later after
Nero was overthrown and he was killed um they did build a statue of her at some
point because they you know used her as a good example of like a Roman woman and a Roman mother but she was um yeah she
had just been through a lot in 44 years and it was a crazy she lived a big 44
years a big 44 years I mean she was like exiled a couple times she was on coins
three times she lived in these like beautiful places she had the ear of the emperor in many different ways she had
traveled all over you know pretty pretty cool I mean for a woman that's the way
to do it you should be rich and not die in childbirth that's another big another key then have your kid hire a homeless
man to Kill You by stabbing you in the back yeah yes yeah I like was he was an enslaved person he wasn't necessarily
homeless but yes we don't know we don't know if the man the enslaved guy had a
home WR write that author you should write that author and ask for that I'm afraid she's going to block us
I'm writing it from our our team Instagram so who knows what
she's gonna say yeah yeah I'm definitely gonna tag her when I say this was my main source for this book so for this
podcast so I'm sure she love it well hopefully hopefully this will come around and then you can do your next
interview you can do your next author interview yeah yeah that'll be fun so
funny so fun I mean I would love it I think she's too famous for me so what
what made you want to go back to ancient Rome there's so much ancient stuff that I haven't gone um you know I'm I spent
so much time in the last 500 years so I was trying to tell a story from like before again I also have always wanted
to read this book so I wanted to go back and read it um and also I know one of our part of our um
surprise that we're doing in for for our fans in the future um we're going to be talking a lot more about women's history
and I this is a really big one I think it's like one of the first like one of the Roman the Roman women that we know
the most about because we don't know a lot about a lot of them and even what we know about Rome is just like all from
Plenty the Elder because he happened to write everything down but like there's plenty of people who didn't write [ __ ]
down but we just like happen to know this like little tiny bit of it and we get we catch this glimpse of a woman who
you know worked really hard and then we catch a glimpse of her in other women's stories as well like I think it's very
close to to an an Bolin who she you know let herself be
executed so her daughter could be Queen essentially you know boil it down so so
these women who do everything for their families for their sons for their children and um history just like gets a
little snippet of them and then some historians like ancient historians sexist historians are like you know she
was a you know she just like slept around and she wanted all this power but then you're like well so did everyone
else you know like okay so did literally everyone else she just woman would you
let yourself be executed so that your kids could be City commissioners absolutely not no I think
they're no Senators US senators um no I I don't think I don't
know no I no I don't think I have that I don't I think that's fine I feel like they also yeah I'd be like nah I think
they can just get regular jobs that's fine yeah but I don't have the I don't have that Royal bloodline so what do I
know you know it's you might you can only go back the same world you can only
go back to your great grandparents that's so true maybe this
is all just because I have some sort of ancient Roman bloodline when the maybe I'm related to agripa because her dad
was like in Germany so maybe he was like [ __ ] around with some of my people and we're related somehow I mean we're
all related you said there's only a thousand of us and we're all related God it goes back so close oh my
goodness you're right we're pretty much a story about me this is about me oh
[Laughter] I yes yes it is yes almost exactly mirrors My Life um
and the times I've been exiled so that's it lovely well thank you for
sharing uh our little journey back you know what I was saying while you were talking I was like man somebody should really make a movie about the fall of
the Roman Empire I'm I'm sure they have you think
there's a there's literally a TV show called Rome that was on like HBO for a while a while ago I'm gonna go back and
listen to Dan Carlin's Roman episode oh my God it's it's like 10
hours of content it's not like an episode it's probably longer than 10 hours to be realistic but yeah it's a
it's a wonderful yeah sweet 12 out of well
thanks for sharing is there anything you want to share before we we hop off um yeah my my friend Lonnie texted
me um laughing about how when we were talking about all the pepper that the Romans got from Indonesia and I said
that's not my opinion it's just colonialism she thought that was really funny so thank you Lonnie for laughing at that
and if anybody finds my jokes funny let me know I need the validation text fars
let him know um send us an email um s us an email at Doom toell pood gmail.com
you can Instagram message us um I won't leave you on red like I've been left
on really blowing This Woman's spot up oh my God she's so cool she's gonna
block me Us in two seconds so I just want to do it as I get as I get in there um but yes follow us on the socials at
dlod the email is dopod gmail.com and we will join youall again next
week sounds awesome thank you thanks fire bye
all