Latest / Nero: Mad Tyrant or Misunderstood Emperor? — Fexingo History / Nero and the Assassination of Agrippina the Younger
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know we've talked a lot about Nero's relationships—with his wives, his advisors, even his subjects across the empire. But today, we're going to tackle the darkest relationship of all: the one with his mother, Agrippina the Younger. Luna: And we're not just talking about a strained mother-son dynamic. We're talking about murder. Lucas: Exactly. This is the story of the assassination of Agrippina in 59 AD. It's one of the most infamous crimes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the details are almost surreal. The ancient sources—Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio—they all tell pretty much the same story, though they differ on some key points. Luna: Before we dive in—if this episode adds something useful to your understanding of Roman history, the way these conversations stay ad-free is listener support. You can help keep us going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: It really does make a difference—and we appreciate it. So, back to 59 AD. By this point, Agrippina had already lost influence with Nero. She had been sidelined by Seneca and Burrus, and Nero's relationship with Poppaea Sabina was becoming serious. Agrippina saw Poppaea as a threat and apparently tried to win back her son by reminding him that she was the one who made him emperor. Luna: Which is a dangerous thing to remind a paranoid emperor. Lucas: Exactly. So Nero decided to act. But he didn't just send assassins—he tried to stage an accident. The plan was to drown Agrippina in a shipwreck at sea, specifically in the Bay of Naples. He had a vessel built with a collapsible cabin, weighted with lead, so that when the mechanism was triggered, the ceiling would crush the occupants. Luna: A collapsing boat. That's… elaborate. Lucas: It's almost like a scene from a thriller. Nero invited Agrippina to a festival at Bauli, near the Bay of Naples, and after a feast, he escorted her to the trick ship—a galley that looked normal but was rigged to collapse. The plan was to have it break apart at sea, and then a nearby vessel would pick up Nero's men, leaving Agrippina to drown. Luna: But it didn't work, did it? Lucas: No, it didn't. According to Tacitus, when the mechanism was triggered, the cabin collapsed, but Agrippina and her companion Acerronia were in a part of the couch that didn't get crushed. The ship broke apart, but Agrippina, a strong swimmer, managed to escape and was rescued by a fishing boat. Acerronia, who cried out that she was the emperor's mother, was killed by the rowers. Luna: So she survived the assassination attempt and made it to shore? Lucas: She did. She swam to a small villa on the Lucrine Lake, part of her own estate. And then she made a critical mistake: she sent a freedman named Agermus to tell Nero that she was safe. But that gave Nero a chance to frame her. He had Agermus arrested and accused her of sending an assassin to kill him. Luna: Wait—that's the cover story? That she tried to assassinate him? Lucas: Yes. Nero now had to finish the job. He couldn't let her live after she'd survived. He called in Anicetus, the commander of the fleet at Misenum, who had invented the collapsible ship. Nero ordered him to take a squad of marines to Agrippina's villa and kill her. Anicetus carried out the order—surrounded the villa, broke in, and found Agrippina alone with a single slave girl. Luna: What did she say when she saw them? Lucas: According to Tacitus, when Anicetus and the assassins—the trierarch Herculeius and the centurion Obarius—burst in, Agrippina looked at them and said, 'If you have come to see me, say that I am well. But if you have come to kill me, I know that my son is not behind this. He did not order his mother's death.' Then she bared her belly and said, 'Strike here—the womb that bore Nero.' And they killed her. Luna: That's incredibly dramatic. But do we know if that's what she really said? Lucas: We don't. Tacitus is writing about sixty years later, and he's clearly shaping a scene. But it's the version that has stuck. After the murder, Nero reportedly examined his mother's corpse and commented on her beauty. Then he panicked and rushed back to Rome, where he spread the story that she had plotted against him and committed suicide. Luna: Did anyone believe that? Lucas: Not really. But Nero had the Senate on his side—they were afraid of him—and they issued a decree of thanks for his deliverance. They even voted to expunge her name from official records, a kind of damnatio memoriae. But the stain never washed off. Suetonius says that Nero was haunted by nightmares for years afterward. Luna: So the assassination of Agrippina is this pivotal moment—Nero crosses a line from which he can't come back. Lucas: Absolutely. From that point on, he became more paranoid, more ruthless, and the Senate and the people began to lose faith in him. The murder of his mother is often seen as the beginning of the end for Nero. And it's a story that reveals so much about the cutthroat politics of the imperial family—how love and power can twist into something terrifying. Luna: It makes you wonder: if Agrippina hadn't pushed so hard for Nero's rise, would any of this have happened? Lucas: That's the great tragic irony. She made him emperor, and in doing so, she sealed her own fate. Nero may have been a monster, but he was a monster she created.