Violent Fems of the Ancient World

Part 1. Introducing Valeria Messalina.

Don't be fooled by her Madonna-esque quality or the beautiful renaissance art, this young lady was quite the piece of work... if you believe the misogynist male writers of the ancient world.

Married to the much older Roman Emperor Claudius she was infamous for her voracious sexual appetite... or so the ancient men would have us believe.

Ancient gossip columnist Suetonius wrote: "Not confining her licentiousness within the limits of the palace, where she committed the most shameful excesses, she prostituted her person in the common brothels, and even in the public streets of the capital.”

Juvenal, the dirty poet called her, "the Imperial whore" who "took her stand with naked breasts and gilded nipples... received all comers with caresses."

You could almost disbelieve this and brush it aside as the most grotesque of slander except that Pliny the Elder, naturalist, and naval commander also tells history of a competition between the Empress of Rome and a prostitute, which Messalina one after her 25th customer in a single night.

Outside of the bedroom, she was no saint either, accused of having a man killed because she wanted his gardens,  trying to seduce her step-father, of having a female cousin exiled and executed for taking too much of her husband's attention and sending an assassin to kill another infant cousin in his bed. 

Sadly for Messalina, whose husband had until then ignored her excesses, the lively lass fell in love with 'the most beautiful man in Rome', one Gaius Silius. So besotted was she, that while her husband and Emperor was absent from Rome, she married the man. A grave mistake that saw her new husband beheaded and Messalina herself executed in the very gardens she had once killed a man to own, after having tried and failed to open her own veins.

Messalina is just one of the wonderful characters you will encounter in my Aquila trilogy...