Book 12 of Tacitus’ Annals is Agrippina the Younger's book. From the opening chapters in which she bests competitors to become Claudius’ new bride (12.1–9), to the central section in which she exerts tremendous power over palace affairs (12.22–6) and foreign relations (for example 12.27 and 12.37), to the book's final tableau in which Claudius is poisoned and her sixteen-year-old son Nero emerges as princeps (12.66–9), Agrippina's sway over the events of Book 12 is commanding and complete. During that period of time, Tacitus tells us, ‘the state was transformed, and all things were obedient to a woman’ (uersa … ciuitas et cuncta feminae oboediebant, 12.7.3).Footnote 1
Tacitus captures the strength of Agrippina's position in this book by emphasizing her unmatched number of familial connections to those in power, making her ‘a unique example to this day’ (unicum ad hunc diem exemplum, 12.42.2),Footnote 2 and especially by highlighting at several points the formalities of her elevated status. At 12.26.1, for example, he notes that in 50 c.e. ‘Agrippina is augmented by the cognomen “Augusta”’ (augetur et Agrippina cognomento Augustae)—the etymological wordplay underlining the heightened stature that comes with this title that previously had gone only to Livia.Footnote 3 In 12.37.4 we read that the defeated British general Caratacus and his family ‘venerated [Agrippina] with the same praise and gratitude they had extended to the princeps’ (isdem quibus principem laudibus gratibusque uenerati sunt). Tacitus goes on in 12.37.4 to note that for a woman to preside over the standards was unprecedented, and resulted from the fact that ‘she was carrying herself as a partner in the command won by her ancestors’ (ipsa semet parti a maioribus suis imperii sociam ferebat). In the final line of Book 12, the historian explicitly casts Agrippina as a majestic Livia figure, when ‘the rite of [Claudius’] funeral is celebrated in the same way it was for the deified Augustus, with Agrippina emulating the magnificence of her great-grandmother Livia’ (funeris sollemne perinde ac diuo Augusto celebratur, aemulante Agrippina proauiae Liuiae magnificentiam, 12.69.3).Footnote 4 When Book 13 and Nero's Principate commence, Tacitus demonstrates just how high she has risen by spotlighting the murders of the perceived threats Junius Silanus (13.1.1) and Narcissus (13.1.3), both killed on Agrippina's orders, with the young princeps unaware.
Yet in presenting Agrippina ascendant Tacitus goes beyond depicting her as another Augusta, a co-princeps, and a de facto regent for her teenaged son. Prior to each of the characterizations noted above, the historian had already cast Agrippina in the role of someone much greater, more powerful, indeed supremely powerful. In 12.22, through an allusion to Book 2 of Ovid's Tristia, Tacitus pointedly aligns Agrippina at the height of her powers with none other than Augustus himself.
In what follows I will consider how this Ovidian allusion operates and its relevance to both Book 12 and Tacitus’ depiction of the Julio-Claudian dynasty as a whole. But I begin with a contextualization and summary of 12.22, which falls amid the historian's account of the year 49. After an extended treatment of res externae (12.12–21), Tacitus returns to Rome and immediately directs the reader's focus to the actions of Agrippina, whose marriage to Claudius had been formalized earlier that year (12.7–8). He begins this section on res internae by writing (12.22.1):
isdem consulibus atrox odii Agrippina ac Lolliae infensa, quod secum de matrimonio principis certauisset, molitur crimina et accusatorem qui obiceret Chaldaeos magos interrogatumque Apollinis Clarii simulacrum super nuptiis imperatoris.
When the same men were consuls, Agrippina, fierce in her hatred and hostile to Lollia because she had been a rival for marriage with the princeps, trumps up charges and an accuser to make the claim that [Lollia] had asked the Chaldeans, magicians and a shrine for Apollo Clarius about the emperor's marriage.
So Tacitus begins the passage with a juxtaposition that is characteristic of his style in the Annals: in the manner of Republican historiography, he marks the year by reference to its consuls (isdem consulibus—Gaius Pompeius and Quintus Varanius, named at 12.5.1), but then moves right to a demonstration of where power really existed under the Principate: in the imperial house—and at that time in the person of Agrippina.Footnote 5 She exhibits that power through her effort to destroy Lollia Paulina, the famously wealthy ex-wife of Caligula who, we learned in 12.1–2, had been Agrippina's chief rival for the marriage of Claudius.Footnote 6 After writing in 12.22.1 that Agrippina had trumped up charges against Lollia, Tacitus recounts in 12.22.2 that, as a result, Claudius brought the matter of Lollia's destructive plans (perniciosa in rem publicam consilia) before the Senate, and decreed that her wealth would be confiscated and that she would be exiled. This all leads up to the final step in Agrippina's demolition of her rival—her murder. But Tacitus prefaces the chilling conclusion of the episode by shoehorning in a counterexample, writing (12.22.3):
et Calpurnia inlustris femina peruertitur, quia formam eius laudauerat princeps, nulla libidine, sed fortuito sermone, unde ira Agrippinae citra ultima stetit. in Lolliam mittitur tribunus, a quo ad mortem adigeretur.
The distinguished woman Calpurnia is also destroyed, because the princeps had praised her beauty—not out of lust but in a chance conversation; as a result Agrippina's anger stopped short of lethal action. To Lollia is sent a tribune, by whom she was led off to death.
The insertion into the narrative of the case of a certain CalpurniaFootnote 7 is somewhat jarring, but it works to underline a contrast and thus highlight the deadly extremity reached in Lollia's case. The critical issue for the prospects of each rival of Agrippina's was how far her anger would proceed; and so the force of the expression ira Agrippinae citra ultima stetit carries over from the counterexample of Calpurnia to apply, in inverse, to the more significant matter of the punishment of Lollia. The adversative asyndetonFootnote 8 operative between stetit and in Lolliam in a sense opens a path for Agrippina's anger to carry into the actions of the next sentence, while also punctuating the contrast: in Lollia's case, unlike in Calpurnia's, the anger of Agrippina did not stop short of lethal action.
Scholars have long noted that the description of Agrippina's anger in 12.22.3 closely recalls Ovid's use of nearly identical language in a very similar context in Tristia Book 2.Footnote 9 This is the poet's long address to Augustus, in which he defends the Ars amatoria and requests reprieve from his exile in Tomis. In making his case to the princeps, Ovid writes (Tr. 2.121–8):
And so this house of mine, though welcomed by the Muses, has come crashing down, after collapsing under the weight of a single—though not thin—charge. And just as it has fallen, so it may be able to rise up, if only the injured Caesar's anger may soften. In the event the clemency of this punishment is so great that it has turned out to be lighter than I had feared. Life was granted to me, and your anger stopped short of death, o princeps, you who are sparing in the use of your strength!
After proposing that Augustus soften and rethink the exile, Ovid adroitly turns to credit the princeps for the leniency of his initial sentence of exile, with a conspicuous pivot to the second person in the words ‘your anger stopped short of death, o princeps.’ So the poet highlights Augustus’ great strength and capacity for anger but also his moderation and discretion in deploying that strength and indulging that anger.Footnote 10 The pentameter o princeps parce uiribus use tuis (‘o princeps, you who are sparing in the use of your strength’) neatly captures both the emperor's awesome powers and his restraint.
Tacitus’ ira Agrippinae citra ultima stetit in Ann. 12.22.3 clearly evokes Ovid's citraque necem tua constitit ira in Tr. 2.127. In each statement ira is the subject of a form of sto, a iunctura that Tacitus employs only here;Footnote 11 and Tacitus’ prepositional phrase citra ultima, his only use of citra in the Annals,Footnote 12 is synonymous with Ovid's citra necem. Just as significantly, the contexts of the two passages are nearly identical, as both authors are addressing specifically whether the grievance of the individual in power (Augustus and then Agrippina) will stop short of capital punishment and be content with exile for the accused—or not.
Through this careful allusion, then, Agrippina is equated with a figure of imperial sway no less authoritative than Augustus himself. The anger of Ovid's addressee Augustus (tua … ira; Caesaris ira above in Tr. 2.124), who had the agency to proceed or to show restraint, carries over and lives on, taking on a new driving force as Agrippina's anger (ira Agrippinae). Like Ovid's Augustus, Tacitus’ Agrippina has an anger with the power and the range of movement to make the ultimate decisions, to determine life or death.
The lines of connection that Tacitus draws between his Agrippina and Ovid's Augustus also point towards an important contrast. Scholars have focussed on the historian's depiction of Agrippina in Annals Books 12–14 as a transgressive figure, one who crosses boundaries between male and female, who attains great power but also hurtles out of control, swept up by the muliebris impotentia (‘womanly unruliness’) that Narcissus attributes to her at 12.57.2.Footnote 13 In this vein Judith Ginsburg has written of Agrippina's destruction of Lollia in 12.22: ‘Once again, both Agrippina's masculine and her feminine qualities emerge: on the one hand, she is moved by a ferocity and an anger that are more often associated with men; on the other, it is female jealousy that motivates her behavior.’Footnote 14 And when we look at the actions of her anger in 12.22.3 alongside those of Augustus’ anger in Tristia Book 2, another instance of boundary-crossing comes into focus. Ovid's Augustus was sparing in the use of his strength (recall parce uiribus use tuis in Tr. 2.128); his anger had limits. The gesture of stopping (constitit) on one side of the death penalty (citraque necem), without crossing over, is a firm and final one—and exile is deemed a sufficient punishment for Ovid. We have seen that Agrippina's anger comes to what is essentially an identical stop in the case of Calpurnia (citra ultima stetit); but that boundary is immediately transgressed in the following sentence detailing the assassination mission to Lollia: in Lolliam mittitur tribunus, a quo ad mortem adigeretur. Following the adversative asyndeton, the opening accusative prepositional phrase in Lolliam captures the rapid motion towards and against Agrippina's victim, as do the hurried images expressed by the swift expressions mittitur tribunus and then ad mortem adigeretur, with the repetition of ad accentuating the rush to execution. Unlike for Ovid in Tristia Book 2, for Lollia the punishment of exile is not sufficient. The anger of Agrippina crosses over that intertextual and syntactic point of stopping, heads to her chief rival's place of exile, and expeditiously exacts lethal punishment.
The transgressiveness displayed when Agrippina's anger blows past the limits her intertextual forebear—and historical great-grandfather—had honoured also foreshadows her eventual doom. In 59 c.e. Nero, set off by his mother's imperiousness and usurpation of his own standing, will plot her assassination, which Tacitus narrates over the opening chapters of Book 14. After recounting the matricide, he writes of Nero's efforts to slander Agrippina and separate himself from her deeds (14.11–12).Footnote 15 Here we read that ‘he even permitted the ashes of Lollia Paulina to be brought back [to Rome] and a tomb to be built’ (etiam Lolliae Paulinae cineres reportari sepulcrumque exstrui permisit, 14.12.4), restorative honours that read as direct responses to the punishments of exile and murder abroad. This detail is revealing of the long shadow of Agrippina's destruction of Lollia ten years earlier and perhaps, since it is included in the treatment of Nero's post-matricide political messaging, of a long-held public perception that the banishment and assassination of Lollia were undue and excessive. While underscoring the notion that Agrippina's unleashing of her un-Augustan anger on Lollia was emblematic of her transgressiveness, the evocation of the murder just after the account of Agrippina's own murder also compels us to see the former as a harbinger of the latter, a flashpoint in both the empress’ consolidation of power and the overreach that spelled her eventual ruin.
While pointing to Agrippina's personal downfall later in the Annals, the intertextual contrast between Agrippina's boundary-crossing anger and Augustus’ temperate anger in Tristia Book 2 also speaks to a larger arc in the work. Francesca Santoro L'Hoir has read the depiction of Agrippina in Annals Books 12–14 as key to understanding Tacitus’ characterization of the Julio-Claudian dynasty as a whole, writing that ‘the continuous female ascent and usurpation of male authority—a reversal of the natural order of the universe—has predicted the inevitable descent and destruction of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.’Footnote 16 Indeed, the end result of Agrippina's actions in Book 12 is the calamitous rule of Nero and, in turn, the end of the family's reign. In this light Tacitus’ allusion in Ann. 12.22.3 to Ov. Tr. 2.127 is all the more revealing, marking as it does a distinction from the very founder of the imperial line. While at the beginning of the dynasty the fearsome but restrained anger of Augustus had communicated potency, the unrestrained anger of Agrippina represents unruliness and ultimately the loss of power for the Julio-Claudians. We come to see that the transformation of the state that Agrippina carries out (recall uersa … ciuitas at 12.7.3) not only harks back to Augustus’ own transformation of the state into a dynastic autocracy (uerso ciuitatis statu, Ann. 1.4.1) but also threatens to unravel that very accomplishment.Footnote 17 This trajectory from Augustus to Agrippina, from great-grandfather to great-granddaughter, from a dynasty's beginning to its undoing is tautly captured in the allusion to Tristia Book 2.
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It is worth recalling that Tristia Book 2 includes a large section on the place of Ovid's poetry within the Greek and the Roman literary traditions. As part of his defence for writing the Ars amatoria, he commits over one hundred lines to the discussion of literary precedents in Greek (361–420) and Latin (421–66) that also dealt with matters of love and sex. These, Ovid explicitly states, are the authors he has succeeded (his ego successi, 467).Footnote 18 The passage thus emerges as a sort of Ovidian literary manifesto on his understanding of the tradition and his place in it. When in Annales Book 12 Tacitus evokes an earlier moment in this Ovidian poem of self-fashioning, is the historian making a similar statement about literary succession? Might the allusion at 12.22.3, however compressed, speak to a broader engagement with Ovid?
Readers of Tacitus have focussed on the historian's adaptation of language and imagery from a number of poetic predecessors, most of all Virgil and Lucan.Footnote 19 His engagement with Ovid's language seems to be more limited,Footnote 20 but we have seen here that the most celebrated and controversial poet of the Augustan era also has a meaningful spot on the intertextual palette of the historian of Augustus’ successors. While Ovid had told the tale of Augustus’ anger, its power and its capacity for restraint, Tacitus un-checks, perpetuates and creatively stretches out the story of that anger in his narration of Agrippina's rise, overreach and fall. In the exploration of this dynastic arc, Tacitus’ writing on the Julio-Claudians thus stands as an extension but also a transformation of Ovid's own consideration of the potent forces latent in Augustus and his burgeoning regime. Moreover, it is surely significant that in Ann. 12.22 Tacitus chooses to direct the reader to the banished Ovid of the Tristia, and so to bring to mind his status as a Roman author writing from the outside looking in. This element of Ovid's identity—the onetime insider who then chose to showcase, even flaunt, his vantage point from the outskirts—doubtless appealed to Tacitus, who himself is constantly negotiating and leveraging his position as insider/outsider to the seat of imperial power.Footnote 21 The evocation of Ovid the exiled and endangered victim of the emperor brings to the passage a cachet in critiquing imperial hubris and heavy-handedness that few other intertextual models carry. We might say that the allusion points to a sort of ideological intertextuality operative between Ovid and Tacitus, of the sort that Ellen O'Gorman has discussed as existing among Thucydides, Sallust and Tacitus.Footnote 22
A possible marker of the meaningful afterlife of Ovid in Tacitus’ writing appears in the latter's literary debut, the Agricola. The final words of Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law read: ‘Agricola, his story told to posterity and handed down, will be a survivor’ (Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus superstes erit, Agr. 46.4). A.J. Woodman describes the concluding pair of words superstes erit as ‘an Ovidian tag’, as the poet had used the phrase of himself and his legacy at Am. 1.15.42 and again at Tr. 3.7.50.Footnote 23 Tacitus also uses the term superstes of himself earlier in the Agricola (3.2), and so at the work's conclusion we see what is ‘the final comparison between biographer and his subject: just as T[acitus] was a superstes after his metaphorical death in Domitian's reign (3.2), so A[gricola] will also be a superstes thanks to the power of literature’.Footnote 24 In this way the final sentence of the Agricola compels the reader to think of not just Agricola the subject but also Tacitus the author as one who will live on. And if Ovid's uses of superstes erit come to mind, the reader might imagine Tacitus’ literary survival together and in lively rapport with Ovid's enduring afterlife. In the perpetuation and transformation at Ann. 12.22.3 of the Ovidian imagery at Tr. 2.127, the dynamic possibilities of Tacitus’ engagement with his fellow survivor become apparent.
