Diana Arterian’s Agrippina the Younger is a book fascinated with the telling of history, with the voids that both drive and emerge from this telling. Looking at the history of Roman empress Agrippina the Younger, the book responds to the displacement of Agrippina from her story by the men around her. Writing “that a handful of men defined this woman’s life narrative,” that Agrippina is in essence absent from her own life, Arterian embarks on a search to make that absence felt, to give it form and presence, a process that takes the appearance of filling it in. Both through imaginative reconstruction and embodied experience, Arterian writes toward and from the loss of Agrippina, moving asymptotically to recovery. This impossible desire to regain and recreate the traces of Agrippina in her fullness drives the collection, making for an experiment in recuperative identification across the torn fabric of history.
Centered on the titular figure of Agrippina, the poems of the collection alternate between two modes. Lineated poems provide a mostly chronological recounting of the events around Agrippina’s life, appearing in staccato lines punctuated by blank spaces, while prose sections contain Arterian’s own embodied experience of Rome and Italy as she seeks out sites related to Agrippina. In both cases Agrippina serves as the motive force for the work, the justification for the value of any particular time or place.
The meat of the historical poems takes place between 15 ce and 68 ce, from the birth of Agrippina the Younger to the death of Nero. Agrippina was born shortly after the death of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and the start of the rule of Tiberius, not only uncle but adoptive father to Agrippina’s father, Germanicus. Following Tiberius’ death, Agrippina’s brother Caligula took power until his assassination, after which Agrippina’s uncle Claudius became emperor and eventually married Agrippina. After Claudius’ death, potentially at the hands of Agrippina, her son Nero took power and held it until his own death by suicide.
For all its complexities, this history is presented through a clear, legible structure. Along with the clarifying focus on Agrippina, the book’s paratext works to provide the reader with a consistent sense of location within a broader series of events. Each historical poem is marked by a year or range of years, and on occasion a place. Arterian provides a family tree at the start of the book, with the key players further characterized by stone busts of their faces. A somewhat similar dynamic plays out in the titles of the autobiographical prose sections, each one naming where we are. Despite the spatial focus, these often carry as much if not more historical details as the lineated poems.
These two forms of writing are braided together into a complex mode of historical investigation. The chronological ascent of the lineated portions pairs with the overlapping immediacies of the prose sections. The movement through Agrippina’s life forms a linear series of vivid reconstructions, while the present-day instances trouble this progression, excavating the buried pasts of Rome and folding Arterian’s present in among them. It is only in these prose sections that Augustus, origin of the Empire, appears. With the interconnection of these two forms Arterian creates a telling of history that advances even as it spirals back on itself.
One of the most striking aspects of this telling is the sense of inarguable reality Arterian brings to this classical history. The specificity of details constructs a trust in what we are being told, even as their strangeness furthers our fascination. Accounts of the rituals of birth and weddings and death, the reactions of crowds, the practice of medicine, all elicit belief. Italicized quotations from the annals and other sources are woven into the work, integrated by the lines’ staggered poetics. This alignment between past and present is furthered in the present-day prose sections, where Arterian’s commitment to experiential research is unfurled. Her desire to harmonize herself with Agrippina, to “collapse the disk of time, stand beside her,” buttresses this rhetoric of expertise and experience, blurs the two sides of it. Perhaps the height of this is the framing of the historical scenes as equally perceptual. Describing the birth of Agrippina by Agrippina the Elder, Arterian places the scene within her vision.
Here is the Rhine I care about Agrippina’s sons sent
to the fen’s Ubii tribe They bring two women—
midwives? healers? I don’t know The women spread
oil on Agrippina’s belly to begin One coats a finger
massages her cervix open to the size of an egg
I see it a lens an eye a mouth
However, this concreteness exists alongside a sense of its own instability. Even as the reality of what Arterian describes asserts itself, the awareness of this as an effect of description is equally felt, at times vertiginously so. From the beginning, Arterian acknowledges the difficulty of working with the sources she draws on, the pitfalls of historiography that afflict “The modern historians who take great pains to undercut the veracity of the Roman annals but then quote them continually.” She asks, “Which are the grains of truth among the enormous field of wheat that shakes before me, that taunts? How to see history, not from a text, but what it writes around—a vibrating cipher?” Even as we are shown stark solidity in the historical poems, these are also modulated by comments on their probability, the repetition of what is “likely” and the acknowledgment of Arterian’s own desires in shaping the scene. Alongside the perception of the scene is the desire to perceive.
We see this in the present-day sections of prose as well. In an account of her visit to the island of Agrippina’s exile, Arterian imagines her activities there with her sister Livilla, seeks to swim in the same water, places it in a history of prisons. It is only at the end we learn an error was made:
But then, years later, I find out she was never there, never at all. She was on
some other spit of dirt nearby: Tyrrhenia (now Ponza). She didn’t even have
her sister for company. Or maybe they were both on Tyrrhenia. Everyone has
the same names, is sent to the same archipelago. Books are vague. Websites
confuse translations. I read and read but can’t know for sure.
Yet Arterian’s visit is no less real, her imagined Agrippina no less written.
Something similar happens regarding the urn of Livilla, the same sister who may or may not have been on the island with Agrippina. In a poem titled “Agrippina the Younger / Now with Power / Does What She Has Long Desired,” in which Agrippina places Livilla’s urn within the family mausoleum, the urn is described as being made of alabaster run through with veins and the words hic crematus est etched onto it. Later, in an addendum chronicling her attempts to view the urn in the Vatican Museum, the presence of such an etching is emended to “likely.” Finally, once the urn comes into view, there is no writing upon it at all. Yet this discovery does not erase the urn Agrippina placed in the mausoleum. One does not bury the other; rather, like the buildings of Freud’s Eternal City, both persist.
What allows this persistence is the figure of Agrippina herself, the way her existence as a formation of desire and fascination gives equal weight to the imagined as to the seen. She forms the skeleton of the work, her life and her death the infrastructure of linguistic production. This is not a bloodless creation; gore opens the book and suffuses it. The first poem—whose title mirrors that of the collection—begins with Agrippina’s murder by Nero, her son, and his supposed looking into her womb. Arterian frames this death and mutilation as macabrely productive:
And as he peered in the cleft,
that exposed organ
began to petal outward
growing and deepening
to an enormous vagina—
until he looked in
and saw only darkness
This occulting swell moves beyond just the vision of Nero,
And she continued to grow
until she held all of Rome,
which burned and was rebuilt
while she tessellated, fanned
And Agrippina smiled
with her mouth of bloody eyeteeth
And this red embrace spills throughout the book, given in visceral accounts of animals killed in hunt and sacrifice, wives murdered by husbands and husbands by wives, Romans nailed to trees in Germania and strung up in Britian and dead by a thousand cuts as their emperor watched. The slaughters and assassinations that answered those deaths. A brother killing a brother. Later, when the collection returns to Agrippina’s death, Arterian mentions she would learn that Nero’s inspection of the uterus is an invention arising far later, yet its hold upon the book does not abate; the essential threads remain.
Arterian seeks to strike an ethical stance as regards her construction of Agrippina and the Roman world. She wants to distance herself from sensationalized portrayals and the casting of ancient Rome as a “freakshow,” which for Arterian—quoting disabilities studies and feminist theory scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson—serves as a “figure of otherness upon which the spectators could displace anxieties and uncertainties about their own identities.” Arterian rejects framing the early Roman Empire as a carnival outside of a shared history. Rather we are invited—as much as is possible—to see its ruling class soberly, not as a monstrous other but as a continuation of ourselves. This goes hand in hand with a refusal to reduce Agrippina to her relationships with frighteningly powerful men, as simply the daughter of Germanicus, the sister and prisoner of Caligula, or the mother and victim of Nero. As Arterian puts it, what drew her to Agrippina was that she “was a woman who lived in a society that treated her like a second-class citizen” who nevertheless “realized her impossible quest for power,” and the lessons we can draw from this.
Arterian makes plain her commitment to aligning her identity with Agrippina’s, in order to manifest her presence as fully as possible. The degree to which an element intersects with or evokes Agripinna becomes the measure of its importance, not only as regards the machinations of emperors but the loss of lives, the flow of rivers, the geological movements of time. That Agrippina appears to be the “vibrating cipher” of history made visible, the identity between the text and what it writes around registers in Agrippina’s ability to shock the language of the work. A rare moment when Arterian diverges from her reserved chronicler’s register arrives upon her watching the 1979 film Caligula and asking “Where the fuck is Agrippina?”
Yet this identification is ultimately rooted in the fascination Agrippina evokes, and this cannot be separated from her murder. Even in the most sober telling, the murder of a mother by her son is hallucinatory in its horror. As Arterian puts it, “the macabre story of Agrippina’s death hounded me. Then I fell into the void of her existence in her own life’s story.” This contradiction, between the desire to take in the full life of Agrippina and the connection of this desire with her death, is staged throughout the work. Multiple times Arterian positions herself in a manner that evokes not Agrippina, but Nero. The act of taking in the cervix of Agrippina the Elder described above, the emphasis on its visual consumption, parallels the mythic desire of Nero to see Agrippina the Younger’s womb. Arterian describes her search for a lesson from Agrippina’s life as staring “into the dark boundless space of her life” where the lesson could come into view “if one looked closely enough.” The visual emphasis of the entire collection reinforces the connection with Nero. Arterian shows how the cruelty of history cannot be stopped from spilling into its telling, only registered.
Ultimately what is perhaps most striking about the book is the gap that remains between Arterian and Agrippina. In her approach to history Arterian invites us to move past the Grand Guignol theatrics of the rulers of empire. However, once we part the lurid curtains of madness and perversion and overcome the othered monstrosity of figures like Nero and Caligula, we are faced with a cold logic of domination no less vicious than before but now simply without ornament, though perhaps no less insidiously seductive.
We are forced to ask a question hard to consider in the midst of writing that interpellates the reader both to the position of Agrippina and also of one who seeks that identification: is the ease with which we fall into the void of Agrippina not itself a consequence of that dominating logic, not only because of her victimization by it, but also her ambition for it? To ask if there is perhaps not something alien in the desire for power over others, not only Nero’s but also Agrippina’s, or if at least we shouldn’t wish to experience it as such. We face head on the possibility that the absences in the historical fabric were still cut from the same cloth, so to speak, and in this way we are pushed to consider how true this is of us. The refusal to cordon off the ancient world as other does not efface its monstrousness, but rather forces us to confront the identity we share with it. In this complex, paradoxical book, Arterian shows us that identification is the obverse of repulsion, another turning away from the historical cipher, and in doing so at last turns toward it.
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Agrippina the Younger. By Diana Arterian. Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025. 124 pp. $20.00.