Britannicus

They were reasonable people doing reasonable things, one after another, without seeing where they led.

Then came Britannicus, the son of Claudius, whom Nero saw as a rival.

He was almost 14.

One night, at a banquet, in front of the whole family, he was served a poisoned drink.

The boy collapsed, and Nero, perfectly calm, said it was one of his usual fits and that it would pass.

Agrippina went cold.

Octavia, the sister of Britannicus, had already learnt to show nothing on her face, and the dinner went on.

And Seneca, the philosopher who wrote about virtue, found himself trapped beside a man who grew more dangerous with every passing year, richer and richer, more and more compromised, with less and less room to say no. That's the situation so many people are in with toxic people.

There's some sort of slightly interesting stuff which sort of suggests that he has a kind of sort of royal right kind of running through him.

He's meant to have partaken of the same draft that killed Britannicus but it didn't kill him.

It gave him a kind of, it gave him a bit of tummy trouble.

That's not quite what it says.

I mean, there are two, Nero has, so the emperor was Claudius.

Remember I Claudius, or you've heard of it? I Claudius had a son named Britannicus.

Racine wrote a whole play about him.

There's an opera about him.

And she is the mother of two of Claudius's children.

We have Octavia and And more importantly, for the macho, masculine Roman mind, you have Britannicus, a boy, a male heir.

And we know pretty much nothing else about her early biography, because as is pretty much always the case with Roman women, especially in the imperial household.

Who cares? Yeah, they only become important when they start orbiting around powerful men.

Interesting.

And they already had a child together, Octavia, who will go on to be murdered, spoiler alert, by Nero.

And soon after becoming emperor, she'll give birth to another child, Britannicus, a boy who will also, spoiler alert, go on to be murdered by Nero.

And what Messalina does, we're told, at the very beginning of Claudius's reign, is she has several people put to death, really in following in the tradition of Julio-Claudian women.