Agrippina the Younger (November 6 AD 15 – 23 March AD 59) and Diana Arterian's new collection about her
It’s strange how synchronicity works. Three events that happened to me over the last few weeks have helped me better understand the life of Agrippina the Younger (November 6 AD 15 – 23 March AD 59) and Diana Arterian’s stunning collection of poems about her life. The first was a few weeks ago, when I was in Rome walking through the ancient ruins with my youngest son. The second occurred a few days ago, when I watched a film with a friend called Hamnet that brought to life characters from William Shakespeare’s life. And the third occurred just last night when I listened to a podcast by Dr. Kate Lister on Betwixt the Sheets, in which she discussed the life of Lady Margaret Beaufort and her son, Henry VIII.
As I re-read Arterian’s poems this morning, I still had the sense memory of the Roman ruins I had seen in my body. The stones that Agrippina the Younger had once walked upon were still embedded in the soil. The hordes of tourists Arterian remembers from her visit to the Vatican Museum were still there when my son and I wandered through it, feeling that all of this had been bought with the blood of others. The collesium, equally packed, became more vividly what it was: a place where thousands had been murdered. At every Roman site we visited, I kept seeing that scene from Kubrick’s The Shining, where blood pours from the elevators and through the halls over and over again in my mind.
Then, a few nights ago, I saw the haunting film Hamnet (adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name—she also wrote the screenplay). The film was atmospheric. Max Richter’s spell-like soundtrack is combined with cinematography that centers on the repetition of imagery, forming a sort of symbology. But what struck me most was how the story decentered the patriarchal version of the story of William Shakespeare’s wife and family that we had always been told. When I took a course on Shakespeare in college, we learned that he had a wife named Anne Hathaway, but nothing about who she was or if or how she influenced him. We were also told he had children, but they were all sidenotes: brief mentions in a laudable history of a great man. Hamnet changes our point of view by placing Anne, who goes by the name Agnes (as she was called in her father’s will), at the center of the narrative. She informs us how we see the world in which we find ourselves. As Maggie O’Farrell explains: “What I did was go back to the plays and read around them differently, seeing if I could find her, because I’ve always felt that I can see Hamnet in Hamlet. But I was wondering – I thought she must be there.”
During the film, Shakespeare is only called by his full name once, late in the film. Because of this recentering, we see the world differently. Given the film’s historical fiction, perhaps not all the details are exact facts. But the feeling, the way she inspired, informed, and at times directly influenced the trajectory of Hamlet. A play canonized as being one of the best in the world feels completely and utterly real.
The facts show that in 1582, at age 18, William Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a sheep farmer, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. The facts also show that three years later, she gave birth to twins named Judith and Hamnet (at the time, the name Hamnet was often used interchangeably with Hamlet). The facts also tell us that in 1596, when he was just 11 years old, Hamnet died. We don’t know what he died of, but we do know that during that year, the most common cause of death was the plague. Hamnet was buried on August 11th. It’s almost sure that Shakespeare could not have made it back to Stratford in time for the funeral because he would have been on the road with his theatre troupe. And finally, we also know that four years after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.
These sparse facts have left room for historians to fill in the gaps with their own assumptions. As O’Farrell explains, "We’ve only ever really been given one narrative about her, and most biographers have just run with it, which is that she was an illiterate peasant who trapped him into marriage, that he hated her, that he ran away to London to get away from her. “ Her film acts as a balm to heal this wound left in the historical record.
In the same way, in her collection of poems on Agrippina, Arterian observes how the powerful woman from an elite Roman family was vilified by historians. She also remembers the ghost texts: Agrippina’s three memoirs written late in her life while she was in exile about her life and the state of the Roman Empire and its ruling class as she lived, and mourns them and how Tactius refers to having read the memoirs but doesn’t take the time to recopy them. What Mary Beard called “one of the saddest losses of classical history.” Not just for the loss of the details of Agrippina’s life, but for the perspective she provided. A history recentered. No longer told by “Rome’s most powerful men” that could have opened up a fuller, clearer picture of what Ancient Rome was actually like.
Finally, last night I listened to Dr. Kate Lister interview with historian Lauren Johnson on her podcast Betwixt the Sheets about Henry VIII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443 – 1509), who was married off before she turned 12 years old to a much older man named Edmund Tudor. She became pregnant, then Edmund died of the plague, so Lady Margaret was a widow. Then she gave birth to Henry at age 13. Even during the Tudor era, marrying off a young girl to create a powerful match to maintain power and control within a family was unusual. Usually, an aristocrat’s daughter would not be married off until the age of 18. But Lady Margagaret was an exception.
What struck me this morning, as I reread “After Agrippina’s Wedding to Domittius As With Custom What Follows” about how thousands of years before Henry VIII was born, 13 year old Agrippina was married to a 52 year old man, for the sake of extending power, creating a longer line of Roman emperors within their family, I could feel the repition of history; how Rome’s example had embedded itself into the future of England and how at the heart of this violence was a young girl. Arterian captures what it must have been like for Agrippina the Younger on her wedding day in the poem, “ After Agrippina’s Wedding to Domitius”
He stares at her body pale in the dark
hairs just there breasts beginning
He pinches a small nipple between thumb
and knuckle Agrippina turns her face
toward or away you decide
I don’t want to imagine anymore
What all of these experiences opened me up to was how one’s world shifts when alert and when one no longer sees a hard archival wall dividing what is deemed history from what is not.
At the opening of the second section of her book, Arterian quotes poet Robin Coste Lewis, “What can History possibly say?” as she engages in the act of resurrecting a life lost due to archival violence. But what I am realizing, after these last few months and after speaking with Arterian about her book, is that if we open our eyes, if we pay attention, if we recenter our perspective and listen, history can tell us the truth.
I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Diana Arterian as much as I did!
Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and editor and co-translator of Smoke Drifts (World Poetry Books, 2025), a collection of Nadia Anjuman’s poetry co-translated with Marina Omar. Diana’s first poetry collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press and twice-finalist for the National Poetry Series, Diana’s creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Millay Arts, and Yaddo. Her work has been featured by The Academy of American Poets, BOMB, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, New York Times Book Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Diana holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is the 2026 Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor at San José State University. She writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at Lit Hub and lives in Los Angeles.
Interview with Diana Arterian
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: What drew you to telling the story of Agrippina the Younger’s life?
Diana Arterian: It was during my MFA program that I first encountered her. I don’t remember the moment I first learned about her, but when I did, I couldn’t get her out of my head. During my PhD, I returned to her as a subject for a poem (which became the first poem in the book, “Agrippina the Younger”). I started with a general deep dive into her Wikipedia page, where I leaned into and examined all the tropes that have been cultivated about her over the last 2,000 years, like she’s this monster. There’s a lot about her maternal body. And about how her son, Nero, had her assassinated. And as someone who loves history and who is drawn to strange facts, I was really lit up. And then, once I started to peer through the keyhole of her life, I was like, Oh my god, this is huge and is emblematic of things that are beyond her lifetime, and I couldn’t really stop.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Why did you approach this story through poetry instead of prose?
Diana Arterian: Poetry is the most ancient creative endeavor; it’s endlessly flexible. So you can do whatever you want, and I really love that liberty, and it also feels germane for her life, because there are so many gaps in her chronology. It’s just baked into the form of poetry that the reader is going to be making connections.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I definitely see why you went with poetry. It felt like your book was in the same lyric space as A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.
Diana Arterian: I’m obsessed with that book!
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Same!
Diana Arterian: I was already deep in this book when I found out about it. When I read it, it felt like our books could sit next to each other, like they’re friends, for sure.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Yeah, right? The recovery work that she’s doing, and the work that you’re doing in your book, is so important. One of the goals of Finding Lost Voices is not only to bring back the voices of women, but also to show the work that everyone’s doing right now, to bring those voices back and connect all of you in a community. So, welcome to the community.
Diana Arterian: Thank you, I’m truly honored.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I was really struck by this description in the poem, “The Island of Capri,” where, you say, after years of reading and research and travel, it is this scene that finally clicks an understanding into motion in my mind.
When I realized the Western world’s obsession — the continual return to this era, these people — for what it is: a freak show.
I thought that was so telling of how the story of Rome has been coveted, recreated, and crafted into this almost idealized diorama of society. Whereas, like, when I went there, and probably you had the same feeling, it was like, you know that scene in The Shining, when all the blood starts pouring down the halls? The atrocities that had happened were so visceral there. Why do you think that Rome, this place of violence and othering, was so coveted and reinvented as a model for future civilizations?
Diana Arterian: I love history and classics, but I’m not an expert, so I give my answer with that caveat. My sense is that it’s certainly connected to white supremacy and misogyny. Also, the longer reaching nostalgia for a time and place. I mean, it’s something that we’re seeing writ large in the United States right now, right? And we will probably be contending with for decades.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: I’d love to also talk with you about where our idea of what Rome comes from. You talk about that in your stunning poem, “Augustine Sanctuary and Residential Complex,”
For example, at the end of that first section, you write:
We don’t even know where Agrippina is fucking buried.
I feel like the word “fucking” has never been more warranted in a poem!
And in the second section, where you’re quoting, and you say, how the Palatine looked when it was home to Rome’s most powerful men. And in my head, I’m like. Oh, yeah, it’s just men, right? Then two lines later, you write,
Rome’s most powerful MEN--the dodge I see over and over again.
Which made me feel like we were in conversation as I was reading your poem! And then at the end, when you reveal that Agrippina had three memoirs she’d written about her life while she was in exile that have been lost. I had that same sense of loss that I feel about Sappho’s lost work. What was lost because of who decided to keep history, and what was kept? I’d love for you to talk about how you feel about this lost history, these lost voices.
Diana Arterian: Yeah, I mean, it’s so depressing. Tacitus, in his annals, says he had access to her three memoirs. The memoirs were called: The Disasters of the Father’s Family, The Disasters of the Mother’s Family, and the third memoir was about herself, which she writes in the form of “de vita eius” (“on her life”). Emperors and statesmen wrote “de vita sua.” To me, this illustrates that she had a very clear interest in creating a legacy.
At the point that she wrote these memoirs, her son Nero had already exiled her from Rome. She was isolated and losing her mind because she was being completely excluded from everything politically.
In his annals, Tacitus writes, “let me tell you more about Agrippina,” and then it becomes a fragment. So even when a man is writing about her, there’s so little interest in copying the information, and that information/ that piece of the historical record, just gets erased and therefore destroyed.
And then the other little beam of information we get about her is the form she uses to write about herself. It was a form that was usually used only by powerful men (such as politicians or military officers) to record their conquests, political ventures, and successes.
The only thing that we know for sure is that she wrote about in this memoir is a description of her giving birth to her son Nero. He was born breached, which is something that even today is very dangerous, and she and her son both survived. Her writing about the remarkable success she felt fit within this “de vita eius” form is very telling to me. And the only reason we know that is because Pliny wrote about it in Natural History under prodigious and monstrous births. And he doesn’t even quote her.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle Wow.
Diana Arterian So we get these tiny biographical morsels, right? I was grateful to have anything because certainly any word from the ancient world written by a woman surviving is a miracle. It’s not unique that her words don’t survive because of the misogyny of ancient history and the lack of interest and record of women’s thoughts.
It just sucks that Tacitus had access to her memoirs and just wanted to paint her as a terrible, villainous person. I’m like, why does that asshole get access and I don’t?
Iris Jamahl Dunkle Totally! Well, let’s go back to what we do know about Agrippina. Who is her mother and her father, and take us through her history?
Diana Arterian My book has a family tree because it feels impossible to chart out her family history. Agrippina’s mother was also named Agrippina, so this is also part of the reason that the family tree felt important, because everybody has the same names.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle How very Roman!
Diana Arterian: Yes, it’s so Roman, and she was Emperor Augustus’s granddaughter. And Augustus goes back to Julius Caesar, so she’s from a very noble and lauded family. Agrippina the Elder is married to Germanicus, and they’re kind of distantly related. I love them. I think that they were actually in love. He was a golden boy general, and she went on campaign with him, which no noblewoman had ever done before. She gave birth to Agrippina the Younger during the campaign in the hinterlands. Germanicus would come to Arippina (the mother) with questions, and if he needed help, he would turn to his wife, which I think was very unique.
They were a highly venerated family. Agrippina the Elder had many children and that made her look good. And, Germanicus was the heir apparent to the imperial throne. Their family represented the future of the empire. First, there was Augustus, who was the first emperor, and then his stepson, Tiberius, and then, after that, Germanicus, was next in line. When Agrippina the Elder had so many male children, it seemed as if there would be a long line of this family.
Spoiler alert, that’s not how it goes.
Tiberius has Germanicus poisoned. And every single one of their children, except for one, dies a violent death. And Agrippina’s mother dies in exile as well. I think she starves herself because she realizes that she’s just going to be abused and harmed until she dies. So in this family, where it seemed like there was no way it could fall apart, everything unravels. And subsequently, the Roman Empire, too, in terms of the imperial structure, begins to unravel.
Agrippina grew up in a family where it was expected that she had a political role to fill. And it was just a question of how she would fill that role and what would happen. So she marries Domitius, who is in his early 50s when she’s 13. She gives birth to a son, which is a windfall for her, because that is a potential way to gain access to power, at least through proximity to a male heir.
Then, Domitius dies, and Agrippina the Younger’s brother, Caligula, becomes emperor after Tiberius dies. And he does a pretty good job for a while. He does a lot of really remarkable things for his sisters, which really makes him unique. Essentially, they were granted rights and power that were not otherwise granted to women. Then Caligula loses his mind. He sends his sisters into exile and has them assassinated.
Then Agrippina’s uncle, Claudius, becomes emperor. And the short version is that she eventually marries him. This was illegal; they had to change the laws to allow such close relatives to marry. And when they marry, he adopts her son, Nero, so that he is in line for the throne.
Agrippina had a really brilliant political mind, and she did want power. Her role model was her great-grandmother, Livia, who was Augustus’s wife. And who absolutely had an impact on his decisions. Like Livia, Agrippina used her husband, Claudius, as a puppet to run things politically.
Then Claudius dies, and the narrative is that she poisoned him, but I don’t really know why she would. it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of ways that they slandered women was to claim that they were having sex with the wrong people, or that they poisoned people, and Agrippina is no exception.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Isn’t it funny that’s still how women are slandered?
Diana Arterian: Oh my god, yeah. So when Claudius dies, Nero becomes emperor, but he’s only a teenager, so he has advisors: Seneca, Burrus, and his mother, Agrippina. This is her glory period, because she has this young kid who’s running things, and she can use him to run the empire herself, and does. Women are barred from the Senate, so she builds a secret door into it so she can sit behind a curtain and hear everything and advise her son on how to rule.
But as Nero gets older, he and his mother begin to butt heads, and he eventually exiles Agrippina; there’s nothing she can do about it. You know, obviously, at the same time, she’s wealthy, she’s fine. But she’s losing her mind, because she’s not able to do the things that she desperately wants to do, and she knows that her son doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. And… This is the period during which she’s writing the memoirs.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Wow.
Diana Arterian: Eventually, Nero decides that his mother needs to die. And it becomes almost silly, like this Nostradamus thing, because he keeps trying to kill her, and she keeps living. He tries to poison her, and that fails. He tries to sink her in ships, but she survives. Then, he just gets down to business and sends somebody to stab her. Her famous last words are her last flex of power: smite my womb, or strike me here (pointing to her womb), because she’s illustrating that she knows the source of her death. It’s her son. And then she dies! And then he buries her, and he is still in charge for, like, 13 years before he is assassinated. Without Agrippina to guide him, he was brutal to people and extremely irresponsible with money and how he ran things.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Wow, what a life! I can see why you would have been inspired by it! When did you decide to add in parts of your own life into your reclamation of Agrippina’s life?
Diana Arterian: I decided late that I wanted to include more of myself and my experiences in Rome and during all this research as part of the book. But once I realized this, I had already gone to Rome and had already done all of my physical travel research, so I would go through my photographs and write, think about what each photo meant, and what it made me recall.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Tell us what writing the book has taught you?
I should say the superficial answer is misogyny hasn’t changed, and it can be helpful to remind people how ancient that project is. These tools against women have been sharpened over many, many, many, many, many, many years. And this violence is not only consigned to women.
When I read in public, I can’t read the second Island of Capri piece. I read it at my book launch, and I knew I was going to cry, because it’s just so heart-wrenching how little things have changed for so many people. You know, again, not only women, but anybody who, for whatever reason, your society has decided that a part of your identity makes you less than.
When I launched my book, ICE raids were happening all over LA. I really wish that this book were not so timely. I’ve been working on this book for a decade, so I didn’t think that it was going to be something that felt so palpable.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: It didn’t seem like it would be the way it is now, 10 years ago.
Diana Arterian: Yes. I started it before Trump was elected the first time. I wasn’t ignorant of misogyny as a social project, or political project, but before that, but I think…
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: You, like most of us, were probably ignorant of the fact of how quickly it can all shift.
Diana Arterian: That is the really stunning thing. And I know that I’m not alone in that. I also know that I am probably more optimistic than most, and so…Yeah, I’ve been really stunned. What I learned while researching and writing this book is that your existence can be manipulated both during your life and after your death. And that all this has been true for thousands of years. It’s really hard to swallow. I went in blazing, you know, at the misuse of this person and how she’s been made into a footnote. And then I just saw how knowing about what happened to her just lit up this enormous network of oppression that is just so palpable today. For me, she represents the innumerable people who never made it into the archive at all. The only reason I even know about her is that she was an empress. She was somebody who had incredible privilege, despite being a second-class citizen. Innumerable people would never have even made it into the archive. It really changed how I think about history, in general.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: This kind of work does that, right?
Diana Arterian: Yes, absolutely.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Yeah, it’s the archival violence that’s been done, as Jacques Derrida has so aptly pointed out in his book Archive Fever, what gets remembered is so complex once you start to look into it. And I love the way that you are doing this archival work, which may have opened up a little room for more voices to come through.
Diana Arterian: I hope so, because I have such deep respect for the archives as a history nerd and person who loves texts, and as an academic, where a deep respect for the normative archive is drilled into us. This project was a very long dismantling of those ideas for me. It’s not that I suddenly have disrespect for it, but just recognize the deep complication, and very, very, very long project of eradication, or just obliteration, or just, like, even just not copying. That’s an act of violence. Not copying someone’s words is an act of violence.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: And how your experiential experiences within these places where she lived and wrote, and the stones she walked on, right? How that is also part of the archive.
Diana Arterian: Yes, and how embodiment, which is something, again, Derrida and many other theorists and scholars have talked about, how embodied knowledge is something that many different colonial powers have worked very hard to uproot.
But I’m hopeful about the fact that there are a lot of people who are trying really hard to change the approach, and be open to embodiment
Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Awesome. Well, it’s been so amazing to speak with you today!
Diana Arterian: Likewise. I’m so grateful for your questions, Iris. Thank you. I also think this Substack is amazing. It’s such a great project.
For More Information
Read Agrippina the Younger, Poems by Diana Arterian
Listen to the Betwixt the Sheets podcast with Dr. Kate Lister
Another great post. I love your phrase - "a hard archival wall."
Thank you thank you thank you