Poppaea Sabina

Roman noblewoman

• Born: 31 c.e.
• Birthplace: Pompeii, Campania (now in Italy)
• Died: 65 c.e.
• Place of death: Unknown

Poppaea Sabina established herself as a pivotal figure in the popular support for the regime of the Roman emperor Nero.

Early Life

Poppaea Sabina (paw-PEE-ah sa-BI-nah), a woman of noble birth and financial resources, was an immensely influential figure in Nero’s Imperial court. As she became an increasingly public figure, many of her decisions seem to have been driven by a desire to legitimize her position in the Imperial household. Indeed, the position and influence of Poppaea Sabina were, on more than one occasion, matters of such considerable interest to the populace at Rome that on them rested the support of the Imperial regime.

Poppaea Sabina was the daughter of Titus Ollius and the granddaughter of Poppaeus Sabinus (from whom her name was derived). Poppaeus Sabinus, as a confidant of both Augustus and Tiberius, had held the consulship and was awarded a military triumph. Her mother (also Poppaea Sabina), known for her beauty, was accused of adultery by Valeria Messallina during the reign of Claudius I and driven to suicide in prison. It is reasonable to conjecture that the examples of both her mother and Messallina early awakened the younger Poppaea Sabina to the possibilities and hazards for beautiful and powerful women in the house of the emperor.

Beyond this, almost nothing is known of the early life of Poppaea Sabina. She married Rufius Crispinus, a distinguished man of the equestrian order who had served as Praetorian Prefect under Claudius. With Rufius, Poppaea had a son, also named Rufius Crispinus, whom Nero had drowned on a fishing expedition sometime after the death of his mother. Poppaea is said to have cultivated art and learning and to have been an excellent conversationalist. Further, she was known as a beauty with a taste for the finer things. In her tours of elite Roman society, Poppaea made the acquaintance of Marcus Salvius Otho (later to be heralded as the Emperor Otho by the Praetorians in 69 c.e.), who at the time served as a close adviser to Nero. After she had a brief, clandestine affair with him, the two were legitimately married. Rufius Crispinus, for his part, continued to live in Rome and serve in the government until he was banished by Nero in 64; the allegations in the case of Crispinus’s banishment are unknown, but his crime in Nero’s eyes was surely his past marriage to Poppaea.

Life’s Work

Nero took notice of Poppaea. Otho, having previously been most trusted by Nero, was now increasingly excluded from the emperor’s inner circle. The historian Tacitus reports that Nero appointed Otho as governor of Lusitania in order to remove him as a rival for Poppaea’s affections, but it is not possible to say with certainty that Nero’s true goal in making Otho a provincial governor was to remove him from Rome. Otho served well in his administrative post until the death of Nero in 68. Poppaea remained at Rome after her husband’s departure. An alternate story, told in Tacitus’s Ab excessu divi Augusti (c. 116 c.e., also known as Annales; Annals, 1598) and Suetonius’s “Life of Otho” (in De vita Caesarum, c. 120 c.e.; History of the Twelve Caesars, 1606), is that Nero himself may have orchestrated Otho’s marriage to Poppaea Sabina in order to keep her available in the Imperial court until he was able to divorce his own wife, Octavia. Whatever the circumstances of their original introduction, Otho’s affection for Poppaea was genuine; after his accession as emperor, he had statues of her restored throughout the city of Rome at public expense, despite her general lack of popularity.

Poppaea’s initial effect on Nero’s actions can be traced to her desire to secure her position as the legitimate wife of the emperor. At the time he fell in love with Poppaea, Nero was legally married to Octavia, daughter of Agrippina. Poppaea knew that popular support for Nero had flagged under the weight of his notorious relationship with a freedwoman named Acte and the widespread rumors that he had engaged in an incestuous relationship with his mother. She further knew that, regardless of whether the rumors of the relationship were true, Agrippina exercised a powerful control over Nero’s actions.

Sensing that she would never be able to marry Nero without removing Agrippina’s influence, she encouraged the emperor in a plot to murder his mother. This plot came to fruition in southern Italy when Nero invited Agrippina to join him at Baiae. Although the notorious attempt to drown her at sea in a staged shipwreck ultimately failed, she was eventually dispatched by Anicertus, commander of the fleet at Miseunum, who volunteered for this task. The story of what actually happened circulated widely among the people despite the official Imperial position that Agrippina had died after being discovered in a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor.

After returning to Rome, Nero sought to regain popular support for his regime though the introduction of entertainments and the destruction of his increasingly popular subordinates, Sulla and Plautus. After the assassinations of these two (Sulla at Massilia, or Marseilles in Gallia Narbonesnis and Plautus in Asia), the emperor felt sufficiently recovered from the scandal of Agrippina’s murder and the treachery of his seditious operatives to go forward with his original intention of divorcing Octavia to marry Poppaea.

Nero at first removed Octavia from his household on the grounds that she was unable to provide him with a son, but Poppaea then suborned one of Octivia’s domestics to declare that her mistress had engaged in a sexual relationship with a slave named Eucaeus. Although subsequent investigation failed to evince any more evidence than the highly suspect testimony of slaves from Octavia’s house (some of whom corroborated the original accusation under torture by Nero’s minister Tigellinus), the emperor nonetheless obtained an ordinary divorce under the provisions of which Octavia was to be allowed to depart with considerable property. However, the further step of banishing her to Campania under military guard was taken as an executive action by Nero and seems to have been instigated by the exhortations of Poppaea, desirous to be publicly married and to remove any possible influence from Octavia. The banishment of Octavia so offended the populace and resulted in such widespread expressions of displeasure that Nero was forced once again to recognize Octavia as his wife.

As soon as Nero’s reversal of the divorce was made public, demonstrations of disdain for Poppaea Sabina erupted throughout the city of Rome. Her images were desecrated, while those of Octavia were decorated. In an excess of thanks and celebration, one mob ascended the Palatine and approached the Imperial residence to salute and thank the emperor. They were greeted by an armed guard that turned them back; it now became clear that Poppaea’s influence with Nero was far from extinguished and that further outbursts of this sort would not be tolerated in the city. Octavia was not recalled from Campania, and Nero considered his options.

Driven by her own need for legitimacy and conscious of Nero’s paranoia, Poppaea Sabina began to take action to establish a greater control over the emperor. She attempted to convince him that the popular uprising they had just witnessed was a precursor to a revolution that would come to fruition should Octavia ever return to Rome; the common people had begun to see in Octavia a heroine of the opposition who could lead a revolution against Nero. Persuaded by these arguments, Nero decided to bolster the claim that Octavia had engaged in an extramarital affair with a slave by manufacturing yet more compelling evidence. He enticed Anicetus, the same lieutenant who had been involved in the assassination of Agrippina, to declare that he had himself intrigued with her against the emperor. Compelled to this service, Anicetus was rewarded with a lifetime in exile on Sardinia without loss of his property. There, he would die a natural death. The crime of Octavia now sufficiently established, Nero had her banished to the island of Pandateria, where, after a short time, she was cruelly executed by Imperial decree. Only days later, Nero married Poppaea. They had a daughter they named Claudia Augusta, but she died in infancy.

Poppaea is said to have died at the emperor’s hands in 65 c.e., perhaps after he kicked her in a fit of rage. Suetonius testifies that Poppaea, pregnant with a second child and also ill, had enraged Nero by complaining because he had returned home late from the races. Poppaea was given a lavish state funeral at which her corpse was burnt with a legendary amount of incense. Nero also decreed Poppaea deified, and she was thus incorporated into the state cult at Rome.

However, the people of Rome were quietly pleased when they heard of the death of Poppaea Sabina, and the reception of her demise is surely testimony to the degree of importance that she had taken on in the popular imagination. She had come to symbolize the capricious cruelty that was to be the mark of the last few years of Nero’s reign. The noted senator Thrasea Paetus is said to have been conspicuously absent from Poppaea’s funeral and refused to recognize her divinity. Many stories, some probably apocryphal, circulated about her lust and indulgence. The younger Pliny claims that it was well known that Poppaea kept she-goats with her at all times because she liked to bathe in their milk to enhance her beauty. Not long after Nero’s death, the Octavia was composed. A Latin tragedy in the style of Seneca, the Octavia tells the story of Nero’s cruelty toward his first wife following his affair with Poppaea. The image of Poppaea Sabina as femme fatale lived on in the classical tradition, again surfacing in Claudio Monteverdi’s 1642 opera L’incoronazione di Poppaea.

Significance

Poppaea Sabina caught the popular imagination in ancient Rome as the quintessence of women who stood against the traditional values of the ruling classes. For many, she came to represent the woman who is more concerned with her own needs than the affairs of the state. At the same time, she shrewdly manipulated power and influenced several of Nero’s policies. The historical tradition does not treat Poppaea Sabina well, but this may, in part, reflect a growing resentment of the power wielded by women in the household of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

Bibliography

Suetonius. The Histories of the Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. New York: Welcome Rain, 2001. By referring to Suetonius’s chapter on Nero, the reader will find much valuable information in this primary source document, which is one of history’s best guides to the Julio-Claudian emperors.

Syme, R. Tacitus. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1963. The reader should consult the index for references to Poppaea Sabina in Syme’s text. Syme not only discusses the evidence from Tacitus; he also brings to bear expert knowledge of a broad variety of sources in an interesting and readable way.

Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated by Michael Grant. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Tacitus. The Histories. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tacitus described the reign of Nero and role of Poppaea Sabina in two sections of his work: The first starts at The Annals 13.45 and the other at The Histories 1.13. Tacitus’s prose is readable, and the comparison of his testimonies with those of Suetonius provide the reader with a good sense for some of the problems of interpretation that attend understanding the details of history in this period.

Wiedemann, T. E. J. “Tiberius to Nero.” The Cambridge Ancient History. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Wiedemann provides a clear examination of the political significance of Nero’s relationship with Poppaea Sabina during the various stages of their involvement.