Poppaea Sabina : The Life and Afterlife of a Roman Empress

Like many famous figures from antiquity, we must work through layers of fantasy in order to uncover the life of Poppaea Sabina (c. 30-65 CE). As the ancient sources tell it, Poppaea pushed the young emperor Nero to murder his mother, execute his wife Octavia, marry her and make her his empress--and then, a few years later, kick her to death in a drunken rage.Poppaea's genuine motives and actions, however, cannot be easily recovered from the extant sources.Her narrative comes to us already fictionalized by ancient authors employing her story to induce moral panic.In this book, Neil Bernstein critically examines these sources to produce the first modern biography of Poppaea Sabina.Her brief marriage to the emperor Nero occasioned political, religious, and social innovation.Nero was the first emperor to represent his wife as a near-equal on his official coinage, and the couple was also celebrated by a group of claquers called "Neropoppaeans." Their daughter Claudia would be the first chil