Female agency between acceptance factor and acceptance sector: Agrippina the Younger under Caligula, Claudius and Nero

26.06.2025 - 18:00 - 20:00, present in room 18/E07

 Anna-Lisa Fichte, Dresden University of Technology

The imperial family took on a dual role in the Principate: on the one hand, the emperor gave his relatives political agency, which enabled them to take on official governmental tasks, become militarily active in the provinces, cultivate patronage relationships or exert influence behind the scenes. This integration served a central purpose: to generate acceptance among the three politically relevant sectors - the senate, the plebs urbana and the military (Flaig 1992, ²2019). On the other hand, its political benefits led to family members developing their own expectations regarding their scope of action and increasingly demanding it. The imperial family thus found itself caught between its function as an acceptance-generating factor and the development of its own acceptance sector with corresponding expectations of the Princeps.

For the women of the imperial house in particular, integration into government practice opened up considerable agency. The lecture analyzes the agency of imperial women in the Iulian-Claudian dynasty by looking at Agrippina the Younger in her role as sister, wife and mother, where this tense relationship can be traced particularly well: Under Caligula, she and her sisters served as an acceptance-generating factor and legitimizing element in view of the lack of offspring. As the wife of Claudius, she was granted extraordinary power, honors and room for maneuver - for example through co-determination in political decisions and influence on the succession plan - despite the presence of Britannicus. Under Nero, however, her room for maneuver was massively restricted - a pattern that can already be observed with Livia under Tiberius.

The focus is therefore on the question of how strongly female agency depended on the respective familial role, which spaces were opened up or restricted as a result and to what extent these role changes affected women's self-image and political expectations. The lecture will show that female agency in the Iulian-Claudian imperial house was always the result of a precarious negotiation process between dynastic considerations, the striving for the consolidation of acceptance and the political expectations of actors in the emperor's immediate environment, and that it was precisely their proximity to power that both privileged and endangered the women of the imperial house, depending on their familial role. At the same time, it demonstrates that the family should not be understood merely as a passive projection surface for dynastic politics, but as a group in which women played an active role in shaping the political balance of the principate and whose expectations and ambitions helped to determine the success or failure of an emperor.