Agrippina

Also known as: Agrippina the Elder · Family: Roman imperial household · Role: wife of Germanicus · First appears: Annals I (10)

Agrippina the Elder was married to Germanicus, the granddaughter of Augustus, daughter of Agrippa, and daughter-in-law of Drusus (Germanicus's father). She and Germanicus had many children, including Caligula and Julia, whom she bore at Lesbos as her final birth. Livia’s hostility toward her, arising from their stepfamily connection, made them enemies, while Agrippina was also remembered for her celebrated chastity and fruitful marriage.

During the panic at the Rhine in Annals I, Agrippina prevented the bridge from being demolished and aided the soldiers by providing medicines and clothing. “she performed all the duties of a general, relieved the necessitous soldiers, upon the wounded bestowed medicines, and upon others clothes.” This public action brought her into suspicion and jealousy with Tiberius, though it also left her with greater credit among the army than its leaders. Livia directed Plancina to persecute her through rivalry and insults, and Plancina publicly attacked both Agrippina and Germanicus.

After Germanicus’s death, Agrippina departed with his ashes and their children, seeking revenge against Cneius Piso and facing Tiberius as an enemy. In later years Sejanus plotted against her household and the sons of Germanicus, using Livia the elder, Livia the younger, and Julius Posthumus to portray Agrippina as aspiring to the Empire; she was also connected as a rival to Livia and as an enemy of Tiberius. Her cousin Claudia Pulchra was accused in the destruction directed toward her, and Agrippina was warned that poison had been prepared for her at her father-in-law’s table. She was eventually exiled to Pandataria, where Tiberius ordered her murder; her death was later commemorated by an annual offering to Jupiter on the seventeenth of October.