Suetonius
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Valeria Messalina, sometimes spelled Messallina, (c. 17/20 – 48) was a Roman Empress as the third wife of Emperor Claudius. A powerful and influential woman with a reputation for promiscuity, she conspired against her husband and was executed when the plot was discovered.
Reputation
The ancient Roman sources (particularly Tacitus and Suetonius), portray Messalina as insulting, disgraceful, cruel, avaricious, and a foolish nymphomaniac. Many women of her age and status enjoyed festivities and parties, but the two historians contended that Messalina unwisely combined her zest for meeting people with a sexual appetite.
The oft-repeated tale of Messalina’s all-night sex competition with a prostitute comes from Book X of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Pliny does not name the prostitute; the Restoration playwright Nathaniel Richards calls her Scylla in The Tragedy of Messalina, Empress of Rome, published in 1640, and Robert Graves in his novel Claudius the God also identified the prostitute as Scylla. According to Pliny, the competition lasted for 24 hours and Messalina won with a score of 25 partners.
Roman sources claim that Messalina used sex to enforce her power and control politicians, that she had a brothel under an assumed name and organised orgies for upper class women and that she participated much in politics and sold her influence to Roman nobles or foreign notables.
Juvenal is also highly critical of her in his Satire VI (first translation by Peter Green and second translation from wikisource):
- Then consider the God's rivals, hear what Claudius
- had to put up with. The minute she heard him snoring
- his wife - that whore-empress - who dared to prefer the mattress
- of a stews to her couch in the Palace, called for her hooded
- night-cloak and hastened forth, with a single attendant.
- Then, her black hair hidden under an ash-blonde wig,
- she'd make straight for her brothel, with its stale, warm coverlets,
- and her empty reserved cell. Here, naked, with gilded
- nipples, she plied her trade, under the name of 'The Wolf-Girl',
- parading the belly that once housed a prince of the blood.
- She would greet each client sweetly, demand cash payment,
- and absorb all their battering - without ever getting up.
- Too soon the brothel-keeper dismissed his girls:
- she stayed right till the end, always last to go,
- then trailed away sadly, still | with burning, rigid vulva,
- exhausted by men, yet a long way from satisfied,
- cheeks grimed with lamp-smoke, filthy, carrying home
- to her Imperial couch the stink of the whorehouse.
- Then look at those who rival the Gods, and hear what Claudius
- endured. As soon as his wife perceived that her husband was asleep,
- this august harlot was shameless enough to prefer a common mat
- to the imperial couch. Assuming night-cowl, and attended by a single maid,
- she issued forth; then, having concealed her raven locks under a light-coloured peruque,
- she took her place in a brothel reeking with long-used coverlets.
- Entering an empty cell reserved for herself, she there took her stand, under the feigned name of Lycisca,
- her nipples bare and gilded, and exposed to view the womb that bore thee, O nobly-born Britannicus!
- Here she graciously received all comers, asking from each his fee;
- and when at length the keeper dismissed his girls,
- she remained to the very last before closing her cell,
- and with passion still raging hot within her went sorrowfully away.
- Then exhausted by men but unsatisfied,
- with soiled cheeks, and begrimed with the smoke of lamps,
- she took back to the imperial pillow all the odours of the stews.
