Messalina: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine: The Story of the Most Notorious Woman of the Roman World

The shocking and scandalous story of Messalina—the third wife of Emperor Claudius—one of the most controversial women to have inhabited the Roman world.

The lubricious image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless, predatory, and sexually insatiable schemer—derived from the work of male historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius—has taken deep root in the Western imagination.

Here, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin puts this traditional narrative of Messalina to the test. She looks first at ...