Dr Emma Southon
speaker
450 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Dr Emma Southon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They think that Claudius particularly needs a wife because he just needs something to focus on.
He's had four already and it's believed for whatever personal reasons that he just can't really be trusted without a wife, that he just needs that sort of stabilizing influence.
He has a whole bunch of concubines, but they believe for some reason that he requires a woman next to him just to complete him.
So it immediately breaks down into factions within the palace or within the imperial court, which is dramatized really pleasingly by Tacitus as this kind of roundtable discussion between three freedmen.
and there are various arguments for various eligible women, one of whom is a woman that Claudius has already been married to, one of whom is this woman who just keeps being married off to people called Lolia Paulina, who's very beautiful, and one of whom is Agrippina, who is put forward because...
Basically, the argument is made that he needs to marry somebody within the best family.
It has to be somebody from the Julia-Claudia family, basically.
If he marries somebody from outside of the family, then he will be giving power to another
faction.
There will be a whole nother family that is raised up to imperial levels and it will cause chaos.
But if they marry him off to somebody who's within the Julio-Claudia family, then it keeps everything nice and neat, like the Habsburgs.
And she's basically the only woman left standing who is a member of the Julio-Claudians.
The argument is made that she has already proved that she's fertile, so she can have more children, that she
is of the best family and the Egyptians did it.
So it's probably fine for semi-divine people to do it, which Claudius obviously now is.
Well, there are stories of her using her privileged access because she is a member of the family.
She is one of the few people who can touch him, one of the few people who can hang out with him on a one-on-one basis.
Of her using that access to basically seduce him, to kind of sit on his lap, to give him kisses, to stroke his hair and tell him he's handsome, which...
He is definitely involved in the processes that have to take place to allow him to marry her.
So he must have been, if not persuaded that it was a good political idea, then definitely wanted to marry her.
Showing 201–220 of 450 · page 11 of 23
← Previous
Next →