Dr Emma Southon

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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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · Agrippina the Younger: Rome's Most Notorious Empress · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

And they're very good at optics.

Agrippina is particularly very good at optics.

And there's a lot of, whenever they appear in public, they will always make sure that Nero, who is kind of 15 years old-ish, is dressed as a

a full soldier or in military garb or as a grown man and that Britannicus is always presented in the garb of childhood.

So he's always wearing a short tunic and they have this thing called the bulla, this protective necklace that only children wear that you give up when you become a man.

So he's always presented as a very much kind of a pathetic child compared to this wonderful, magnificent 15-year-old boy.

Pretty much, yeah.

For the second half of his reign, from about 50 onwards, they get married in 50, to the end of his reign, she is the prominent power.

It is by the conservatives.

It's an interesting thing that later on when people are writing about it, so all of the sources that we have are pretty much written under Trajan and later than that.

So when the idea of what the emperor is has shifted quite a lot.

They find it disgusting, absolutely disgusting that this has happened, which is why Agrippina appears as the great villain of Tacitus' histories.

He's writing under Trajan and Nerva.

And so she is the real big bad of his history at this point.

They're very much men's men, but they also have perfected, more than any other emperor, the image of the princeps, who listens to advisors and is a military hero and...

and is not tyrannical in any possible way.

And they really managed to get down this idea that they are the first man rather than the kind of divine tyrant or a semi-king.

And they are beloved by the people who are writing about them, or at least they say they love them while they're writing about them while they're alive.

But at the same time, when people are alive during Claudius' reign, the senatorial decrees and the things that survived from that period, which is not a huge amount, all talk about them in the most glowing terms.

Oh my God, we love Agrippina so much.

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