Free A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland Page B

twice her age when they married. But none of her sons survived to fulfil her father’s dreams of finding a male heir of his own direct lineage. It was one of her two daughters, Agrippina, who would go on to produce a male heir to the throne – the emperor Caligula.
    Julia’s behaviour was more than just a wild fling. The orgy on the rostrum was timed (as well as placed) for maximum effect. The very year that Augustus was declared Father of his Country, his daughter demonstrated his complete failure as a father to his own family. She knew how a daughter can most keenly wound her father. Her promiscuity was the revenge of a daughter who rebelled in the only way that was open to her – to seek her own personal gratification, as Seneca notes with horror. She was playing sexual politics, forced to do so because her body had become a political commodity. Paradoxically, by giving it away she was reclaiming it as her own. But Julia’s acts were acts of political defiance as well as ofpersonal protest. Augustus’ laws were deeply unpopular (as Livy noted), nowhere more so than within the intellectual coterie in which Julia moved and from which evolved a counter-cultural rebellion. Something similar happened in America and other Western democracies with the sexual revolution of the 1960s against the conservative, family-oriented moral code of the previous decades.
    Augustus, enraged, did not try to keep the scandal secret. He dragged his daughter and her friends before the courts, accusing her of promiscuity, adultery, and prostituting herself. The court heard the full, lurid story. She was condemned. He banished her forever. She died 16 years later without ever seeing him or Rome again.
    The stage was now set for one of the great creations of misogyny. Cato the Elder had warned his fellow Romans long ago, when women were demanding the right to wear gorgeous clothes, that ‘woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal’ to whom any concession of freedom will lead to complete abandonment and the collapse of all moral standards. That fear was embodied in Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius (10 BC – AD 54).
    Messalina was the great-granddaughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia, who married Mark Antony after Fulvia died. She married Claudius in AD 37, when she was probably still a teenager (though the year of her birth is not known for certain) and he was almost 47. Four years later, after the assassination of Caligula, Claudius succeeded him to become emperor. He would last for 13 years. Perhaps the most unlikely of Rome’s rulers, he is portrayed as a rather scholarly eccentric, maladroit, and consumed with the pursuit of arcane history. In dramatic contrast, his young wife has become identified with a psycho-sexual disorder: ‘Excessive heterosexuality (promiscuity) or what is known as the Messalina complex . . .’ 60
    According to Havelock Ellis, one of the twentieth century’s most famous sex experts: ‘Sex is no real pleasure to the Messalina type. It’s only an attempt to find relief from deeper unhappiness. You might call it a flight into sex.’ 61
    In modern times, various theories have been expounded to explain ‘the Messalina type’, from frigidity to thwarted maternal instincts to latent lesbianism; more recently, the whole notion of such a thing as nymphomania has been questioned. 62 But the Messalina of history is more than a psychological category. Among other things, she is one of the outstanding examples of how prejudice works as a kind of reductionism.
    Messalina’s historical importance stems from the fact that she was only the second woman to become a Roman empress. Her sole role model was Livia, the austere wife of Augustus whose private life was as impeccable as any matron’s. In but one thing Messalina seems to have imitated her: her determination to get rid of anyone suspected of hostility to her or to her husband, or of harbouring ambitions to supplant her son Britannicus as Claudius’