Rereading Octavia and Poppaea: Unraveling the literary afterlives of Nero’s wives
| dc.contributor.advisor | Ginsberg, Lauren | |
| dc.contributor.author | Baroff, Melissa | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-06-06T13:45:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-06-06T13:45:33Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.department | Classical Studies | |
| dc.description.abstract | Claudia Octavia and Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s first and second wife, have long been typecast based on how they appear in the historiographical works of Tacitus and Cassius Dio. Tacitus paints Octavia as a passive, meek victim who endures Nero’s abuses, including the murder of her brother, without complaint and without displaying emotion. Her death scene is famously brutal and needlessly cruel, heightening her status as a victim of Nero and of Poppaea. Poppaea, on the other hand, is portrayed as scheming and manipulative, a woman who controls Nero and urges his worst crimes through her combination of wicked attributes. And often the women are shown in conflict: Tacitus famously recounts how a triumphant Poppaea demanded to see Octavia’s severed head after her execution. These images of Octavia and Poppaea have persisted in modern historical scholarship and in the modern popular imagination of Nero’s reign. At the same time, there exists a wider breadth of ancient characterizations of these two women: beyond the historiographical tradition, Nero’s wives appear in encomiastic poetry, epigram, satire, natural history, biography, historical drama, and other genres. The Octavias and Poppaeas of these other genres often differ dramatically from those of historiography, sometimes in a mutually exclusive way, and particularly in how these authors write the women’s emotional inner lives. This dissertation explores the literary characterizations of Octavia and Poppaea outside of the historiographical accounts. Each chapter investigates one important genre or text and offers a close reading of that work’s central themes, language, intertextual and intratextual allusions, generic features, and, where illustrative, comparative study of the iconographical record in order to uncover that particular author or text’s idea of Octavia and Poppaea. The goal of each chapter or of the work as a whole is not to create a cohesive picture of one single literary Octavia or Poppaea, much less to parse a “true” historical Octavia or Poppaea as one might find in a modern work of history or biography. Rather, this dissertation returns to the study of these women the wide body of literary reflections of their lives in all its variety. This dissertation argues that the literary afterlives of these women is as variegated and important as that of more well known (and, therefore, more well studied), figures of Nero’s reign | |
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| dc.subject | Classical studies | |
| dc.title | Rereading Octavia and Poppaea: Unraveling the literary afterlives of Nero’s wives | |
| dc.type | Dissertation |