Messalina: The Life and Times of Rome’s Most Scandalous Empress

This is the story of Messalina â third wife of Emperor Claudius and one of the most notorious women to have inhabited the Roman world. The image of the Empress Messalina as a sexually insatiable schemer, derived from the work of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, has taken deep root in the Western imagination. The stories they told about her â of nightly visits to a brothel and a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute â have defined the empress's legacy, but her real story is much more complex.

In Messalina, Honor Cargill-Martin reappraises one of the most slandered female figures of ancient history, and finds a woman who succeeded in asserting herself in the overwhelmingly male world of imperial Roman politics. Intelligent, passionate and ruthless when she needed to be, Messalinaâs story encapsulates the cut-throat political manoeuvring and unimaginable luxury of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in its heyday. Cargill-Martin sets out not to 'salvage' Messalina's reputation, but to look at her life in the context of her time.

Above all, she seeks to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously circumscribed by currents of high politics and patriarchy.