Agrippina in the Literary Tradition

The Literary Record On Agrippina The Younger Is Shaped With Calculation to produce a portrait-or portraits. The product may intersect or overlap with history, but it is not to be confused with history. This entangled relationship between report and design arises most conspicuously and powerfully in Tacitus. But it clings also to the accounts of Suetonius and Dio Cassius, and to the interlocking narratives generated by those authors, our principal literary sources. EC] We will go a long way toward dispelling the power that the Tahitian account of Agrippina has over us by recognizing that a number of literary and rhetorical features of the historian’s narrative make it extremely problematic to take the picture of Agrippina that emerges as an accurate reflection of the historical woman. We need to acknowledge, in other words, that Tacitus’s Agrippina is largely a literary construct that serves the larger ends of the narrative of the participates of Claudius and Nero.

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