Overview
Title: Agrippina’s Arrogant Fecundity
Author: Caitlin C. Gillespie (Brandeis University) — cgillespie@brandeis.edu
Date: Presented in 2021
What this page contains:
Overview and analysis of Caitlin Gillespie’s presentation “Agrippina’s Arrogant Fecundity,” including a detailed summary of the key arguments and imagery discussed in the accompanying slides. The page also links the original slide deck (PDF) and contextualizes Gillespie’s exploration of Agrippina’s political, maternal, and symbolic legacy within Julio-Claudian ideology.
Summary
Caitlin Gillespie’s presentation, “Agrippina’s Arrogant Fecundity,” examines how Agrippina the Younger’s motherhood and fecundity—her capacity to bear heirs—became both the source of her political influence and the cause of her downfall within the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Drawing from literary, numismatic, and sculptural evidence, Gillespie situates Agrippina within the broader framework of Roman gender ideology and imperial propaganda, showing how female reproductive power was at once celebrated and feared in a patriarchal society obsessed with lineage, succession, and moral control.
The presentation opens by grounding Agrippina within her dynastic context using the Julio-Claudian family tree. From Augustus to Nero, Gillespie highlights how Agrippina’s position as sister of Caligula, niece of Claudius, and mother of Nero gave her unparalleled access to power—but also made her an object of suspicion. Through the Grand Camée de France, depicting divine ancestry and imperial continuity, Gillespie illustrates how dynastic imagery enshrined women’s reproductive roles as guarantors of imperial legitimacy.
The central theme—pregnancy as a dangerous form of power—frames Agrippina’s fecundity as both sacred and subversive. Gillespie juxtaposes terracotta votives of pregnant women and childbirth scenes with Tacitus’ accounts to demonstrate how Roman culture visualized and controlled the female body. Pregnancy and fertility were celebrated when safely contained within moral and dynastic boundaries, but condemned when women appeared to wield them independently of male authority.
Tacitus becomes the lens through which Agrippina’s “arrogant fecundity” is constructed. Gillespie divides Tacitus’ portrayal into four key facets:
- Public Knowledge: Tacitus depicts Agrippina’s maternal visibility—her presence in the military camp with her young son Caligula—as a performance of virtue that verges on political display.
- Hierarchies: Her fecundity rivals and surpasses other imperial women (notably Livia and Livilla), producing tension within the dynastic hierarchy.
- Dependency: Tacitus portrays her grief and exhaustion after Germanicus’s death as physically and emotionally entwined with her reproductive identity—her womb both a political and personal burden.
- Arrogant Fecundity: In Annals 4.12, her chastity and fertility make her untouchable yet dangerously influential; Tiberius, unable to harm her directly, manipulates others’ envy of her superba fecunditas.
Gillespie then contrasts Agrippina’s image with that of Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s later wife, whose own pregnancy and death illustrate how female fertility remained a political weapon. The “fecundity failures” of both women, culminating in death scenes charged with irony and violence, underscore how Rome’s moral and legal systems (exemplified by the Augustan moral legislation) turned motherhood into an instrument of patriarchal control.
By tracing visual archetypes—from Arsinoë II of Egypt to Roman imperial mothers—Gillespie argues that fecundity itself operated as political rhetoric. Statues, cameos, and coins made female bodies bearers of dynastic continuity, while texts by Tacitus and others turned those same bodies into moral lessons. Agrippina’s legacy thus exposes a recurring paradox: in the Roman imagination, women’s generative power both legitimized empire and threatened its patriarchal order.