![]() ![]() What about fiction? Honor Cargill-Martin has already co-written children’s novels. It was the same story for Baudelaire, the Marquise de Sade and EM Delafield. ![]() In the 19th century, the official medical term for a nymphomaniac was a “Messalina”. witch, hell-cat most insatiate whore that ever cleav’d to the loynes of letchers,” as Nathanael Richards called her in his 1640 Tragedy of Messalina. ![]() She is the “whore empress” of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire the “top gallant strumpet. But she is ill-suited to such a treatment, because she has always – magnificently, but monotonously – symbolised one thing: nymphomania. The Senate ordered what we now call damnatio memoriae: her name was chiselled off monuments and her statues resculpted in the likeness of her successor, Agrippina.Ī fashionable workaround would be the “cultural history”: posthumous glimpses of her in art and literature, demonstrating that each century gets the Messalina it deserves. Her downfall, according to Tacitus (who wasn’t born at the time), was precipitated by her bigamous wedding to a handsome senator in a Bacchanalian orgy while her husband, the emperor Claudius, was out of town. How do you solve a problem like Messalina? A straight biography is nearly impossible: the ancient accounts of her short life are ludicrously hostile, written decades, and in some cases centuries, after her execution in 48 AD. ![]()
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