Agrippina Reclaimed: Diana Arterian’s Feminist Excavation

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Anyone who has studied Roman history knows that its depiction, and the ways in which its emperors, empresses, and conquerors have been remembered, often depends upon the highly subjective accounts of one or two ancient historians. In Agrippina the Younger: Poems, Diana Arterian fuses poetry, history and critical reflection in strikingly original ways, producing a meditation not only on patriarchy and imperial power, but also on what Marc Nichanian has termed the “historiographic perversion”— the distortion of historical memory through ideological narration.

Drawing upon anecdotes transmitted almost exclusively by male Roman historians, many of whom had clear political and cultural investments in portraying Agrippina the Younger as monstrous, manipulative, or sexually transgressive, Arterian reclaims one of antiquity’s most maligned women through lyric inquiry and historical excavation. The result is a remarkable volume, notable not only for the poems themselves, but also for the reflections they provoke on history, gender, authorship, and the unstable processes through which historical “truth” is constructed.

Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was born Julia Agrippina, the daughter of the celebrated general Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder, and the sister of the emperor Caligula. She later married her uncle, the emperor Claudius, becoming empress and eventually securing the succession of her son, the future emperor Nero. Her life, marked by exile, political intrigue, survival, and ultimately assassination at Nero’s command, has fascinated historians for centuries, though nearly every surviving account was written by men such as Suetonius and Tacitus deeply suspicious of female political authority.

Arterian’s poems are accompanied by reflections, readings, and archival research conducted in situ in Rome and at other sites associated with Agrippina’s life, including the island of Pontia to which she was exiled by Caligula and where, according to some accounts, she composed memoirs now lost to history. These meditations deepen the collection’s engagement with the fragmentary and mediated nature of historical memory itself. Her poems are interwoven with reflections on history: who writes it, whose voices it preserves, and what it deliberately or structurally obscures. At once feminist inquiry and historical excavation, the literary archaeology in which the poet engages is deeply engaging, even if the search for the “real” Agrippina can at times resemble the pursuit of a needle in a proverbial Roman haystack.

Many readers will know Agrippina through Robert Graves’s classic historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, later adapted into the unforgettable I, Claudius television series. Those old enough to remember watching it may still recall its atmosphere of relentless intrigue, betrayal, poisonings, and imperial paranoia. I first encountered it as a schoolboy just beginning to study Latin, and the constant succession of murders and conspiracies terrified me at the time.

Arterian’s strategy in this highly original volume is to juxtapose poetry with prose historical reflection. For example, in “Agrippina After Her Mother Tells Her Emperor Tiberius Is Giving Her Over to Marriage (28 c.e., Palatine Hill, Rome)”:

“She goes up to the curved-roof Temple
of Cybele alone.  The throned goddess
all smooth marble save for her face—
black meteorite   The celestial fleck

shot down to Anatolia.  brought from the coast
to Rome by a single line     of women
Thousands passed the raw rock with care
carved to features upon its arrival.    I want to sit

in the goddess’s stone lap…”

Facing this text, Arterian writes about her visit to “The Palatine Hippodrome,” a beautiful meditation on equine husbandry and Roman life:

“Not a space to move horses around as the Greeks did—here, slow strolls in loops by the important families homed in a ring around the palace. Walls raised to shade the grassy walkway, its shape like a long pill. Semicircular fountains of marble to sit and feel coolness coming off water.”

Later, in “The Death of Livia, Empress-Mother (29 c.e., Palatine Hill, Rome),” Arterian writes of Agrippina tending to the dead Livia’s corpse:

“She is set on earth as when born
cleaned and ready on a couch

a heavy coverlet up her neck
a spruce bough at the door

Slaves wash the body nightly
It a slow green   as in a damp place

Each day Agrippina sits   hand on
covered foot until the day the body

begins to blister…”

In an opposite entry titled “The Isle of Capri,” Arterian juxtaposes the care Agrippina showed Livia with Tiberius’s perverse frolicking:

“It is here where Tiberius had a bath; he had boys (‘little fishes’) tickle his parts underwater. Some unweaned babies put his organ as though to the breast, Suetonius tells us. When done with them, he pushed them off cliffs into churning water. Adults Tiberius found to be criminals were brought here and tortured, then cast headlong into the sea before his eyes, while a band of marines waited below for the bodies and broke their bones with boat hooks and oars.”

Here, as elsewhere in the volume, Arterian skillfully pairs poems about Agrippina and other Roman nobles who showed greater humanity, with accounts of the brutality of their male counterparts. Roman empresses could be harsh, but their cruelty pales beside that of figures such as Nero, Tiberius, Caligula, and Domitian.

Agrippina the Younger will appeal equally to amateur historians, classicists, and readers of contemporary poetry. In a review of my own collection, A Poet in Washington Heights, Aris Janigian observed that “Armenian Americans are now among some of the finest poets working in the U.S.” Diana Arterian deserves a place within that distinguished lineage. Alongside poets such as Aaron Poochigian and Lory Bedikian, she has established herself as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. This current volume was awarded the 2026 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, while her first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, announced a writer of exceptional intellectual and lyrical gifts. Agrippina the Younger confirms Arterian’s importance on an even broader scale, making a significant contribution not only to contemporary poetry, but also to the ongoing dialogue between literature, history and the politics of memory.

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