This opera takes us to one of the most notorious periods of imperial Roman history, the age of Nero. But while the writings that survive from ancient history often center the voices and worldview of men, Poppaea takes us into a world of women. In doing so, it stages two intertwined stories. The first is a story about Nero’s two wives, Octavia and Poppaea, as they wage a war fueled by women’s rage within the heart of the imperial palace. The second is a story about the rage of men against powerful women and the ways in which that rage vents itself – on their bodies, on their supporters, on their legacies. Never before had a Roman emperor’s divorce of an unloved wife threatened to undo his power; never after would a Roman emperor’s violent obsession with a new wife echo so clearly in eternity. This new work takes us back in time to these violent years but sheds the detached male eyes of ancient history in order to foreground the emotional interiority of the women who experienced these events, especially the woman for whom Nero would risk everything: Poppaea.

Poppaea strikes the Roman historical record like a lightning bolt. As a woman with few significant social connections, she mattered little to ancient historians whose eyes remained firmly trained on the center of power, the House of the Emperor. She only ‘matters’ once her orbit intersects with that center of power; in other words, for ancient historians, she only matters once Nero notices her. Then, suddenly, she matters very much. We would do well to remember this dynamic as a first act of violence committed against her.

Poppaea’s paternal line was of middling significance, but her mother’s line could boast a man, Gaius Poppaeaus Sabinus, who rose from obscurity to be consul of Rome, a political office second only to the emperor. For this reason Poppaea chose to go by a name descended from her maternal line, an irregular choice and one that foregrounds the role of women in transmitting power and prestige. Her mother too was a victim – executed on trumped up charges by the empress Messalina, wife of the previous emperor Claudius. While few ancient sources seem interested in this episode, we might imagine how it colored Poppaea’s understanding of imperial power.

She came to Nero’s attention through his good friend, Otho, who was either Poppaea’s lover or her husband. Although the timeline of her affair with Nero is uncertain, it is clear that Nero decided there must be a marriage. It probably seemed to Nero that it would be easy to accomplish: he simply had to divorce his current wife, Octavia, who had born him no children and whom he clearly disliked, in the same way that earlier emperors like Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius had divorced earlier wives in pursuit of more appealing matches. Yes, Octavia was the daughter of his predecessor, Claudius, and had been important for Nero securing the throne eight years earlier, but he was now a mature ruler with a firm grasp on the empire and an equally firm need to shore up that throne by producing an heir. Poppaea may even have been pregnant at this time. What Nero clearly did not imagine was the tidal wave of rage that his decision would unleash, a rage that informs an early scene in Poppaea.

First came the rage of the people who loved their princess with a passion that should not be underestimated. For one of the only times during the reign of Nero, they took to the streets in protest. Octavia was the wife who mattered. Her children must rule after Nero. They seem to have taken particular offense to statues of Poppaea cropping up throughout the public spaces of Rome, replacing those of their beloved people’s princess. They attacked Poppaea’s statues viciously, tearing them limb from limb or otherwise smearing them with mud and dung. They reerected Octavia’s statues throughout the political centers of the city. And though the crowd here touches statues, we must see in their actions how the statues become proxies for the bodies of the women, for the loving caresses they offer the one and for the violence the enraged mob wishes to inflict on the other.

Nero’s rage comes next. He rages against the people and sends armed guards to violently suppress the riots. But the true target of his rage is the wife he wishes to rid himself of. It is clear to him now that the people will not let him let her go, that keeping her alive, even if divorced, will only turn her into a rallying point for those who would dethrone him. And so he manufactures a charge of adultery and treason against her such that he could exile her and, once she is out of the reach of her mob-protectorate, execute her. She was at most twenty-two years old.

Where was Poppaea during this time? The historical record is keen to tell us that she played puppet master behind the scenes driving Nero’s rage to the point of murder. She was behind the murder of his mother. She was behind the decision to execute Octavia. From the perspective of male Roman historians, the only explanation for Nero’s choices was a truly evil woman whispering into his ear. And yet just as quickly as she entered the historical tradition, upon her marriage she is all but forgotten. We hear only of the birth of their first child, a daughter whose tragic death engendered deep and profound grief in her parents. We next hear of Poppaea at her own death. It is as if once she became the empress of Rome, her story was done being written. But of course this is not so.

When we look beyond the writings of ancient historians, we can piece together a wider picture from the fragments that remain. We can observe how Nero minted golden coins advertising her fertility, the title “Augusta” that he bestowed on her, and their partnership in power. Partnership? Was this possible? It seems that the answer is yes. Even within the historical tradition we see references to certain political decisions being made “in the presence of Poppaea.” Elsewhere we have a glimpse of more: the Jewish writer Josephus records that Poppaea twice interceded on behalf of the Jewish people when they petitioned Nero to address certain wrongs. More locally, chance surviving graffiti from Pompeii, the likely city of Poppaea’s birth, show us a faction of citizens who felt they had benefited from the joint decisions of Nero and Poppaea and who consequently called themselves the Neropoppaeenses. This circumstantial evidence points to a widespread perception of Poppaea as key player in Neronian politics, a woman who steered her imperial husband towards good decisions.

Why were the ancient historians uninterested in this side of her story? Because, of course, they too feel rage against a powerful woman and they use their texts to play their part in her abuse – this is what we mean when we refer to an ancient authorial “bias” when writing about women. This brings us to Poppaea’s untimely death. According to some ancient writers, she was poisoned by Nero but our major sources believe this cannot have been the case and suggest instead that, in a fit of rage, he caused her death by kicking her in the stomach during the final months of pregnancy. But according to these same sources, none positively inclined to Nero, it must have been an accident because of how much Nero loved Poppaea. If modern audiences bristle at how Roman male historians can so easily make excuses for domestic violence by appealing to the idea of love, we should go one step further and realize that this is part of how history continues to abuse women. It would not fit the historical idea of Poppaea as an evil woman puppeteering all of Nero’s worst crimes to have her suddenly become a sympathetic victim without agency. The focus of ancient historians, then, remains not on the tragic death of the woman in question, but on Nero’s fits of rage and on his extravagant grief for her in the aftermath. In other words, in her final hour she remains for ancient historians a vehicle for exploring Nero’s story, not her own.

But there is more: scholars have recently drawn attention to how the ancient historians of Nero’s reign write less with an eye to facts and more with an eye to replicating certain stereotypical story patterns drawn from Greek ideas about mad kings. In other words, many famous episodes of Nero’s life are scripted so that they fulfill certain wider ideas about how tyrants live. One recognizable pattern is that mad tyrants kill their pregnant wives, an act that becomes an index of their perversity as they destroy their own legacy in utero. One particular tyrant, Periander of Corinth, seems to become a wider, consistent model for ancient historians writing about Nero. This should cause us pause. And so if Nero did not beat Poppaea to death, what may have killed her? This is also a tragic tale as old as time: Poppaea may have died from complications from a miscarriage or childbirth. This fate befell many women, no matter their status. Poppaea may have been one of them. Ancient historians were so uninterested in such “women’s” details that this story could easily be overwritten by a more sensational tale of a tyrant fulfilling his prescripted destiny.

It is not necessary for you to choose which seems more believable. There is a more urgent need: to rewrite this story as the story of Poppaea’s death versus Nero’s actions. We should put the woman back at the center of a very female tragedy, whether that be ineffective gynecological care or domestic violence, two tragedies which harm women every day in the modern world. By focusing on Poppaea, the modern world of scholars and artists can give voice to her experience even as ancient historians have silenced her.

The stories of these two women, Poppaea and Octavia, do not end with their deaths. Their memories continued to haunt Nero’s reign. Nero likely continued to vent his rage against Octavia, first through decapitating her corpse and second through the destruction of her statues; indeed, several possible likenesses survive with intentional damage to her eyes and nose. But in the ancient imagination the fate of this once celebrity couple was joined to such a degree that the date of Nero’s suicide was imagined to be on the anniversary of Octavia’s execution, as if Octavia had her own vengeance at last against the man who had abused her.

Nero’s treatment of Poppaea after her death showed a similarly masculine attempt at control. He eschewed traditional Roman funerary practices by embalming and perfuming her body in the manner of Egyptians, eventually burning her body with what the historical record indicates was an entire year’s worth of incense from the East. In doing so he “othered” her permanently, sowing the seeds for the hostile historical tradition who saw her as a reincarnated Roman Cleopatra to be denigrated. He then had her deified and worshipped as a goddess alongside their earlier child. And finally, we are told, for the rest of his life whenever he would act a tragic role on stage – especially roles involving the pain of a woman in childbirth – he would wear a mask of Poppaea’s face, as if reviving and killing her in a perpetual cycle. In these ways Nero raged at his grief, raged at Poppaea’s death, and raged at his inability to raise her from the dead.

Throughout this essay, I have drawn attention to the rage of men: the rage of Nero, of the Roman people, and of the male-dominated historical tradition. All three form sites of violence against the women of Nero’s reign, albeit using different tools. But while the historical tradition uses these women to tell the story of men, a different tradition has long been interested in bringing these women back to life to tell their own stories. This tradition is the stage and it begins shortly after Nero’s suicide.

The years after Nero’s unexpected death feature many different attempts to tell his story. One particularly fascinating example is an anonymous history play, Octavia, which dramatizes Nero’s divorce of Octavia and marriage to Poppaea. As its title suggests, the play is less interested in Nero than in the women surrounding him, especially his first wife. It is the story of a war between women that will shake an empire. It is a story about two women who are cast as victims and villains simultaneously in their experience of Neronian Rome. In order to make this clear, the play leaves behind the public spaces of men and takes us into the bedrooms of two empresses, into their deepest fears and traumatic memories, and, in the case of Octavia, into her rage against the injustices she has suffered at the hands of Nero’s infidelity and, more globally, what she has suffered as part of the machine of Roman history which forges a path over the bodies of women. Where ancient historians silenced these women or reduced them to stereotypes, this staging of Nero’s wives centers their voices, lets them sing and scream in alternation, as it foregrounds more complicated histories.

The story of Nero, Octavia, and Poppaea goes on to have a long afterlife on the stages of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Perhaps the most famous is Monteverdi’s opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea with a libretto by Busenello. Like its ancient dramatic predecessor, this opera gives voice to the passions of women, but admittedly with less sympathy. Although it shifts focus to the love triangle between Nero, Poppaea, and Otho, we are not allowed to forget the wronged Octavia who surpasses her ancient counterpart by forcing a man, Otho, to attempt the murder of Poppaea. Poppaea too is ready to eliminate anyone who stands between her and the throne. These are women unafraid to use their power to violent ends.

L’Incoronazione di Poppea appeared within an intellectual climate that read into Roman imperial history the idea that Rome’s excessive decadence was fundamentally intertwined with the rise of politically powerful women. The opera plays with the idea of women as dangerous – dangerous to each other, to the state, to morality. But as it does so, it fundamentally rewrites the history of these women. Octavia sails off to exile and strips off her imperial insignia, but the hints of her impending death are removed. More dramatically, the opera ends with Poppaea in triumph, having achieved both objects of her desire: Nero and power. Within the world of the stage, these women are victims and villains, constrained by the choices of men, yet granted their own agency. The tragic next act in their histories is left tantalizingly to the side.

In contrast, Michael Hersch’s Poppaea with its libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann does not shy away from the tragedies of Octavia and Poppaea. The opera is ringed by twinned scenes of domestic violence committed against Poppaea by her husband; it closes with a pointed look at Nero’s continued violent control of her body and her legacy after her death. At the opera’s center we are invited to watch as Octavia bleeds to death, a scene which the stage has often declined to depict. But Poppaea does not allow us to view the violence against these women’s bodies with the voyeuristic eyes of male-centered drama. Rather, the true drama comes from the staging of the inner lives and complex psychology of women who are victims, yes, but who are also agents of vengeance against a world that would continue to victimize them through its storytelling. We experience Poppaea’s journey to the center of political power as a journey to her own inner darkness as she learns to be comfortable with stage-managing murder and watching bloodshed. So too as we see Octavia die, we might be surprised to see her continue to haunt the stage as a vengeful ghost who finds pleasure in the death of Poppaea’s child, who seems to relish Poppaea’s bloodthirstiness, and who looks forward to Poppaea’s own destruction at the hands of her husband.

Poppaea is an opera about Nero’s wives for the modern world. Its polyvalent characterization of these women gives them back their agency and their psychological interiority by refusing to flatten them into the convenient stereotypes of ancient history. But although it centers their passions and their agency, it refuses to use their complicity within the system of imperial oppression to deny them the status of victims. For they are victims: of Nero, of history, and of the many stories that have been told in between. As a scholar of antiquity, I see within this new work an emotional awakening within the power of their story that began on the stages of ancient Rome but which recognizes a power in female anger that belongs squarely to this century.

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg is Associate Professor of Classical Studies and of Theater Studies at Duke University. She specializes in the literature, culture, and history of Neronian Rome. She has published widely on Roman drama, epic, and history, including the book Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia (Oxford University Press2017). She also works on the reception of Nero and Neronian Rome in post-Classical popular culture. Her work has been supported by awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Memoria Romana project funded by the Max- Planck Institute, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.