The evidence of the coins from the imperial mints, however, strongly suggests that Nero’s wives never had public roles as prominent as earlier Julio-Claudian women.  Only two issues from Rome represent one of the wives.  (Fig. 1)  She and Nero appear on the reverse of these aurei and denarii as tiny full-length figures, he holding a scepter, wearing the toga and the rayed crown, she with a cornucopiae in the crook of her left arm, and both holding paterae in their outstretched right hands.  The inscription reads simply “AVGVSTVS AVGVSTA.”²  The latter is probably Poppaea, who received the title “Augusta” in A.D. 63.   The coins evidently wish to convey the legitimacy of their highly controversial marriage, since their attributes identify the couple with piety, prosperity, and above all, the ruler’s divine authority.  Poppaea’s full name and portrait face, however, remain discreetly out of sight on official coins throughout her marriage.  In order to find coin portraits of these women, we must examine provincial coinages of the eastern Mediterranean. These objects give us some evidence about the status and public presentation of the women, although they are of little use for physical appearance. I then propose to review some extant portraits in marble that may represent Octavia, and Poppaea, or just possibly, Statilia Messalina.

            First, however, let us consider what the literary record tells us about Nero’s wives, while taking the usual grain of salt.  Although I do not by any means intend a “revisionist” apologia for Nero, we must remember that almost all extant sources were written after his fall.  Inevitably, all portray him as a tyrant doomed to a bad end.  The characterization of a tyrant involves certain topoi that serve rhetorical purposes, although they may sometimes also be true.  One of the most popular slurs to hurl at a hated ruler throughout history has been “feminization.”   Both Suetonius and Tacitus, therefore, gleefully  recount the story of Nero’s marriage in drag to another man, and both present it as the “capper” in a long list of decadent and licentious acts.³  After that, what could Nero do for an encore except to burn down the city?  Tacitus describes the great fire of A.D. 64 in the very next paragraphs of the Annals.  In another respect, however, Suetonius and Tacitus characterize Nero differently.   Suetonius takes the more conventional approach, blaming Nero’s atrocities on his own cruel and depraved nature.   Tacitus, on the other hand, portrays a weak emperor whom others easily manipulate.⁴  A theme throughout the Annals is the scheming woman behind the scenes.   Livia works through Augustus and then Tiberius to attack her enemies and protect her guilty friends.  Under Claudius,  Messalina and Agrippina use fraudulent prosecutions to eliminate rivals or to seize wealthy people’s property.  Nero, finally, is ruled first by his mother and then by the even worse Poppaea.  As I have argued elsewhere, Tacitus apparently wants to demonstrate that autocratic power is dangerous because it lacks accountability, and can be abused by persons who have private access to the ruler.

            The verifiable facts about the women in Nero’s life are these: Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, married the emperor Claudius in A.D. 49.  Although Claudius had a son of his own by his disgraced former wife Messalina, he legally adopted Nero, who was older than Britannicus and who thus became the elder son.  To further cement their relationship, Claudius arranged Nero’s marriage to his daughter Claudia Octavia.  Since the two were legally sister and brother, Octavia had to be adopted into another family before Nero could marry her.⁵   By making Nero the potential father of his biological grandchildren, however, Claudius further secured Nero’s position as heir.  The marriage was unhappy from the outset; indeed, the tragedy Octavia implies that it was never consummated.⁶   In any case, the couple was certainly childless.  A  remark attributed to Nero early after his succession to power implies that if there had ever been intimacy between them, it no longer existed.  When chided for giving Octavia too little attention, Nero replied that Octavia should be content with the “uxoria ornamenta,” meaning presumably the legal but not the actual status of a wife.⁷

            During his early years as emperor, Nero’s regular concubine was a freedwoman named Claudia Acte.⁸   At some point before A.D. 58, Nero began another affair, this time with an aristocratic woman named Poppaea Sabina, who had been married earlier to Rufrius Crispius and then to M. Salvus Otho.  The relationship may have begun during Poppaea’s first marriage, and Otho may have married her at Nero’s request simply to provide a respectable excuse for her presence in Nero’s company.⁹  Nearly every historical account, including Tacitus’s Histories, tells this version of the affair.  But by the time Tacitus wrote the Annals, he had changed his story.  Here, he claims that Poppaea left her first husband not because she was already Nero’s mistress, but because she planned to seduce the emperor, and needed an entrée into his social circle.  Either version casts Nero as a stereotypical tyrant who respects no relationship, and therefore steals other men’s wives.  Tacitus’s later account, however, also portrays a cold, calculating Poppaea who married and slept her way to the top.  Whatever its beginnings, Nero’s affair with Poppaea raised the specter of a divorce from Octavia. Agrippina’s determination to preserve the dynastic marriage that she had arranged may have been the final straw in a long series of power struggles with Nero.  It is possible that she actually became involved in some conspiracy against her own son, as he later claimed, but such speculation is unprovable.  As is well known, Nero attempted to assassinate her using a faked shipwreck, and when that failed, he had her summarily executed for treason.¹⁰

            Nero waited  another three years, however, to marry Poppaea, possibly because Seneca and Burrus also opposed his divorce.  Burrus is quoted as advising Nero that if he divorced Octavia he would have to return her “dowry,” meaning of course the empire.  Naturally, Octavia held no legal right to succession, but if Nero had forfeited his connection to his predecessor’s family, Burrus recognized that he would also lose a major claim to legitimacy. ¹¹ After Burrus died of throat cancer, amid the usual dire conspiracy theories, and Seneca was effectively banished from Nero’s court, Nero proceeded with his divorce.¹²  His primary justification was Octavia’s infertility, but Tacitus tells that he also accused her of adultery with a flute player named Eucaerus. ¹³ Despite strenuous efforts to obtain evidence, however, the latter charge allegedly presented difficulties.  Questioned under torture, one lady’s maid famously replied to her tormentor that “Octavia’s vulva, Tigillinus, is cleaner than your mouth.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, Nero sent Octavia to Campania, and twelve days later married Poppaea.  He soon learned, however, just how badly he had miscalculated public opinion, when a false rumor circulated that Nero had changed his mind and recalled Octavia.  A crowd of her supporters publicly celebrated, and the demonstration soon turned violent, as the crowd vandalized Poppaea’s portraits.¹⁵  Nero now recognized that Octavia could become a rallying-point for rebellion.   She could marry another man who would then claim power as the previous emperor’s true son-in-law.¹⁶  Nero, therefore, determined to get the “evidence” he needed of Octavia’s adultery.  The admiral Anicetus, who had collaborated in Agrippina’s murder, was susceptible to blackmail and bribery.  Nero persuaded him to confess to an affair with Octavia, and armed with this testimony, he executed Octavia.  Anicetus, meanwhile, enjoyed a comfortable exile to Sardinia.¹⁷ 

            After Octavia’s death, the Senate voted a farcical thanksgiving for Rome’s deliverance from a traitor.  Octavia’s public images would have been removed, defaced or destroyed at this time, just as Agrippina’s had been.¹⁸  Nero, however, probably still feared Octavia’s supporters.  Although no usurper could now marry Octavia, her memory as a political martyr might remain potent.  This may be one reason that Poppaea appears only once, and very discreetly, on Roman coins.   But Nero may also have wished to prevent any other woman from enjoying the publicly institutionalized power that his mother Agrippina the Younger had held.  Dio reports that when Claudius was emperor,  “Agrippina . . . used to greet in public all who desired it, a fact that was entered into the records.”¹⁹  We also learn, both from Dio and from Tacitus, that she publicly accompanied Claudius as he conducted state business, and received ambassadors with him.²⁰  Despite the hostility between Nero and Agrippina after A.D. 55, she retained the adamant loyalty of  the Praetorian guard.²¹  Their devotion probably forced Nero to arrange an “accident” for her by sea, since the navy would co-operate with him where the land troops would not.

            Poppaea drops almost entirely from sight in Tacitus’s Annals after her marriage, except for the birth of her daughter, and later, her death and deification.²²  This treatment of the imperial wife contrasts strikingly with that of Agrippina the Younger.  Tacitus repeatedly mentions Agrippina’s involvement in prosecutions and public events.  Other sources, however, indicate that Poppaea did sometimes play an active political role.  Like Livia and Agrippina before her, she sometimes presented formal requests to her husband on behalf of provincial clients.  Josephus informs us that she twice persuaded Nero to decide a dispute in favor of the Jews against the Roman provincial authorities.   Since the Jewish delegate on one of these occasions was Josephus himself, this is first-hand information.²³  Josephus also portrays the Augusta’s character quite differently from Tacitus, describing her admiringly as a “god-fearing” person.  This statement has given rise to speculation that Poppaea might have been a secret convert to Judaism, since in Josephus’s terminology, “god fearing” meant specifically a believer in Yaweh. It is far more likely, however, that Poppaea, who had been raised in a polytheistic culture, was willing to perform an act of worship to the Jewish God, as a gesture of courtesy to the ambassadors, without feeling the need to renounce belief in her own religion.  As for her political intervention on behalf of the Jews, Tacitus would probably have mentioned such female meddling in public affairs had he known of it. We can infer, then, that Poppaea did not meet ambassadors in public ceremonies, and that her interviews with them did not appear in the public record.   Her relatively low profile in public art supports the inference that Nero wanted any such patronage on her part to be exercised discreetly.

            When Poppaea gave birth to Nero’s daughter in A.D. 63, Nero celebrated the event extravagantly, feeling perhaps that his wife’s fertility vindicated his actions.²⁴  Tacitus, as usual, finds Nero’s “ultra mortale gaudium” rather distasteful.²⁵  He had earlier criticized Tiberius for much the same overdone exuberance when his twin grandsons were born.   Poppaea received the title of Augusta, along with her daughter, and the “AVGVSTVS AVGVSTA” coins probably commemorate this occasion.²⁶  These coins definitely date between 64 and 68.  The inscriptions do not allow more specific dating, but Nero’s obverse portrait type would place them closer to A.D. 64.   They may well, then, refer to an event of 63.   Poppaea’s cornucopiae would allude to her fertility, the occasion for her newly acquired title, and would identify this mother of an imperial child with the empire’s well-being.  Claudia Augusta died at the age of only four months, however, and Nero deified her.

            In AD 65, Poppaea became pregnant again, but miscarried the pregnancy and died of complications.  Gossip blamed her death on Nero: Tacitus and Suetonius both claim that he kicked her in the stomach, while Dio even more colorfully describes how Nero jumped with both feet on her body.²⁷  Doubt obviously existed on this subject, however, since  Tacitus also mentions, but rejects, a rumor that Nero poisoned his wife.²⁸  Nothing in Nero’s career leads us to doubt that he would abuse a pregnant woman, but again, there are elements here of the stereotypical “tyrant” portrait that should give us pause.  Literary precedents exist for the tyrant whose uncontrolled rage causes the death of his own wife and unborn child.²⁹ Both Cambyses of Persia and Periander of Corinth are supposed to have done the same thing, and in each case, historians present this crime against a woman he loved as proof that the tyrant was mad.  A variant on the same topos occurs again in accounts of Domitian’s principate: this tyrannical emperor, we are told, impregnated his niece Julia Titi (thus living up to the stereotype that the tyrant, in his arrogant disregard of social taboos, commits incest) and then caused her death by ordering her to procure an abortion.³⁰   Suetonius, furthermore, links Nero’s alleged assault on Poppaea to his other frivolous and disreputable pursuits.   Here,  Poppaea provokes Nero to rage by scolding him when he comes home late from the horse-races.  Octavia’s partisans must have wanted to believe that Poppaea had gotten her just deserts for marrying Nero, especially since they must have found her lavish funeral galling.  Nero deified Poppaea, and delivered a glowing eulogy that praised her for her beauty and for being the mother of a deified child.  Poppaea’s body was embalmed, rather than cremated, and placed intact in the Mausoleum of Augustus.  The exotic ritual smacked of Hellenistic royalty and foreign religious practices, and seems to have offended Roman traditionalists.   Poppaea’s deification must also have rankled for another reason: the charge of blasphemy against the deified Poppaea became a political weapon.³¹  In a prosecution that Tacitus describes as an attack on virtue itself, Nero executed Thrasea Paetus for offenses that included  boycotting her funeral, and leaving the Senate when her divine honors were voted.

            After the fall of Nero, every historian gleefully attacked Poppaea, portraying her as wildly extravagant and vain.  Most sources, however, only depict Poppaea as the passive object who inspired Nero’s injustices.  Tacitus, on the other hand, presents her as the true instigator of both Agrippina’s and Octavia’s executions.  Whether her role was active or passive, however, the public would certainly have blamed those events on her.  Her memory and images would undoubtedly have suffered along with Nero’s after his death.  Many of Nero’s portraits, of course, survive in good condition, despite his fate, although the majority are recut or defaced.³²  Poppaea’s portraits, however,  were probably scarcer to begin with, given her relatively low public profile, leaving fewer to escape destruction.  

            Since Nero still had no heir, he promptly set about finding another wife after Poppaea’s death.  Suetonius reports that he considered marrying Claudia Antonia,  the only surviving child of Claudius and of course the sister of the woman he had divorced and executed three years earlier.  When Antonia very sensibly refused this proposal,  Nero had her executed on a trumped-up charge.  Tacitus, on the other hand, suggests that the charge had some basis, reporting a rumor that Gaius Calpurnius Piso had intended to marry Antonia and then seize power.  Tacitus is skeptical that Piso would have divorced his own beloved wife, although he definitely did plot a coup.  Nero probably recognized, however, that the daughter of Claudius could  inherit her sister’s mantle, becoming a focus of rebellion. The possibility of her marriage to anyone else would have threatened Nero’s position, and therefore, after Piso’s failed coup, she had to be eliminated.³³  

            Nero, meanwhile, contracted his third and last marriage in A.D. 65, to Statilia Messalina.  Once again, sources accuse him of stealing the wife of another man; Messalina had been married to the consul Vestinus, whom Nero executed for involvement in Piso’s coup.³⁴  Both Suetonius and Tacitus claim that Nero’s lust for Messalina was the true motive for the prosecution.  This marriage produced no children, and compared to Nero’s two earlier unions, appears to have been rather quiet and uneventful.  Messalina survived the coup that drove Nero to suicide, and retained enough prestige to have been seriously considered as a potential wife by Otho during his short-lived bid for power in A.D. 68.³⁵  The funerary inscriptions of her freedmen attest to a long and prosperous private life after her brief membership in the imperial family.³⁶

            The public images of these women, as this account has demonstrated, were not prominent, but the emperor’s wife was too important a figure not to appear at least occasionally in public monuments.  Let us review the admittedly skimpy surviving evidence.  Since Octavia never appeared on coins from the Roman mint, we lack the most reliable evidence for her physical appearance.  Her absence from coins is in one respect a break from immediately preceding tradition, since Agrippina’s face, name and titles, had appeared on imperial coins soon after she married Claudius.  These coin profiles, moreover, wore a divine attribute, the corn-ear crown of Ceres.³⁷  After her son’s accession in 54, Agrippina gained an even more prominent position, accompanying the emperor himself on his obverses. ³⁸  Perhaps Agrippina’s honors left no room for a second living woman in public imagery.  Octavia never received the title “Augusta,” which Agrippina still held; the empire was evidently not large enough to accommodate two of them.   At least nine provincial mints, however, do represent Octavia.   Local die-cutters obviously invented some of these “likenesses” out of whole cloth.  On issues from Teos and Corinth, Octavia wears a very old-fashioned coiffure suspiciously similar to that of Livia’s later portraits.³⁹  This simple arrangement of hair in full waves around the face and a small bun at the nape hardly ever appears on women of younger generations in the Julio-Claudian family.  Most other coin profiles show Octavia wearing a newer fashion: small curls around the face, two longer locks hanging to the shoulders, and rest of the hair drawn into a looped queue at the nape. Octavia’s features vary so much among provincial mints that the coins are probably useless for reconstructing her appearance.  Indeed, two issues from Perinthus, one in honor of Octavia and the other of Poppaea,  show virtually the same faces, differentiated only by their inscriptions. (Figs. 2-3)  The die-cutters were obviously conferring identity by fiat on a stereotypical portrait.⁴⁰

            Octavia’s coins from Perinthus also have the unusual distinction of calling her “Octavia Sebaste,” the Greek equivalent of “Octavia Augusta.”  This was a title that she never officially held.  These generous die-cutters have also given her a crescent-shaped diadem.  Evidently, news about relations between the imperial couple traveled a bit slowly to this Thracian city, although the Perinthian mint magistrates rectified their error as soon as Poppaea became the new Augusta.  Three issues of coins from Teos also give Octavia a diadem, but those are the only two mints where this attribute appears.⁴¹  Another provincial mint, at Sardis, refers to Octavia on four issues of coins as “Octavian Thean,” Octavia Goddess.⁴²  The title of “thea” usually honored a woman of the imperial family who had given birth.⁴³   Evidently, the mint magistrates of Sardis were both premature and over-optimistic.  Like their counterparts at Perinthus, they also gave her a divine attribute, the corn-ear crown of Ceres. This they probably copied from Roman coins of Agrippina the Younger, assuming that the attribute of Ceres must be appropriate for an emperor’s wife.  All the remaining issues that bear Octavia’s images, however, identify her in terms of her relationships to others.  Those of Corinth, Alexandria, Paneas, and Knossos identify her as “Octavia, wife of the Augustus.”⁴⁴  Two issues, from Sinope and Methymna, identify her as the daughter of Claudius.⁴⁵  The three issues from Teos, finally, simply call her  “Octavia,” without any title or patronymic.⁴⁶   The formats of these coins usually also emphasize her connection to Nero.  On two issues from Sinope and three from Alexandria, she occupies the reverses of coins that bear his obverse portrait.⁴⁷   Sometimes, she shares the reverse with some other figure.  An issue from Knossos represents Nero twice, alone on the obverse, and facing Octavia on the reverse.⁴⁸  The little sunburst and crescent over their heads identify the young couple with the sun and moon.  It is rather a pity that this charming image of a harmonious imperial relationship was so far off the mark, but judging from Nero’s youthful features, this issue is very early.  In A.D. 54 and 55, hope for the success both of his principate and of his marriage was still strong.⁴⁹ 

            Octavia’s other important relationship was to her stepmother and mother-in-law Agrippina.   An issue of coins from Paneas  represents the senior woman on its obverse as an enthroned goddess with the attributes of Ceres, while Octavia appears on the reverse as a worshiper at an altar, pouring a libation.⁵⁰   (Fig. 4).   At Perinthus, each woman receives her own issue, but they share an identical reverse of corn ears that connects the emperor’s wife and mother while identifying both with fertility.⁵¹ (Fig. 5).  Finally, an issue from Methymna combines them in a jugate portrait on the reverse of Nero’s coins.⁵²

            The only securely identified portraits of Octavia in sculpture represent her as a young child (Figs. 6-8).  The archaeological context of a charming statue from Baia leaves little doubt that it must represent Claudius’s daughter, since it belonged to an imperial portrait-group.⁵³   Even here, however, some questions have been raised about the figure’s identity: a fragmentary  hand that appears to belong to the figure held a butterfly, a familiar image in funerary art for the soul of a child who has died.  On this basis, some observers have argued that the little girl must be another daughter of Claudius, one who did not live to adulthood.⁵⁴  There is no literary or epigraphic evidence, however, for the existence of such a child.  Suetonius mentions only three daughters of Claudius: Claudia, the daughter of his first wife, whom Claudius disowned and abandoned after divorcing Urgulanilla; Octavia, by Messalina, and Antonia, by Paetina.⁵⁵  Octavia and Antonia survived to adulthood, while the daughter he disowned would certainly not have been honored in later family groups.  Furthermore, several copies exist, including one from another imperial group at Rusellae, that appears to show the same little girl at a slightly more advanced age, suggesting that the Baia statue cannot be posthumous.⁵⁶  The fragmentary hand found at Baia may instead have belonged to a statue of Claudius’s son Drusus, who did die in early adolescence, the victim of a freak accident.⁵⁷  

            Inscriptions attest that Octavia appeared in at least two more family groups from her father’s lifetime.⁵⁸  Neither finds nor inscriptions, on the other hand, attest her presence in any groups after Nero became emperor.   When the thirteen-year-old Octavia married Nero in A.D. 53, public statues must have commemorated the event.  The statues celebrating her marriage, however, would have been the most obvious targets for destruction after Nero had her killed.   A badly damaged head in the Vatican shows a clear resemblance to Octavia’s child portraits, as well as to those of Octavia’s mother Messalina.⁵⁹  (Figs. 9-10).  The best preserved likeness of Messalina, in my opinion, is a statue from Rome, now in the Louvre, that shows her carrying her infant son Britannicus.  (Figs.11-12)  The lavish attributes of the Chiaramonti head (figs.9-10) strongly suggest an imperial identity, and perhaps a special reference to Octavia’s role as the hope for Rome’s future.  She wears a helmet, laurel wreath and turret crown: the attributes of Minerva, Cybele, and perhaps most importantly Dea Roma.   Although the face is still very child-like, she now wears the coiffure of a grown woman, as a married woman should.  Peeping out around the helmet, we can see at least two rows of ringlets around her face, and the stumps of two long locks that would have hung to the shoulders in the original work.   But this portrait lacks one crucial piece of evidence for identification: to my knowledge, there are no surviving replicas.  We cannot rule out the possibility that it is the funerary portrait of some unknown young girl whose family lavished these divine attributes on her in the privacy of their own home or mausoleum.⁶⁰

            One more portrait type that has been identified by several scholars as Octavia does survive in three replicas: in the Museo Nazionale Romano, in the Vatican (figs. 13-14), and at Olympia (figs. 15-16).  The original evidence for this identification was the additional discovery at Olympia of a youthful male portrait that Vagn Poulsen identified as Nero.  The two were not actually found together, and the male portrait is no longer believed to be Nero, but the identification has persisted regardless.  The diademed female head bears a striking stylistic  resemblance to the Claudian statues from the Metroon at Olympia, although excavators found it some distance away, built into a late-antique wall.   Operating on the assumption that the head belonged to that group, with the deified Claudius and Agrippina the Younger as priestess (fig. 17), Renate Bol argued that the group must be datable soon after the death and deification of Claudius, and must therefore also have included the younger imperial couple of Nero and Octavia.⁶¹  There are, however, several problems with the identification.  The crescent diadem that appears in all three of these heads has been compared to the attribute that Octavia wears on the Perinthian coins (fig. 2).  Yet as we have seen, these coins are the exception, rather than the rule; most provincial issues show her without this attribute.  Meanwhile, Brian Rose has been hacking at the foundations of this hypothetical “Metroon group.”  The statue of Agrippina as priestess (fig. 17), as he points out, was not found inside but outside the Metroon, and may not belong with the statue of Claudius.  These sculptures from Olympia are undoubtedly the product of a single atelier, but did not necessarily stand together.   My own objections to the identification are, first, the diadem, and second, the maturity of the face.  The evidence of Octavia’s provincial coins indicates that honors to her were rather modest, and clearly subordinated to those of Agrippina the Younger.  The diadem is the attribute of major Olympian goddesses; Agrippina is the first living woman to wear it in her portraits.  I find it hard to believe that her daughter-in-law would promptly have received the same honor, or that her portrait at Olympia would have worn it (figures 15-16) while that of Agrippina II did not (fig. 17).  As for the age of the subject, Octavia was 21 at the very oldest when she died.  Any portrait types probably predate Nero’s open estrangement from her.  They are not likely to show her older than her mid teens.

            These three portraits of the diademed woman have also been identified with Agrippina the Younger herself, which is possible, since the coiffure conforms to that of her “Ancona” portrait type.  If so, however, the face is extremely idealized, so much so as to erase some of Agrippina’s most characteristic features, notably the low, broad forehead and protruding upper jaw.  I have suggested yet another possible identity for  this type, as posthumous representations of Agrippina the Elder, her appearance assimilated to that of her daughter.  This identification, however, has won few converts.  The fact remains, however, that the identification with Octavia is implausible.

            Poppaea’s coin portraits, as we might expect, are both more widespread and more honorific than her predecessor’s.  She appears on the coinage of 15 provincial cities, in a total of 18 issues, as opposed to 9 cities and 19 issues for Octavia.  Although Poppaea appears on the coins of more cities, the number of issu

recall that Octavia was married to Nero for nine years, eight of them after he became emperor, while Poppaea’s marriage lasted less than three.   Eleven issues identify her as “Poppaea Sebaste.”⁶²   Obviously the news traveled fast to the colonies that she had produced a child and received the title “Augusta.”   At least one provincial issue, from Paneas, commemorates Poppaea’s death and deification.  (Fig. 18).  The two sides of the coin represent temples, one to the recently deceased Augusta, the other to her daughter Claudia Augusta, who had been deified two years earlier.

            Poppaea, like Octavia, often occupies the reverses of Nero’s provincial coins.  Antioch, Thyatira, the Koinon of Galatia, Alexandria, Nicaea and Iconium all struck coins that combined the imperial couple this way.⁶³    Iconium, bronze coin of Nero with Poppaea as Kore on the reverse: RPC 3544., p. 543, pl. 141.  Sometimes these reverses bear her portrait profiles, while others show her as a small, full-length figure with the attributes of some goddess or personification. Those from Iconium represent her as an enthroned Kore, with a scepter and poppies.  The goddess of new life and fertility was a perennial favorite for identification with young and fertile imperial women.  At Nicaea, a similar enthroned figure bears the attributes of Securitas.  An issue from Smyrna portrays a winged figure with the inscription “Poppaea Nike.”  But she appeared on obverses of her own  issues, as well: at Acmonea (fig. 19), Laodicea in Asia, and Perinthus (fig. 3).⁶⁴ The obverse portrait from Acmonea bears particularly striking attributes.  Here, Poppaea not only wears the corn-ear crown of Ceres, but appears to have a tiny lion beside her shoulder.  The latter would associate her with Cybele, a goddess of fertility, a protector of the Roman state, and the “Great Mother of the Gods,” “Magna Mater Deum.”  Either the birth of Claudia Augusta or the child’s death and deification probably inspired the mint-magistrates of Acmonea to give Poppaea this extravagant honor.  And on at least five issues from four separate mints, Poppaea shares the obverse of a coin with her husband.  At Ephesus (fig. 20), Smyrna and Ankyra , she appears in confronted busts with her husband, while another issue from Ephesus pairs them in a jugate likeness.⁶⁵

            If provincial coins offer scanty evidence for the portraits of Nero’s first and second wives, they are even less useful for his third.  Since Statilia Messalina never had a child by Nero, there was no special occasion in her life to celebrate, and only three provincial cities honored her on their local coinage, on a total of four issues.⁶⁶  In  coins from Nicaea, we see once again how mint-magistrates alter an identity simply by changing the inscription.  The seated figure that bears Messalina’s name is identical to Poppaea’s earlier image. The title “Sebaste,” however, disappears from Messalina’s inscription.⁶⁷  Indeed, no coin inscriptions identify Messalina as “Augusta” or “Sebaste.”

            The coin from Hypaepa gives Messalina her most honorific treatment, pairing her with Nero in a confronted obverse portrait.   Here, as at Ephesus, where Messalina appears once on a reverse of Nero’s coin, and once in an issue of her own, we can see the tendency to assimilate the appearance of the wife to that of her husband.  All these issues show Messalina with a heavy double chin, thick neck and hooded eyes.⁶⁸ 

            Armed with this information, and with the evidence of Poppaea’s more numerous coins, can we recognize either Poppaea or Statilia Messalina in other media?  Statues of Poppaea undoubtedly existed, since we know that a mob in A.D. 62 tore down and smashed some of them.   Inscriptions attest her presence in imperial groups, both in Italy and  the provinces. ⁶⁹  Compared with the absence of epigraphic evidence for Octavia’s portraits after A.D. 54, these three inscriptions indicate that Poppaea had considerably greater visibility.  Messalina also received  public statues, although probably fewer than her predecessor.  Just one surviving inscription attests to her presence in an imperial group.⁷⁰  This inscription also refers to her as “Sebaste,” but no other source indicates that she officially received this title.  The people of Acraephia may have been so delighted at receiving immunity from taxation, the occasion for which they dedicated these statues, that they gave the emperor’s wife a title she did not possess.⁷¹

            None of these women’s coin images, unfortunately, are very useful for their actual appearance.  Images of each woman vary considerably and often seem like generic images on which identity has been conferred by fiat.  We have seen how at Perinthus (figs. 2-3), virtually the same type was used for Octavia and Poppaea, and how the Nicaean mint recycled an image of Poppaea for Messalina.  In Poppaea’s coins, as well as Messalina’s we also see a strong tendency to assimilate her appearance to Nero’s, giving her a thick neck and prominent chin.  The coins from Ephesus that show the couple confronted (fig. 20) illustrate this phenomenon especially well.  Granted that the coins tell us little of how Poppaea really looked, however, some of them, notably including some specimens from Ephesus, do show striking similarities to a marble head in the Museo Nazionale Romano.⁷²  (Figs. 21-22) Both share a strong similarity to Nero: the rather fleshy face, hooded eyes, thick neck and prominent chin.   Futhermore, this portrait, like the Ephesian coin profile, wears a crescent diadem.  This attribute is as rare on Poppaea’s provincial coins as on Octavia’s, appearing only at Ephesus and Perinthus.   However, the lavish honors and titles on her coins allow us to infer that her sculptured portraits also bore impressive attributes.  Furthermore, by the time Poppaea received public portraits, she was the highest ranking woman of the imperial family -- indeed, the only one.  Unlike Octavia before her, she was not subordinate in status to her mother-in-law.   And she was the only adult woman whom Nero deified.  The coiffure of the head from Rome generally conforms to those on Poppaea’s coins, but this life-sized work includes a detail that those small profile views do not show.  The second and third tiers of curls around her face, instead of lying flat against the scalp, have been combed upward into large rolls.  The curls over the forehead now ascend in steps  toward the diadem.  We can see here the transition toward the high, fanciful piles of curls favored in the Flavian era.  Poppaea would certainly have been a trend-setter in fashion; many years after her death, her name was still associated with beauty regimens.⁷³

            The Rome portrait has at least one known replica, a marble head discovered in Barcelona.⁷⁴  (Figs. 23-24).  The latter is slightly over-life-size, made for insertion into a statue, is made of high-quality white marble, and displays excellent workmanship.  All these features contrast strikingly with  the provincial style and coarse stone of the local portraits from the same colony.   If the woman’s portraits existed both in the capital and the provinces, and if the colony of Barcina purchased her image from a high-quality atelier elsewhere, she must have belonged to the imperial family.  Other identities have also been proposed for this type, however,  including Valeria Messalina, the infamous wife of Claudius, Agrippina the Younger, and Claudia Octavia.  No one, to my knowledge, has suggested Statilia Messalina, the third wife of Nero, but she too makes a plausible candidate.  The most widely accepted identification for the Barcelona head is Agrippina the Younger, whose images were ubiquitous in Roman Spain, while honors to Poppaea are otherwise unknown.⁷⁵  As we have seen, however, Poppaea’s portraits are scarce everywhere.  An argumentum ex silentio, from the absence of coins and inscriptions, does not prove that an image of her could not have been set up in Spain during her brief period of prominence as Augusta and Diva.  Neither the facial features nor the coiffure of this head match any of Agrippina’s securely established portrait types.  The most conspicuous difference is the curls in front of the diadem, which, like those of the head in the Museo Nazionale Romano, are combed up from the scalp, and back toward the diadem, creating a rather dramatic aureole of curls around the face.  Agrippina’s portraits from the time of her marriage to Claudius share with the Rome-Barcelona type the three or more rows of curls around the face, but Agrippina’s curls lie flat against the scalp in the great majority of her surviving images.  Agrippina’s latest and most flamboyant official portrait is her “Stuttgart type,” in which she was represented as the priestess of the deified Claudius in a magnificent basalt statue.⁷⁶   Here, she wears more three-dimensional curls that rise up from the scalp, but these curls are combed under rather that upward and outward, giving her head a more closed and contained contour than that of the Rome and Barcelona portraits.  The distinctive curls of two latter works are rather unusual among extant sculpture, and they closely resemble each other, the only difference being that the Barcelona head has three rather than two such tiers of curls.  The slightly larger scale of the Barcelona head easily explains this discrepancy from its Roman replica.

            Von Heintze has suggested that a head in Fulda represents the same woman, and the profile view, in particular, does show striking physical similarities, despite the difference in hairstyle.   (Figs. 25-26).  We know that Statilia Messalina’s prominence both preceded and outlasted her marriage to Nero.⁷⁷  She could, therefore, have had more than one portrait type during her lifetime.  Poppaea also was married to two prominent men prior to Nero, however, and could have afforded private portraits.  These might have been replicated at the time of her marriage to Nero, prior to the creation of a new type when she became “Augusta.”   Whichever woman these portraits represent, the Fulda head, with its somewhat more old-fashioned coiffure, is probably earlier, while the diademed heads with their more ornate hairstyle depict her as an emperor’s wife.  Without the evidence of coin portraits from Rome, unfortunately, we can neither confirm nor eliminate any of these identifications, although Claudia Octavia seems unlikely for the same reason as with the Olympia type.  This is not the face of a teenaged girl, nor does the large and imposing diadem suggest a woman of subordinate importance to a senior Augusta.  She is much more likely to be either Poppaea or Statilia Messalina.   The prominence in both replicas of a large diadem, the slightly over-life-size scale and highly idealized style of the Barcelona replica, all argue in favor of Poppaea, the wife whose deification required cult images. 

            Another portrait type that we considered earlier still seems to need an imperial identification: the three diademed heads in Rome (figs. 13-14) and Olympia (figs. 15-16).  The diadem and the number of replicas obviously indicate imperial rank, as does the provenance of the replicas from widely separated locations.  Having once muddied the iconographical water by identifying this woman as Agrippina the Elder, let me now muddy it even further by suggesting that she could also quite conceivably be either  Poppaea or Statilia Messalina.  The age is believable for a woman in her thirties: Poppaea was born no later than A.D. 32, married Nero in A.D. 62, and died three years later at the age of about thirty-three.  The best of these replicas, from Olympia (figs. 15-16), gives the face a sensitively melancholy treatment that one might expect in the posthumous image of someone who has died young.  All three show a much more attractive woman than the subject of the Rome-Barcelona type, and therefore a more plausible likeness of a famous beauty.  Standards of attractiveness are notoriously fluid, however, and history tends to exaggerate that quality in famous women.  The suggestion that the Olympia type may represent Nero’s second or third wife must remain exactly that, a suggestion.  Until and unless more evidence comes to light to confirm the identity either of this or of the Rome-Barcelona type, any identifications must remain hypothetical.  

            One more portrait also makes a possible candidate for Poppaea or Statilia Messalina, a marble bust in the British Museum.  Karin Polaschek observes that the woman wears a twisted cloth band across the crown of her head very similar to the one that Antonia Minor wears in most of her portraits.   This ornament would appear, therefore, to indicate high imperial status, and since the coiffure is Neronian, the subject would presumably be one of Nero’s wives.⁷⁸  Polaschek is an authority whose opinion one must take seriously, but like the Vatican portrait that I propose to recognize as Octavia (figs. 8-9), this object lacks the confirmation of replicas.  The coiffure  resembles that of the Rome-Barcelona portrait type of Poppaea, but the London head differs too much in physical features and details of the coiffure to be a replica of that type.  The ornament that Antonia wears has defied precise identification for years, and we cannot rule out the possibility that it is simply a hair ribbon.   After Antonia became priestess of the deified Augustus, the twisted cloth band of her earlier portraits gave way to a beaded infula, suggesting that the earlier ornament had no political or religious significance.⁷⁹ The identification of the London bust, therefore,  must remain another appealing but unproven hypothesis.

            Despite their obvious historical importance, we have depressingly few visual records of Nero’s wives.  The combined forces of Nero’s overbearing ego, damnatio memoriae, and the relatively short time that each of the women held a position of prominence have combined either to destroy their images or to make them impossible to recognize with certainty from surviving evidence.  We can speculate about the imperial status of the helmeted head in the Vatican, or the bust in the British Museum, but cannot prove it without replicas.  And we can theorize about the identity of the two obviously imperial portrait types, Rome-Barcelona and Rome-Olympia, but can produce no definitive evidence for their names.  We might pessimistically conclude, then, that we are left only with several unproven hypotheses and a handful of provincial small change.  However, the situation is not altogether hopeless.  Small and unprepossessing objects like the provincial coins, which could escape the notice of those attempting to rewrite history, can preserve some information about the lives of these women whose memories others tried so hard to erase.

Susan Wood

Oakland University

1.         C. Brian Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio–Claudian Period.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 94-95 no. 21; 161 no. 98; 171 no. 109; 136-137 no. 67.

2.         RIC I², 153 nos. 44, 56, pl. 18; BMCRE I, 208 nos. 52-54, pl. 39, figs. 11-12.  The earlier edition of the RIC, surprisingly, identified the woman as “Messalina (or Poppaea?)” but Statilia Messalina probably  never received the title of Augusta.  The 1984 edition of the RIC merely identifies her as “Empress,” and is noncommital about which one.

3.         Suet. Nero, 29; Tac. Ann. 15.37-38.  See also Tamsyn Barton, “The inventio of Nero: Suetonius,” Reflections of Nero, ed. Jas Elsner and Jamie Masters, London: Duckworth, 1994, 53-55.

4.         Franz Holztrattner, Poppaea Neronis Potens: Studien zu Poppaea Sabina, Berger & Söhne: Graz-Horn, 1995, passim.  See esp. 21-26, 37-46, 67-69, 79-125.  See also Martha Vinson, “Domitia Longina, Julia Titi, and the Literary Tradition,” Historia 37 (1989) 440-44.

5.         Dio, 61,33,2²; Holztrattner (supra n. 3), 69-73.

6.         Octavia, 287: the chorus praises Octavia’s “virginitas” and “pudor,” although at this point she has been married to Nero for years.  See Holztrattner, supra n. 3, 110, on whether or not this line should be taken literally.

7.         Suet. Nero, 35.1: “Octaviae consuetudinem cito aspernatus, corripientibus amicis sufficere illi debere respondit uxoria ornamenta.”

8.         Tac. Ann. 13.12-13.

9.         Tac. Hist. 1.13.3;  Suetonius, Otho, 3.1-4, Dio, 61.11.1-4.  For a review of the ancient versions, and a critique of them, see Holztrattner, 26-36.

10.       Tac. Ann. 14.4-8; Suet. Nero, 34.1-4; Dio 62.12-13; Octavia 593-645; Anthony Barrett, Agrippina: Sex, Power and Politics in the Early Empire.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, 181-195.

11.       Dio 62.13.1-3.

12.       Tac. Ann. 14.51-56.  Tacitus concedes that Burrus did have a large tumor of the throat, but adds that some think that a doctor acting on Nero’s orders hastened the progress of the illness.  Suet. Nero 35.5 briefly mentions the same story.

13.       Vinson (supra n. 4), 442-43, questions the truth of this early charge of adultery, which has the earmarks of a literary topos.  Exile to Campania would seem a suspiciously mild punishment for a wife suspected of adultery with a slave.

14.       Tac. Ann. 14.60; Suet. Nero 35.1-2; Dio 62.13.1-2.

15.       Tac. Ann. 14.61; Octavia 780-850.

16.       Holztrattner (supra n. 4), 79-85.

17.       Tac. Ann. 14, 62-64, Octavia 851-876.

18.       Tac. Ann. 14, 63-64; Dio, 62.16.2^a.

19.       Dio, 61.33.1.

20.       Tac. Ann. 12.37, 12.56,  Dio, 61.33.3 and 7.

21.       Barrett (supra n. 10), 119-123 on Agrippina’s careful construction of a power-base of allies in the Praetorian guard; p. 189 on their refusal to cooperate in the execution of Agrippina.

22.       Holztrattner (supra n. 4), 125-126.

23.       Jos. Ant. Jud. 20.189-196; Vita 16; Margaret H. Williams, “‘θεοσεβ¬ς γ?ρ µν’ – The Jewish Tendencies of Poppaea Sabina,” Journal of Theological Studies, 39 (1988), 97-111.

24.       Tac. Ann. 15.23.

25.       Tac. Ann. 2.84; 15.23; Holztrattner, 126-7.

26.       RIC I² pp. 145-146 on date of these coins.  The weight of the coins post-dates Nero’s reforms of 64, but inscriptions do not allow a more precise dating than 64-68.  However, Sutherland and Carson believe, on the basis of officina analysis, that they belong early in that four-year period.

27.       Suet. Nero, 35.2; Dio, 62.28.1-2.

28.       Tac. Ann. 16.6.  Holztrattner, 128; René Martin, “Les récits tactiéens des crimes de Néron sont-ils fiables?”Neronia V, Néron: histoire et légende (Bruxelles: Latomus, 1999), 81-82, notes that the existence of different versions of Poppaea’s death casts doubt on the validity of both of them.  Roland Mayer, “What Caused Poppaea’s Death?” Historia 31 (1982) 248-249, makes a similar observation, and also notes the similarity of this story and several other anecdotes about Nero to those about Periander of Corinth.

29.       Holztrattner, 129-131.  On Cambyses’ murder of his wife, Herod. 3.32, in which his insanity is portrayed as the vengeance of Apis for the sacrilege that Cambyses had committed against his cult.  On Periander’s murder of his wife Melissa, Herod. 3.50; Diog. Laer. 1.94.  Herodotus says that Periander killed Melissa, but does not say how.  Diogenes Laertius supplies the detail that he kicked her during a pregnancy.  Herodotus, however, reports another morbid rumor: that Periander had committed necrophilia with her after she died, and that he later robbed the women of Corinth of their clothes in order to appease her spirit: Herod. 5.92. 

30.       Plin. Ep. 4.11.6; Juv. 2,29-33; Suet. Dom. 22.  For a discussion of the story, see Martha P. Vinson, “Domitia Longina, Julia Titi, and the Literary Tradition,” Historia 38, 1989, 431-450.

31.       Tac. Ann. 16.21.2.  “. . . et cum deum honores Poppaeae decernuntur sponte absens, funeri non interfuerat.”  Dio, 62.26, also mentions the executions, and gives Thrasea’s absence from Senate meetings as one of the grounds for prosecution, but does not mention the deification of Poppaea as one of the votes that he missed.

32.       Eric Varner, “Tyranny and the Transformation of the Roman Visual Landscape,” Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture, exh. cat.  Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, 2000, p. 12.

33.       Suet. Nero, 35.4; Tac. Ann. 15.53.

34.       Tac. Ann. 15.68; Suet. Nero, 35.1.

35.       Suet. Otho 10.2.

36.       CIL 6², 6596, 6619, 6625, and CIL 6⁴, 26915.

37.       RIC I² 125 no. 75, pl. 15, and 126 nos. 80-81; BMCRE I, 174-175 n