Claudia Octavia

Family

Octavia was the only daughter of the Emperor Claudius by his third marriage to his second cousin Valeria Messalina. She was named for her great-grandmother Octavia the Younger, the second eldest and full-blooded sister of the Emperor Augustus. Her elder half-sister was Claudia Antonia, Claudius's daughter through his second marriage to Aelia Paetina, and her full sibling was Britannicus, Claudius's son with Messalina.

Early life

She was born in Rome. As a young girl, her father betrothed her to future praetor Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, who was a descendant of Augustus.

Rise of Nero

Octavia's mother was executed in 48, for conspiring to murder her father, the emperor Claudius, who subsequently married his niece (and Octavia's first cousin) Agrippina the Younger. Agrippina's son, from her first marriage, was Nero (birth name Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus).

Agrippina, through her plotting and manipulating, ended the engagement between Octavia and Lucius Silanus and persuaded Claudius to adopt Nero as his son and heir, and arranged for Octavia and Nero to marry on 9 June 53.

Life as empress

Claudius died on 13 October 54 and Nero acceded to the throne, possibly poisoning Octavia's full brother Britannicus in early 55 to do so. Tacitus states that from this moment Octavia became very unhappy, but learned to hide her affections and feelings around her husband/stepbrother. Octavia was caught up in the power struggles between Nero and his mother, which concluded when Nero murdered his mother in March 59.

Although she was admired as empress by the Roman citizen body, the marriage was unhappy. Octavia was an ‘aristocratic and virtuous wife' (in Tacitus's words), whereas Nero hated her and grew bored with her (according to both Tacitus and Suetonius), trying on several occasions to strangle her (according to Suetonius) and having affairs with a freedwoman called Claudia Acte and then with Poppaea Sabina. He excused this treatment of her when his friends showed their concerns about it. When Poppaea became pregnant with Nero's child, Nero divorced Octavia, claiming she was barren, and married Poppaea twelve days after the divorce.

Banishment and death

Nero and Poppaea then banished Octavia to the Campania region, and eventually to the island of Pandateria (modern Ventotene) on a false charge of adultery with Nero's former tutor Anicetus. When Octavia complained about this treatment, her maids were tortured to death.

Octavia's banishment became so unpopular that the citizens of Rome protested loudly, openly parading through the streets with statues of Octavia decked with flowers and calling for her return. Nero (badly frightened) nearly agreed to remarry Octavia, but instead he signed her death warrant.

A few days later, Octavia was bound and her veins were opened in a traditional Roman suicide ritual. She was suffocated in an exceedingly hot vapor bath. Octavia’s head was cut off and sent to Poppaea. Her death brought much sorrow to Rome. According to Suetonius, years later Nero would have nightmares about his mother and Octavia.

In later fiction

The events of the divorce are dramatized in Octavia which is sometimes attributed to Seneca the Younger and, more recently, in Handel's lost opera Nero, Giovanni Francesco Busenello's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643), Reinhard Keiser's opera Octavia (1705), and Vittorio Alfieri's tragedy Ottavia (1782). Octavia is also the subject of the massive German novel Die Römische Octavia (1677-1707) by Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and a character in Robert Graves's novel Claudius the God (the sequel to I, Claudius) and the television series I, Claudius. She is the main character of "Octavia: a tale of ancient Rome," the beautiful book written by Seymour Van Santvoord, published in 1923.

In Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical, Nero, she is portrayed as mute, only singing in interior monologue. In the reading at Vassar, she was played by Lea Michele. She was played as a frightened, unwilling bride. She was very close to her brother Brittanicus, played by Michael Arden.