Abstract
This thesis argues that, in the Annals, Tacitus writes the stories of three imperial women, Livilla, Messalina, and Poppaea Sabina, to echo Livy’s Lucretia narrative. The imperial women considered here play Lucretia’s role in these stories, but Tacitus has them differ from Lucretia in a very important way: all three willingly commit adultery just as Tacitus begins his references to Livy’s famous story. Tacitus’ echoes of Livy’s narrative are thus inversions, the three imperial women designed by him as in fact antitheses of Livy’s Lucretia. Tacitus does not merely intend by this comparison to mark the immoral characters of the three imperial women, however, because the consequences he attributes to their immorality are so dire, not only for themselves and their families, but also for all of Rome. By contrast, Livy writes that Lucretia earns long- lasting influence on the Roman imagination as a positive exemplum because she acts upon what he describes as her moral goodness and thereby inspires her compatriots to reassert their dignity and secure their freedom through the establishment of the republic, all identified as good things in Livy’s narrative. Tacitus’ three imperial women likewise possess tremendous influence over Rome as Julio-Claudian dynasts, but he writes that their use of their influence exclusively endangers the empire. The point of Tacitus’ inversions of Livy’s Lucretia narrative, then, is to highlight that the hereditary transference of power that so elevates the position of imperial women over Rome leads to disasters for the state. Tacitus thus ultimately reasserts Livy’s connection between moral goodness and qualities like dignity, freedom, and republican government, as Tacitus repeatedly describes these same qualities as threatened or disgraced in the inversions of Livy’s story that he includes as he describes the Julio-Claudian era in the Annals.