She won the competition with the most famous whore of Rome

The ancient historians were surprisingly unanimous about the Empress Valeria Messalina (before 18–48). Tacitus attested to her drive for "unknown desires", Suetonius permanent adultery and Cassius Dio the organization of veritable sex orgies in the palace. According to these testimonies, Messalina was one of the greatest nymphomaniacs of antiquity.

One of the reasons for this characterization was Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, simply called Claudius, and he had been Emperor of Rome since the year 41. He made it easy for his contemporaries to deride him as a cuckold who, in his "passionate love for Messalina" (Suetonius), simply ignored her antics. And they did it with great enthusiasm, for Claudius was not very popular, since by the time he died in 54 he had evidently sentenced to death numerous senators and knights whom he suspected of conspiracy.

It had been pure coincidence that Claudius had come to the throne. As the son of Augustus' adoptive son Drusus, who died early, he belonged to the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but suffered from numerous disabilities from birth. He had a limp and had trouble speaking, so Augustus kept him from public view. When Claudius' nephew Caligula was killed by the Praetorians in 41, they discovered the trembling 50-year-old behind a curtain and immediately proclaimed him the new Emperor. Thus Claudius' third wife Messalina unexpectedly became the empress.

The ancient historian Werner Eck countered the assumption that Messalina was only 15 years old at the time in his detailed study of “The Women Next to Caligula, Claudius and Nero”. She was probably at least 20 years old, if not over 25, and not only was she an attractive beauty from the best of society, she was also distantly related to Augustus. It could well be the case, Eck concludes, that the marriage to the unloved prince was intended to seal an alliance between two powerful families.

Anyway. Research has long since worked out that the negative picture that the ancient sources paint of Claudius only corresponds to a limited extent to reality. The conquest of Britain began under his reign, he took care of the administration of justice and the improvement of the infrastructure, and is said to have written a considerable (albeit lost) literary work. But his tendency to rely on the advisers who had served him before he came to the throne alienated him from the Senate aristocracy. Because they were freedmen or other outsiders from better society, with whom a prince with no prospect of the throne had to make do.

Politically inexperienced as he was, the emperor allowed himself to be controlled by those around him, and Messalina was a crucial part of that. At the end of the 1st or beginning of the 2nd century, the poet Juvenal summed up what was said about her in a bitterly angry satire: At night she was said to have moved “to the muggy brothel” with a blond wig, where she was naked and with gilded breasts offered the customers "and lying on her back, she swallowed the thrusts of many".

Admiral Pliny the Elder, a contemporary witness, also described the mating forms of the animals in his “Natural History”. Messalina was presented as an extreme example, having achieved 25 concubitus in 24 hours in competition with the most famous whore in Rome. In the palace, on the other hand, she asked aristocrats to “give themselves to others in front of their husbands,” writes Cassius Dio.

None of this can be verified, and similar reports from other emperors and their courts show that sex fantasies were a common means of defamation in Rome. It is also quite possible that Messalina's successor in Claudius' marriage bed, Agrippina the Younger, Nero's mother, deliberately spread such stories in order to discredit Messalina's memory. But the readers were obviously attuned to such images, argues Werner Eck: "So a corresponding characterization must have been associated with Messalina at the time."

A well-known affair in the fall of '48, perhaps sometime in November, provided a lot of material. Messalina celebrated a festival with her current lover, the beautiful Silius, which was generally understood as a wedding ritual. This alarmed the high-ranking freedmen in the imperial household, who had assisted her in numerous intrigues by slandering rivals or competitors to Claudius, who then signed the death penalty.

That both Claudius and Messalina lived in an open relationship was still acceptable, although this contradicted Augustus' strict marriage laws. The fact that the wife dissolved the marriage through bigamy allowed only one consequence: In order to forestall the foreseeable deadly reaction of her husband, the newlyweds had to put themselves at the head of a conspiracy against the Emperor according to the political rules of the time. If successful, the freedmen would lose their boss and probably their heads as well. So they immediately switched sides.

Narcissus, one of the emperor's closest advisors, rushed to Ostia where his master was on business. There he is said to have presented him with a list of all his wife's lovers and informed him about the consequences of the wedding for him. Claudius then hurried back to Rome. When Messalina heard this, she once again relied on her charisma and the fact that she had given birth to the heir to the throne in Britannicus. But before he got the chance to soften, Narcissus had given the praetorians the order to kill. Beautiful Silius was smart enough to ask for an easy death.

Was Messalina really stupid enough not to overlook the consequences of her escapades? The construction of the intrigues that she is said to have spun speak against a lack of intelligence. Perhaps the experience of successfully getting out of affairs with her husband had blinded her judgment.

Maybe just carpe diem (enjoy the day) had become their maxim. If one includes all possible and probable falsifications, Eck writes, "there is enough to see in Valeria Messalina a woman driven by her passions, who also considered the prospects of her children, whom she had borne to Claudius, and thus her own, but who was not able to subordinate or at least classify their emotionality to them in the long term".

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