Claudio didn’t want to tolerate Agrippinila’s behavior, so he prepared to end her power by having his son put on the toga virilis and declaring him heir to the throne. Upon learning this, Agrippinila was alarmed and hurried to remedy the situation by poisoning Claudio. However, due to the large amount of wine he drank and his general lifestyle habits, which all emperors typically adopted for protection, he couldn’t be easily harmed. Agrippinila then sought out a famous poison dealer, a woman named Locusta, who had recently been convicted of the same charge. With her help, she prepared a poison which she placed in a vegetable called mushrooms.

Dion Cassius recounts in his work Roman History the poisoning of Emperor Claudio by his wife Agrippina (or Agrippinila), who, as we see, resorted to the knowledge of poisons possessed by a certain Locusta. Historians such as Tacitus (Annals) and Suetonius (The Twelve Caesars), as well as writers like Juvenal (Satires) and, much later, Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) also make references to her. However, they do little more than mention her (Dumas merely compares her to the poisoner in his novel, Madame de Villefort) and, if anything, provide the detail that she was a Gallic slave.

In antiquity and in subsequent ages until relatively recently, history focused on kings, military figures, and notables; someone of such low condition as a slave did not deserve more attention than the contextual, so we do not know much about that woman, nor if the nefarious image she has left for posterity corresponds to reality. Juvenal reports that she came from Gaul, arrived in Rome in her adolescence, and managed to set up a herbalist business on the Palatine Hill.

It is deduced, therefore, that she would have reasonable knowledge of pharmacology and, therefore, toxicology and various elixirs. Enough to earn a reputation as an expert poisoner and have her services demanded by all those who wished to get rid of someone in an apparently natural way, whether they were political enemies, lovers, inheritable family members, etc. Despite the discretion involved in her method of killing, it seems that she was imprisoned for it on occasion.

Bust of Agrippina
Bust of Agrippina. Credit: Ángel M. Felicísimo / Wikimedia Commons

However, according to the classical account, Agrippina turned to her when she decided to get rid of her husband, Claudio. He had grown tired of her machinations in the shadows and threatened to remove her from the court, which would mean that the succession to the throne would not fall to her son Nero but to Britannicus, the offspring he had with Valeria Messalina, his previous wife. Agrippina, known as the Younger to distinguish her from her mother, was the daughter of Germanicus and sister of Caligula; that is, Claudio was not only her husband but also her uncle.

But Nero was not born to him but to his previous spouse, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had already warned that from the union of Agripina and I, only a monster can emerge, as if he wanted to confirm the definition of “despicable and dishonest” (Tiberius condemned him for adultery and treason, escaping the scaffold only thanks to the death of the emperor) that Suetonius would dedicate to him decades later. Agripina married him in 28 AD, at just thirteen years old, and was widowed twelve years later when he was killed by an edema, who knows if provoked.

Despite being involved in a plot against Caligula, Agrippina survived his turbulent reign, as he simply exiled her. She then remarried her brother-in-law, Gaius Sallustius Crispus, whose sudden death in 47 AD sparked rumors that he had been poisoned. Then her uncle Claudius, who was widowed because he had ordered the execution of Messalina for adultery, chose her as his new wife, surely because he needed an adult heir to dissuade attempts at coups such as the one he had suffered at the hands of Gaius Silius, the lover of his already executed wife; Britannicus was still a child, while Nero was a couple of years older.

Claudius' proclamation, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1880)
Claudius’ proclamation, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1880). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The close kinship between Claudius and Agrippina prevented them from marrying legally, but they obtained a special permit from the Senate and the marriage was officially recognized in 49 AD. He was already elderly and Agrippina cleverly manipulated him, getting him to appoint her Augusta (something that had only happened once before, when Octavius did the same with Livia), to marry her daughter Octavia to Nero, and to adopt Nero as co-heir alongside Britannicus (a Roman tradition applicable when the natural heir was underage).

Once all those objectives were achieved, Claudius only became an obstacle and she began to plan his death, if we believe the sources mentioned above. It was then that she turned to Locusta. Tacitus tells the story:

Then [Agrippina] decided on something of a very subtle nature “that would disturb [Claudius’s] mind and require time to kill him”. An experienced artist in such preparations was chosen named Locusta, lately condemned for poisonings and long kept as one of the instruments of ambition. Thanks to the skill of this woman, the poison was prepared; Halotus was appointed to administer it, a eunuch whose office consisted of serving the emperor’s meals and tasting the dishes.

Locusta testing the poison prepared for Britannicus in the presence of Nero, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1876)
Locusta testing the poison prepared for Britannicus in the presence of Nero, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1876). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Halotus was the emperor’s taster and the main function of his job was not so much to detect poisons as to ensure that the food was in good condition. In any case, he always accompanied his master and could therefore administer the poison easily. It is possible that Halotus had been bribed by Agrippina or that he even belonged to her circle of followers. It is also possible that he had nothing to do with it and was subsequently added as another element to enrich the plot. Tacitus himself acknowledges something like this:

Strictly speaking, all aspects of that transaction were known in such detail afterwards that writers of these times are able to relate “how the poison was poured into a dish of mushrooms that Claudius greatly enjoyed; but its effect was not immediately noticed, either because his senses were dulled or because of the wine he had just drunk”.

Now, was there really a poison? One hypothesis suggests that the mushroom dish prepared for the emperor for dinner on that October 13 included the death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides), a mycorrhizal fungus whose appearance is very similar to edible mushrooms – the species that Claudius usually ate is the Caesar’s mushroom (Amanita caesarea), which sometimes leads to accidents because it actually contains toxins that, when ingested, act on the kidneys and liver in the so-called phalloid syndrome, proving lethal (the current mortality rate has dropped to 15%, but in the mid-20th century it was still 60-70% and in the past it was almost 100%).

Characters who are believed to have died from it could testify to its potential lethality, such as Archduke Charles of Austria (the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne who sparked the War of Succession against the Bourbon candidate) or Tsarina Natalia Naryshkina (the mother of Peter the Great), with the particularity that it is very difficult to establish the cause of death if there was no previous ingestion. According to this, Claudius’ death could have been accidental… unless the death cap mushroom was deliberately added to the dinner.

Several specimens of the death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides)
Several specimens of the death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides). Credit: Jerzy Opioła / Wikimedia Commons

It is also possible that instead of pieces of that mushroom, its toxin was previously extracted and applied, which an expert like Locusta could have done to later give it to Agrippina and she to Halotus. Or perhaps the mushrooms only served as a channel and the poison was different; experts see a coincidence between the symptoms Claudius suffered – diarrhea, vomiting – and those caused by arsenic, a metalloid that in small doses was used for therapeutic purposes but could be lethal when increased, especially in the form of a whitish powder (arsenious anhydride), which is tasteless and odorless.

The list of possibilities is broader, as other experts suggest belladonna (Atropa belladonna), a solanaceous shrub whose berries contain atropine, an alkaloid used as an analgesic and anesthetic (it depresses the parasympathetic nervous system), aphrodisiac (in religious festivals in honor of Athena or in the Dionysian cult, causing long hallucinations) and cosmetic (it whitened the skin, hence it was common in the dressing rooms of Roman ladies and perhaps its name is due to that, bella donnas meaning beautiful ladies).

Ultimately, as with many medicines, its positive or negative effect depended on the dosage, and so belladonna had a more sinister use: before making a fortune in the Middle Ages, related to witchcraft, it was already the most common poison in Rome; it was said that Livia, the aforementioned wife of Augustus, was a regular user and it seems logical to assume that Locusta would also know all the secrets of its preparation and administration.

A plant of belladonna with its fruits
A plant of belladonna with its fruits. Credit: Joan Simon / Wikimedia Commons

And to top it off, some experts point to another substance: that extracted from colocynth or bitter apple (Citrullus colocynthis), a type of climbing plant used by doctors in antiquity and the Middle Ages as a purgative and abortifacient. In this case it is not a poison but the drug that Xenophon, the emperor’s personal physician (who should not be confused with the homonymous author of the Anabasis), would have administered to him to finish him off when he saw that he was still alive because the mushrooms were not effectively fulfilling their deadly function. Again, Tacitus explains it:

At the same time, some relaxation of the intestines seemed to do [Claudius] some good. Then Agrippinila felt dismayed, but since her life was in danger, she thought very little about the odiousness of the procedure and asked for help from Xenophon, the physician whom she had already implicated in her guilty purposes. It is believed that he, as if trying to help Claudius in his efforts to vomit, introduced into his throat a feather soaked in deadly poison…

Suetonius says that Xenophon poisoned the food directly. Be that as it may, Claudius died on October 13th, 54 AD, it is not known if during the night or at dawn, after a tense agony; it is also not clear if it happened in Rome or in Sinuessa, a locality in Campania that between the 1st and 2nd centuries AD experienced a moment of splendor because many senators and nobles had villas there due to the fame of its baths.

A coliquíntida with its fruits still green (when ripe they turn yellow)
A coliquíntida with its fruits still green (when ripe they turn yellow). Credit: Orangerind / Wikimedia Commons

As planned, Nero was proclaimed emperor and, faced with the rumors that circulated about the murderous mushrooms, he proclaimed them “food of the gods”, making it impossible to identify them as something bad but, at the same time, giving historians clues about the method used. At the moment it didn’t matter much because he was at the height of his popularity, which allowed him to assert himself over Britannicus in the succession without too much complication. But being a sixteen-year-old, his mother handled him as a puppet ruler.

At least initially, because little by little he distanced himself from her until he ended up openly opposed: he ordered the execution of his lover, Aulus Plautius, and took Popea Sabina as his wife, who convinced him to get rid of her. The chosen method was to poison her, and for this he had the invaluable collaboration of Locusta, who had not only collaborated in Claudius’s crime but also in Britannicus’s.

Upon the emperor’s death, the authorities conducted a raid of suspects, and she ended up in jail. There, Nero went in 55 AD to get her out and resort to her services by eliminating his half-brother. He had earned her enmity by accusing him of effeminacy, having gathered around him a group of opponents who evidenced the rupture between the two family branches, the Claudia and the Julia. Tacitus adds that Nero raped Britannicus once, spreading the rumor that his true father was not Claudius; on top of that, Agrippina, disgraced by her own offspring, approached him.

Agrippina crowning her young son Nero
Agrippina crowning her young son Nero. Credit: Carlos Delgado / Wikimedia Commons

The first son of Claudius resisted the potion they gave him, suffering only from diarrhea, which led Nero to assault the poisoner. However, he gave her another chance and she did not waste it: during a banquet organized specifically by the emperor, Locusta ordered that a very hot broth be served to Britannicus; so hot that it needed to be cooled with water. Of course, that wasn’t what she added to the bowl; the symptoms suggest that it was water dropwort (Ranunculus sceleratus).

The juice of this plant was used to treat rheumatism and muscle spasms, as well as to regulate menstruation, but in itself it is so toxic that even bees avoid sipping it. Britannicus was instantly killed by it, suffering strong facial muscle contractions and frothing at the mouth, which made everyone believe that it was the epilepsy he suffered from. No one suspected Nero, who rewarded Locusta by granting her several rural properties where she could instruct several disciples.

We were saying that the emperor tried to poison his mother unsuccessfully, just as he failed in attempting to kill her through other less subtle means, so he ended up accusing her of conspiracy and then executing her; He will be king, but he will kill his mother, a Chaldean astrologer had prophesied to her, to which she replied Let him kill me as long as he reigns! And so it was, but he wouldn’t escape a tumultuous fate either. In 68 AD, after fourteen years of an increasingly worse reign – and with the terrible fire of Rome in between – the generals Vindex and Galba rebelled.

The death of Britannicus in a nineteenth-century illustration by Abel de Pujol
The death of Britannicus in a nineteenth-century illustration by Abel de Pujol. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The Senate supported an uprising of the Praetorian Guard, and Nero had to hastily flee the city. He carried with him a poison he had obtained from Locusta, although he did not use it because he instructed his secretary, a Greek freedman named Epaphroditus, to stab him with his pugio. The senators proclaimed Galba emperor, who unleashed a bloody persecution against all those who had collaborated with his predecessor. Only Ofonius Tigellinus, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and Halotus, the taster, were saved, something that caused as much surprise as indignation (although the former did not live much longer: he took his own life a few months later, when Otho overthrew Galba).

On the other hand, Locusta was arrested along with Narcissus, Helius, and Patrobius, freedmen loyal to Nero. Dio Cassius says that she, accused of causing four hundred deaths, was paraded through the streets loaded with chains and executed without mercy during the Agonalia (a religious festival dedicated to the god Janus).

It is not known exactly what method they used to take her life, but the legend about it is quite curious, as it tells that she was raped to death by a giraffe and then torn apart by several beasts. Historians believe it must have been something less sensational: hanged and her body burned.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on March 6, 2024. Puedes leer la versión en español en Locusta, la esclava que preparó el veneno que mató a Claudio y a su hijo Británico

Sources

Tácito, Anales | Dión Casio, Historia romana | Suetonio, Vidas de los doce césares | Juvenal, Sátiras | John Timbrell, The poison paradox. Chemicals as friends and foes | Dirk C. Gibson, Legends, monsters, or serial murderers? The real story behind an ancient crime | Wikipedia

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