A Twist on the Tradwife: Agrippina the Elder

Picture this: you’re a hard-working man, coming home from your 9-5 job. As soon as you open the door, you’re greeted by a spotless home, the smell of something delicious cooking in the kitchen, and your darling children. Your beautiful wife, the talk of the neighborhood, comes into the living room to take your coat and hand you your favorite drink to help you unwind for the day.

Though an obvious simplification, this was the ideal that a 1950s housewife was meant to uphold, perfect for her husband, family, and the broader community.

Now that you’ve got that in your brain, picture this: you’re still a hard-working man, but as you come home from work, you walk into the kitchen to see your wife propping up her iPhone to film herself cooking. She takes multiple shots of the same loaf of sourdough bread before asking you to pose with a slice to show her followers what a great wife she is. Your kids are told to be on their best behavior while Mom is filming. You feel as though aspects of your relationship are becoming performative.

This is the reality of the “tradwife” trend, a new movement of women, primarily on TikTok, dedicating their lives to upholding traditional feminine roles and characteristics usually identified with the housewife stereotype. The curation of the tradwife image is noticeable when the term is searched online. However, several women seem to meet the requirements, but would not personally identify with the label. For example, model and influencer Nara Smith has been labeled with the term by fans and haters alike, but she does not necessarily agree, saying that while she films videos cooking for her family, she is also a working woman. In the same article, however, she does admit to the “performative nature of some of her videos,” which may be the reason people are so quick to label her.

What so fascinates me about the “tradwife” trend is the aforementioned performative aspect. While some people don’t feel like they are putting on a show, the nature of the trend forces women to put their lives on display in order to expose people to this lifestyle. This led me to ask several questions: Why is it that people are so attracted to these ideals? Why are they making a comeback? Why is it that people have such strong reactions - both positive and negative - when women use the label? And, of course, the one this post aims to answer, who in the Roman world may be the ancient equivalent of the tradwife? While Agrippina the Elder could not film her daily life, she could however appear publicly to wield her role as a wife and gain the support of the public, much like the goal of the tradwife trend.

Agrippina the Elder was born in 14 BCE to Julia Augusti (or Julia the Elder) and her second husband Agrippa.¹ She had four siblings: Gaius, Lucius, Agrippa Postumus, and Julia the Younger. Unlike the Julias who were both famously exiled for adultery, Agrippina grew up to be an honorable woman, “greatly esteemed” by emperor Augustus himself.² She was married to Germanicus, a skilled general and the nephew/adopted son of her stepfather emperor Tiberius (yes, you read that right) in 5 CE. She was said to have been quite spirited, but “purity and love of husband” were some of her best qualities.³ Their marriage was a clear and successful combination of the Julian and Claudian branches since Germanicus was “principally a Claudian” but Agrippina was the daughter of Julia Augusti and granddaughter of Augustus.⁴ Because of Agrippina’s connections to the powerful imperial family, she held a prominent position in society. In order to live up to the compliments of her grandfather, she needed to cement her reputation as “a woman of impressive fecundity and pre-eminent purity.”⁵

For the sake of consistency, picture this: you’re a hard-working Roman legionary soldier, worn out from fighting against the Germans in an attempt to conquer Germania (Germany). Word has spread that angry Germans are heading your way, so you and your fellow soldiers begin to panic. However, you suddenly see a woman begin to distribute clothes, bandages, and praise to calm your fears.

This is the image of Agrippina the Elder that survives in Tacitus’ Annals 1.69. In the Annals, Tacitus makes note of how Agrippina would accompany her husband on campaigns while pregnant or caring for small children.⁶ In situations like the uprising described above, Agrippina alone was able to stop it. This was not the first time she got involved with her husband’s affairs; when the soldiers mutinied in 14 CE, Germanicus threatened to send her away because he feared she would not be safe around the men. In this instance, she appealed to Germanicus with her role as his wife, “embracing her pregnant belly and their common son,” as well as her position as Augustus’ granddaughter.⁷ When Germanicus spoke to the soldiers, they asked that she not be sent away, as Tacitus records in the Annals 1.44.1 that the soldiers referred to her as “the legions’ darling.”

While the soldiers clearly adored her, her stepfather Tiberius hated her, fearing that she had more power over the army than she should have had.⁸ Though quelling a mutiny is different than baking sourdough bread from scratch, these passages show that Agrippina (or, at least Agrippina according to Tacitus) was able to utilize the community’s perception of her role as a loving wife and mother to gain favor. This is not dissimilar to “tradwives” who use their roles in the same way to gain followers/online audiences.

Additionally, just as there are mixed reviews of the “tradwife” trend, Agrippina had clear fans in Germanicus’ troops and a clear hater in Tiberius. Since a woman can behave as a “tradwife” without being forced to or doing it explicitly, perhaps Agrippina did not mean to highlight her feminine roles in order to elevate herself. Or, on the other hand, perhaps she did recognize the “value of her symbolic role as a Roman woman.”⁹ According to Tacitus, Tiberius believed that there was certainly a performative aspect to her actions, claiming that her “attentions are not ingenuous.”¹⁰ After Germanicus died in 19 CE, Tacitus more explicitly states that he believed Agrippina made a spectacle of Germanicus’ ashes and children “to everyone’s pity.”¹¹ I think perhaps that it is a combination; she probably both loved and leaned into her roles as wife and mother.

At this point, you might be wondering: to what extent is this image of Agrippina created by Tacitus? Should we believe what he says about her, or do other authors think differently? Three major surviving works discuss the Julio-Claudian women at length: Tacitus’ Annals, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, and Cassius Dio’s Roman History. Each of these sources was influenced by something different: Tacitus was interested in political intrigue and hostility toward the imperial family, Suetonius paid attention to gossip, and Dio aligned himself with 3rd-century attitudes that were both culturally and politically different from the Julio-Claudian era.¹² It then follows that different authors focused on different things and people. Both Suetonius and Dio mention Agrippina the Elder less than ten times, while Tacitus mentions her just under thirty times. Clearly, Agrippina was more useful to Tacitus’ narrative than she was to the others. Additionally, none of these sources were written during the lifetimes of any Julio-Claudian family member. The reign of their dynasty officially ended with the suicide of Nero in 68 CE, but Suetonius and Tacitus didn’t write their works until the second century, and Dio’s was written in the third century. According to Cynthia Damon, Tacitus claims “that he writes with greater objectivity” because of this distance, but it is arguably impossible for bias not to creep in.¹³

Regardless of this bias, from what we can know about Agrippina the Elder, it is clear that she used her role as an imperial Roman wife to influence the public’s perception. However, perhaps like Nara Smith, Agrippina was not doing this intentionally. Either way, there certainly seems to be an element of performance to Agrippina’s public appearances, which makes her the perfect example of an ancient "tradwife."

Footnotes:

1. David C. A. Shotter, “Agrippina the Elder: A Woman in a Man’s World,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 49, no. 3 (2000): 341.

2. D.S. Potter and Cynthia Damon, “The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre,” The American Journal of Philology 120, no. 1 (1999):35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561709.

3. Tacitus, Annals, 1.33.3.

4. Shotter, 343.

5. Tacitus, Annals, 1.41.2

6. Susan E. Wood, Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 B.C.-A.D. 68, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1999), 204.

7. Tacitus, Annals, 1.40.3.

8. Tacitus, Annals, 1.69.4.

9. Wood, 205.

10. Annals, 1.69.

11. Annals, 2.75.1.

12. Francesca Cenerini, “Chapter 33: Julio-Claudian Imperial Women,” In The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 1st ed., (London, England: Routledge, 2020), 399.

13. Cynthia Damon “Introduction,” Introduction, In Annals, xix–xlii, (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), xxiii.