Agrippina and the Power of Rhetorical Stereotypes

Abstract Much of what Hilliard ascribes to the rhetorical stereotypes with which politically active women of the late Republic were fashioned may be true of the rhetorical construction of Agrippina and her predecessors. We can agree that the allegations against imperial women that have made their way into the historical tradition probably had their origin in contemporary political polemic and that at least two motivations underlie these negative portrayals: to cast opprobrium on the men with whom these women were associated and to discourage aristocratic and imperial women from challenging the male monopoly of the Roman political system.