Las últimas emperatrices julio-claudias: estudio de sus imágenes públicas
The Last Julio-Claudian Empresses: Study of Their Public Images

Summary/Abstract: Despite the importance they had in their time, many of the women of the Roman imperial families share a bad image that continues to this day. The pejorative description, present in the accounts of ancient historians, has made these female characters largely unintelligible and it is practically impossible to reach an objective conclusion about their true role in history. The present article aims to offer an analysis of the images of the last empresses of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. We will focus on the wives of Caligula, Claudius and Nero by analyzing the literary evidence we possess about them in order to try to reach a conclusion free of the powerful misogynistic impressions about them that have been provided in the past. To this end, we have taken into account not only the life trajectories of the empresses, but also those of the main men in their lives, the emperors, to try to glimpse if their family relationships could have had some kind of impact on the way women were portrayed by the sources.

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