Portretul Messalinei: între surse antice și încercări contemporane de reabilitare
Messalina’s portrait: between ancient sources and contemporary rehabilitation efforts

Summary/Abstract: Valeria Messalina was the third wife of Emperor Claudius. She was characterized by strange, impudent behavior, modest obscenity, and sexual hyperesthesis; a beautiful, intelligent woman, among other things, who used her qualities as dictated by her senses and sexual stimuli. Empress Messalina was passionate for money, she had the ambition of leadership and she was dominated by the thirst for revenge and blood. This paper deals in parallel with the way in which the writings of the Roman authors – especially Tacit, Suetonius, Juvenal, and Cassius Dio, constructed Messalina’s portrait, and the current discourse of the scholarly literature proposing a rehabilitation of the image of the Empress. For example, researcher Kristen A. Hosack casts doubt on the ancient description of Messalina and presents a series of arguments designed to change this image of the empress that has been passed on to us, that of a woman who was easily engaged in activities that contravened Roman morals. One reasoning in this direction is that Tacit, interested in Roman morality, wanted to offer a series of lessons to his readers and thus exaggerates the portrait of Messalina. Senatorial tradition was hostile to Claudius; the presentation of Messalina supported the unfavorable image that Tacit wished to make to Claudius, the historian choosing to depict Claudius negatively through his wife. We notice, in an entirely new way in the Romanian historiographical landscape, how ancient writers manipulated the historical events and the language, in order to distort the public's perception of Messalina.

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