Professor Catharine Edwards explores the dramatic lives of two women at the heart of power in 1st-century imperial Rome. One is Messalina, whose scandalous reputation lives on 2,000 years after her bloody and dramatic death. The other is Agrippina – sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero – an extraordinary woman who was not only a skilled and ambitious politician but also a murderer and ultimately a murder victim.