The madness of Messalina told by Antonella Prenner

LHistory has always been quick and merciless in handing down the deeds of women. If of Messalina, empress of Rome in the 1st century, we are given a few more pages, it is because its flame could not in any way be held in silence. In fact, a wicked and perverse story is told of her, with shades so little nuanced as to set in motion the sensitive pen of a writer, philologist and university professor of ancient literature such as Antonella Prenner, who has already shown in previous books, Darkness and Caesar, its cinability to look behind the obvious and to find the human roots that lie within the official stories.

Antonella Prenner has Italian and German origins. You teach Latin literature at the Federico II of Naples. She is the author of important studies on ancient literature and of the novels Tenebre and Caesar. Photo: Anna Dies

The song of Messalina (Rizzoli) is the profound portrait of a grieving womansacrificed to power at just 17 for her beauty as a favorite of Caligula and wife of Claudio, a man much older than her, crippled and stupid. A woman thirsting for eros and death, since she herself had been raped and killed in her innermost dreams. All sewn with a style that has the clarity of historiography and the depth of the novel, where history and fiction come together in a noir tale that captivates to the last breath.

Messalina, a controversial figure

How does the urgency of this novel arise?
I am interested in the strong and controversial characters of ancient history, and I am interested in the stories of women. That is to say look to the other side of official historyand, as I did in Darknessin which the narrating voice is that of Tullia, daughter of Cicero, or in Caesarwhere Caesar is seen by the gaze of Servilia, the woman he secretly loved all his life.

How did you tune into Messalina’s character and what did you understand about her?
Messalina is one of the hottest figures of antiquity, according to the sources. Juvenal talks about her and gives us a one-way portrait of sensuality and cruelty. In this way her betrayal continued. In reality I have analyzed several texts well and I have deduced a woman victim of power who, after the loss of her father, is forced by her mother Domizia Lepida and her second husband Fausto Silla to marry Claudio who was thirty years older, lame, stammering and not even too intelligent, at the request of the emperor Caligula who wanted to make him his lover for himself. Her mother and her godfather, for the charm of this imperial glimmer of light, sacrifice Messalina and her happiness, wounding her to death and preparing in her her revenge.

Il canto di Messalina by Antonella Prenner Rizzoli pp.  448, € 16.50.

The song of Messalina by Antonella Prenner, Rizzoli, pp. 448, € 16.50.

Was her nature different from the fate that befell her?
Her nature was certainly strong and warm, but her childhood was not happy: she became an instrument of the ambitions of others, her beauty was a bargaining chip, this determined the direction in which she directed her strength.

From a true story he created a novel. How do history and fiction merge?
They have a very close and thoughtful relationship. The history is not altered in any point, of course, and to prepare for writing I sifted through the documents with the method of the historian, considering that the ancient source is affected by the era that produced it: Juvenal, for example, was aimed at criticism. , and his satires contain his bitterness, this must be weighed. Then a selection of the sources is made, and then a plausible context is constructed with the novel technique, knowing well how people lived in ancient Rome.

Messalina and the other characters are seen from the depths. How did you reconstruct its psychology?
Ancient historiography is different from modern and contains elements of psychology. Tacitus, who is often my reference, restores well-rounded figures in his Annals. According to Messalina, the portrait I found in the tradition always makes a perverse figure of him. I studied everything thoroughly, but in the end it became my version of Messalina. And I heard a girl and then a young woman, as she dies at 25, whose dreams have been cut off for thirst for power and who, when she unexpectedly becomes empress and herself the representative of that power, transforms her suffering into revenge, demanding lovers and killing those who resisted them, in a totally arbitrary way. I don’t want to justify violence, but to look at the causes that produced it.

Messalina in his story has traits of great freedom, almost masculine for the time.
Yes, she is the opposite of the succubus woman, and as soon as she can she behaves like a man, so it was normal to have lovers and bully with power.

Eros and Thanatos – love and death – are held here hand in hand.
They go hand in hand because she died when they overturned her dreamed idea of ​​love. So she then she will continue to combine desire and death.

And did you know true love?
He met him on the very day of his wedding in the figure of Gaius Silio, whom he will pursue all his life and finally will have. She will stage a fake wedding with him, also to mock her husband, which will cost her her life.

At a certain point Messalina tells Silio that they live in a time when “virtue must obey foolishness”. Or how are we today? Was history “magistra vitae”?
The states of the human soul are universal and so are its falls, but in every context and in every time there are individuals who have the ability to turn on a higher light, even in epochs of decay. It was like that then, and it is today.

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