History’s Back Staircases

Emily Van Duyne explores Diana Arterian’s “Agrippina the Younger.”

By Emily Van DuyneAugust 14, 2025

• Poetry

• History

I ONCE DREAMED I was at an archive that was also a restaurant, with natural light and vaulted ceilings, filled with long wooden tables with benches on either side. The servers brought menus from which you could order archival materials; mine included “Angie Bowie’s fake fingernails from the Ziggy Stardust tour” and “Sylvia Plath’s red bandana.” This was the rag-and-bone shop of my heart, a single sunny place that distilled the ephemera of the dead and longed-for into a made-to-order catalog. Small quests, easily completed. In my waking life, by contrast, I have chased after Sylvia Plath, but she never comes fully into view, despite having published a book about her last July.

It’s possible that my longtime obsession with Plath, as well as the lengths I’ve gone to feed it, makes me the ideal reader for the latest book by Los Angeles poet Diana Arterian. Agrippina The Younger (2025) charts the life, death, and politically constructed afterlife of the titular Roman empress, whose son, Nero, had her stabbed to death in 59 CE. Agrippina wrote three memoirs in her lifetime, including the only primary description of childbirth from the classical world. All three were lost or destroyed. We only know of them because of historians like Pliny the Elder, who “references / Agrippina’s memoir with no direct quotation” in his volume Of Prodigious and Monstrous Births. Agrippina considers the ways that men mythologize the lives of women such as the eponymous empress, a practice that “continues even as the buildings she moved through have begun to crumble back to the earth.”

Plath’s 20th-century dwellings are still standing. But I recently found myself peering into the basement crawl space where she famously hid herself for three days, during a suicide attempt in the summer of 1953. The crawl space peered back. As we turned to leave the narrow, crowded room, my friend Joy hissed at me to grab the piece of concrete wedged between a wall and a drainpipe. Its edges crumbled in my fingers as I stashed it in my bag, which, on my flight out of Logan Airport, I decided to check at the last minute. I was flooded with a sinking terror that the TSA would take my rock, which did and did not contain the basement crawl space that once held Sylvia Plath, overdosing at the age of 20.

Containment is Arterian’s subject. The murder of Agrippina opens the book in vile, irresistible verse that contorts the empress with great intention and expansion, until she holds the whole of history in her mouth and smiles back at us “with her […] bloody eyeteeth.” The apocryphal story of Agrippina’s murder says that she ordered her assassins to stab her in the belly, the place that once housed her son and killer. Rather than ponder the truth of this, Arterian writes that Nero has his mother “cut down / the middle to see / the womb that formed him.”

Nero peers in, but this abyss has purchase: Agrippina’s dead uterus grows a monstrous flower, engulfing him in a darkness so total he “burned prisoners / in his garden for light.” So much for Nietzsche, and for the moment, good riddance. Writing an early draft of this, I laughed out loud as I typed, and quickly deleted, a summary of Agrippina’s famed historical relations: sister of Caligula, mother of Nero, wife of her uncle, Claudius. The erasure was my knee-jerk 21st-century feminist reaction (woman as her own self, adjunct to no man). True enough, but it’s difficult not to note a woman’s male relations when it’s these men. And yet I could not bring myself to remove the black lines slashed through the men who slashed at Agrippina. Arterian is a fine storyteller, moving the reader deftly between Agrippina’s real and imagined histories and the poet’s present-day search for her. The book is cleverly paced, arranged so that Arterian’s quests seem to reveal Agrippina’s secrets. Before long, I felt infected with the loving obsession that drove the writing of this book. I wanted to protect its subject.

The opening, more traditionally lyric poems sliver down the page in terse, enjambed couplets, offering debauched feminist images of ancient Rome. I was initially bugged to turn the page and discover long prose meditations on the historical events of Agrippina’s life: her birth abroad while her father, the idealized general Germanicus, was on campaign in Germany; marriage at 13 to a red-bearded bastard said to have deliberately run down a child with his chariot; selection as a vestal virgin by Caligula before he exiled her; motherhood; empresshood; assassination. I briefly thought, reading this sections, that the book had become boring, and put it down. But Agrippina called me back. It felt heavy, it wanted me. The shape of the book came into focus, its historical meditations interspersed with Arterian’s experiences walking through Agrippina’s landscapes as she attempted to “collapse the disk of time, stand beside her.” Reading and rereading Agrippina, I searched hard for anything I might have missed. I was brooding, immersed in a heaviness that no longer felt estranging, one of danger and desire, other worlds and lives that refuse immediately to give way.

Arterian’s aloof, elegant prose reads like a pragmatic dream, which, ideally, is what travel is. It’s all well and good to envision yourself on the Palatine Hill at dusk, in a laurel wreath, but getting there is another matter entirely, and if you don’t plan it with precision, you might find yourself there on the wrong day, jet-lagged, locked out of history and wearing a baseball hat to cover your unwashed hair. Arterian tramping halfway across the world to occupy the places her idol once inhabited might strike the reader as impractical, if not insane, an enterprise undertaken by the flighty or the foolish. But having taken many similar trips myself in search of Plath, I can attest to the calculated necessity of strategy when pursuing the dead: committing the strange names and odd schedules of provincial churches or ruins to memory, tracing and retracing a path on the moors to ensure you recall the way back from a specific footpath that may or may not hold Assia Wevill’s ashes. Seeking out the island where Caligula exiled Agrippina, Arterian writes: “Everyone has the same names, is sent to the same archipelago. […] I read and read but can’t know for sure.” While touring Agrippina’s great-grandmother Livia’s home, Arterian describes her obsessive pursuit and the assumptions people have about her research: “One woman sees my little flip notebook and asks if I’m a reporter. I want to open up and tell her everything, Agrippina and poetry, but just say, No, no.”

If brief conversations with strangers don’t necessarily lend themselves to this kind of project, the forms Arterian chose for Agrippina the Younger suit it unusually well. In pages of blocky prose, Arterian describes chasing down Agrippina’s sister Julia Livilla’s funerary urn in the labyrinthine Vatican Museums and their accompanying website. She fields phone calls and emails from their staff in her desperate attempt to see the closest remnant of the woman closest to Agrippina, whose burial place remains in question. “Is she in there?” Arterian asks us. The text is italicized as though, perhaps, someone is speaking, as though someone else is speaking, a distant historian or a modern lecturer. Sometimes Arterian writes, “This is important as …” in a series of notes at the bottom of certain pages; these are also italicized. She never elaborates on who “this” is important to, or what, precisely “this” importance is, since these occasional footnotes are always attached to the whole of the text, rather than to a particular detail. Here is another open space for mystery made by Arterian, voices commingling and ventriloquized in the jigsaw of the collection.

While the forms in the book feel unwieldy at first, the events and their historiographies prove to be even more so. That, of course, is their intrigue, and power. Through Arterian’s careful study and poetics, all of us have the chance to troop down history’s back staircases, trying at once to preserve the dusty footprints underfoot and to make our own marks. Agrippina’s form mirrors Arterian’s devoted search. Some revelations are immediate, others followed by long silence: the blank space of the page, and then “the sky shows through the door holes like blue tombstones.” Women in history and literature who are perceived as wild are often punished with a damning attention for that wildness, and so the moment when Arterian, accompanied by a friend, strips naked and slips into the Tyrrhenian Sea, in order to swim out in search of a better view of the ruins where Agrippina was once exiled, feels like both a kinship and a delicious rebellion. I think back to my own travels with friends to London, Boston, Yorkshire, knocking on strangers’ doors in the hope that they might let us into Plath’s former dwellings. “I nearly fell to my knees,” one friend wrote to me after visiting Plath’s grave for the first time. About Agrippina, Arterian writes: “[I]t’s possible I stared into the dark boundless space of her life because, while I didn’t know it yet, its narrative elements might also serve as a lesson—if one looked closely enough. So, I peer.” Graves don’t talk back; neither does the sea. But through both, history and the dead demand our time, rage, ambition, and attention, and this is ultimately the voice that Agrippina the Younger amplifies with fury and grace.