Gun Laws & Legislation

Guns & Politics: Mean Girls

Susan Smith Columnist
Font Size:

Is there anyone left in the world who does not think Hillary Clinton is exactly what she is?

Even her supporters acknowledge that she is at the very least a serial prevaricator, and willing to say or do anything to achieve her seemingly endless ambition.  She is universally recognized as joyless, shrill, inelegant, unlikeable and classless.

But that won’t stop millions of people from voting from her.

Far be it from me to even begin to figure that one out, but it started me thinking, has there ever been a woman quite so awful as Hillary Clinton who came before?  Well, I examined our international  foremothers, and came up with the answer, and it is unequivocally, absolutely, yes.

Messalina was a Roman who at the age of 15 years and in the year 38 AD married Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, later known to history as Emperor under the name of Claudius.  Claudius was over 50 at the time, and had had two previous wives, neither of whom had quite worked out for him for various very Roman reasons.  It is said about this marriage that: “History would remember him as the emperor who drooled and stammered and her as one of the most controlling, devious and ambitious in all of history.”

Sound familiar yet?

Messalina was from a quite well connected Roman family, being descended from Mark Anthony, and related as well to the former Emperor Caligula.  There were two children of the marriage, Claudia Octavia, who later married Claudius’ step-son and heir, the soon-to-be unlovely Emperor Nero, and Tiberius Claudius Germanicus, known as Britannicus, born just three weeks before his father was proclaimed Emperor.  The child received the name Britannucus after Claudius’ victory in Britain; unfortunately, Britannicus would be poisoned by his step-brother Nero in 65 AD.   There are those who claim that these two children were actually the offspring of Caligula, as from very early on in her marriage to Claudius, Messalina was a fixture at Caligula’s orgies.

The Empress was a very busy girl, as very soon after her marriage to Claudius she felt it necessary to ban/banish/torture/kill her husband’s two nieces, Agrippina and Julia Livia.  Messalina was very jealous of both, and did as much as she could as soon as she could to destroy either them or their influence.  She turned out to be quite justified in one of these cases, as Agrippina eventually became Claudius’ fourth wife, despite the fact that she was his niece.  Julia Livia was not so fortunate, as she eventually died starved to death in exile.

It was said about Messlina that she had such an insatiable appetite for men that she would don the garb of a prostitute and ply the trade by night all over Rome.  Messalina, feisty and fun loving girl that she was, was reputed to have challenged the most well known prostitute of the time in Rome, a woman by the name of Scylla, to an all night copulating contest with the winner being the one who serviced the most men.  The Empress won hands down, as Scylla gave up as dawn broke, supposedly after 25 men, while Messalina “continued zealously all throughout the morning.”

Messalina then decided that she wanted the man who had just married her mother, a former governor of eastern Spain named Appius Silanus.  Silanus made the fatal mistake of rejecting the advances of his step daughter, who eventually convinced her hapless husband, the Emperor, that Silanus was laying in wait to assassinate the Emperor.  The Empress convinced her husband of Silanus’ supposed guilt, and the poor innocent fellow was soon executed by order of Claudius.

The Empress had many other, um, relationships, one of these actually ending up in a bigamous marriage.  Thinking herself in love, the Empress reached the conclusion, after having met with a Roman Senator named Gaius Silius, that this was forever, so in her inimitable style, she convinced her lover that the two of them would overthrow Claudius and rule the empire together.  Messalina forced Silius to divorce his wife, adopt her son, and marry her in a rather obvious ceremony.  She even moved furniture from the imperial palace into her new home; she could be a very persuasive person.

Sound familiar yet?

Poor hapless Claudius, who had either pretended not to be aware of Messalina’s activities or just didn’t care (sound familiar yet?), finally had to come to terms with his wife’s faithlessness when SHE MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE while married to him.  So Claudius, aware that he finally had to take some sort of appropriate action, ordered everyone who attended the wedding executed, starting with the groom, and ordered, via a courier, Messalina to commit suicide.  She thought she could still talk Claudius out of this what she felt to be overly harsh command, but Claudius’ courtiers would not let the two of them meet and the courier himself stabbed the Empress as she could not make the plunge, as it were.

Claudius married his niece a very short time later, a union that would not fare much better then what he had endured with Messalina.

While our modern Messalina is certainly, one wouldn’t think, not guilty of similar crimes and misdemeanors, she rivals the Empress in such demonstrable naked ambition.  Say anything and do anything?  I think we see sisters in evil, though Messalina was clearly a lot more fun that Hillary will ever be.