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40 Things About The Outlandish Math Cult Leader, and Other Unusual Facts From the Ancient World

Khalid Elhassan May 22, 2020 33 min

Democritus and Protagoras - Odysseus and Nausicaa (Ulysses and Nausicaa) — 'Pythagoras and the Fishermen', by Salvatore Rosa. Wikimedia

18. “The Food of the Gods”

Agrippina Minor crowning her son, Nero. Pinterest

Agrippina was the granddaughter of Emperor Augustus, and the younger sister of Emperor Caligula. At age thirteen, she married a cousin, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, and bore him a son, the future Emperor Nero. Ahenobarbus died in 41 AD, and when Claudius executed Messalina in 48 AD, he chose Agrippina as his fourth wife. She convinced Claudius to adopt her son, Nero, and make him his heir and recognized successor in lieu of his biological son with Messalina, Britannicus.

By 54 AD, Claudius seemed to repent of having married Agrippina, and began favoring Britannicus and preparing him for the throne. So Agrippina poisoned Claudius at a banquet with a plate of deadly mushrooms. For the remainder of her life, she jokingly referred to mushrooms as “the food of the gods” (because Roman emperors were deified as gods after their deaths, and by killing Claudius, mushrooms had made him a god).

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.