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The Weirdest Ways Children Were Treated in History

Khalid Elhassan March 28, 2021 36 min

Baby dangling over the street in a cage. The Sun

Bronze coin with the heads of Claudius on one side, left, and Britannicus on the other, right. Wikimedia

3. The Unfortunate Britannicus Was Poisoned by His Stepbrother, Shortly After His Stepmother Had Poisoned His Father

Messalina seemingly slept with half of Rome, publicly wed another man while still married to Claudius, and plotted with her lover and bigamous husband to murder her imperial hubby and usurp his throne. That marriage ended in Messalina’s execution. An incorrigible optimist, Claudius married for a fourth time, this time wedding his niece Agrippina Minor (15 – 59 AD). Thirty-three years Claudius’ junior, 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.

The marriage ended with her poisoning him to death. She convinced Claudius to adopt her son, Nero, and make him his heir and successor instead of his biological son with Messalina, Britannicus. By 54 AD, Claudius seemed to have had second thoughts about marrying 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). Shortly after Nero ascended the throne, he had the unfortunate Britannicus, then thirteen years old, poisoned.

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.