Pomponia Graecina - Biography

Biography

Pomponia married Aulus Plautius (d. by 65), a senator and general who led the Roman conquest of Britain in 43, for which he later received a military ovation, and governed Roman Britain until 47. A younger Aulus Plautius, probably their son, was murdered by the emperor Nero, supposedly because Nero's mother Agrippina had fallen in love with him and encouraged him to bid for the throne.

In 43, Pomponia's relative Julia, daughter of her uncle Julius Caesar Drusus, was executed on the orders of her maternal uncle, the emperor Claudius at the instigation of the empress Valeria Messalina. Pomponia spent the next forty years in open mourning in defiance of successive emperors. She escaped punishment for this, possibly as a result of her own illustrious ancestry and her husband's sterling military reputation, which gave her prestige. According to Tacitus, Pomponia lived a long, unhappy life, possibly as a result of her son's murder and the deaths of several relatives associated with the Imperial family. In 57 Pomponia was charged with practicing a "foreign superstition", which has been taken by some to mean conversion to Christianity, although there were other regulated cults in ancient Rome. According to ancient Roman tradition, she was tried by her husband before her kinsmen, and acquitted.

Inscriptions in the catacombs of Saint Callistus in Rome suggest that later members of Pomponia’s family were indeed Christians. The archaeologist Battista de Rossi controversially identifies her with Saint Lucina, the purported donor of the part of the catacombs where the inscriptions were found, and suggests that Lucina was Pomponia's baptismal name. Saint Lucina is honored by the Roman Catholic Church on the 30 June. She is said to have visited the martyrs Martinian and Processus, the two former guards at the Mamertine Prison who had been converted by their prisoner Saint Peter, in prison, and buried their bodies after their execution.