Reputation
The ancient Roman sources, particularly Tacitus and Suetonius, portray Messalina as extremely lustful, but also insulting, disgraceful, cruel, and avaricious; they claimed her negative qualities were a result of her inbreeding. The oft-repeated tale of Messalina's all-night sex competition with a prostitute comes from Book X of Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Pliny does not name the prostitute; however, the Restoration playwright Nathaniel Richards calls her Scylla in The Tragedy of Messalina, Empress of Rome, published in 1640, and Robert Graves in his novel Claudius the God also identified the prostitute as Scylla. According to Pliny, the competition lasted for 24 hours and Messalina won with a score of 25 partners.
Roman sources claim that Messalina used sex to enforce her power and control politicians, that she had a brothel under an assumed name and organised orgies for upper class women, and that she sold her influence to Roman nobles or foreign notables.
Juvenal is also highly critical of her in his Satire VI (first translation by Peter Green and second translation from wikisource):
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Read more about this topic: Valeria Messalina
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