Agrippina the Elder

Agrippina was born around 14 BC, daughter of Augustus' right hand Agrippa and Augustus' own daughter Julia - putting her at the heart of the first imperial family. Her brothers Lucius and Gaius were Augustus' heirs until both died young, and in the reshuffle of AD 4 she was married to her second cousin Germanicus to bind him to the Julian line. She followed Germanicus through his posts in Gaul and the eastern provinces, their children in tow; in Gaul she dressed her son Gaius in a tiny soldier's uniform, giving him the nickname Caligula. When Germanicus died of illness in AD 19 amid a bitter feud with the governor of Syria, she carried his ashes back to Rome and publicly accused the emperor Tiberius' circle of murder to clear the path for Tiberius' own son. She spent the next decade championing her sons Nero and Drusus Caesar as heirs, which set her against the praetorian prefect Sejanus. He dismantled her faction with treason charges, and in AD 29 she and Nero were exiled - she to the island of Pandateria, where she starved to death four years later.