Messalina

by Jack Oleck

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0007E8376
• Release Date: January 1959
• Publisher: L. Stuart
• Length: 307 Pages

Customer Reviews

Old School Historical Fiction

I read this book over 30 years ago and since then I have never encountered in books a character like Messalina with no redeeming qualities. Messalina was a take no prisoner vixen. I am a lover of history and when you can find a story like this you just sit back and enjoy. This book is not for the faint of heart there are no happliy ever afters. This is Rome, the time of the Cesar's when it was common to kill your relatives. If you like this book you should read Child Of The Sun by Kyle Onstott & Lance Horner. They just don't write like this anymore.

Messalina, by Jack Oleck

Published in 1959 and continuously in print for the next several years, Jack Oleck's Messalina is now long out of print and barely remembered. Yet it is historical fiction of the best sort: trashy, exploitative, packed with violence and graphic sex. No "detectives in togas," no poorly-written military fiction, no thinly-veiled Christian glurge - this is a full-on romp in the salacious world of Imperial Rome, more Technicolor than Elizabeth Taylor's "Cleopatra." Messalina recounts the tale of the real-life woman who married Claudius, the fourth emperor of Rome. She's known to history as a backstabbing schemer with an insatiable lust for sex, so don't go into this novel expecting a G-rated story of ancient Rome. Oleck takes us from her youth to her end, barring no details of her cold-blooded and predator-like ways: for Messalina, sex was a means to power, and boy did she know how to use it. Within the first 60 pages Messalina has already caused a slave to be facially scarred for life, the death of two men, and a Roman senator to be disgraced and publically ruined - and she's still only 15 years old. Within a few more pages she's pregnant - still only 15. And they say kids today grow up too fast. This is the type of ride Oleck takes us on, the kicker being that it's all cut straight out of history. Oleck changes a few things here and there, but for the most part he gives us a thorough retelling of this malicious and cunning woman. Those who know Messalina's story will know what's missing- namely, the all-night sex competition that, according to Pliny the Elder, Messalina once took part in with a prostitute. It goes unmentioned here, though Oleck does at one point state that various rumors are circulating about Messalina - the implication being that this competition might be one of those rumors. There's also no acknowledgement of the young Nero, whom the real-life Messalina wanted dead, as she realized he could one day become emperor rather than her son Germanicus. A warning: Messalina will likely be the most unlikeable main character you ever encounter in a novel. She has no redeeming qualities. With cold detachment she plots and counterplots throughout the narrative, ruining lives, ordering deaths, toying with emotions. Even the two children she bears Claudius go unloved - and here Oleck veers from the historical record. For it's often speculated that Messalina's plotting was the result of her fear for her children's lives; anyone who knows Roman history knows that children of the aristocracy always lived near death. Messalina's children Octavia and Germanicus would be next on the list if their father Claudius was murdered. In real life it seems that Messalina ordered deaths and banishments of those whom she believed posed a threat to her children - and in most cases her hunches were correct; Poppaea Sabina the elder was one of those whom Messalina had killed, and her same-named daughter later had Octavia killed. But in t