She was born in Rome around 39 or 40, shortly before the assassination of Caligula, and her father's subsequent accession to the throne. Her brother, Britannicus, was born soon after, in 41. As a young girl, her father betrothed her to future praetorLucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, who was a descendant of Augustus.
In 48, her mother was executed for conspiring to murder her father, the emperor Claudius, who subsequently married his niece Agrippina the Younger. Agrippina's son, from her first marriage, was Nero. Agrippina, through her plotting and manipulating, ended the engagement between Octavia and Lucius Silanus and persuaded Claudius to adopt Nero as his son and heir, and arranged for Octavia and Nero to marry on 9 June 53.
Life as empress
Claudius died on 13 October 54 and Nero succeeded him as emperor. In early 55, Britannicus died suddenly, likely poisoned on Nero's orders, as he represented a substantial threat to Nero's claim to the throne. According to Tacitus, both Octavia and Agrippina were present at the meal at which the poisoning took place, and were equally shocked. He states that from this moment Octavia became very unhappy, but learned to hide her affections and feelings around her husband/stepbrother. Octavia was caught up in the power struggles between Nero and his mother, which ultimately concluded when Nero murdered his mother in March 59. Although she was admired as empress by the Roman citizen body, the marriage was deeply unhappy on a personal level. Octavia was an ‘aristocratic and virtuous wife', whereas Nero hated her and quickly grew bored with her, trying on several occasions to strangle her and having affairs with a freedwoman called Claudia Acte and then with Poppaea Sabina. He excused this treatment of her when his friends showed their concerns about it. When Poppaea became pregnant with Nero's child, Nero divorced Octavia, claiming she was barren, and married Poppaea twelve days after the divorce.
Banishment and death
Nero and Poppaea then banished Octavia to the Campania region, and eventually to the island of Pandateria on a false charge of adultery with Nero's former tutor Anicetus. When Octavia complained about this treatment, her maids were tortured to death. Octavia's banishment became so unpopular that the citizens of Rome protested loudly, openly parading through the streets with statues of Octavia decked with flowers and calling for her return. Nero nearly agreed to remarry Octavia, but instead he signed her death warrant. A few days later, Octavia was bound and her veins were opened in a traditional Roman suicide ritual. She was suffocated in an exceedingly hot vapor bath. Octavia’s head was cut off and sent to Poppaea. Her death brought much sorrow to Rome. According to Suetonius, years later Nero would have nightmares about his mother and Octavia.
In later fiction
Her sufferings, and her divorce from Nero, are the subject of Octavia, a play by an anonymous author written sometime after Nero's death which dramatises Octavia's misery in her final days. More recently, she appears in Handel's lost opera Nero, Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione di Poppea, Reinhard Keiser's opera Octavia, and Vittorio Alfieri's tragedy Ottavia. Octavia is also the subject of the massive German novel Die Römische Octavia by Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and a character in Robert Graves's novel Claudius the God and the television seriesI, Claudius. She is the main character of "Octavia: a tale of ancient Rome," by Seymour Van Santvoord, published in 1923, which paints her as a Christian. In Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical, Nero, she is portrayed as mute, only singing in interior monologue. In the reading at Vassar, she was played by Lea Michele. She was played as a frightened, unwilling bride. She was very close to her brother Britannicus, played by Michael Arden.
