Poppaea Sabina turning his 'loyal subjects' the Roman populace against him. (This form of murder may have been suggested to the screenwriters by Tacitus' claim that Nero had made several unsuccessful attempts at strangling his first wife, Octavia, when drunk.) Another portrayal of Poppaea is featured in the 1932 film "The Sign of the Cross". She is seen bathing in asses' milk. Daringly for the time, she is portrayed (by Claudette Colbert) as being openly bisexual, suggestively inviting a female slave to bathe with her in the asses' milk, but lusting after Roman soldier Marcus Superbus (Fredric March). In the 1976 BBC
Poppaea Sabina the Elder Poppaea Sabina the Elder Poppaea Sabina the Elder was an aristocratic woman who lived during the Principate. During her lifetime she was famed for her beauty, but as Ronald Syme writes, her "fame and follies have been all but extinguished by her homonymous daughter", Poppaea Sabina the Younger. She met her end as a victim of the empress Valeria Messalina, wife of Claudius. Poppaea Sabina was the daughter of Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, "homo novus" and consul of AD 9. She had been the wife of Titus Ollius, who was a friend of the prefect of the Praetorian Guard Sejanus and