I also thank you for the evidence writeup! Yet again Lehndorff is a treasure :D (I get the sense from your comments that a nontrivial part of his utility -- besides that he's so readable and engaging -- is that he really isn't someone that people feel the need to impress, I imagine particularly later on, so it's possible to take his observations at face value rather than worry too much about whether there are other factors at play.

Though I suppose the flip side to that is that in many ways he's not super self-aware so one has to filter through that, e.g. MESSALINA :) But that's better, I suppose, than having to filter through whether he's making up stories about his exes :P )