A few years later, Clodius was killed in a street riot, within sight of the shrine to the Bona Dea.
Caesar divorced Pompeia, though he stated publicly that she had not committed adultery, or in any way encouraged Clodius’s advances. Why, then, sneered the other senators, was he divorcing her?
Because, said Caesar, Caesar’s wife must be beyond reproach.
This isn’t really a story about Pompeia. To be honest, we don’t know much about her. But it is, very much, a story about Roman women.
6. Clodia
Another Roman woman synonymous with scandal was Clodia, sister of the aforementioned Publius Clodius. Clodia lived for scandal. She was rich, sexy and glamorous, and lived life to the absolute full. She belonged to a group of Bright Young Things who relished their decadent lifestyle. For a long time, she was the mistress of the poet Catullus, who immortalised her as Lesbia in poetry such as the following:
VIVAMVS, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
(let us live, my Lesbia, and love)
rumoresque senum seueriorum
(and value all the rumours of old men)
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
(as worth a single penny)
soles occidere et redire possunt:
(the suns are able to fall and rise)
nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux,
(when that brief light has died for us)
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
(we must sleep a perpetual night)
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
(give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred)
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
(then another thousand, then a second hundred)
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;
(then another thousand more, then another hundred)
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
(then, when we have so many thousands)
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
(we will mix them all up, so as not to know)
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
(and so no one else will think ill of us because they know)
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.
(how many kisses we have shared).
In Dorothy L. Sayers, there is a scene in which the newly married Lord Peter and Harriet Wimsey are making out against the side of the car—but this is only evident if you translate the Latin he is quoting (with many ellipses to represent the smooching). The poet he is quoting is Catullus, and the poem is about ‘Lesbia’.
You can’t believe how clever and educated I felt when I figured that one out.
After Clodia dumped Catullus (inspiring some far less romantic and more bitter poetry), Clodia moved on to a younger, lover. When this one left her, she wanted revenge and brought a court case against him for theft and other misdemeanors. The plan backfired, though, when her ex-toyboy hired Cicero, the best (and most moralistic) orator in Rome. Given that the Roman legal system revolved around who was the most persuasive speaker, Clodia was pretty much sunk.
Cicero destroyed Clodia in court, portraying her as an amoral tart in a speech that still exists today, full of quippy zingers that made the courtroom roar with laughter. By far the best insult he came up with was ‘Clytemnestra of the Aventine’ which, among other things, implied that she murdered her late husband.
Clodia’s social life may have revolved around scandal of the ‘Ooh, isn’t she naughty’ variety, but being exposed in such a public forum was beyond the pale. She found herself friendless and abandoned after the court case, and withdrew quietly from the social scene.
7. Fulvia
Fulvia was another of the scandal-loving set that included siblings Clodius and Clodia, as well as the rather more famous Mark Antony. Indeed, Fulvia was married to Clodius before his violent death. After dabbling with another husband, she finally settled down with Mark Antony, who was a political hothead and lover of luxury just like Clodius. Antony was a cannier politician than Clodius, however, and he was Julius Caesar’s right hand man.
Fulvia was a loyal wife, and mother of many children. When Antony went off to war, she went with him. Indeed, we believe that Fulvia is the first woman whose portrait appeared on the coinage of Rome—all senators of Antony’s military rank released their own coinage, and one of Antony’s coins depicts the personification of Victory.
It could simply be the personification of Victory, but in Roman art personifications of virtues tend to have very bland, idealised faces (think the Statue of Liberty) and there’s something about this particular Victory that looks very human. Given that Antony put a later wife on coins (though one more politically significant), it is likely that Fulvia is indeed the model for Antony’s Victory.
When Julius Caesar died, Antony (who had expected to take over from his mentor as Dictator of Rome) found himself in opposition with Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir. Octavian used propaganda to insult and degrade his rival, and Fulvia was one of the cards he used against him, referring to her less than pristine past, and calling her a ‘virago’.
‘Virago’ means a violent or militant woman—in Roman terms, the absolute opposite of what a woman should be. This and other insults brought against Fulvia to discredit or mock her husband comprise most of the information we have about her, so she is generally remembered as a Bad rather than Good Roman woman.
But there’s something very likeable about Fulvia—a feisty, aggressive woman who refused to kowtow to the Roman definition of the good wife who waits at home for her husband to return from war. Given that Antony had already caught the eye of Julius Caesar’s exotic mistress, Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, one can hardly blame Fulvia for refusing to be a docile domestic goddess.
INTERLUDE: WHAT CAESAR DID
Roman women tend to be classified as either Good or Bad. I used to think this was significant until a fellow scholar pointed out that Romans categorise everything this way. Men, women, Emperors, fictional characters, countries. Everything is either Very Good or Very Bad.
Rome was a Kingdom, then a Republic, the latter being a political system best described as ‘every rich man gets a vote’. In a time when the Republic was falling to rack and ruin, Julius Caesar was a popular man. He had some good ideas about how to run Rome and the growing Empire of territories it had conquered. He became high priest (pontifex maximus), then Dictator (a short-term position brought in occasionally for emergencies). Finally, he was made Dictator for life. He was the only one that the city of Rome trusted to Get the Job Done.
Caesar’s Achilles heel was that he tended to assume everyone was (almost) as smart as he was, and that the world would see that he was trying to save Rome, get shit done, etc. But success breeds jealousy, and many of his peers resented his a) smarts b) popularity c) saucy Egyptian mistress.
Because, yes, Caesar had visited Egypt to borrow their navy and ended up in bed with their Queen. His dalliance with Cleopatra, and other less than subtle reminders of his new power sent off warning bells in the heads of many of his fellow senators. (the ones whose power he had effectively usurped…)
Remember Lucretia? She was used as an excuse to kick the kings out of Rome. Now, hundreds of years later, Roman society had a horror of kings—a group paranoia about returning to the Bad Old Days. When Caesar’s good pal Antony offered him a crown in public (Caesar refused it, theatrically), rumours began that Caesar planned to overturn the Republic and become a King.
Ironically, the word ‘dictator’ had none of the negative connotations it does now, but rex (king) was enough to put fear into the hearts of a whole city. Or, at least, the hearts of the rich white men who were used to being allowed to vote.
So a bunch of senators got together and stabbed Caesar to death.
The Republic was dead. Caesar’s work had been left half done, and their train wreck of a political system couldn’t snap back into its original shape. The people wanted a replacement sole ruler, and they found two: Caesar’s best pal Antony (a lush
and a flake), and Caesar’s great-nephew and heir Octavian (had the right kind of evil smarts, but too young to be taken seriously). Together the two men took the show on the road, and hunted down Caesar’s assassins.
The next step, obviously, was to rule Rome together. Sadly, they didn’t like each other very much, and that’s where the whole thing fell down.
8. Octavia
Octavia was Octavian’s sister, a good and modest widow with several children. When Fulvia died, Octavian saw a chance to cement his uncomfortable alliance with Antony by marrying him to his sister. It worked, for a little while. They even released coins in commemoration of the friendship between the three of them.
While Octavian busied himself in Rome, Antony took on some of the more interesting outer reaches of the Roman Empire, regularly leaving his wife at home with their various children (his by Fulvia, Octavia’s by her first marriage, plus an expanding crop of their own, like a Roman version of the Brady Bunch) to bury himself in the wealth, luxury, politics and Queen of Egypt.
That’s right, Antony had taken up where Caesar left off with Cleopatra.
Octavian became suspicious—Cleopatra had wealth, resources and a kick-ass navy. Rome had empty coffers. If Antony chose to turn the power of Egypt against Rome…well, it all looked pretty threatening. Then Antony sent Octavia a letter, announcing that she was divorced. The last tie between Antony and Octavian had been broken, and war was imminent.
While soldiering was not Octavian’s superpower, political propaganda absolutely was. He did some of his best work on Antony, who became known as the shiftless sucking-up-to-foreigners traitor, while Octavian was painted as the virtuous and loyal Roman. Likewise, Cleopatra was portrayed as an evil, luxury-loving slutbag while the abandoned Octavia was presented as the best and most modest of Roman women…
And yes, Octavian’s machinations really were that effective, because this propaganda still deeply affects the way all these people are remembered today.
To be fair, I do think he had Antony right on the money, JUST SAYING.
While Antony was bedding a queen and revelling in the luxury of her court, Octavian planned a dynasty of his own. He heaped honours upon his sister Octavia and wife Livia, giving them a public identity through the (incredibly rare for women) right to be portrayed on statues. He named Octavia’s eldest son from her first marriage, Marcellus, as his heir.
There was a war. A civil war, really, because Antony’s troops were as Roman as Octavian’s—but propaganda came to the fore again, and Octavian made it clear that his men were fighting a war against the decadent Queen of Egypt and her boyfriend, not their fellow Romans. It ended badly for Antony and Cleopatra, who both died as a result.
Octavia continued in public life as the mother of Octavian’s heir. After Antony and Cleopatra’s children were marched in the streets as prisoners of war, Octavia quietly took them into her own household along with their various half-siblings. Just like that episode where Marcia, Jan and Cindy had to share their room with the Egyptian princess who worshipped Isis!
Oh, what fun they had.
Marcellus died young, and Octavia was so wracked with grief that she withdrew from public life, leaving Octavian (who had renamed himself Augustus Caesar, another masterstroke of PR) to find other women to promote as the Ideal Roman Matron.
Octavia was remembered as a Good Woman, long after Antony or Octavian ceased to be politically relevant. But no one ever mentioned if she was happy.
9. Cleopatra
Foreign vs. Roman has always been a key indicator of virtue to the Ancient Romans (they were pretty racist, if that hasn’t already been made clear), but never so much as during the fifty year period when Augustus Caesar ruled Rome.
Austerity, modesty, restraint were all virtues equated with Romanness. Decadence, luxury and debauchery belonged to those foreign devils.
Cleopatra was the ruler of Egypt, despite being female. She wore cosmetics and jewels (trashy, by Roman standards!). She costumed herself as a goddess, and draped ships with silk. She ate and drank the best of everything—when Antony dared her to eat a ‘million-sesterce’ meal, she made it happen low calorie style, by dissolving a rare pearl in vinegar and drinking it. (Apparently for this to actually work, you have to grind the pearl up into a powder first, which makes the story a bit more believable.)
She represented female power, and basically she terrified the hell out of the Romans.
Cleopatra bore Julius Caesar’s son, which wasn’t relevant to anything dynastic, because the baby wasn’t Roman. As far as they were concerned, if you weren’t Roman, you weren’t anything. Caesarion was never going to ride into town and declare he was the rightful ruler of Rome. Citizenship required a local mother as well as a father.
If Octavia represented the ultimate Good Wife, then Cleopatra was the ultimate Wicked Mistress. She provided plenty of material for Octavian’s anti-Antony propaganda, simply by being herself: the last of a long line of glamorous Egyptian pharaohs.
Better historians than I have written many more words on Cleopatra than I intend to—besides, my theme is Roman women, not ‘kick ass female Pharaohs’, so I’ll concentrate on some of the ways in which Cleopatra’s presence and public image affected Roman women.
Augustus banned the worship of the goddess Isis, because she was so closely identified with Cleopatra. Banning a god was extremely rare in Ancient Rome, because they were so superstitious that they hated to offend any deity. Isis was a most excellent goddess, representing married women, queens, mothers and prostitutes all at once—a real multi-tasker. While Augustus was often portrayed as equal to a god, he was very careful not to do the same with the women of his family, in order to preserve a contrast between them and Cleopatra.
A statue of Cleopatra remained in the forum of Julius Caesar, leftover from her days as his mistress—tactless! Augustus didn’t remove the statue, but he did take the expensive pearl earrings from it, putting them instead on a statue of Venus. Only goddesses, not mortals, were fit to wear such finery. A subtle put-down, but a put-down nonetheless. No woman of Augustus’ family wore jewellery in any official portraiture, while Cleopatra dripped gold and gems.
Octavia and many other women of the imperial family wore a particular hairstyle which we call the nodus style. It was a very harsh, pulled-back-over-scalp affair, with a tight bun of hair at the back, and a severe roll of hair on top of the scalp. This hairstyle represented the modesty and restraint that Augustus wanted the women of his family to demonstrate. Not a wisp of hair was allowed to soften the effect.
On at least one coin issue, Cleopatra chose this same hairstyle for herself, possibly in an attempt to promote herself as a woman demonstrating Roman (rather than those trashy Egyptian) values. Only, she added a couple of curls and a few accessories, because she didn’t want to go out looking like a complete frump.
Woman had style.
10. Livia Drusilla
When Livia met Augustus, they were both married to other people. He had a daughter, and she was pregnant with her second son. Within a few months of meeting each other (round about the time Antony and Octavia were getting married), they divorced their respective spouses and shacked up together. They got married almost immediately after she had her former husband’s baby.
Does that sound like a relationship that happened two thousand years ago? I know, right?
Livia never bore Augustus any children. There is no cited reason for this—they had both had children with their previous spouses. She did suffer a miscarriage early in their marriage, which could have led to physical complications. What is interesting is that despite Augustus’ desire for a male heir of his body, he never divorced Livia to get a wife who would bear him a son. She was far too useful to him as a wife.
HEAR THAT, HENRY THE EIGHTH?
After Livia’s first husband died, her two sons, Tiberius and Drusus, came to live in Augustus and Livia’s household. She also fostered various children. Ultimately, it was her eldest son Tiber
ius who succeeded Augustus as Emperor.
In the literary sources Tacitus and Suetonius (not to mention the iconic novel I, Claudius by Robert Graves), Livia is portrayed as a manipulator, a poisoner and an ambitious mother. The premature deaths of many of Augustus’ male heirs (his nephew, several grandsons) are attributed to her, as are the public downfalls of many of his female relatives, including his daughter Julia, who was exiled for adultery and intrigue.
Both Tacitus and Suetonius are openly misogynistic in their work. They were both writing a century or so after the reign of Augustus, and their main priority was to show how modest, chaste and non-murderous the women of the current imperial dynasty were in comparison to their wicked predecessors.
By the time they get to ‘Livia sent her personal physician to the boy wounded in battle and he mysteriously died (cough–septicemia–cough)’, or ‘she murdered her own grandson because he was more popular than her son’, or ‘she murdered her own husband after 50 years of marriage’, well, my eyebrows get tired from being raised so much. It’s such a blatant hatchet job on her reputation.
Having said that, if the sources are right and Livia was actually a controlling, manipulating, murderous and ambitious bitch from hell? She apparently kicked ass at it.
During his reign, Augustus promoted Livia as a public example of the ideal wife: working in wool (she had a whole household of slaves to do this for her), dressing modestly, behaving chastely. He publicly stated that husbands should guide their wives in proper wifely dress and behaviour, which the senators all thought was hilarious—when they asked him how they should actually go about this, he looked a bit vague and pretended he had to be somewhere else.
50 Roman Mistresses Page 2
