The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  Three years into Julia’s marriage to Agrippa, in 18 BC, Augustus’s reforming zeal led him to introduce a highly controversial new set of laws that were designed in part to promote Julia’s child-bearing example to others while purporting to deliver a sharp, self-righteous prod of moral reproof to the soft, lazy and licentious underbelly of the Roman aristocracy. The leges Iuliae, or ‘Julian laws’, were introduced in apparent response to a dwindling marriage rate among the Roman elite, and contained strict new measures aimed at cracking down on such laxity while offering economic incentives to marry and procreate. There was clearly also a related agenda of firming up the social hierarchy by preserving the purity and financial integrity of upper-class families, as demonstrated by restrictions the laws imposed both on marriage between unequal class groupings such as senators and freedwomen (former slave women who had won their liberty), and on testamentary bequests made outside the family.68 The centrepiece of the new legislation was the lex Iulia de adulteriis, which made adultery a criminal offence for the first time and prescribed the exact punishment procedure for those caught in the act. In a display of stark inequality, the brunt of these legal repercussions was to be borne by women.

  Under the new laws, a woman was guilty of adultery if she had sex with anyone but her husband, but a man was guilty of the offence only if the woman he was involved with was married. Slave girls, prostitutes, concubines and single women were fair game, for the key consideration was to ensure that a man’s paternity of his own children was not in doubt. The law also stated that a married woman caught in flagrante could be killed by her father, along with her lover, while a cuckolded husband, although not allowed to kill his wife himself and subject to punishment if he did so, was obligated to divorce her immediately. Once divorced, the woman and her lover would be tried in a special court of law and, if found guilty, faced exile as the most likely punishment. Any man who failed to divorce a disgraced wife could be charged with ‘pimping’ for her, drawing an equivalence between an adulterous woman and a prostitute. A later revision of the law also forbade an adulteress ever to remarry a freeborn Roman male, and confiscated half her dowry and a third of her property, again underlining the fact that these laws were aimed chiefly at the wealthier classes of Roman society.69 Widows and women between the ages of twenty and fifty, who were not guilty of the sin of adultery but had divorced for other reasons, were required by law to remarry within a year and six months respectively.70

  The new marital legislation waved the carrot as well as the stick, offering tax breaks to members of the Roman senatorial classes who married and produced children, while penalties, such as the forfeiture of inheritance rights, were imposed on men aged 25–60 and women aged 20–50 who remained unmarried or childless.71 Women who fulfilled their child-producing obligations under the law also gained the chance to win a certain measure of independence. Freeborn women who gave birth to three children or more were exempted from male guardianship (four children or more were required for freedwomen to be eligible) thanks to the ius trium liberorum – ‘the three child rule’. Women who conformed to this ideal were held up as examples to their peers, and one particularly fertile slave woman was even honoured with a statue by the emperor.72 In sum, the ‘Julian laws’, named after the emperor’s own family, promised a return to old-fashioned family values, and the ‘good old days’ of Rome’s past, an imaginary time when women were chaste and adultery an aberration. As Augustus himself wrote in his documentary account of his reign, Res Gestae (‘My Achievements’): ‘Through new laws passed on my proposal, I brought back many of the exemplary practices of our ancestors which were falling into neglect.’73

  But the surface portrait painted by Augustus of the happy results of his own handiwork masked a murkier, more fractious and ambivalent reality. For a start, the close correlation in our literary sources between accusations of adultery against married women and attempts to portray their cuckolded husbands as politically impotent make it apparent that some charges were motivated by personal rivalries. Also, the extent to which Augustus’s legislation was actually enforced or enforceable is a grey area.74 There was no Crown Prosecution Service at Rome, and many husbands and wives probably preferred not to go through the public embarrassment and inconvenience of a trial. There were public demonstrations in favour of the laws’ repeal, and one woman named Vistilia apparently even registered herself as a prostitute in order to get off an adultery charge, a loophole closed under Augustus’s successors.75

  One of the most subversive voices in the ongoing debate surrounding the Julian laws was that of the poet Ovid, who thrust a witty spoke in the wheel of the emperor’s marital reforms. As well as advising men on how to chat up women at chariot races – the only sporting event given immunity from new rules that relegated all women, with the sole exception of the Vestal Virgins and the women of the emperor’s family, to the back seats of the theatre and gladiatorial arena – his poetry offered wives tips on how to deceive their husbands while flirting with their lover at dinner parties:

  When he pats the couch, put on your Respectable Wife expression,

  And take your place beside him – but nudge my foot

  As you’re passing by. Watch out for my nods and eye-talk,

  Pick up my stealthy messages, send replies.

  I shall speak whole silent volumes with one raised eyebrow,

  Words will spring from my fingers, words traced in wine.

  When you’re thinking about the last time we made love together,

  Touch your rosy cheek with one elegant thumb.76

  Ovid’s persistent mockery later contributed to his exile on the Black Sea in the year 8.

  But Augustus’s biggest nemesis of all was his own daughter. In a piece of supreme irony, the demure poster-girl of the Augustan ideal of womanhood, the only woman to appear thus far on coins minted at Rome, and the mother of two of Augustus’s would-be successors, was turning out to be the Dorothy Parker of her generation, a popular good-time girl with a steady stream of witty one-liners on the edge of her tongue, a woman who privately chafed at the shackles imposed on her by her conservative father. That is the portrait at least that emerges from a fictional dinner-party conversation about Julia’s jokes and sayings in a fifth-century work called the Saturnalia. The author, Macrobius, culled his material from a collection of witticisms edited in the first century by one Domitius Marsus, who, as a protégé of Augustan socialite Maecenas, was presumably repeating stories that were doing the rounds of Roman court gossip at the time.77

  The first blots on the portrait of Julia as a paragon of maternal rectitude came with whispers about the paternity of her children. Infidelities during her marriage to Agrippa were alleged with figures such as Sempronius Gracchus, a member of the famous Gracchi clan, and though her father shrugged off these suspicions, her closest friends apparently knew better. When Julia was asked how it was that all her children by Agrippa resembled him when she had so many other lovers, she is said to have made the pert reply, ‘Passengers are never allowed on board until the hold is full’, implying that she only let others into her bed once she was safely pregnant by her husband.78

  Nonetheless, Julia was apparently a popular figure with the public on account of her ‘gentle humanity and kindly disposition … those who were aware of her faults were astonished at the contradiction which her qualities implied’.79 According to the stories repeated in the Saturnalia, Augustus adopted an indulgent rather than a stern attitude to his daughter at first, advising her to moderate ‘the extravagance of her dress and the notoriety of her companions’. He was offended when one day she came into his presence in a risqué costume. The next day she came in wearing a demure dress and a prim expression, and embraced her father who was delighted at this show of respectable decorum. ‘This dress,’ he remarked, ‘is much more becoming in the daughter of Augustus.’ Julia had a reply ready. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for today I am dressed to meet my father’s eyes; yesterday it was for my husband’s.’80


  Dress, for a Roman woman, was a social, as well as sartorial, minefield. Although Livia and other exalted females were often portrayed in statuary wearing the traditional stola – a pinafore-like gown with a V-shaped neckline that constituted the female equivalent of the male toga and the standard uniform of the republican Roman female citizen – it was no longer everyday wear in Julia’s lifetime, although donning it might well have added an extra veneer of pious respectability for her father’s benefit. Instead, a long gap-sleeved tunic and palla (mantle) were typically worn by wealthy matrons from the first century BC onwards. An enveloping costume, with the tunic’s wide elbow-length sleeves and high neckline, and the voluminous folds of the palla, which was draped in complicated fashion around one’s body and drawn up over the head when one ventured out of doors, it clearly distinguished Rome’s female leisured classes from their social inferiors, who could never have performed their daily tasks in so hot and restrictive a set of garments – poorer women wore shorter, unbelted tunics. The amount of material involved also ensured the cost of such a get-up put it beyond the reach of all but the well-heeled.81

  Although the overall shape of female dress remained unchanged for centuries, Roman women did find ways to express both their status and sense of style. The whitewashed remains of ancient statuary give little sense of the colours women once wore, but traces of pigment on the marble of such sculptures, and painted portraits from Egypt and other provinces of the empire, vindicate literary testimony that a rich palette of dyed hues was available, from sky-blue (aer), sea-blue (unda), dark green (Paphiae myrti) and amethyst (purpurae amethysti) to saffron-yellow (croceus), pale pink (albentes rosae), dark grey (pullus) and chestnut-brown (glandes) – all colours selected by Ovid to flatter a girl’s complexion. Conversely, to choose certain colours, such as cherry-red (cerasinus) and greenish-yellow (galbinus) was to mark one out as vulgar, while the exorbitantly expensive pigment purple increasingly became the exclusive preserve of the emperor and his family.82 One’s palla could be dyed to match the tunic underneath, while patterns and striped borders in complementary hues were popular too. Dyed and jewel-encrusted sandals (soleae) and shoe-boots (calcei) also helped women feel superior to less fortunate females. Fans (flabellae) fashioned from vellum or peacock feathers and closed with ivory handles; parasols (umbraculae) dangling tassels; high-waisted belts made of twisted cord and in a contrasting colour to the tunic underneath – all these completed the well-to-do Roman woman’s wardrobe.83

  The cost of importing the material and dye needed to make this clothing was astronomical. Although some Roman commentators argued that an expensively turned-out woman was a credit to the wealth and public standing of her husband, there were also voices of disapproval at the kind of conspicuous sartorial consumption that saw some women shunning homespun fabrics like wool or linen and instead requesting silk, a material that had to be imported into the empire at vast expense from China. Special condemnation was reserved for a type called ‘Coan silk’ – a flimsy, diaphanous material woven by women on the island of Cos, which was apparently all the rage among Roman women of the upper classes, yet frowned upon by some as a transparent fabric suitable only for a prostitute or a loose woman. It was just such a gown that would have inflamed Augustus’s disapproval, if he had seen it being worn by his daughter.84

  Several other reported confrontations took place between father and daughter over the issue of her dress and deportment. On a separate occasion, he arrived to visit her only to witness her maids plucking out her prematurely greying hairs. He was frustrated by such vanity, and after enquiring whether she would prefer to be bald or grey-haired, and receiving the response that she would rather go grey, he was said to have replied acidly, ‘Why then are these women of yours in such a hurry to make you bald?’85 Roman literature abounds with both plausible and preposterous-sounding stories of the lengths to which women went to adhere to an ideal – treating spots with chicken fat and onion; vanishing wrinkles with axle-grease; applying face-packs made from bread, barley, myrrh or rose leaves; whitening skin with chalk dust, lead or even crocodile dung to achieve the much sought-after pale complexion; exfoliating with ground oyster shells; scraping away body hair with a pumice stone. For Julia‘s own problem of greying hair, an alternative treatment of earthworms mixed with oil was recommended.86

  Although certain of these more grotesque beauty recipes, such as the recommended use of crocodile excrement to lighten the complexion, derive from sources more concerned with sending up women’s attempts to stave off the hand of time, it is nevertheless clear from multiple archaeological discoveries of cosmetic tubes and containers, including a perfectly preserved jar of face cream made from animal fat, starch and tin, that the elite Roman woman’s dressing table was richly loaded, and the cosmetics industry a thriving concern.87 Julia’s preoccupation with her personal appearance may have been at odds with her disapproving father’s mantra of frugal adornment and moral irreproachability, but it placed her in company with many other Roman women.

  Nevertheless, as societal disapproval of Coan silk and satirical diatribes about more elaborate forms of beauty regimen demonstrated, it was easy to fall foul of the dividing line between acceptable self-embellishment and what was seen to be over-extravagant narcissism. With her sharp-tongued cracks, her relationships with undesirable men, and her racy clothes, Julia was coming to embody all of the characteristics that made Romans anxious about women, and threatening to undermine Augustus’s new moral order from within. It was a dangerous game to play, especially when one’s father was so public and powerful a figure.88

  In 12 BC, the death of fifty-one-year-old Agrippa at his country estate in Naples while Julia was pregnant with their last child, Agrippa Postumus, left the emperor’s only daughter a widow for the second time at the age of twenty-seven. As the mother of five children, she was now technically eligible to benefit from the clause in her father’s legislation that permitted women with three children or more to be excused the protection of a husband or male guardian. Instead, perhaps wary of Julia’s potential to cause him embarrassment, but also looking to provide himself with options in the succession stakes, Augustus decided that Julia should now after all marry Livia’s eldest son, thirty-year-old Tiberius, who along with his younger brother Drusus had recently been winning great kudos on military campaigns around the Alps. If Augustus was toying with the idea of making his stepson his heir, an interim candidate perhaps until Gaius or Lucius could take over, he kept his audience in the dark. But his decision meant that Tiberius had to divorce his wife Vipsania, who ironically, as the daughter of the deceased Agrippa, was Julia’s own stepdaughter. It was an unhappy arrangement, one that Tiberius at least was said to have raged at. He was devoted to Vipsania, the mother of his son Drusus Minor, and the sight of her in the street one day after their divorce is said to have reduced him to tears. He also heartily disapproved of his stepsister Julia, who was whispered to have long harboured feelings for him which he did not reciprocate.

  Octavia, maintaining her low profile since the demise of Marcellus, lived long enough to see her former daughter-in-law Julia married to Tiberius. If Seneca’s report that Octavia feared this to be Livia’s ambition all along is to be believed, the sight would have been mortifying to her. Her death came soon enough, in 11 BC, reputedly of a broken heart, the ideal mother to the end.89 A grieving Augustus delivered his sister’s funeral oration himself, and in a simple ceremony she was interred alongside Marcellus in the mausoleum by the Tiber. The tombstone that she shared with her son was discovered during excavations in 1927.90

  Two years after Octavia’s funeral, on 30 January 9 BC, the new-look Julio-Claudian family gathered together for a magnificent ceremony to mark the dedication, not far from the mausoleum, of the Ara Pacis (‘Altar of Peace’), one of the showpieces of Augustus’s self-glorifying programme of public art, built to celebrate the emperor’s recent triumphant return from Gaul and Spain and to proclaim the age of Augustus and his family as
an age of peace.

  It was, significantly, also Livia’s fiftieth birthday. Though her role as a conduit between her husband and his subjects had been well established over the past twenty years, Livia was the only one of the three leading women of the imperial household thus far not to have been recognised on a coin of the Roman mint or with a major public building or monument in the city. That year marked her debut at last with her depiction alongside her husband on the Ara Pacis, in the most elevated and flattering guise in which she had yet appeared. Gone was the prim nodus, and instead her long hair was parted in the centre and allowed to fall loose under a veil, in a deliberate echo of the statuary poses of classical goddesses. Her husband also stood veiled and garlanded beside her, casting the pair as the benevolent patriarch and matriarch of the empire, a veritable Jupiter and Juno on earth.

  The Ara Pacis was the first Roman state monument on which women and children had featured. This was both a sign of the Augustan regime’s growing confidence with giving the women of the imperial household a public role, and a further indication of Augustus’s desire to make his family-man image a integral part of his public persona. Later that year, a banquet was held for the Senate on the Capitoline hill in honour of the military successes of Tiberius over the Dalmatians and Pannonians, and both Livia and Julia were given the distinct honour of presiding as joint hostesses over a separate feast attended by the leading women of the city – the first time that women are known to have been given a leading role in celebrating a triumph for a male relative.91 As mother of Gaius and Lucius, and wife of the guest of honour Tiberius, Julia enjoyed exalted public status, although her complicated private life was conceivably already prompting curious whispers among the guests. Marriage to Tiberius, which had initially been conducted with a semblance of amity, had hit choppy waters, with the couple rumoured to be sleeping in separate beds. This was said to be Tiberius’s decision, following the death of their infant firstborn in the Italian city of Aquileia.92