The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  Rome’s attempts to airbrush certain citizens from its memory in this way usually leave telltale traces, obvious scars where someone’s name or image has been erased from a monument. In Julia’s case there is little sign of that happening. Her existing public portraits were probably allowed to remain, given that she was the mother of the still-in-favour Gaius and Lucius. Their removal would have spoilt the balance and aesthetic appeal of group family portraits in which she already featured prominently. But a quiet word from on high seems to have been dropped in the ear of artists and town-planners around the empire, and an unofficial moratorium issued on further production of portraits of the emperor’s disgraced daughter, while her existing portraits may later have been recycled, remodelled and relabelled to fit the image of other, later imperial women.119 This would explain why the coin issued for her and her two sons in 13–12 BC is the only securely identifiable portrait that survives of her, a woman who was once the centrefold of her family dynasty. Lead theatre tickets from Rome, and bone gaming tokens from Oxyrhyncus in Egypt, featuring images of a woman resembling the coin portrait, have been found, but we cannot tell for sure if they are Julia.120

  Julia was the first woman in the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s young history to suffer such a downfall and condemnation. She was not the last. Her fate had exposed irreparable cracks in the seemingly impenetrable façade of this new, morally rejuvenated golden age of Rome, cracks that would prove difficult to repair.121

  When Tiberius, taking a break from his daily diet of study in self-imposed exile in Rhodes, heard of his wife’s fate, the news apparently delighted him – although he had been writing to Augustus, half-heartedly urging a reconciliation between father and estranged daughter, perhaps in the hope of wheedling his way back into the emperor’s good graces. Nevertheless, the irreconcilable breakdown of Tiberius’s marriage had weakened any claim he might have had to succeed his stepfather as emperor. When his subsequent requests to return to Rome were eventually granted in the year 2 by an unwilling Augustus, egged on by pleading from Livia, Tiberius settled down to what should have been a life of political seclusion, decamping to an out-of-the-way house in the Gardens of Maecenas.122

  Despite their mother’s scandalous exit from Rome, Julia’s sons Gaius and Lucius were still riding the crest of a great wave of popularity as the de facto heirs to Augustus. Both had long since shed the childish tunics of their boyhood and graduated to the toga virilis, the dress adopted by young men on reaching sexual maturity.123 In 1 BC, shortly before the twenty-two-year old Gaius departed for a career-building posting in the eastern provinces, the Julio-Claudian house had celebrated its first imperial wedding in a decade, with Gaius’s marriage to his cousin Livilla, daughter of Antonia Minor and the deceased Drusus, and thus granddaughter to both Livia and Octavia. All seemed set for the inevitable coronation of Gaius or his younger brother Lucius as successors to their grandfather’s dignities.124

  Yet within two years of Tiberius’s return to Rome, Augustus’s dynastic blueprint was in tatters. On 20 August 2, Lucius died of a sudden illness at Marseilles while en route to an army posting in Spain. The same year, Gaius received a wound during a siege at Artagira in Armenia, which ultimately resulted in his death eighteen months later on 21 February 4, while attempting to make the journey back to Italy.125 The premature demise of these two popular young men left Julia’s and Agrippa’s last surviving son, the sixteen-year-old Agrippa Postumus, as the emperor’s one surviving male grandchild. Augustus could not rest all his hopes on the shoulders of an inexperienced teenage heir, and bowed to the inevitable. On 26 June, four months after the death of Gaius, he officially adopted forty-four-year-old Tiberius, moving his wife’s son to the head of the Julio-Claudian line of succession. As a pre-condition of his promotion, Tiberius was compelled to adopt in turn his seventeen-year-old nephew Germanicus, the eldest son of Drusus and Antonia. Leaving nothing to chance, Augustus also adopted Agrippa Postumus, providing another option in the succession stakes, should it be needed. The pieces on the Julio-Claudian chessboard had shifted dramatically. The next emperor of Rome would now in all likelihood come from the family of Livia and not Augustus.

  In August 14, at the age of seventy-five, Augustus set out from Rome on his last journey, attended by Livia. His purpose was to accompany Tiberius, who was being dispatched to Illyricum on official imperial business, as far as the town of Beneventum, south of Rome. The last decade of Augustus’s rule had been dogged by setbacks, culminating in a disastrous defeat for the Roman legions in Germany at the battle of Teutoburg Forest five years previously, which effectively curtailed further Roman territorial expansion for the time being. The empire’s borders were now delineated by the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, the Euphrates in the east and the Sahara in Africa, and few new territorial gains would be made during the remaining course of empire.126

  The trip did not begin auspiciously. The emperor, always a poor traveller, contracted diarrhoea during the sea voyage off the coast of Campania. The imperial party broke their journey at the emperor’s villa on Capri to allow the emperor a few days to rest, before continuing to Beneventum via Naples. Having parted company with Tiberius, Augustus, who was still suffering from his stomach complaint, turned around and began the return leg of the journey back to Rome with Livia. But Augustus never made it home. On 19 August, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, according to official reports, Rome’s first emperor died at his family’s estate in the Campanian town of Nola, not far from Mount Vesuvius. His last words were to his wife of fifty-two years, whom he is said to have kissed and adjured, ‘Live mindful of our marriage, Livia, and farewell’, before his eyes closed in death.127

  For five days while Augustus’s body burned on a pyre in the Campus Martius, Livia did not leave his side, but remained rooted to the spot in silent grieving vigil long after the senatorial mourners and their wives had gone home. Traditionally, the task of washing and caring for the bodies of the dead before burial fell to Roman women, but Livia’s commitment was unusual. To a witness who claimed (in what was probably a pre-choreographed statement) to have seen Augustus’s spirit soaring out of the flames to the heavens, Livia paid a reward of 1,000,000 sesterces to show her gratitude. Afterwards, accompanied by leading members of the equestrian order, she completed her duties by scooping up his bones from the fire, and laid them in his purpose-built mausoleum by the Tiber, where the remains of Marcellus, Agrippa and Augustus’s sister Octavia already rested.128

  That is one version of what happened. But in a pattern that will become all too familiar as this history of Rome’s imperial women unfurls, another tradition exists, one which casts Livia in an entirely different light. Anxious that Augustus was about to renege on his choice of Tiberius as his designated heir, and anoint Julia’s last surviving son, Agrippa Postumus, his successor instead, it is suggested in some historical sources that Livia had in fact disposed of her husband by smearing poison on the ripe green figs which the clean-living emperor liked to pluck from the trees around his house and then suppressed the news of his death until Tiberius could reach Nola. Thus the announcement of Augustus’s death could be followed seamlessly by an on-the-spot proclamation of Tiberius as the new emperor, obviating any delays and ensuring a smooth transition of power from father to adopted son. Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s youngest son and the last potential obstacle to the succession, was murdered immediately after Tiberius’s investiture. There was confusion about who had given the order.129

  Livia the devout wife at her husband’s deathbed, or Livia the manipulative cold-blooded political operative? Which portrait should we believe? It is a dilemma all too common to the study of these women, and is not a question that can be answered with any satisfying degree of certainty. Livia was not the last empress to be accused of murdering her husband. Indeed, the striking plot similarities between Livia’s reported actions following Augustus’s death and accounts written by the same historians of the behaviour of at least two future empresses sho
uld make us at least sceptical of taking such accusations at face value.130

  But there is a bigger point at stake in the recycling of these stories about Rome’s first empress. They speak to the profound anxiety sparked amongst the Roman elite by the increased visibility of women in Roman public life under Augustus. Where power had once been located firmly in the Senate, and distributed among its patrician members, now, for the first time in its history, Rome had its own first family, a dynastic clan from which the rulers of empire were exclusively chosen, and which celebrated the female guarantors of that progression with unprecedented amounts of exposure. Moreover, the designation on the Palatine of an imperial residence equivalent to a White House or a 10 Downing Street meant that women now presided over a household that also served as the headquarters of government, bringing them closer than ever to the epicentre of political power, both literally and figuratively. From that privileged position, they enjoyed the kind of access to the emperor that others could only dream of: as Nancy Reagan once said of her relationship with her presidential husband: ‘For eight years, I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn’t give you special access, I don’t know what does.’131 Wherever the truth lies of Livia’s involvement in Augustus’s death, the question of how much and what kind of influence should be wielded by her and other Roman first ladies, was to be a key battleground of imperial politics over the coming decades.

  3

  Family Feud: The People’s Princess and the Women of Tiberius’s Reign

  Everyone called Agrippina the honour of her country, the blood of Augustus, the only and last example of the ancient Roman Vertue: And everyone prayed the Gods that they would preserve her Race, and make her live beyond, and after the entire ruin of these wicked men.

  Madeleine de Scudéry, Les femmes illustres (1642)1

  On a winter’s day in the year 19, a packed crowd of spectators stood shoulder to shoulder at the harbour of Brundisium (Brindisi) on Italy’s southern-eastern heel, awaiting the return from overseas of one of Rome’s favourite daughters. Brundisium was the gateway to Italy for travellers from Greece and Asia Minor. A bustling port usually clogged with merchant ships unloading their wares, it was here in 40 BC that Octavian and Antony had held their peace summit and toasted it with the latter’s wedding to Octavia. But on this day, almost sixty years since that ill-starred treaty, the stage of Brundisium was set for a wake, not a marriage feast.

  As all eyes strained across the truculent grey winter sea, some of those present waded into the cool shallows in their eagerness to catch sight of the lady’s ship, already looming over the horizon from the direction of Corcyra (Corfu). Others squatted on nearby rooftops and walls, like rooks silhouetted against the sky. The mood was subdued, according to Tacitus, with people wondering ‘whether they ought to receive her landing in silence or with some utterance. As they still hesitated about the appropriate course, the fleet gradually came nearer. There was none of the usual brisk rowing, but every deliberate sign of grief.’ When at last the ship had laboured into port and the lady stepped down the gangplank on to dry land, barely able to meet the eyes of her well-wishers, it was seen that she was accompanied by two of her children, and that she carried ‘the urn of death in her hands. Her companions were worn out by prolonged grieving; so the sorrow of the fresh mourners who now met her was more demonstrative. Otherwise everyone’s feelings were indistinguishable; the cries of men and women, relatives and strangers, blended in a single universal groan.’2

  The ship’s passenger was not Julia. Augustus’s daughter was, alas, long dead, perishing in exile of malnutrition just a few months after her father’s passing five years previously, her death a direct result of her ex-husband Tiberius vengefully cutting off all financial support to her. Her aged mother Scribonia had since returned to Rome – whether she was still alive or not at this point is unknown.3 The grieving newcomer was in fact Agrippina Maior, Julia’s younger daughter from her marriage to Agrippa, and the urn she carried bore the ashes not of her ill-fated mother, but of her immensely popular thirty-four-year-old husband Germanicus, the eldest product of the marriage between Octavia’s daughter Antonia and Livia’s boy Drusus, and one of the great hopes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.4 Germanicus had died weeks earlier in Syria. The circumstances were mysterious, his body so ravaged by the effects of poison, some said, that his skin was covered in dark stains and his mouth flecked with foam.

  The journey from Brundisium to Rome along the 370 miles (600 kilometres) of Rome’s oldest highway, the Appian Way, typically took travellers anything from a week to a fortnight. As Agrippina and her husband’s funerary cortège proceeded slowly towards the capital, where Germanicus’s ashes were destined for the family mausoleum, mourners in their black and purple weeds watched their sad progress, and the air, usually ripe with the odour of the mosquito-dwelling swamps which plagued travellers along this route, was instead thick with the scent of perfumes and burnt offerings made by each settlement along the way. At the coastal town of Tarracina just short of Rome, the procession was met by Germanicus’s younger brother Claudius, and some of the deceased’s children. Inside the capital, they found a city in mourning, so lost to grief that people were not even observing the public holiday which should have been given over to feasting and celebration in honour of the Saturnalia festival that took place every December.5

  But amidst the lamentation, there was another current running through the grieving crowds – one of anger and suspicion. It had not gone unnoticed that at least two mourners were highly conspicuous by their absence. Where, people demanded, was the Emperor Tiberius? Where was his mother Livia? Why had they not come out to mourn the people’s prince?

  The twenty-three-year reign of Rome’s unlikely second emperor Tiberius was a chequered stewardship. Not the first or even the second choice for the job, Tiberius’s undoubted competence as a general was not matched by his skills as a politician. A reserved, dour figure, lacking the charisma and populist antennae of his stepfather Augustus, who was said to have been reluctant to hand over the reins of empire to someone with such ‘slow-grinding jaws’, Tiberius wore the purple awkwardly. His reign was characterised as a penny-pinching, indecisive era of government, dogged by tensions between the emperor and the senatorial classes, which eventually descended into outright despotism and vice.6

  This hostility between emperor and Senate was mirrored by feuding within the imperial family itself. It centred in part on Tiberius’s souring relationship with his elderly mother Livia, whose prominence in his administration was a source of great friction between mother and son and a target of hostility from the jury of ancient historians sitting in judgement on Tiberius, who perceived the pre-eminence of a woman in public life as a symptom of the political chaos said to characterise the Julio-Claudian era after Augustus. Germanicus’s death, however, was the most serious crisis of Tiberius’s reign. As well as sparking accusations of a cover-up against the emperor and his mother, it fuelled a simmering row between Tiberius and the widowed Agrippina, and raised new questions about the appropriate role of women in public life, questions that dogged the footsteps of every generation of imperial women who followed in their wake.

  Livia had now embarked on the final chapter of her life. It was just over fifty years since marriage to Octavian had plucked her from relative obscurity and set her on the path to becoming empress. Just as she had been the first woman to define that role, the accession of her son Tiberius following the death of Augustus in 14 meant that she now became Rome’s first dowager empress and entered uncharted waters once more.

  Attempts were made to clarify Livia’s new role in the guise of ‘queen mother’ even before her husband’s lavish state funeral had begun, with the public reading in the Senate of his will, which Augustus had painstakingly copied into two notebooks just over a year before his death.7 In the first instance, it confirmed that Livia and her son had been nominated as the chief beneficiaries in Augustus’s estate, which in total amounted to a
value of 150 million sesterces. Tiberius received two-thirds of this, while the other third went to Livia herself. It was a vast sum. Females were usually subject to strict limits on the amount that they could inherit thanks to the Lex Voconia, a law which had been on the statute books since 169 BC and which still prohibited women from receiving bequests from those whose wealth was estimated at more than 100,000 asses (an as being a unit of Roman currency).8 A special waiver from the Senate, however, now permitted Livia to inherit a fortune that made her one of the richest women in Rome, supplementing the income from the farming estates, brickworks and copper mines she owned in Italy, Gaul and Asia Minor, and Egypt, where she had a large papyrus marsh, vineyards, farms, olive presses and winepresses, possibly allotted to her after her husband’s defeat of Cleopatra at Actium.9 Livia had also recently been a major beneficiary in the will of her good friend Queen Salome of Judaea, who bequeathed the empress the territories of Jamnia, Phasalis and lush Archaelais, an area to the west of the River Jordan, renowned for its palm groves and high-quality dates.

  More importantly though, in terms of the public role envisaged for her in the new imperial set-up, Augustus’s will also stipulated that Livia should be adopted into his own Julian family clan. This was a gesture from a husband to his wife without historic precedent. In addition, having for so long held off giving her an honorific name or title equivalent to his own, Augustus’s will stated that Livia should henceforth be known as Julia Augusta. Her new cognomen represented an official elevation in status, and laid down yet another new marker – no other woman before this is known to have received a feminised version of an honorary title held by her husband.10 Subsequently, Augusta became the official moniker for many of Livia’s successors whose sons acceded to the throne, just as Augustus became part of every Roman emperor’s own title.11