For Gráinne
– like Livia, ‘probitate, forma [mulierum] eminentissima’
…‘These literary gatherings get a little on my nerves,’ Judy said, ‘I sometimes wish I’d married a plumber.’
‘Even a plumber, my dear,’ Arnold said with a constrained twist of his lips, ‘would, one imagines, take a certain interest in his work.’
‘Yes, but a plumber finishes his work when he finishes it,’ said Judy. ‘He isn’t always talking and thinking about plumbing. He doesn’t go to plumbing lunches and plumbing teas and plumbing conversaziones. He doesn’t give lectures on plumbing.’
Richmal Crompton, Family Roundabout, 1948
Author’s Note
For British television viewers of the 1970s, Livia loomed large in the history of ancient Rome. Jack Pulman’s thirteen-part small-screen adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius promulgated a version of events in which Livia played a leading and decisive role. Even for the armchair student of Roman history, this is cause for surprise. Neither the Republic nor the principate recognized the vesting of formal power of this sort in women’s hands. What then was Livia up to? Who was deceiving whom?
The Pulman–Graves account of the founding of the Roman Empire owed much to the work of Publius or Gaius Cornelius Tacitus. Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome, written early in the second century, is an intensely vivid record of the Rome of the first emperors. Its purpose was more than reportage. ‘It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty,’ Tacitus wrote with tub-thumping moral afflatus, ‘is to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity’s denunciations.’ A number of evil deeds he placed squarely at Livia’s feet.
Tacitus considered himself without partisanship. Other surviving ancient texts – painting different portraits of Livia and her actions – suggest that Livia would not have agreed. Without seeking out undiscovered fragments, lost inscriptions or unknown papyri, I have revisited these other sources and a wealth of scholarship arising from them, alongside Tacitus’s account. My intention has been to create a portrait of Livia that, no less remarkable than the scheming villainess of the Tacitus–Graves–Pulman triad, is more finely balanced, more equivocal – and less indebted to burlesque.
This book was written with the assistance of a generous award from The Society of Authors. To The Society, and particularly the members of the distinguished judging panel under the chairmanship of Antonia Fraser, I express my grateful thanks.
As ever, I am grateful to those many people who, in different ways, provided help with the writing of this book. In Italy, Sir Timothy and Lady Clifford offered hospitality, kindness and inspiration at a critical moment; without their intervention, this book would not have been written. Other friends were generous in their hospitality throughout the research period: Jim and Fern Dickson, Claudia Joseph, Cathy Davey, and Ivo and Pandora Curwen.
I am grateful to those people who read, answered questions and offered advice on the manuscript, including Dr Adrian Goldsworthy, Kathryn Jones of The Royal Collection and, especially, John Everatt, an inspirational classics master and a patient reader. The staff of The Library of the Societies for the Promotion of Hellenic and Roman Studies and The London Library were helpful, as was Ann Price of Denbigh Library in North Wales, who mastered for me the inter-library loan scheme. I am grateful to my agent, Georgina Capel, and my editor Richard Milbank.
Immense thanks, of course, are due to the unsung behind-the-scenes efforts of my wonderful parents, my father-in-law and above all my beloved wife, Gráinne, for so much patience, encouragement and love.
‘Few women of real nobility have received such venomous treatment as Livia.’
J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Roman Women: Their History and Habits, 1962
‘Of all the Roman empresses, Livia may be said to have done the greatest honour to her dignity, and to have best supported the character of it. Augustus owed a considerable part of his glory to her, and not only consulted her in the most important and difficult affairs, but generally took her advice.’
‘…it cannot be denied that there was a great deal of art and cunning in her manner of proceeding, which the emperor did not find out till it was too late.’
‘…not even Augustus, with all his art and skill, could avoid being deceived by her. She knew well how to take full advantage of his weakness, and acquired such an ascendancy over him that nothing could resist it; and Caesar, master of the world, might very properly be said to be slave to Livia.’
J. R. de Serviez, The Roman Empresses, 1718
‘In the domestic sphere she cultivated virtue in the time-honoured fashion, she was affable beyond what was approved in women of old, a headstrong mother, a compliant wife, a good match for the intrigues of her husband and the hypocrisy of her son.’
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
‘No Roman woman ever wielded such power and influence as Livia.’
Donald R. Dudley, The World of Tacitus, 1968
Contents
Author’s Note
Family tree
Preface ‘He chopped down the family tree’
1 ‘Superbissima’
2 In the beginning…were the Claudii
3 ‘Innocent of guilt’
4 ‘Virility to her reasoning power’
5 A young man of noble family, of native talent and moderation?
6 ‘Night would last for ever’
7 Fugitive
8 ‘The whimsicality of fate’
9 ‘An eagle flew by’
10 The price of comfort
11 ‘No magic chant will make you a mother’
12 By the side of the goddess
13 Sacrosanct
14 ‘A charming view with minimal expense’
15 ‘A man and his family should live together as partners’
16 ‘They compelled him, as it seemed, to accept autocratic powers’
17 ‘Born of his sacred blood’
18 ‘Her sacred office’
19 ‘If you come to any harm…that is the end of me too’
20 Three cities of Judaea
21 ‘The man set apart by such an alliance would be enormously elevated’
22 ‘Outstandingly virtuous’
23 ‘Tiberius closer to Caesar’
24 ‘What more can I ask of the immortal gods?’
25 ‘Try not to guess what lies in the future’
26 ‘Perpetual security’
27 Purer than Parian marble?
28 ‘Blood-red comets’
29 Augusta
30 ‘His mother Livia vexed him’
31 Above the law?
Epilogue ‘You held your course without remorse’
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
Preface
‘He chopped down the family tree’
‘It seems to me,’ offers the narrator of Tennyson’s poem ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, published in 1842, “‘Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.’
A century after Tennyson, in a spirit of benign flippancy, those lines inspired a black and white film which remains, on both sides of the Atlantic, among the most popular comedies ever made in Britain. Kind Hearts and Coronets, advertised in 1949 with the slogan ‘He chopped down the family tree’, tells the story of Louis Mazzini, the child of a late-Victorian mésalliance between an English noblewoman and an Italian opera singer. On her death, the family of Louis’s mother, the D’Ascoynes, refuses to admit her body to the family crypt. Louis avenges this indignity by removing every D’Ascoyne who stands between him and the family’s
title. Eight deaths later, he finds himself, as he had intended, Duke of Chalfont. Although the contributions of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford – both at intervals canvassed for assistance – failed to make it to the final cut, it is a slick piece of screenwriting. It is proof, too, that the oldest jokes can be the best.
Almost two thousand years before the cameras began rolling at Ealing Studios, a man born Tiberius Claudius Nero became second emperor of Rome – despite sharing no blood ties with his predecessor, Augustus. Tiberius was the son of Augustus’s wife Livia and her first husband Nero. Livia’s second marriage, like that of Mazzini and his D’Ascoyne bride, was the union of a woman of lofty breeding and ancient lineage and a man, in relative terms, of unknown background. With ill grace, Augustus adopted his stepson as his heir five months short of Tiberius’s forty-sixth birthday. In poor health and nearing the considerable age of seventy, Augustus justified his action ‘for reasons of state’. It was not a choice born of affection and he came to it only after exhausting a number of alternatives.
Between Tiberius and the throne had stood at various moments five or possibly six candidates preferable to Augustus, as well as Augustus himself. All died unexpectedly, in each case in circumstances which remain in part unresolved. Of those six deaths five were attributed by at least one ancient author to the malign intervention of Tiberius’s mother. Livia’s scheming, her malevolence and, above all, her unbridled maternal ambition and lust for power, so the story goes, jibbed at nothing in pursuit of the throne for her son and a perpetuation through him of her own influence in Rome. She is Louis Mazzini without the smiling insouciance, let loose on a stage set that is larger and darker than the comic opera buffoonery of the latter’s mise en scène – like Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere, a woman of position but cold heart, rejoicing in inflicting cruelty.
In Kind Hearts and Coronets, Mazzini writes his memoirs and cheerfully confesses to his dastardly exploits. Livia left no corresponding confession. Nor would she have, since in fact no evidence connects her with the deaths of Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Agrippa Postumus, Germanicus – or even Augustus. Frequently Livia was hundreds of miles away when her ‘victim’ died of fever or a battle-wound. On the principle of ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’, distance apparently proved no obstacle to this mistress of the dark side. In almost every instance her weapon was poison. Against both reason and probability, we are asked to believe that, Mazzini-like, she ‘chopped down the family tree’.
Livia’s true ‘crime’ was not murder but the exercise of power. In a society so assertively masculine that its historians avoided mentioning women save as exemplars of outstanding virtue or vice – or, in the unique but vexed case of Cleopatra, as a ruler in her own right – Livia created for herself a public profile and a sphere of influence. The wife of one princeps (‘leading citizen’) of Rome, she became the mother of his successor after a series of unforeseeable deaths. In the early years of Tiberius’s reign she was acknowledged by several sources as almost his equal in power. Unofficially she was hailed as ‘Mother of Her Country’. But any power she exercised was always circumscribed. Assiduously she confined her visible sphere of influence to acceptable, traditionally female areas. That she won public plaudits for her contribution to Roman life was in itself enough to condemn her – in the eyes not only of contemporaries but also of influential later writers.
Her posthumous deification in AD 41 did not guarantee Livia respect. Tacitus condemned her to eternal Grand Guignol in his revisionist Annals, published less than a century after her death. His portrait of a ‘feminine bully’, a malevolent stepmother and an ‘oppressive mother’ both to her family and the Roman state eventually inspired the Livia of Robert Graves’s ripping yarn, I, Claudius. Once Graves’s novel became an acclaimed television series in 1976, Livia acquired two lives, that emerging from the scant evidence of the surviving contemporary sources, advanced by scholars, and the stronger meat from which actress Siân Phillips conjured the Livia of the popular imagination. In seeking to create a portrait of Livia, it is necessary to steer between the two.
It would be preposterous to suggest that Kind Hearts and Coronets, a piece of postwar levity dressed up in pastiche Edwardian frou-frou, was inspired by Tiberius’s accession to supreme power in ancient Rome, or to mine it or the poetry of Tennyson for clues to elucidate our reading of that earlier event; this is not my intention. Robert Hamer’s comedy does not draw on historical sources. Possibly the mésalliance of Mazzini’s mother recalls the operetta-style marital career of the Habsburg princess Louise of Tuscany, who, divorced from the Crown Prince of Saxony in 1903, four years later married an Italian musician, Enrico Toselli, to the consternation of the courts of Europe. But the connection is tenuous. The point of interest is that, for sixty years, a sophisticated but feather-light comedy of multiple murder has delighted audiences throughout the English-speaking world without any of them imagining there is any truth behind the story. In the case of Livia and Tiberius, readers – and latterly television viewers – have treated a story of comparable plot and similar ghoulishness with greater credulity. What in Kind Hearts and Coronets is obviously fiction, in the lost world of ancient Rome becomes believable, despite the origin of Livia’s rumoured misdeeds lying with authors who neither pretended nor attempted impartiality and made no effort to substantiate their claims. The truth, as so often, appears richer and stranger than fiction.
‘The first forty-two years of the Queen’s life,’ Lytton Strachey wrote in Queen Victoria, ‘are illuminated by a great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert’s death a veil descends.’ Just such a veil has descended over much of Livia’s life. Periodically, she is absent from or discounted by the sources, or otherwise obscured by the corrupting effect of ancient historians’ animosity towards women in general and those closest to the workings of empire and the Julio-Claudian ascendancy in particular. Given such depredations – silence concerning Livia’s childhood, virtual silence about her later years – it is not possible to write a conventional biography of this woman who died almost two thousand years ago or, with authority, as Robin Lane Fox once wrote of Alexander the Great, to pretend to certainty in her name. This book is part quest, part cautious conclusion.
Chapter 1
‘Superbissima’
The walls of the atrium were lined with wooden cupboards, a honeycomb of boxes, each with its own door. Open or closed, there was no secret about the contents of the cupboards. Nor could there be, in this the most public room of the house, accessible to every visitor, invited or unknown. In time, the atrium or main hall would all but disappear from Roman houses, re-imagined as little more than a passageway from the elaborate doors on to the street, closed only in times of mourning, to the private realm within. In the dying days of the Republic, the atrium continued to extend its welcome.
That welcome was more a matter of form than of comfort. This busy room was sparsely furnished. Many objects distracted the eye; few offered respite to tired limbs or indeed the anxious petitioner.
On festival days, when the household altar shone red with the blood of animal sacrifice, the doors of the wooden cupboards stood open. A label, the titulus, marked each one, explaining the precise nature of its contents. Or perhaps, not so much its nature as its achievements. For the atrium’s wooden cupboards, called armaria, contained the past – moments frozen in time, like the blown birds’ eggs and preserved butterflies of Victorian naturalists.
Roman armaria displayed the wax ancestor masks of the city’s patrician nobility, each a cross between a portrait bust and a death mask, framed inside its box. These were the imagines maiorum of ancient Rome, recorded in the second century BC by the Greek historian Polybius and described two hundred years later by Pliny the Elder as the archetypal example of traditional Roman domestic art.1 Today no trace of them remains, except in the written sources. Each mask personated a significant member of the family in whose atrium it stood. Its wooden c
upboard was by way of a shrine.
Inclusion within the gallery of imagines was a question of hurdles successfully jumped. The subject must be dead; must in its lifetime have held public office above the rank of junior magistrate or ‘aedile’ – and must, of course, have been a man. We cannot know the quality of craftsmanship, whether the wax was tinted, how the hair was treated or the masks made. All that survive are the complementary accounts of Polybius and Pliny and the less fragile record preserved in stone portrait busts, which presumably shared predominant characteristics with their wax counterparts. Worn or carried by the actors employed in Roman funeral processions, imagines maiorum were at the same time realistic in appearance and functional, with holes for the eyes and breathing.2 They were a public face of Rome’s oldest love affair, its romanticizing of its own noble and strenuously masculine history. In Rome, history and legend merged. Even politicians, once dead, became masks for actors, the makers of history mere ciphers in a pageant, reputation a matter for a strolling player. In the Roman Republic, immortality was a reward for public service. The records of the tituli were businesslike, impersonal. It was not a sentimental society. Daily, domestic animals – chickens and lambs – found their throats slit in appeasement of gods who offered no lifeline of eternal redemption. A dish of blood spilt on the altar was enough to hold heavenly ire at bay.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 1
