Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  By the time of Cicero’s purchase, nine years after Marcus and Alfidia’s marriage, Marcus had attained the rank of praetor, one of the Republic’s senior magistracies with a powerful judicial role, as we have seen. The praetorship was an elected position. In ancient Rome, victory in the hustings seldom came cheap.

  The satirist Juvenal famously denounced the political disengagement of Romans who craved, he claimed, only two things in return for their loyalty: bread and circuses. His was not a solitary lament. Five years before Livia’s birth, Cicero defended Lucius Licinius Murena against a charge of bribery in the consular elections. His speech contained valuable lessons for every politically ambitious Roman. His point was simple: ‘The Roman people…love public magnificence.’5 Cicero illustrated his argument with reference to a case from the end of the second century BC.

  The senatorial career of Quintus Tubero had stalled at the position of praetor. Tubero was mean; his parsimony cost him votes and esteem. Asked to oversee banquet preparations at the funeral of the Punic War hero Scipio Africanus, Tubero ‘used goatskins to cover his wretched Punic stools, and set up Samian crockery, as if indeed it were Diogenes the Cynic who were dead and not as if they were doing honour at his death to that great man Africanus.’6 Punic or Carthaginian stools were low, narrow benches, Samian crockery the inexpensive red earthenware used by Romans as everyday table- and kitchenware; goatskins, too, clearly fell short of expectations. It was not the route to Romans’ hearts, and Quintus Tubero, despite first-rate patrician connections, paid with his career. Julius Caesar, by contrast, achieved electoral victory in 65 BC partly as a result of his lavish spending on renovation of the Appian Way.

  There had been too many politicians among the Claudii and Livii Drusi for Marcus not to have learned so fundamental a lesson. The demands of public life on the private purse were urgent and pressing. Votes existed for the buying, popular support for the wooing with bribes. Clients too exacted their fistful of silver. It is quite possible that it was the cost of politics which necessitated Marcus’s sale to Cicero – a case of losing one part of Rome in order to win over another.

  We cannot assess the nature of Marcus’s financial needs. Nor can we form an estimate of whether their extent was such as to impact on Livia’s childhood. Marcus had family connections in Pisaurum. A Roman colony of the second century BC, northeast of Rome on the Via Flaminia, Pisaurum was described by Catullus as ‘sickly.’7 Marcus’s connections with the ‘sickly’ colony evidently continued to play a part in his life, since Cicero referred to him mockingly as Pisauran – scarcely a compliment in the light of Catullus’s estimate. Cicero’s reference may further suggest that Marcus retained property in the colony. In 42 BC Livia would give birth to her first child, Tiberius. In the following century, according to Suetonius, a belief was widespread ‘that Tiberius was born at Fundi’.8 Mistakenly, it was assumed that Livia had returned for her confinement to her grandparents’ house outside Rome. If an association between Livia and Fundi remained current, perhaps she or her mother had inherited property in the town, which they visited intermittently.

  The likelihood that Livia’s parents continued to own and administer property in both Pisaurum and Fundi allows us to discount Marcus’s decision in 50 BC to sell land in Rome to Cicero as proof of large-scale financial difficulties. Instead we can conclude that anxieties of this sort were sufficiently manageable as not to disturb Livia’s childhood – which may, in part, have been spent agreeably at family properties in Umbria and Campania: a peripatetic aristocratic life of the sort outlined in Cicero’s letters. In later life, despite unimaginable resources, Livia espoused a lifestyle of understated luxury at odds with that of Romans unaccustomed to wealth.

  Two years previously, when Livia was six, a man who would later loom large in the early years of her marriage had found himself the victim of popular fury. That man was Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The future Triumvir was named as interrex in the tense days following the murder of that vexatious Claudian, Livia’s kinsman Clodius. The nomination was not without its dangers – in this case the storming of Lepidus’s house by incensed pro-Clodian plebs. Asconius recalled the scene. ‘Then [the mob] broke through the gateway with all manner of violence and pulled down his ancestral portraits [the imagines maiorum], broke up the symbolic marital couch of his wife Cornelia, a woman whose chastity was considered an example to all, and also vandalized the weaving operations which, in accord with ancient custom, were in progress in the entrance hall.’9

  As in Lepidus’s atrium, so in that of Marcus and numberless Roman patricians. The masculine element dominated but did not overwhelm the space. Records of male achievement lined the walls – those ancestor masks commemorating holders of the great magistracies of the State. In the centre of the room stood potent symbols of Roman womanhood. The lectus genialis, a low couch, represented the matrimonial bed. Nearby a loom or looms, tall and broad and workable only by a standing weaver, indicated traditional feminine activity – woolworking, ‘lanificium’, weaving specifically. Since weaving required both light and space, the atrium, with its expansive layout and roof open to the sky, was the obvious place.

  The mob that threatened Lepidus, while sparing the senator himself, destroyed every cherished building block of patrician domesticity. Trampled underfoot was the sanctity of past, present and future. Each was represented in the atrium: in the ancestor masks of a distinguished family; the looms on which a devoted wife wove cloth for her husband; and the marriage bed in which successive generations were faithfully conceived. Daily, entering or leaving the atrium, Livia would have been aware of the room’s contents. Over time she would have learned their symbolic import. The vigorously masculine world of Rome sought in these concrete signifiers to encompass a woman’s whole existence.

  As with so many aspects of Roman women’s lives, our picture of daughters’ education in the late Republic is a moth-picked patchwork. Mothers exercised a supervisory role in their children’s education. Overwhelmingly, this role was one of moral guidance. Intellectual instruction was entrusted to a slave or pedagogus who was bought or hired to teach children at home.

  In order for a mother’s supervision to be effective, women required at least basic literacy. In many upper-class families, among whom education was held in high esteem, women’s accomplishments extended far beyond the rudimentary. Caecilia Attica, daughter of Cicero’s secretary Atticus, was taught by a slave as a young child, before receiving instruction from the famous freedman grammaticus Quintus Caecilius Epirota, whom her father hired to advance her education a stage further. Although traditionally Roman education for girls had emphasized moral virtues and skills that were predominantly domestic over academic accomplishments, by the end of the Republic, bilingualism was increasingly prevalent in senatorial nurseries, apparently in the form of reading and writing in addition to the spoken word. Girls as well as boys learned both Greek and Latin. Pompey’s daughter Pompeia began reading Homer sometime after her eighth birthday.10

  It is impossible to know if there was a sense of going through the motions in all this. The purpose of boys’ education was to produce adept public speakers, skilled in oratory and rhetoric. Seriousness, loyalty and courage were the qualities valued by the Republic. Such aims never motivated a girl’s upbringing, even in cases like Livia’s where a daughter was an only child. Most girls of the senatorial class would be married before the age at which young men completed their studies and made their first public speech: any education on which they embarked was invariably left unfinished.

  In this Livia was typical of girls of her class, marrying for the first time when she was either fifteen or sixteen. The highest expectation of a Roman daughter was that she display the sterling qualities of her father, an outcome which, though commended, was not considered likely. Cicero records one exceptional case, that of Laelia. ‘It was my good fortune more than once to hear Laelia, the daughter of Gaius [Laelius], speak, and it was apparent that her careful usage was coloured by her
father’s elegance of speaking, and the same was true of her two daughters.’11 As in so many other aspects of their lives, Roman women were a conduit for the transmission of masculine virtues or the preservation of male distinction. Behaviour which earned praise was that in which the ‘female’ was submerged in the ‘male’. It is characteristic of Roman thought in this matter that women received ready compliments for their resemblance, in mind or character, to their fathers rather than their mothers.12 Women themselves, as if to prove the strength and efficacy of the tradition, did not jib at this extremity of self-denial. In the elegy Propertius wrote for Cornelia, the stepdaughter of Livia’s future husband Octavian, Cornelia roots her claim to exceptional merit in two sources: her adherence to that code of behaviour prescribed for respectable Roman noblewomen and her illustrious kinsfolk.13

  Always hovering near the surface was the Roman conviction that women were intellectually and temperamentally different from their men-folk. The Jewish philosopher Philo, a near contemporary of Livia’s, who may have encountered her towards the end of her life, characterized a woman’s world as of the senses, a man’s as of the mind.

  The truth was that Romans mistrusted erudite women. Discussing Pompey’s wife Cornelia, who had been taught literature, music and geometry and had ‘listened with profit’ to lectures on philosophy, Plutarch took pains to reassure his readers that Cornelia remained nevertheless ‘free from the distasteful pedantry which such studies confer upon women’.14 Juvenal’s disparagement of a later generation of Roman bluestockings is a desperate plea for a return to traditional values of female ignorance and silent submission. It betrays more than a hint of fear.

  The woman who begs as soon as she sits down to dinner to discourse on poets and poetry…rattles on at such a rate that you’d think all the pots and pans in the kitchen were crashing to the floor and that every bell in town was clanging. All by herself she makes as much noise as some primitive tribe chasing away an eclipse…Wives shouldn’t try to be public speakers; they shouldn’t use rhetorical devices; they shouldn’t read all the classics – there ought to be some things women don’t understand.15

  By contrast, Agricola’s mother Julia Procilla earned Tacitus’s praise for her careful supervision of her son’s education. She checked his enthusiasm when he showed more interest in studying philosophy than was suitable for a Roman senator.16 The evidence of the sources suggests that Livia successfully avoided both overtly intellectual interests and Juvenalian garrulousness. The only ancient author able to quote her speech at length is Cassius Dio: in his own words, he attributes to Livia sentiments she may or may not have expressed.

  In early imperial Rome, a Stoic philosopher earned fame and renown. His name was Gaius Musonius Rufus and his diatribe ‘Should daughters be educated in roughly the same way as sons?’ has led some commentators mistakenly to claim him as an early feminist. Musonius Rufus’s argument was that since women are capable of the same virtues as men, their progress towards those virtues ought to take the form of similar teaching. For virtues, do not read intellectual prowess. ‘I do not mean to say,’ surviving fragments tell us, ‘that women should possess technical skill and acuteness in argument, which would be rather superfluous, since they will philosophize as women.’17 Instead, the Stoic’s reasoning was fundamentally conservative. His treatise ‘That women too should study philosophy’ expressed a point of view that such study was the vehicle of transforming women into good wives, mothers and housekeepers. It enabled them to control their emotions, suppress the selfish instinct and love and care for their husband and children.18 In short, it was a catalyst to ideal womanly behaviour as understood by Roman men.

  Livia’s education aimed at instilling adult qualities from as early an age as possible. This was in keeping with the broader belief that children were simply smaller versions of their adult selves, alike in character. The death of Fundanius’s daughter Minicia while still a young child inspired an encomium from Pliny that sums up the general approach: ‘She already possessed the wisdom of old age and the dignity of a matrona without losing her girlish sweetness and the modesty of a virgin.’19 If such steadfast maturity could be harnessed to properly ‘masculine’ strength of mind, the result would be a prodigy indeed.

  Were these efforts successful in Livia’s case? Did the reading of ancient texts, the transcribing of particularly elevating lines of poetry or drama, the reiteration of age-old precepts and Alfidia’s moral steerage create a woman worthy of Marcus’s senatorial career and the dazzling achievements of her Claudian and Livii Drusan predecessors? Livia’s future conduct will prove that they did. It was more than sycophancy that inspired Philo’s assessment that Livia rose high above her sex because the excellence of her education ‘gave virility to her reasoning power’.20 Suetonius records a telling detail. In the years to come, Augustus took pains not to embark on serious discussions with Livia without first having committed his thoughts to a small notebook. Did the most powerful man in the world fear, respect or simply recognize the sharpness of his wife’s intellect? Suetonius offers an apparently simple explanation. He acted as he did ‘lest he should say too much or too little when speaking off the cuff’.21 We must form our own conclusions.

  The challenge of Livia’s public life – for the moment far in the future – was to contain praiseworthy ‘virile’ reasoning within the sanctioned bounds of her feminine calling. Insofar as her detractors were concerned, she failed. At a remove of two millennia, we can discern in Livia’s example an early, accomplished mastery of a near-impossible conjuring trick. Her life offers proof that historically a woman, working outside the channels of officialdom, could achieve significant goals – by sublimating the appearance of self-motivation within the schemes of powerful men.

  Chief among Livia’s weapons was homespun. As emperor it suited Augustus to be married to a woman who practised the old Roman customs of home-weaving, just as it suited Livia to exult in the role of domestic Penelope learned from Alfidia in Marcus’s atrium. In the minds of both was a tradition of household weaving begun in the Republic’s infancy and still practised in the sixth century ad.22

  Once, Romans spun and wove wool at home through necessity. As the empire grew, Egypt, Greece and the Near East supplied Rome with linen, tapestry and dyed woollen fabrics. Even silk was available to those prepared to pay. By the time of Livia’s birth, Columella recorded, readymade fabrics were a fact of Roman life. 23 But the loom remained, a nimble monolith, visible to all in the aristocratic atrium. That it served a more than decorative purpose is evident from the numbers of slaves employed in its service. In Rome, the vault of the Statilius Taurus family included the ashes of eight spinners, one supervisor of the wool, four patchers, four weavers, two dyers and four fullers. In time, Livia’s own columbarium would accommodate the remains of two supervisors of the wool, two fullers and five patchers.24

  By then, old associations had transformed the Roman loom into more than a frame for weaving. It was a symbol of matronly virtue, as if its taut strings permitted no slackening of the moral fibres. It represented the submission of the self that was the ultimate aim, according to Roman men, of every Roman woman – days spent in peaceable industry for the benefit of husband and children. As the ideal woman suckled her babies, so too she clothed them, protecting them from the harshness of the world outside in layers of woollen homespun. Not without reason did the Roman bride carry a spindle and a distaff. It was a fallacy, of course, a fantasy, but it bolstered the status quo and promised to preserve the eternal verities of a Roman state built on masculine achievement and the attendant succour of women and household gods.

  As a married woman and empress of Rome, Livia, assisted by her propagandist husband, took pains to present herself as the archetypal Roman matron. This meant denying that her own very new role was anything but the acme of very old Roman aspirations. Central to her personal myth-making were the homely traditions of the great days of the Republic, a simplified vision of a time before luxury and vice sof
tened Roman sinews. Livia’s renown emphasized the extent to which she embodied cherished Roman virtues. She herself became the symbolic thread spun by ancient forebears and woven into the emperor’s new clothes which her husband claimed she made for him on the household loom. Livia’s, so the story went, was the quintessential Roman upbringing and education. It may not have been so far from the truth.

  Chapter 5

  A young man of noble family, of native talent and moderation?

  The goal, of course, was marriage. The great men whose likenesses survived in sculpted wax, the legendary women who bore and tended them – all, by and large, were married. Roman men had joked since time immemorial that it was impossible to enjoy a really harmonious life with a wife at your side. Most, like the senator Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus in the century before Livia’s birth, would have conceded that, without a wife, there was no sort of life at all.1 There were exceptions, but these were the few not the many. Once every five years, daughters of the upper classes were chosen as children to serve the goddess Vesta. Thereafter, eternally virgin, they guarded Rome’s sacred flame. Vestal Virgins were seldom plucked from families with only one child. Sacrosanct chastity would not be Livia’s portion.

  Livia’s marriage is the first event since her birth which we can infer with certainty. Here again, however, we must assume a date. From the birth of her first child in November 42, it is reasonable to conclude that Livia was married either in the previous year – 43 BC – or early in 42. She would have been fifteen, at most sixteen.