Whether Octavian was aware of or even inspired by that parallel we do not know. We can draw comfort on his behalf from the absence of censure of either Cato or Hortensius in surviving sources. Lucan, in his verse account of the Civil War, chose to interpret Cato’s action as moral. He invoked Xenophon’s evidence that the Spartans passed on fertile wives to their friends in order to create a bond between fathers and allow other men to sire heirs, an argument Asconius reiterated elsewhere in relation to Pompey and Marcus Aurelius Scaurus, whose solidarity he attributed to both fathering children by Mucia.10 Although in Lucan’s version it is Cato’s part which deserves praise, no criticism attaches to Hortensius. Ditto, he must have hoped, Octavian. Cato’s contemporaries, though intrigued, were apparently not shocked by the incident. What disturbed them was the fact of Marcia being pregnant at the time the deal was struck. Once again, ditto Octavian – with the added complication that Octavian’s own wife was also pregnant. Unblinking, Octavian took a married woman as his mistress. He requested that her husband divorce her so that he in turn might marry her, having determined to divorce his own pregnant wife. But he balked at providing his detractors with unnecessary grounds for accusing him of impropriety. In his defence, he invoked the assistance of the college of pontiffs, asking the priests, as Tacitus recorded, ‘the farcical question whether it was in order for [Livia] to marry –’ that is, remarry ‘– while pregnant’.11
That learned fraternity obligingly ruled that so long as there was no doubt of the child’s paternity – that Drusus was Nero’s baby – no obstacles existed to Octavian and Livia’s marriage. Cato-like, Nero himself erected no barriers and divorced his wife with every semblance of good grace. Brutally, Octavian ensured Scribonia’s compliance: he divorced her the very day she gave birth. Her baby was a daughter, Julia, as it happened the only child Octavian would have. As a reward for the agonies of childbirth, Scribonia’s treatment appears harsh. Octavian skimped on explanations. ‘I could not bear the way she nagged at me,’ he offered, in Suetonius’s account.12 Even in Rome, where divorce was an easy matter, his pretext was flimsy.
Octavian’s unflinching assumption of another man’s wife betrays the ruthless steadfastness of purpose that would afterwards win him leadership of the Roman world. At no point are his actions uncharacteristic, save in his spontaneous falling in love with the nineteen-year-old Livia. Even this is an inference on our part, though the inference of love is corroborated by the length and relative tranquillity of the marriage begun under such irregular circumstances. If, then, Octavian behaved in character, what of Livia? – what of Nero?
It is difficult to accept at face value Velleius Paterculus’s assessment of Nero as ‘a man of noble character and high intellectual training’.13 The willingness with which Nero apparently ceded a beautiful, intelligent and previously loyal and faithful wife to the political opponent who had plundered his patrimony and only narrowly missed robbing him of his life surely stretches the broadest definition of nobility of character. Was Nero’s concern with Livia’s happiness? Had the experience of exile vanquished his Claudian pride and fighting spirit? Was he simply apathetic? Or, more probably, did Nero anticipate personal gain from Octavian’s plan? If so, he demonstrated his customary flawed judgement, poor testament to that high intellectual training of Velleius’s eulogy. With Marcus dead, it was Nero Octavian asked for Livia’s hand. Symbolically, Nero played the father’s role and gave Livia away at her wedding to Octavian, a formal re-enactment of a less elegant truth. Soon after Drusus’s birth, in accordance with accepted practice, Octavian returned the newborn baby to Nero. He made an official record of his action and of the child’s paternity. It was the only restitution of property Livia’s second husband ever made to her first. The years following Livia’s remarriage did not witness a revival in Nero’s chequered career.
So what of Livia? How are we to explain her behaviour in embracing her proven enemy with such alacrity? Can we explain it? Did she act on the impulse of the moment, swayed by love or desire, or approach with calculation a premeditated goal? Perhaps she anticipated benefits from marriage to Octavian which outweighed both the unorthodoxy of her conduct and her nicer scruples. Although Octavian’s position was still not assured, Livia could not have failed to recognize what form those benefits would take: material security, political sponsorship for her son Tiberius and restored prestige for the Claudii. Fifteen years later, the poet Horace published his first three books of Odes. He described Livia as ‘unico gaudens…marito’ – ‘rejoicing in her unparalleled husband’14 – a neat compliment that lends itself to alternative construction: a wife whose very joy lies in her husband’s distinction.
Characteristically, Tacitus suggested that Livia may have been a willing victim of Octavian’s abduction. In Roman terms this was grounds for neither scandal nor blame. Cicero records the story of a woman called Tutia. Far from following where she was led, as in Livia’s case, Tutia sought to exercise control over her private life and herself proposed to Cicero’s son Quintus. Tutia was not only already married, though on the brink of divorce, but older than Quintus, who was twenty-two. In recording her conduct, Cicero imputes no disgrace or unseemliness to his son’s pursuer, only interest in the unusual incident.15 Tacitus’s treatment of Livia is less benign. But Tacitus is not to be trusted where Livia is concerned. Or is he?
Chapter 9
‘An eagle flew by’
Today tall pine trees flank one side of the remains of a villa that once belonged to Livia. They screen from view the encroaching suburb and the tarmac scar of a modern Italian motorway visible at the bottom of the steep hill. Underfoot, their resinous cones are stickily aromatic. Louder than the background murmur of the road is the all-pervasive chatter of cicadas. Little survives of Livia’s villa above knee height. But its floor-plan, clearly discernible, remains impressive.
Here is the site of a small garden, partly embraced by the house. Beyond, traces of a grand terrace once formally planted have fallen victim to the farming methods of succeeding centuries. Despite losses, both areas have yielded up to excavation earthenware pots punctured with holes for drainage. The ollae perforatae were used by Roman gardeners for bringing on specimens prior to planting out. Here, in just such pots, Livia grew laurel bushes. Here too she raised broods of white chickens from which, two thousand years ago, the villa took its name. Pliny called Livia’s villa Ad Gallinas, ‘The Poultry’. It stood close to the ninth stone marker on the Via Flaminia, the road that led northwest from Rome to the Adriatic.1 In the vicinity of the ancient Etrurian city of Veii, it once enjoyed long views across the Tiber valley. Today it is within sight of the unlovely Roman satellite town of Prima Porta.
It was more than a love of husbandry that guided Livia’s hand in the matter of laurels and chicken-keeping. We have no reason to attribute to her the countrywoman’s instinct for tending and growing. Although she would later be noted for her fondness for gardening and commissioned for the summer dining room of her villa a garden-inspired mural that remains one of the highlights of Roman art, her childhood – typical of ancient Rome – had been essentially urban.
At Ad Gallinas, both chickens and laurels were the result of a portent, one of those uncanny, apparently ‘natural’ signs used by Romans to take the temperature of the times. Suetonius places the portent at the beginning of Livia’s marriage to Octavian: ‘As Livia was returning to her home at Veii…an eagle flew by and dropped into her lap a white pullet which it had just pounced upon. Noticing a laurel twig in its beak, she decided to keep the pullet for breeding and to plant the twig.’2
Evidently this unusual windfall did not frighten Livia, who recognized it, Cassius Dio tells us unsurprisingly, as ‘a sign of no small moment’.3 She understood it as a promise of good fortune and took steps to harness the promised boon. The twig took root. So luxuriant was its growth that in years to come five successive emperors of Rome – the entire Julio-Claudian dynasty of rulers – cut from The Poultry’s laurels the stems t
hey wore twisted into triumphal wreaths. In defiance of a Roman belief that white chickens were sterile4 – the grounds for Juvenal’s description of fortune’s favourite as ‘the son of a white hen’ – the plummeting portent produced a brood of pale chicks.
We must decide for ourselves the truth of this curious incident. Ancient writers accepted its veracity and, like Livia, interpreted it positively. If it did happen, it must have been a source of comfort to Livia. At the time of her wedding to Octavian, the omens had been less benign. Fire destroyed the hut of Romulus, one of Rome’s most sacred sites. Across the city reports circulated of the anger of the Great Mother, that deity whose statue Claudia Quinta had miraculously liberated from the sandbanks of Ostia. Dio notes that olive oil sprouted from the banks of the Tiber. In the Forum, palm trees sprang up from nowhere.5 As superstitious as her new husband – to whom Suetonius attributed ‘absolute faith in…premonitory signs’6 – and, like him, conscious of the singular circumstances of their marriage, Livia gave credence to such ‘ominous’ happenings. Better by half that this youthful aristocratic wife and mother should cultivate laurel groves and white poultry, symbols of rulership and good luck.
Livia was sixteen when she gave birth to her first child in November 42 BC. Her pregnancy had been marked by a degree of anxiety concerning the baby’s sex. We do not know Nero’s thoughts in the matter. Suetonius tells us that ‘Livia had tried various means of foretelling whether her child would be male or female.’7 There is no suggestion that she did this at Nero’s prompting. Presumably the anxiety was her own. She had taken too much to heart the lessons of an aristocratic childhood, with its emphasis on the discrepancy in the relative values of male and female. Whether she had learnt this from Marcus and Alfidia, from the all-male cult of the atria’s armaria or from precepts of Claudian history – the memory of Clodia and her incestuous sisters shamefully recent – we will never know. If Livia had surmised that the interests of a family were better served by sons, few under the Republic would have challenged her. Roman history furnished examples of sons inspired and exalted by their noble mothers’ lofty birth. Plutarch records that Livia’s contemporary, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, son of Sulla the dictator, was honoured as a child by his playmates not on account of his father’s repute but the prestige of his mother, the aristocratic Caecilia Metella.8 Such instances offered pause for thought to the scion of a famously proud family on the brink of motherhood.
Livia need not have worried. Her fate, like Lady Macbeth’s, was to bring forth boy children only. She took an egg from the nest of a broody hen. Depending on the source consulted, she warmed the egg in her hands or against her breast. Either way, she was assiduous in her efforts not to let the egg cool, passing it among her slaves and waiting women. In this way she succeeded in hatching the egg. The chick was a cock, complete with a handsome comb.9 Clearly – and correctly – the portent foretold a healthy baby boy. Livia’s reaction to Tiberius’s birth is not recorded. In the light of her desire for a male heir of the Claudii so strong that it drove her to primitive acts of clairvoyance, we may draw our own conclusions.
Among Livia’s contemporaries, maternal ambition would occupy a central place in her mythology. Rome’s curtailment of female aspiration was stringent. Public life presented few roles for women. The historian Livy quoted a senatorial debate in which a tribune called Valerius claimed that, in compensation for the glittering prizes women might not possess, they were permitted purple and gold fabrics and splendid embroidery.10 Elsewhere Livy attributed female ostentation in the matter of dress to their exclusion from male sources of prestige: political offices, priesthoods, triumphs and spoils of war.11 With caveats, society was happy to sanction a patrician mother’s legitimate ambition for her son.
In Livia’s case, it is possible that motherhood unleashed latent ambitions which were simply a facet of her Claudian inheritance. In the light of subsequent events – or the version of events the sources bequeath us, which we should approach with caution – her concern over the sex of her first child looks like an early warning sign. A woman’s son can become his stepfather’s principal heir without skulduggery on the part of his mother. When the prize is as great as the throne of Rome, only a mother of exemplary virtue would not dare to dream. Over time, her determined championing of Tiberius notwithstanding, official propaganda would seek to present Livia as just such a mother.
In 42 BC the Roman Republic had not yet been dismantled. A determined mother might plan the consulship, even in exceptional circumstances a dictatorship, for her son, but no further. No evidence survives to suggest that Livia was unhappy with her lot at that time. Married to the husband of her father’s choice, a man who shared her own family distinction, she would soon give birth to that son whose sex she had taken pains to divine. At the same time, Nero, like Marcus before him, won election to the praetorship.
This was the life foretold for Livia not in any hatched egg or falling pullet but the accretions of family exempla displayed in Marcus’s atrium. So much can change in three years. By the time of Livia’s return to Rome in the summer of 39, Nero was no longer realistically a vehicle for his wife’s hopes. Henceforth her ambition must fasten on Tiberius – just as Cornelia, celebrated mother of the Gracchi, and Julius Caesar’s mother Aurelia had channelled their hopes through their sons. If Nero’s poor record blighted Tiberius’s prospects, Livia must look elsewhere for the champion her son required. The man who had killed her father and robbed her of the resources that ought to have been hers by inheritance and marriage was an unlikely guardian angel. But in 39 BC, Livia could lift her eyes no higher than Octavian.
Octavian pursued his quarry with ardour. The speed of his assault on both Livia’s affections and her marriage inspired a sardonic response in his fellow Triumvir Mark Antony. It may also have provided the grounds for Tacitus’s subsequent assertion that Livia’s removal from Nero’s house took the form of an ‘abduction’. Inevitably, given Octavian’s prominence, his breakneck courtship spilled over into the public arena. For the remainder of their married lives, Octavian and Livia would work hard to kick over the traces of so noisy a beginning. It was not by accident that Livia later came to acquire the honorary status of univira, the Roman ‘one-man woman’. Official amnesia in relation to her first marriage effectively denied the possibility of youthful improprieties. In the short term, Octavian and Livia were preoccupied with the consummation – on a number of levels – of their desire. Before her marriage on 17 January 38 BC it is likely that Livia had already become Octavian’s mistress. In this capacity, setting the pattern for the remainder of their lives together, she appears to have exerted an influence over him that was more than physical. A disgruntled Scribonia certainly thought so.
Octavian celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday on 23 September 39 BC. He marked the month of his birthday (if not the date itself) with a lavish celebration. Dio tells us that he held a ‘magnificent entertainment’ for friends, and at the same time ordered ‘at public expense’ a festival for the citizens of Rome.12 The occasion for this munificence was not in fact his birthday but a traditional Roman rite of passage.
Roman portraiture of the late Republic includes almost no examples of likenesses of young men.13 The Republic accorded social and political significance to age, and art reflected this bent. Minimum-age qualifications applied to the magistracies of state: thirty for the quaestorship, forty-two for the consulship. One result of this career clockwatching was the emphasis placed on young men’s progress towards political eligibility. The final stage on that journey was a ritualized first shave, in which the beard clippings were dedicated either to one of the gods or to an ancestor (distinctions between the two frequently blurring in the minds of young Roman noblemen). It was known as the ‘depositio barbae’. Although individual celebrations varied, the depositio usually took place around the time of a man’s twentieth birthday. The epitaph of Laetilius Gallus, a decurion’s son, who lived ‘twenty years, seven months and seven days’, explicitly s
tates, ‘I bore an unshaven beard when I met my death.’14 Clearly, the celebration had been in Gallus’s contemplation. His failure to attain this last condition of official maturity adds to the poignancy of his early death.
In Octavian’s case, postponement arose from preoccupation with affairs of state. He spent the months preceding his twentieth birthday locked in deadly combat with Mark Antony’s troops at Mutina. Within weeks of his birthday, recent hostilities briefly consigned to history, Octavian found himself joint ruler of Rome. Given his extreme youth, his membership of the Triumvirate overturned Republican regulations on the proper age for political office. As a marker of readiness for a senatorial career, the depositio barbae had become irrelevant to the leapfrogging Octavian. Postponement had the further happy outcome of allowing what by all accounts was a somewhat weedy, yellowish beard additional time to grow. The change in Octavian’s status between the ages of twenty and twenty-four also enabled him to translate a conventional rite of passage into a city-wide spectacle. His purpose, according to rumour, was to impress Livia.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 9
