He probably succeeded. Livia cannot have been long returned to Rome. She was wrestling with adjustment to her new downgraded status in the city of her birth and weary after three years of struggle and danger. Ill at ease in her marriage to Nero, she was also beginning to feel her pregnancy. If she was impressed, it was not by the ceremony of Octavian’s shaving or the consecration of the shorn beard in a decorative casket. It was the underlying statement of status and power embodied in the scale of the accompanying celebrations which must have struck Livia forcibly. Octavian, too, was pleased with the outcome of this particular piece of theatre. He did not allow his beard to re-grow but, according to Dio, ‘kept his chin smooth afterwards…for he was already beginning to be enamoured of Livia’.15 Livia may have been five years younger than her would-be lover, but Octavian recognized that in order to succeed, his suit required the appearance of maturity. This was an acknowledgement not simply of Livia’s status as a married woman with children, but presumably of her intelligence and gravitas.
Public opinion applauded Octavian’s gift of a festival for the people. If we can trust the satirist Juvenal, writing a century later, it may also at this point have extended a partial amnesty to Octavian for the brutalities of his rise to power. Juvenal tells us that the depositio barbae traditionally drew a line under former misdeeds.16 On the brink of abducting another man’s pregnant wife, Octavian surely appreciated this measure of whitewash. The amnesty would be of short duration.
Mark Antony’s malignity is the likeliest cause for a private fancy-dress dinner party becoming public knowledge. Despite Octavian having married his favourite sister to his colleague in 40 BC, relations between the two leading Triumvirs were less than happy. Neither Mark Antony nor his wife Octavia would attend Livia’s wedding in January 38. Rivals for pre-eminence in Rome, Mark Antony and Octavian were locked into a cycle of point-scoring. Octavian’s misguided ‘Feast of the Divine Twelve’ was too striking an error of judgement for his colleague to ignore.
As with so much of our evidence, doubts attach to this banquet in which, at a time of food shortages in Rome, six male and six female guests each dressed the part of a god or goddess. It may have taken place in 39, 38 or 36. The Treaty of Misenum notwithstanding, in each year outbreaks of famine plagued the capital. Suetonius records that, on the following morning, taunts of ‘The Gods have gobbled all the grain!’ showed the way the popular winds were blowing.17 An anonymous lampoon circulated. Antony wrote ‘a spiteful letter’, now lost, naming all twelve participants. Octavian took the part of Apollo and was castigated as ‘impious’ for his pains, while all twelve guests were rumoured to have indulged in injudicious-sounding ‘novel adulteries of the gods’.18 Livia was almost certainly present. She may have played Juno to Nero’s Jupiter. The banquet may or may not have taken place following the depositio barbae: Apollo was traditionally depicted as clean-shaven. In 36, as Dio notes, the Senate voted Octavian the right to hold an annual banquet in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. It is this which probably explains the final flourish of the lampoon quoted by Suetonius: ‘Jupiter himself had flown from his golden throne.’19
The poet Martial commended a slave called Glaucia. ‘Not an ordinary household slave nor a child of the profit-making slave market’, Glaucia was a ‘pet’ or ‘darling’, a decorative, talkative child slave whose role was partly ornamental, partly for amusement – ‘prattling boys, such as the women keep about them for their amusement’, as Cassius Dio describes them.20 The Romans called such slaves ‘deliciae’.21 Deliciae occupied a special place in the household and in their owners’ affections. Frequently naked, they were prized for their beauty and wit. Glaucia, Martial tells us, ‘died to the grief of all Rome, the short-lived delight of his loving patron’.22 Livia kept deliciae, as did Octavian. At a dinner party described by Dio as Livia and Octavian’s marriage feast, a pert delicia upbraided Livia for reclining beside Octavian when her ‘husband’ – indicating Nero, who was also present – reclined on a different couch.
Dio’s account is proof of the extent to which Nero was involved in Livia’s remarriage, present not only at the wedding itself but at the celebrations attached to it. Hot on the heels of the scandal of the Feast of the Divine Twelve, it may also offer some explanation for Livia’s subsequent resolution to present herself as a model of rectitude. The beginning of her relationship with Octavian was marred by censure and scandal. This was not the prominence her Claudian pride demanded. Perhaps Livia made a decision that marriage to Octavian justified these short-term slights. In the long term, her determination to confound her detractors by espousing an unassailable appearance of virtue would become one of the defining impulses of her marriage.
Happily for Livia, her path would traverse the smooth as well as the rough. For Octavian, Suetonius tells us, she ‘remained the one woman whom he truly loved until his death’.23 She repaid that love by careful tending of the grove of laurels at her villa near Veii, sign and substance of imperial kingship. All Octavian’s heirs wore Livia’s laurel garlands. All, unexpectedly, traced their right to rule from Livia.
Chapter 10
The price of comfort
The marble colonnades of the Forum of Augustus sheltered the story of Rome. Portrait busts of the city’s heroes – winners of military triumphs from Aeneas to the present day – lined their covered walkways. Among them were the men Octavian counted as family.
These were not the Octavii. The portraits commemorated the Julians, Octavian’s family by adoption. They included the deified Julius Caesar, those kings of Alba Longa whose calf-length crimson leather boots Caesar had worn on ceremonial occasions, and Rome’s legendary founders Romulus and Aeneas. Their presence provided a counterweight to the busts of eminent Republicans, each mounted and inscribed with his achievements, with whom Octavian could not claim kinship.
Twenty years before building began, Octavian had vowed to construct a temple to Mars Ultor, Rome’s avenging god of war. The occasion was the battle of Philippi, killing fields of the Roman Republic. Two decades later, after acquiring a suitable site at the cost of 100 million sesterces, Octavian fulfilled his promise. The new temple stood at the heart of a forum which celebrated antecedents of the same Republican nobles vanquished in the wake of Octavian’s vow. By commemorating under a single roof Republican and Julian heroes, Octavian sought in marble and bronze to align himself with Rome’s oldest aristocracy and that system of government he had chosen to reject.
There was no truth in the association. Nobility in Rome was a technical measure, conferred by attainment of senatorial rank. Technically Octavian was of noble stock, since his father, Gaius Octavius, had risen to the praetorship. Just as a summer demands more than a single swallow, an aristocratic atrium could not be furnished with only one ancestor mask. Beneath the surface lay a different story. The visual propaganda of the Forum of Augustus, grandiloquent and misleading, demonstrates the desire felt by the most powerful man in the world to shrug off the outsider status of his birth. The Roman ‘family’ of the Forum’s busts was an exercise in historical revisionism, Octavian’s attempted truce with the nobles of the Republic and with Rome’s past. Throughout the early years of his pre-eminence, Octavian struggled to win acceptance by the former ruling class. This was surely in his mind when, in 38 BC, he married one of them. In the same year, the appointment to the consulship of Livia’s fellow Claudian, Appius Claudius Pulcher, confirmed that at least one aristocratic family of the Republic was prepared to do business with Octavian’s upstart regime.
Love-match or otherwise, the marriage of Octavian and Livia was a bargain to which both contributed and from which both anticipated returns. The price Livia paid for comfort and security was symbolic. To Octavian’s present, she contributed a family history described by Velleius as ‘most noble’, and a past, as we have seen, of notable distinction. As Marcus had discovered, five hundred years of Claudian and Livii Drusan office-holders were insufficient to quash the parvenu Octavian. In embracing her father
’s killer, Livia lent his regime authority and status. As when Julia married Marius, gratitude was Octavian’s part. He was Napoleon, of unknown Corsican stock, to Livia’s Habsburg Marie Louise. It is impossible that either overlooked this aspect of their marriage, even if it was not their primary motivation, which in both cases is questionable. In 33 BC, alongside Livia’s son Tiberius, they sponsored funeral games in honour of Nero, who had recently died; also celebrated in the games was Livia’s father Marcus. It was Octavian who benefited from what looks like an act of atonement but was also a parade of Livia’s Republican nobility. He broadcast his connection by marriage to a political force which, though in theory defeated, unnerved him through its continuing influence over the people of Rome and its mistrust of his own constitutionally innovatory rule.
‘Those who contemplate marriage,’ Musonius Rufus wrote, the following century, ‘ought to have regard neither for family, whether one be of high-born parents, nor for wealth, whether on either side there be great possessions, nor for physical traits, whether one or the other have beauty. For neither wealth, nor beauty, nor high birth is effective in promoting partnership of interest or sympathy…’1 The philosopher had overlooked the recent example of Rome’s first couple.
In 70 BC a wealthy equestrian from a town called Velitrae was elected to the quaestorship and became the first member of his family to join the Senate. Velleius Paterculus described him as ‘a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and extremely rich’. 2 His name was Gaius Octavius. He was a Roman citizen, though not of Roman origin. His son would become Rome’s first emperor; his father was a provincial moneylender.
Like Livia’s maternal grandparents, the Octavii enjoyed a degree of local prominence, presumably on account of their wealth. There can be no other explanation for Gaius’s second marriage. At about the time of his first magistracy, Gaius divorced his wife, a local woman called Ancharia, and engaged himself to another local woman. On this occasion, his choice fell on a bride of unassailably patrician maternal connections. Atia was the daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus, like Gaius a man of uncertain origin, whom Mark Antony would later dismiss as the son of an African baker and perfume-maker. This possibility notwithstanding, Atia’s mother was none other than Julius Caesar’s sister, Julia, an illustrious connection which endowed Atia with all the attractions she needed in Gaius’s eyes. Julia herself may not have embraced this choice of son-in-law. Perhaps Balbus took pity on the novus homo and urged the virtue of his splendid bank account. By dint of determination and usury’s full coffers, Gaius Octavius progressed from middle-class provincialism to office-holding Roman nobility with elevated family connections. His two children by Atia, Octavian and his elder sister Octavia, found themselves before their twentieth birthdays great-nephew and great-niece of Rome’s first deified dictator.
Gaius Octavius the younger, known as Octavian, was born early in the morning of 23 September 63 BC, a little more than four years before his future wife Livia. Like Livia, he was born in Rome on the Palatine Hill, in a house which Suetonius calls Ox Heads. Just as Livia travelled between Rome, Fundi and Pisenum, Octavian spent much of his childhood at the house of his Velitraean grandfather on the edge of the Alban Hills southeast of Rome. The house would later become an early tourist attraction. Suetonius records within it ‘a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry…still shown and described as Augustus’s nursery’3 he also notes a shrine in Rome that marked the site of Octavian’s birth. By Suetonius’s time, at the beginning of the second century AD, both had become destinations for pilgrims. In truth, Octavian’s childhood lacked the distinction of Livia’s aristocratic upbringing.
This was not the fault of the busy and opportunistic Gaius Octavius. Before his death in 58, Octavian’s father had held both the position of praetor and a provincial governorship. If senatorial status was new to the Octavii, Gaius treated his immediate family to a lucrative baptism by fire. On his death, his four-year-old son went to live with his maternal grandmother, Julia – the point at which Rome’s two future autocrats may first have met. Eight years later, promoting the connection of which his father had been so proud as well as demonstrating a degree of statesmanlike precocity, Octavian delivered Julia’s funeral oration. Through Atia’s remarriage, the same period witnessed the accession to the consulship, Rome’s grandest office, of Octavian’s new stepfather Philippus, a vacillating and over-cautious aristocrat descended from the Macedonian royal family. Six years after Philippus, Octavia’s husband Gaius Claudius Marcellus also held the consulship and devoted himself to opposition to his wife’s great-uncle, Caesar. As consuls, both men were rewarded with what St John Chrysostom later described as ‘the splendid trappings…the cheers…in the city, the acclamations in the Hippodrome and the flatteries of the spectators’,4 not to mention the public attendance by lictors each carrying the fasces of office – outward manifestations of rank which must have thrilled a teenager of Rome’s profoundly hierarchical society. Despite the paucity of imagines in Gaius Octavius’s atrium, his son acquired early on a close personal acquaintance with the workings of the Roman state. Octavian saw at first hand the power and allure of high office and the complex allegiances of the Senate House.
Octavian’s childhood, like Livia’s, took place against a background of political instability. As his great-uncle would demonstrate in revolutionary fashion, it was an age of possibilities. By the time Octavian and Caesar met again, around Octavian’s fifteenth birthday, the young man from nowhere was old enough to understand in part the extent of those possibilities, even if Caesar’s ultimate goal remained hidden. By then it must also have been obvious to Octavian that success in Rome demanded more than political acumen and intelligence. In his memoirs, Suetonius tells us, ‘he merely [recorded] that he came of a rich old equestrian family, and that his father had been the first Octavian to enter the Senate.’5 We do not know when Octavian learnt that this was not enough.
Livia was not the twenty-four-year-old Octavian’s first wife. On the contrary, he had been engaged three times previously and married at least once. Livia’s predecessors had each commended themselves to his bosom not through claims of love or attraction but for motives that were explicitly political. Not for Octavian Tennyson’s ‘A simple maiden in her flower is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.’
Servilia was the daughter of Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus. Eminent by birth, connected by marriage to several of Caesar’s assassins, she nevertheless exercised a fleeting hold over Octavian. Within months their engagement lapsed. In Servilia’s place, Octavian made his first alliance with the Claudii. He engaged himself to Claudia, the daughter of Publius Clodius Pulcher, that patrician-plebeian crowd-pleaser whose boisterous exploits enflamed Rome during Livia’s infancy. Briefly disentangled from the arms of his high-living sisters, Clodius had married Fulvia, a battleaxe of a woman who may not have deserved the criticism ancient historians heaped upon her. Out of the frying pan into the fire, Fulvia married Mark Antony. Octavian’s match with Claudia, Fulvia’s daughter and Mark Antony’s stepdaughter, sealed the alliance of the two leading Triumvirs in 43 BC. Neither alliance nor betrothal lasted. Claudia’s extreme youth prevented consummation in the short term, while Fulvia’s overt hostility to her would-be son-in-law, witnessed in the siege of Perusia, did little to commend the virtue of waiting. In the meantime, Octavian’s priorities changed. By the year 40 BC his fears focused on Sextus Pompey, all-powerful on nearby Sicily. He disentangled himself from the still virgin Claudia and married Sextus’s aunt Scribonia, a veteran of two previous marriages and a woman who understood unrosily the political aspect of upper-class marriage in Rome. After Scribonia, Livia.
There is no reason to doubt Octavian’s love for Livia. Cassius Dio attributes to him an endorsement of marriage which presupposes happiness on Octavian’s part. ‘For is there anything better than a wife who is chaste, domestic, a good housekeeper, a rearer of children; one to gladden you in health, to tend you in sickness; to be your partner in
good fortune, to console you in misfortune; to restrain the mad passion of youth and to temper the unseasonable harshness of old age?’6 It is also the case, however, that Octavian’s track record suggests he would have married Livia without love or physical attraction. Where his father led, Octavian followed, repeatedly exploiting the family connections marriage created in order to enhance his status and bolster the political alliance of the moment. It was simply the Roman way. Why else would Musonius Rufus counsel against marriage for worldly ends, other than the prevalence of exactly this sort of marriage? Happily, Octavian’s final victim was not a blushing ingénue. Even at nineteen, Livia understood as clearly as her new husband the philosophy of their union. It need not preclude love, happiness or fulfilment.
Julius Caesar’s will, in which he named Octavian as his principal heir, gives striking evidence of the immensity of his wealth. Plutarch, in his life of Caesar, states that ‘he had given every Roman citizen a considerable gift’7 – a bequest of 300 sesterces. Of the residue of his estate, following what may have amounted to 300,000 such payments, two beneficiaries each received an eighth. Finally, three-quarters of what still remained passed to Octavian,8 a sum estimated at sixty-six million sesterces. To this Octavian added the fortunes of his father and grandfather, large in scale whether or not we choose to believe their origins in moneylending. Octavian owned in addition a number of houses and villas, including property at Lanuvium, Palestrina and Tivoli. Over time his wealth increased exponentially. Cassius Dio claimed that he received more than a billion sesterces in legacies from friends, and bequeathed to his own heirs a sum in the region of 150 million sesterces.9 Such was the scale of Octavian’s personal fortune that, on four occasions, he may have made payments to the state treasury from the imperial privy purse.10
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