This was the settlement for which Livia traded complicity with her father’s killer. To Octavian she gave the political blessing of her unrivalled Republican ancestry. To Nero, in accordance with Roman divorce custom, she gave her children. Tiberius was three years old, Drusus a matter of days, when both returned to live in their father’s house. Even if we believe the sources’ appraisal of the austerity of Livia’s nature, it was a high price for a mother to pay.
Octavian was short in stature. Erring on the side of flattery, his freedman, Julius Marathus, estimated his height at five feet seven inches. Despite this, Suetonius records him as handsomely proportioned, to the extent that only the proximity of someone taller exposed his shortness. His complexion was somewhere between dark and fair and his hair yellowish in colour and slightly curly. Like many naturally good-looking people, he was careless of his appearance. He was, however, proud of his eyes. Although Pliny the Elder claimed that his eyes were like those of a horse and that he became irritated if people stared at them too closely,11 Suetonius offers a different account. ‘Augustus’s eyes were clear and bright, and he liked to believe that they shone with a sort of divine radiance: it gave him profound pleasure if anyone at whom he glanced keenly dropped his head as though dazzled by looking into the sun.’12
Livia was not dazzled by that divine radiance, not in the summer of 39 BC nor through the fifty-two years of her marriage to Octavian. A woman of intelligence and education, she did not imbue with god-like powers the man responsible for the death of her father, the fugitive discomforts of her marriage to Nero and her surrender of her children. That would happen later, when Octavian was dead and the stability of Livia’s position required his deification. Then she willingly gave a reward of a million sesterces to Numerius Atticus, the senator and former praetor who claimed to have witnessed the emperor’s ascent to heaven ‘in the same way, as tradition has it, as occurred in the case of Proculus and Romulus’, as Cassius Dio records.13 At the end of her life, Livia would find herself the priestess of her deified husband’s cult. Even then, we should be wary of assuming that she believed in the rites she professed. She had lived too long in Rome and understood too well the machinations of the city’s politics. It was knowledge she acquired early, probably during her marriage to Nero, with its unexpected reversals and vicissitudes. Livia did not drop her head before Octavian’s glance. She recognized the value of his suit as surely as she apprehended her own value to him. For an instant, footsore in Rome, her parents dead, her husband’s future uncertain, she was perhaps bewitched.
Chapter 11
‘No magic chant will make you a mother’
It was not lead poisoning which brought about the fall of the Roman Empire. Scientists have disproved dinosaur-extinction-style theories, popular in some quarters, that lead pipes in aqueducts weakened Rome’s lifeblood or that the measures taken by Romans to sweeten and preserve wine led to a diminished sperm count in men and a rise in premature and stillbirths among women. Up to a point Romans recognized lead’s hazards. In Livia’s lifetime, Vitruvius cautioned against the dangers of lead piping. ‘Water conducted through [terracotta] pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system…Water therefore should on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.’1 Pliny is among several authors who describe reducing unfermented grape juice in lead or lead-lined vessels in order to create a sugar-rich must to add to wine either as a preservative or to mask sourness. Since Romans drank wine diluted with water, it seems improbable that the quantities of lead leached in the reducing process, when imbibed, would prove sufficient to contribute to widespread poisoning or a decline in the birthrate.
At the time of her marriage to Octavian, Livia was weeks short of her twentieth birthday and the mother of two healthy children. The timing of her marriage ceremony three days after Drusus’s birth places an upper limit on Livia’s required recovery period after labour, at least in that instance. It is reasonable to infer that, at this point in her life, Livia gave birth easily, despite the physical rigours of the early months of her pregnancy, which overlapped with the close of her period of exile, and the heightened emotions of her burgeoning affair with Octavian. For his part, Octavian, less than five years his new wife’s senior, had recently become a father for the first time with the birth in 39 of his daughter Julia. In both cases the couple’s youth and proven fertility were grounds for hope that together they would shortly have more children. This surely was the meaning of the Prima Porta portent months after their marriage: that ‘sterile’ white chicken had not only confounded Roman certainties by producing its brood of white chicks, but the twig of laurel held in its beak clearly symbolized the future authority of the couple’s offspring.
The likelihood of children must have coloured the thoughts of both Livia and Octavian; in Octavian’s case, it is impossible to state with accuracy the point at which his plans for Rome became explicitly dynastic. Livia and Octavian’s marriage predates Octavian’s assumption of absolute power. Since he had probably been contemplating sovereignty of this nature for some time, it is likely that he had considered its long-term implications and requirements, notably an heir. But Livia would conceive only once in the fifty-two years of her second marriage. That pregnancy terminated in stillbirth.
Livia’s failure to have children by Octavian is central to her history. Her reputation for scheming, ambition and ultimately murder all pivot on the manner in which she discharged her role as mother. Did she overstep acceptable boundaries? In the absence of children from her second marriage, Livia’s maternal ambitions – which, as we have seen, Rome was prepared to consider a legitimate outlet for female aspiration – focused on her sons by her marriage to Nero, Tiberius and Drusus. But Octavian’s covert decision in essence to create a hereditary monarchy would theoretically exclude his stepsons. First in the line of succession were Octavian’s biological heirs. At a stroke Livia’s legitimate grounds for ambition vanished. Only Julia’s children, or those of Livia’s sister-in-law Octavia, could inherit Octavian’s position on the basis of blood kinship. Livia’s hopes were unfounded – not motherlove but her own lust for power. That one of Livia’s sons did indeed succeed her husband was all the proof of Livia’s guilt a writer like Tacitus needed. Livia had exceeded herself: she had employed treachery, deceit and possibly worse to achieve her ends. In Tacitus’s hands Livia is above all mother and stepmother, a mother whose perverse nature defiles that relationship of purity and trust, a stepmother of fairytale malevolence. In each case, the ultimate victim was Rome. ‘Livia the mother was a curse to the state; Livia the stepmother was a curse to the house of the Caesars.’2
Virtually all the surviving sources postdate Tiberius’s accession. The ancient writers work backwards from that fact to arrange arguably unrelated events in Livia’s life and that of Octavian’s family into a neat narrative of maternal scheming. This retrospective reading eventually provides the source of Robert Graves’s Livia, villainess of I, Claudius, and Sian Phillips’s powerful television portrayal of 1976. Through misuse of hindsight, ancient historians bequeathed to posterity not the image of a goddess of the Roman pantheon, to which Livia was entitled, but a caricature of feminine ruthlessness which remains current despite repeated debunking by classicists and scholars. Cassius Dio described the Prima Porta portent as one which gave pleasure to Livia and proved that she ‘was destined to hold in her lap even Caesar’s power and to dominate him in everything’. The statement is one calculated to strike a chill into Roman readers’ hearts. ‘Other people,’ he hastens to explain, did not share her pleasure, but ‘were greatly disturbed…by this’.3 He does not, of course, provide a source for his assertion either of Livia’s pleasure or the displeasure of those nameless other people. It is enough that he has cast doubt on Livia’s good intentions.
Children were central to the Roma
n concept of marriage. A second-century funerary inscription to a ‘Lady Panthia’, discovered in Pergamum, commends a wife for the bearing and rearing of children: ‘You bore me children completely like myself; you cared for your bridegroom and your children; you guided straight the runner of life in our home.’4 We have seen that men like Hortensius chose wives with a proven track record of successful childbearing – as indeed Octavian may have done. Childlessness in marriage, by contrast, was a potential source of acrimony. In an extreme example, when Scipio Aemilianus was unexpectedly discovered dead in 129 BC, contemporaries suspected suicide or the dark hand of his wife – ‘Sempronia…who was not loved by him because she was ugly and barren,’ as Appian recorded.5 If Appian is trustworthy, Scipio paid a high price for his insensitivity over Sempronia’s failure to conceive.
Romans assumed as a matter of course that the responsibility for infertility lay with the wife. This is the explanation for a document known as the ‘laudatio Turiae’, probably from the early Christian period of the Empire.6 The funeral oration of a husband for his wife, it records the wife’s certainty that she is to blame for the couple’s childlessness, and her subsequent sacrifice.
You did not believe you could be fertile and were disconsolate to see me without children; you did not wish me by continuing my marriage to you to give up hope of having children, and to be on that account unhappy, so you proposed divorce, so that you would vacate the house and turn it over to a woman more fertile…and that you would henceforth render me the services and devotion of a sister or mother-in-law.7
In Turia’s case, this selfless offer enrages her devoted husband, who refuses to countenance it. A husband who took a different line, though apparently without animosity, was the dictator Sulla. In the generation before Livia’s birth, Plutarch tells us, Sulla divorced his third wife Cloelia for her failure to bear children, but did so ‘honourably and with words of praise, to which he added gifts’.8 Within days Sulla married for a fourth time. His new bride was the high-born Caecilia Metella, widow of the leader of the Senate Aemilius Scaurus, a union clearly for political ends. The speed of his remarriage, we read, notwithstanding his professed reasons for divorce, led to suspicions that he had accused Cloelia unfairly – further lustre for the blameless divorcee’s posterity.
There are no reports of Octavian contemplating divorce from Livia, although there is strong evidence to doubt his fidelity to her. He apparently resisted apportioning to her blame for their childlessness – on the Turia principle – and did not, like Sulla, use that misfortune as a pretext to enter a more convenient marriage. Nor do we learn that, like Scipio Aemilianus and Sempronia, Octavian and Livia’s failure to have children created ill feeling between them, even though we know, apparently from Livia herself, that Octavian felt little fondness for Tiberius and adopted him as his heir only with reluctance. Their marriage was of even tenor and long duration. If it arose from pragmatism, such considerations clearly became a habit that suited both well.
We cannot unravel the degree of Livia’s regret over her childlessness with Octavian. No details survive concerning the unsuccessful outcome of her third pregnancy save its happening, recorded by Suetonius and Pliny. Today the effects of miscarriage and stillbirth are recognized as emotional as well as physical. In marrying Octavian, Livia had accepted the inevitability of surrendering her existing children for the duration of their father’s life. That she was prepared to make this sacrifice need not indicate that she was a woman of hardened sensibilities who would not have suffered as a result of an unsuccessful pregnancy: marriage with Octavian left her no other choice. There may have been serious physical consequences attaching to this pregnancy – the likeliest explanation for Livia’s failure to conceive again – but we can assume from the sources’ silence that these were not recognized at the time. This suggests that any complications which did arise were internal and therefore not apparent to contemporary doctors or, presumably, to Livia and Octavian.
Hindsight sharpens our appreciation of how different Livia’s reputation might have been had Octavian’s successor not been his stepson Tiberius. Had Livia given birth to Octavian’s son, she would at least have escaped the stereotype of the wicked stepmother, prevalent in Greek and Roman theatre and literature, which, as we will see, proved grist to her detractors’ mills. But it is dangerous to assume that Livia’s sinister reputation for ambition, scheming and murder rests solely on the tenuous kinship of Octavian and Tiberius. Republican sentiments survived in imperial Rome, particularly among the educated classes who supplied the empire with its annalists and historians. Such men opposed as a matter of course the principle of hereditary monarchy which Octavian evolved. Their dislike of Livia arose in part from her position as wife of one emperor and mother of a second. It encompassed mistrust of any connection between women and the exercise of ‘male’ power. Livia enjoyed through two generations proximity to the centre of power, with all the potential influence that entailed. That the second emperor was not the son of the first hardly mattered. It merely provided historians with another negative tag with which to taunt Livia – that of step-mother, since the price of Tiberius’s victory was the demise of Octavian’s adopted sons and heirs, Livia’s stepchildren. Criticized for his curmudgeonliness towards his mother following his accession, Tiberius, himself of Republican birth through both his parents, perhaps understood the Roman mentality too well. His refusal to allow the Senate to add to his titles that of ‘Son of Julia’, as Livia was then known, may have been intended in part to spare his mother as much as himself. Public admissions of Livia’s influence were to the benefit of neither Livia herself nor the institution into which her family had evolved.
The Romans inherited Greek thought on human conception. As early as the beginning of the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton had suggested possible explanations for the mechanisms of new life.9 Alcmaeon’s theory that both parents produced semen, itself formed from blood, was challenged by Aristotle in the following century: Aristotle ascribed semen to the father, menstrual fluid to the mother. In the last century of the Roman Republic, the poet Lucretius offered a synthesis of current debate. His ‘two-seed’ theory, by which the semen of both mother and father mingled in the newborn child, kept faith with Alcmaeon’s. Lucretius’s chief interest was the transmission of hereditary characteristics, a suitably Roman concern given patrician conviction of the importance of high birth and family history.10 ‘It may seem strange that female offspring is engendered from the father’s seed, and the mother’s body gives birth to males. The fact is that the embryo is always composed of atoms from both sources, only it derives more than half from the parent which it more closely resembles. This is noticeable in either case, whether the child’s origin is predominantly male or female.’11 What the poet failed to offer women like Livia, Cloelia or Sempronia was practical information on how to optimize chances of conception. The curious puzzle of how a female body gives birth to a male child – if she ever thought of it – may have struck Livia as insignificant in the years following the stillbirth of her baby. It is more likely that she reached a conclusion like that of Pliny, whose Natural History is one of our sources for Livia’s stillbirth. Pliny cited Livia and Octavian as an example of a couple who, despite producing children from other unions, are sterile together.12 It was simply a biological anomaly, proof of the extent to which science remained unfathomable.
Suetonius tells us that once Octavian had achieved mastery of Rome, his domestic policy included reviving ‘certain obsolescent rites and appointments: the augury of the Goddess Safety, the office of Flamen Dialis [a priesthood of Jupiter], the Lupercalian Festival, the Secular Games and the Cross-Roads Festival’.13
The ‘Lupercalian Festival’ had not long been in abeyance. It was at the Lupercalia of 44 BC, one month before the Ides of March, that Julius Caesar, to the acclamation of large crowds, twice refused Mark Antony’s offer of a royal diadem.
Of ancient origin, the festival consisted of
a race through the streets of Rome. The competitors were two colleges of priests, the Luperci Quintilii and the Fabii. Both made sacrifices in the Lupercal cave at the southwest corner of the Palatine Hill, a sacred enclosure described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus as overarched by a grove of oak trees and watered by springs that welled up between the rocks.14 The competing teams made a circuit of the Palatine then returned to the Lupercal. Naked save for loincloths, they carried goatskin thongs with which they struck out at bystanders. Women were their chosen target.
This baffling exercise, which enjoyed notable popularity with the man on the street, operated on a number of levels. It was concerned with the purification of the community of Rome; it became a rite of passage for young men; and, as Ovid outlines in the Fasti, it was connected with female fertility.15 Women struck by the thongs of the Luperci would become mothers in the tenth month after the festival; those already pregnant, at the touch of the priests’ lash, were guaranteed a safe and easy labour. ‘Bride, what do you wait for? No potent drugs, no prayers,/No magic chant will make you a mother./Endure the lash of the fertile hand; your father-in-law/Will soon have the grandsire’s name he covets.’16
We cannot specify the attraction of the Lupercalia for Octavian. It is likely that he responded to its association with Rome’s legendary founders, Romulus and Remus. Perhaps he hoped to remind Romans of the refusal by his adopted father Caesar of a royal crown weeks before his assassination. In his domestic policy Octavian repeatedly took measures to increase the birthrate, particularly among the upper classes. Possibly, the man whose superstitions extended to carrying an amulet of seal-skin to ward off thunder felt that in endorsing this sacred celebration of fertility, he would win the gods’ favour for Livia. It was not to be.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 11
