At a certain point, Romans received the chance to decide for themselves. Historians have suggested that Octavian continued his adopted father’s work of beautifying the Temple of Venus Genetrix at the heart of the Forum Julium. Beside Caesar’s golden statue of Cleopatra, Octavian erected images of his own.26 In order to do so he issued an edict that revolutionized the position of certain women in Rome. The temple images – bust portraits carved from life – represented Livia and Octavia. Octavian’s edict legalizing such portraits transformed their lives for ever.
Neither history nor Octavian forgot Cleopatra’s dramatic suicide in 30 BC. Two years later, in 28 BC, Octavian took measures to forbid the building of temples within Rome’s city boundaries. The proscription was not universal. It applied only to temples to the goddess Isis. The Egyptian deity so closely associated with Cleopatra, who dressed as Isis and mined the goddess’s iconography in her official portraiture, had latterly become an object of popular worship across the Greek-speaking world and even in Rome itself.27
Among Romans, Isis’s cult was chiefly confined to women, possibly as a result of its association with childbirth. Octavian felt no sympathy on that account. Venus Genetrix, progenitor of the Julii, was also associated with childbirth. Her worship had not been tainted by Cleopatra. Nor did it encompass the sentiments Diodorus Sicilus attributed to followers of Isis: that queens were more honoured than kings and that wives ruled husbands. In Oxyrhynchus in Egypt in the second century, a hymn to Isis went a step further, praising the goddess who ‘made the power of women equal to that of men’.28 Had he lived to hear it, it would have been a step too far for Octavian. When seven years had passed, he extended his ban into the country surrounding Rome. Cleopatra’s conqueror was determined to stamp out every expression of her cult. On the surface, equal power for women would play no part in Livia’s long and happy second marriage.
Chapter 13
Sacrosanct
Cato the Censor did not seek to curry favour with women. In 195 BC he expressed his unwavering support for an unpopular Punic War era decree which restricted women’s finery, including their allowance of gold jewellery, measured by weight. A movement was afoot in Rome for reform of the Oppian Law. The impetus came not solely from senatorial ranks, but from women themselves. ‘Will you give the reins to their intractable nature, and then expect that they themselves should set bounds to their licentiousness, and without your interference?’ Cato demanded of the Senate in a well-known speech preserved by Livy. ‘Recollect all the institutions respecting the sex, by which our forefathers restrained their profligacy and subjected them to their husbands; and yet, even with the help of all these restrictions, they can scarcely be kept within bounds.’1
Extreme to modern ears, Cato’s was an orthodox Roman outlook, although not on that occasion the prevailing view: the Oppian Law was repealed in 195, despite the vigour of Cato’s rhetoric. Cato opposed on principle every intrusion of women into Roman public life and in this he espoused majority thinking. ‘What sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women’s husbands?’ he suggested asking the woman who clamoured for the law’s repeal. ‘Could not each have made the same request to her husband at home?…Although if females would let their modesty confine them within the limits of their own rights, it did not become you, even at home, to concern yourselves about any laws that might be passed or repealed here.’2
It is not to be expected that Cato would embrace the suggestion of public commemoration for women. Indeed Pliny notes, ‘There are still extant some declamations by Cato, during his censorship, against the practice of erecting statues of women in the Roman provinces.’3 As with repeal of the Oppian Law, however, Cato found himself confronted by significant opposition. In spite of his ‘declamations’, Pliny tells us, ‘he could not prevent these statues being erected.’ Unfortunately for Cato, in time women’s statues would despoil not only the provinces but even Rome.
In the Temple of Semo Sancus on the Quirinal Hill survived a bronze image that probably depicted the early-sixth-century Roman consort, Tanaquil. Sources mention an equestrian statue of Cloelia, an escapee hostage to Lars Porsenna at the birth of the Republic. The actions of Claudia Quinta at Ostium were also rewarded with a statue, as we have seen.4 But only on one occasion in the history of the Republic do the sources record a public statue in Rome being formally voted to a woman. The woman in question was Cornelia of the Gracchi and the commission originated not with the Senate but with the people of Rome.5 Once completed, the seated bronze figure conformed to Roman prejudices. Its inscription – ‘Cornelia, daughter of Africanus, mother of the Gracchi’ – asserted Cornelia’s status as an appendage of great men.6 In a symbolic gesture, Livia’s husband afterwards restored Cornelia’s statue. He also moved it. Its new resting place was a portico built by his sister Octavia, where it was displayed among images of ideal mothers.7 Hereafter its context fixed its meaning, while Octavian hijacked for Octavia the virtuous associations of Cornelia’s posterity.
Throughout his domestic policy-making, Octavian took pains to emphasize the importance of family and family roles. Social legislation, aimed at Rome’s moral regeneration, afterwards formed a cornerstone of his premiership. It was one of which he was sufficiently proud to list it prominently in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (‘The Acts of the Divine Augustus’), that record of his achievements he bequeathed to be engraved on bronze tablets outside his mausoleum.8
The object of Augustus’s moral regeneration was a return to a rosy-hued Republican past of rectitude and exemplary female behaviour. Octavian incorporated Cornelia of the Gracchi, a Republican popular heroine, within his vision of virtuous Roman womanhood, and expected from Livia lifelong lip service to the same vision. Conveniently Octavian overlooked rumours of Cornelia’s involvement alongside her daughter Sempronia in the murder of the latter’s unsympathetic husband Scipio Aemilianus – just as his propagandists would be encouraged to overlook aspects of Livia’s history, notably her first marriage and hasty divorce. It may be significant that Pliny’s only comments on the restored statue are to reiterate Cornelia’s relationship to her father and sons, and to state without elaboration, ‘She is represented in a sitting position, and the statue is remarkable for having no straps to the shoes.’9 It was not the only time in history when footwear was a safer topic than murder.
Over the next half-century, Octavian repeatedly exploited visual imagery to convey political philosophy. In 35 BC, Cassius Dio tells us, he evolved a proposal concerning his wife and sister. It was a revolutionary innovation for Rome, as startling as the commission of a statue of Cornelia once had been. Livia and Octavia were to receive tribunician sacrosanctity. This legal protection had previously been reserved for elected officials, the Tribunes of the People, and was potentially more powerful even than that usually restricted to Rome’s highest-ranking women, the Vestal Virgins.10 The implications of that award were far-reaching, as we shall see. It was accompanied by a grant of honours. Included in those honours was the right – unique among Roman women both before and after – to be represented in public statues.
Whether by triumviral edict or vote of the Senate, the grant was made law. Close on its heels, Octavian displayed in the Temple of Venus Genetrix new marble images of his wife and sister. A decade had passed since Caesar’s installation of Cleopatra’s golden statue. The trio of female portraits, representing the best-known women of the contemporary Roman world, existed in curious juxtaposition. The Triumvirs’ battle for mastery of Rome was waged even in sacred precincts.
From the moment Mark Antony and Octavia set sail for Greece in 39 BC, missing Livia and Octavian’s wedding the following January, Livia found herself in effect married to Rome’s first citizen. Octavian was not, as he would later become, formally first among Rome’s equals. He shared for the moment triumviral status with Mark Antony and Lepidus, both his senior in years and, in the political life of the Republic, in experience too. But it w
as Octavian, overlord of the western provinces and of Rome itself, and resident in Rome full time, who became the visible face of the triple dictatorship. Mark Antony would never return to the city again. Whatever the future held, Livia must have seen clearly that she was allying herself with a man of singular prominence.
She may well have anticipated influence from her new position. Although Rome excluded women from its political life, it muddied distinctions between public and private spheres. Both overlapped in the morning salutatio, which, as we have seen, took place behind open aristocratic doors; and at senatorial dinner parties, at which in Rome, unlike in Greece, women were present and active participants. A daughter of Rome’s ruling class, Livia would have understood by instinct as well as precedent the opportunities for interesting herself in Octavian’s public life presented by these incursions into her domestic realm. The role she conceived must have been of a behind-the-scenes variety – she was surely too shrewd to aspire to the impropriety of Fulvia or Sempronia – but such hidden influence amounted nevertheless to an approximation to power. The power in question, as Livia also understood, derived exclusively from her marriage to Octavian. It did not take account of her birth status as a scion of the Claudii.
It is impossible to know whether Livia was always ambitious or if her ambition grew incrementally with Octavian’s success. Her concern that her first child by Nero be a boy may indicate that she had always expected to participate in politics, albeit indirectly. Up to a point Rome condoned just such a concealed, ancillary role for its patrician matrons. That role would materialize only in the event that Nero, Tiberius or both achieved high senatorial office. Access to this ill-defined possibility was arguably Livia’s true patrimony, the legacy of her family background and of the nature of the marriage her father arranged for her to a fellow Claudian and a politician. Livia cannot have anticipated any independent part in Roman public life. Perhaps the wilderness years with Nero strengthened latent resolve. Certainly she appeared to perceive readily the implications for herself of Octavian’s rising star and, over time, his unprecedented authority. If she welcomed such a prospect, as we reasonably assume she did, she also glimpsed from the outset the overwhelming importance of remaining married to Octavian.
By 35 BC, when Octavian decided to confer sacrosanctity within his family, he had been married to Livia for three years. Initially, his decision concerned only his sister Octavia and excluded Livia. Octavia was doubly bound to Octavian: not only was she his sister, an indivisible connection, she was married to his fellow Triumvir Mark Antony and, as a consequence, was an important tool in Octavian’s power-broking. The foundations of Livia’s position, by contrast, were less solid. Only love and a keen appreciation of her Republican credentials bound Octavian to Livia. Both ties were soluble. Octavian’s track record of broken engagements yielded stony ground for hope that love would survive long term; there were other daughters of the nobility whose fathers would countenance so advantageous a match. Livia needed a means of insuring her marriage. A child was the obvious answer. So far she had either failed to conceive or given birth only to a stillborn baby. She needed to prove her indispensability to Octavian.
If the sources are correct, the events of 35 BC demonstrate Livia’s shrewdness and mettle. Octavian’s decision to bestow sacrosanctity on Octavia was motivated by a desire to provide himself with formal grounds for war against Mark Antony. Direct benefits to Octavia were only indirectly her brother’s purpose. With Octavia sacred, indignities committed against her by her errant husband in the course of a flaunting relationship with Cleopatra became attacks on the Roman state. At a stroke the decree of Octavia’s sacredness transformed the fact of Mark Antony’s infidelity, and each child arising from that infidelity, into a transgression against Rome and Octavian’s Government. Such transgressions might justly be punishable through war. 11 By elevating Octavia, Octavian created the means of eliminating his fellow Triumvir and a route to absolute power. He did so, apparently, constitutionally.
The outcome would prove entirely satisfactory to Octavian. It bestowed on Octavia, too, a degree of public prominence and independence unheard of in the Republic. But for Livia it promised cold comfort – until she suggested that Octavian also include her in the grant. Dio, our only source here, is unclear about how it became law; nor does he speculate on the process by which a policy devised for Octavia came to include Livia.
Octavian made his move at a moment of strength, in the aftermath of victory in Pannonia, south of the Danube. In Dio’s account, he deferred the military triumph voted to him, ‘but granted to Octavia and Livia statues, the right of administering their own affairs without a guardian, and the same security and inviolability as the tribunes enjoyed’.12 Dio’s order is probably significant: Octavia first, then Livia; the grant of statues more startling than financial independence or official protection.
In the long term it was Livia who would reap greater benefits from the events of 35 BC. Octavian’s award of sacrosanctity thrust both women into the public arena. Public representation implied a public role, sacredness suggested a step towards more than human status, and the freedom to administer their affairs facilitated a degree of private wealth that was in itself a form of independence and a public platform. Sacrosanctity became the pedestal on which Livia elevated herself above the ordinary status of political wife. Irrespective of Octavian’s short-term intentions, it gave a green light to Livia’s ambitions. It sowed the first seeds of her later deification and removed barriers to her amassing a fortune which would come to rival those of Hellenistic consorts, even Cleopatra herself. Before Octavian was declared emperor, his wife took her first steps towards becoming empress.
It is clear that Octavian’s aims were practical and propagandist. Octavia was popular and widely admired. Octavian had enabled her – without provocative action on the part of either brother or sister – to provide him with cause for war against Mark Antony. In addition, since he recognized that awards to the wives of the tribunes would be interpreted as a celebration specifically of their wifely virtues – the only form of public celebration save motherhood available to women – Octavian was able to embark by stealth on that policy of moral reform he would later pursue so doggedly. For the remainder of their lives, Octavia and especially Livia existed in the public arena as personifications of an Octavian concept of exemplary womanhood. Their good behaviour, celebrated in Rome’s streets and temples, contrasted with the conduct of Cleopatra, for whom sexual loyalty had resembled a question of political necessity. It also offered an ongoing rebuke to Mark Antony, in the face of whose affronts Octavia remained serene and apparently devoted, upheld by the love of her brother and the comfort of the sister-in-law whose portrait stood alongside her own.13
At the beginning of the third century AD, the ancient Church writer Tertullian turned his thoughts to women’s hairdressing. ‘All these wasted pains on arranging your hair – what contribution can this make to your salvation? Why can you not give your hair a rest? One minute you are building it up, the next you are letting it down – raising it one moment, stretching it the next.’14 Two centuries before Tertullian, Livia grasped clearly the surprising contribution a hairstyle could make.
The conclusion was one suggested to her by her sister-in-law. Octavia, as we have seen, adopted the nodus hairstyle before Livia. Her face, was longer than Livia’s, so it is unlikely that her inspiration was Ovid, with his frivolous advocacy of the nodus as a corrective to rounded features. If Octavia’s choice was influenced by poetry, it was by default – Ovid’s very failure to find a classical precedent for the nodus was perhaps the deciding factor.15 The absence of earlier Hellenistic nodi meant the hairstyle could be branded as native, distinctively Roman. Octavia’s choice – apparently a simple, private matter of how to dress her hair – became a statement of nationalism flung in the face of Cleopatra. As such, it could not be ignored by Livia.
There remains the possibility that it was Octavian who ‘discovered’ the Repu
blican nodus. It is inconceivable that, having bestowed upon his sister and wife the unprecedented right to public statues, Octavian then took no interest in the form of those statues. Octavian idealized the Republic even as he overturned it. He also idealized his sister Octavia, to whom he remained devoted until her death in 11 BC. There were persuasive reasons for Octavia and Livia to share this unfussy, Roman hairstyle that contrasted so powerfully with the towering, jewel-studded, melon-shaped styles sported by Cleopatra. In seeming to resemble Octavia physically, was it not possible that Livia would acquire in the eye of the viewer something of Octavia’s character and her blameless reputation? Resemblances between the two women could only benefit Livia. They suggested a closer kinship between the sisters-in-law, which appealed to the dynastically-minded Octavian. In due course, he may have wished for an heir of his own body to succeed him. Livia’s failure to conceive denied him that possibility. But if Livia and Octavia were as closely related as their similarly coiffed portraits suggested, a child of Octavia’s became the next best thing. Did the choice of a hairstyle let Livia off the hook? The politics of survival is seldom so simple, but the point should not be discounted. It liberated Livia to prove her indispensability to Octavian through means other than procreation.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 13
