Four years earlier, not only Livia’s world but that of the whole Roman people had changed dramatically. On 13 January 27 BC Octavian – granted the prefix ‘imperator’ since his victory over Mark Antony at Actium – received at a meeting of the Senate the title he would retain until his death: ‘Augustus’, ‘revered one’. The change of name was symbolic.
Did Octavian discuss with Livia the speech he made at the Senate House that day? Prior to Livia’s remarriage, Scribonia had complained of the excessive power she exercised over Octavian in her role of mistress: her protest was couched in language suggestive of political rather than erotic or amatory influence.6 Scribonia’s disdain for a rival notwithstanding, this seems to point to a habit on Livia’s part of expressing her opinions freely to Octavian and, on the latter’s part, of listening to and absorbing those opinions. There is no reason to assume that marriage dulled this habit or that Livia’s viewpoint declined in cogency or forcefulness. Surely Livia knew something of what was in her husband’s mind on that epoch-making January day. It was an undertaking of considerable daring.
Careful to assert the strength of his position, Octavian confounded his listeners by rejecting the very building blocks on which that strength rested. Cassius Dio offers a lengthy transcript of this oratorical master-stroke. ‘The fact that it is in my power to rule over you for life is evident to you all. Every one of the rival factions has been justly tried and extinguished…the disposition both of yourselves and of the people leaves no doubt that you wish to have me at your head. Yet for all that I shall lead you no longer, and nobody will be able to say that all the actions of my career to date have been undertaken for the sake of winning supreme power. On the contrary, I lay down my office in its entirety and return to you all authority absolutely.’7 Despite inspiring mixed feelings among his listeners, this nimble piece of casuistry stimulated the very response we assume Octavian wanted. ‘They frequently broke in with shouts, pleading for monarchical government and bringing forward every argument in its favour, until finally they compelled him, as it seemed, to accept autocratic powers.’8
A grateful Senate gave back with interest the authority Octavian had returned to it. Octavian found himself still consul of Rome, an appointment he shared in 27 with Marcus Agrippa. In addition, he received for ten years a large overseas province that consisted of Gaul, Spain, Syria, Egypt, Cilicia and Cyprus. This in turn guaranteed his power militarily, since these were the countries in which most of Rome’s legions were stationed. As well as the name Augustus, he adopted the resolutely unmonarchical-sounding title of ‘leading citizen’, ‘princeps’. The designation had formerly been used by Pompey and Crassus, those members of the First Triumvirate to whom, at the time of Livia’s birth, Marcus gave his support. As if on cue, the Tiber burst its banks. Flooding in Rome’s low-lying districts enabled small boats to navigate precincts of the city. On this occasion, the soothsayers maintained, the portent was positive, portending power to the new princeps.
Octavian made much of his ‘restoration’ of the Republic, with its ziggurat of magistracies, each assiduously defined as to its duties, stepping-stones to the coveted consulship. But there could no longer be any doubt that, after nearly five centuries, the Republic was dead. Married to its slayer was the daughter of two families who had distinguished themselves throughout its history by the consistency of their service: Livia of the Claudii, granddaughter by adoption of Marcus Livius Drusus. Her father had died in the name of the Republic, her husband forfeited his wealth and position. We will never know whether Livia’s pride in Octavian’s achievement contained traces of ambivalence. Perhaps as a child she had dreamed of marrying a man as distinguished as the ancestors whose wax images lined her father’s atrium, those myriad Claudian consuls, dictators and censors, recipients of triumphs and ovations. She had done exactly that, though not in a manner either she or Marcus could have foretold. Octavian had overarched them all, with no thought of their dutiful examples. ‘With universal consent I was in complete control of affairs,’ he recorded in his funerary inscription. ‘After this time I excelled all in authority.’9 Vaunting in tone, it was no less than the truth.
Over time, Octavian’s changed status would affect every member of his extended family. Republican politics, as we have seen, struggled to separate public and private spheres of interest, the politician from the individual. In 27 BC, alongside increased authority and a new name, the Senate voted smaller, symbolic awards to Octavian. The doorposts of his Palatine house were wreathed with bay leaves and a civic crown was set above his door. Such signs brought the public world of the Senate House, with its hierarchy of offices, into Octavian’s private realm. Octavian’s doorposts were Livia’s doorposts; she, too, passed daily beneath the civic crown. What did such symbols mean to her? On the surface, she shared neither Octavian’s change of name nor a feminized equivalent of his ‘princeps’ title. Senatorial decrees in this respect took no account of Livia. She had been the wife of the Triumvir Octavian, and was now the wife of the princeps Augustus. Since constitutionally her position did not exist, that position continued unchanged.
It was not the Senate but Augustus who in time made Livia Empress. Augustus’s domestic agenda aimed at no less than a moral revolution in Rome. Ultimately unpopular and unsuccessful, it was a policy which required exempla. Augustus provided them from within his own family. Wife and mother, Livia became an archetype. Imperial propaganda emphasized her fulfilment of the twin roles. She was outstanding in her virtue, fidelity and love, the feminine attributes of pietas, fides and concordia. That very outstandingness constituted her public persona; it required no bay-leaf garland or symbolic crown.
On that January day in 27 BC Augustus concealed from the Senate, though perhaps not from Livia, aspects of his long-term philosophy. In private, the settlement probably served to coalesce plans he had nurtured for several years. He owed his position, he recognized, in part to his relationship to Julius Caesar. In the wake of the Ides of March, as an eighteen-year-old virtual novus homo without authority, he had been forced to capitalize on his status as son of the deified dictator – the provocation for a taunt of Mark Antony’s about the boy who owed everything to a name. Latterly he had ceased to assert this once critical relationship. In order to lend credence to his claim of ‘restoring’ the Republic, Augustus needed to distance himself from his adopted father. Caesar’s ambitions for an eastern-style monarchy in Rome were too recent, too well known and still too contentious. But experience had shown Augustus the value of Julian blood – the loyalty that persisted among the people, the army and Caesarian clients – and the potential of such an inheritance. After 27 BC Augustus’s position consisted of legal powers, honorific grants and personal authority. As contained within the umbrella term princeps, all were specific to him and the immediate circumstances of their award; they lacked the constitutional precedents by which such a package could be transmitted intact to a second generation. Undaunted, Augustus began to consider the possibility of perpetuating his principate. His thoughts, more circumspect than those of Caesar, moved closer to the creation of a dynasty. Such schemes could not fail to implicate Livia, his wife.
To date, Livia’s second marriage had lasted more than a decade. Except on one occasion it had failed to result in conception. Although both Livia and Augustus were still of childbearing age, the likelihood of them producing a male heir together must have appeared increasingly slight. Augustus faced two alternatives: either he must divorce Livia in favour of a wife who could provide the heirs she had failed to provide, or he must fall back on that pool of cousins and stepcousins who thronged his Palatine house in the care of his wife and sister. The sources, we know, show no evidence of Augustus contemplating the first course, perhaps our strongest proof of his love for Livia. He approached the second alternative with decision. His choice fell on Marcellus.
In Velleius’s account of Marcellus’s death, written fifty years after the event, Augustus’s intentions towards his nephew were w
idely understood. ‘People thought,’ he tells us, ‘that, if anything should happen to Caesar, Marcellus would be his successor in power…He was, we are told, a young man of noble qualities, cheerful in mind and disposition, and equal to the station for which he was being reared.’10 Velleius does not examine in what way the inexperienced Marcellus was equal to Augustus’s recently elevated station, but is clear that this was indeed the role for which he was being prepared. In fact his qualification for the principate consisted chiefly of his kinship with his uncle and their shared blood link to Julius Caesar, Marcellus’s great-great-uncle through his mother Octavia. Alone it was enough. By 23 BC Augustus had shown Marcellus repeated clear indications of his favour. The Senate, too, had begun to work on Marcellus’s behalf, including among honours voted to Augustus the previous year a waiving in the young man’s case of the age qualifications for senatorial office.11 The process had started as long ago as the beginning of the decade, when Marcellus was thirteen.
If Roman loyalty depended on public magnificence – Juvenal’s bread and circuses – 29 BC must have proved a happy year. Octavian (as he still was) celebrated a triple triumph. The triumph was Rome’s grandest public spectacle, a carefully choreographed parade through the city’s streets of the spoils of Roman victory. It was a demonstration of militarism and nationhood, of conquest and rejoicing, of the relationship between an expansionist people and their warlike gods, of the winning maleness of Rome. The triumph pitted the glitter of booty against the pathos of Rome’s prisoners. Its route began on the broad expanse of the Campus Martius.
In 29 BC Octavian’s triple triumph, held over three days, wore the aspect of a family affair. At least five of that youthful Palatine household wound their way through the Velabrum into the Forum, up the steep curves of the Sacra Via to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.12 Two were children of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, splendidly named after the sun and the moon, found themselves exposed to Roman gaze in the third triumph, a celebration of the conquest of Egypt described by Dio as surpassing all ‘in costliness and magnificence’.13 For public edification, they walked in the train of ‘an effigy of the dead Cleopatra upon a couch’, a brutal but undoubtedly powerful piece of street theatre. A more enviable fate belonged to the two Roman boys who rode the trace horses of Octavian’s chariot. They were Marcellus and Tiberius, respectively his nephew and elder stepson. Together they shared Octavian’s glory.
Their presence invited more than one interpretation. To those among the crowd who recognized the proud teenagers, Octavian’s choice was a memorable introduction of the younger generation of his family into Rome’s public arena. In the absence of sons of his own, the conquering Triumvir had chosen to accompany him these two from the gaggle of boys in his house. Their mothers must have read alternative meanings into this parade of family solidarity. For Livia, pleasure at Tiberius’s inclusion, in the absence of direct kinship with Octavian, was tempered by the knowledge that it was Marcellus, Octavian’s nearest male descendant, who occupied the place of greater honour: it was Marcellus who rode the right-hand trace-horse; Tiberius took the left. Given Rome’s emphasis on ties of blood and descent through a common male ancestor – so-called agnatic kinship – there was no surprise in this. Octavian’s triumph was also Octavia’s triumph. Widowed, she avoided marginalization through her relationships with her brother and now her son. It was perhaps a challenge to Claudian pride.
Even Dio’s account does not suggest that Livia had conceived a desire for Tiberius to succeed Octavian as early as 29 BC. Had she done so, she would have committed herself to a lengthy waiting game. In the event that Octavian had discussed with her his plans for succession, she deliberately – and uncharacteristically – set herself in opposition to his wishes. But there is no evidence of such a course on Livia’s part. Despite the vainglory of his triple triumph – laurels for Illyria, Actium and Egypt – Octavian had yet to achieve formalized mastery of Rome. That came in 27 BC, two years after he proclaimed on Roman streets the order of preference of his youthful family – Marcellus first, then Tiberius. In 29 BC Livia understood the implication; she may even have been involved with Octavian in his preparations for the triumph. Octavia understood it too. It was not Tiberius who, at the triumph’s climax, stood alongside Octavian in the new Senate House commissioned by Julius Caesar. There Octavian dedicated a statue of Victory looted at Tarentum, heaped with the spoils of Rome’s conquest of Egypt. Octavia’s triumph, unlike her brother’s, would be of short duration.
Marcellus, Seneca claimed afterwards, possessed ‘the certain hope of becoming emperor’.14 That hope is traceable to Octavian’s public preferment in the triumphs of 29 BC. It was kindled not only in the breast of Marcellus himself but that of his mother and, if Velleius’s carefully imprecise account can be trusted, in the minds of any number of Roman onlookers. Clearly Octavia the peace-maker, a model of wifely virtue, did not lack ambition for her son. Her response to Marcellus’s death, six years after Octavian’s symbolic declaration, was extreme. It enables us to contextualize that maternal ambition for which Livia was subsequently so robustly scorned – but of which we have so little real evidence – and offers proof of the degree of Octavia’s desire for a crown for her only son. It also invites questions. Was power for her son the ultimate aim of every patrician Roman mother? Does a throne invite ambitious scheming? ‘Throughout her entire life she never ceased to weep and sigh,’ Seneca relates, ‘[nor even allowed] herself to be distracted; concentrating on one thing alone, with her whole mind fixed on it, she remained all her life as she was at his funeral…regarding any cessation in weeping as a second bereavement. She refused to have a single portrait of her darling son and would not permit any mention of him.’15 Seneca claims that in the heat of her bereavement Octavia conceived a hatred for all other mothers. The chief focus of that loathing, we are to believe, was Livia – ‘as the good fortune once held out to [Octavia] seemed to have passed to [Livia’s] son’.16 Perhaps it was Seneca’s account which in turn shaped that of Cassius Dio. Both men wrote after the events they describe. Or perhaps Dio was influenced, as Seneca may have been, by the fact of Tiberius’s eventual succession to look backwards and find false conclusions. More than two hundred years had passed when the Greek historian recorded a rumour that Livia murdered Marcellus as a result of his preferment ‘for the succession before her sons’. It was not a rumour known to Tacitus, whose strongly anti-Livia account is more nearly contemporary.
Propertius’s lament for Marcellus places his death at the smart seaside resort of Baiae, at the western end of the Bay of Naples, where convalescents enjoyed sulphur baths in the natural hot springs and the Roman ton exploited the distance from the city to allow themselves a relaxation of the capital’s moral code.17 ‘Where the sea, barred from shadowy Lake Avernus, plays by Baiae’s steamy pools of water; where Misenus, trumpeter of Troy, lies in the sand, and the road built by Hercules’s effort sounds; there, where the cymbals clashed for the Theban god when he sought to favour the cities of men – but now, Baiae, hateful with this great crime, what hostile god exists in your waters? – there, burdened, Marcellus sank his head beneath Stygian waves, and now his spirit haunts your lake.’18
Temporarily, tragedy cast its blight over the easygoing seaside resort described by Martial as the ‘golden shore of happy Venus, pleasant gift of proud Nature’.19 Hedonism or simply the passage of time restored its customary indolence to the cluster of sea-facing hills. Gentle breezes stirred the leaves of the myrtle groves, spotted with luxury villas like the hills around Fundi. The sources do not record a visit by Livia to Baiae in the autumn of 23 BC, although outbreaks of plague in Rome and a series of troubling omens made this a sensible year to travel. They do not record her whereabouts at all. But there was something in the air in that year of portents and tragedy. A friend of Augustus, the novus homo Lucius Nonius Asprenas, stood trial in the princeps’s presence. The indictment brought against him was poiso
ning. Asprenas had given a lavish banquet for a hundred and thirty friends. All perished. In the event the accused was acquitted, although he forfeited his chances of the consulship.20
Chapter 17
‘Born of his sacred blood’
Intermittently Livia disappears from the sources. We know relatively little of her life in the years immediately following Augustus’s settlement of 27 BC. His goal achieved, Augustus chose to leave Rome. His departure – in Dio Cassius’s account prompted by plans to invade Britain1 – took him first to Gaul and afterwards to Spain, a round trip that kept Augustus away from Rome for three years. Disturbing reports told of revolts by Cantabrian and Asturian tribes in Spain’s ‘impregnable’ northwestern plains and the foothills of the Pyrenees.2 Augustus enjoyed limited success in subduing them. On this the final occasion when he acted as his own military commander, he took with him in his train his trace-horse riders of 29 BC, Marcellus and Tiberius.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 16
