Dio’s disdain notwithstanding, Livia doubtless derived significant pleasure from the achievements of her husband and elder son acting in concord. It is reasonable to assume that Tiberius’s part, but for the intervention of fate, would once have been played by Marcellus, as Livia must have known. Although Agrippa’s marriage to Julia could no longer be denied, Tiberius, Livia may have surmised, had shown himself in Armenia Major a worthy successor to his stepfather. Happily, the Roman people inclined to the opinion of the princeps and his wife rather than that of Cassius Dio: Augustus was afterwards honoured with a triumphal arch. Characteristically, Velleius Paterculus laments the paucity of Tiberius’s recompense: he received the insignia of a praetor, an office he was yet to attain, while sacrifices were offered to the gods.8 ‘For who can doubt that, when he had recovered Armenia, had placed over it a king upon whose head he had with his own hand set the mark of royalty, and had put in order the affairs of the east, he ought to have received an ovation?’9 It was perhaps an assessment shared by Livia.
Livia and Augustus’s eastern tour of the late 20s repeatedly overlapped with matters connected with Livia’s family. The couple travelled to Sparta and twice over-wintered in Samos. Both city and island shared Claudian connections. The former was the site of Livia and Nero’s final resting place on their eastward flight from Octavian in the dark years of the Civil War. It was from Sparta, driven there by the indifference of Mark Antony in Athens, that Livia had fled at night through a burning forest, charring her hair and dress, and endangering both her own life and that of the infant Tiberius. The reasons for her flight are lost. They probably had more to do with Nero than the Spartans. Twenty years later, Augustus rewarded the Peloponnesian city with a territorial grant, the Ionian island of Cythera. To commemorate Sparta’s previous hospitality, he attended a formal banquet.10 If Livia ever doubted the scale of the reversal of her fortunes effected by her marriage to Octavian in 38 BC, this return to Sparta under wholly altered conditions must have proved to her its magnitude. Perhaps too it offered pause for thought at that ‘whimsicality of fate’ which brought her back as the wife of the very man from whom previously she had fled.
The impression of fortunes reversed was surely reinforced by Livia’s visits to Samos. Twice on their eastern tour, Livia and Augustus enjoyed lengthy sojourns on the grape-growing island. During each visit, sources suggest, Livia asked Augustus to grant freedom to the islanders. On the first occasion, the princeps refused his wife’s request; his refusal survives in the letter which, unusually, he wrote to the Samians, explaining his decision. In the same letter he outlines the vigour of Livia’s efforts on their behalf.11 Perhaps Livia redoubled those efforts the following winter. Augustus yielded to entreaty and granted Samos freedom in either 20 or 19 BC. It is reasonable to assume that Livia again provided the driving force. Its explanation must lie in a client–patron relationship between Samos and either Marcus’s family or that of Marcus Livius Drusus. Inscriptions discovered on the island honour Livia’s parents, while statues of Livia found in the island’s large sanctuary of the goddess Hera, the Heraion, bear her family name ‘Drusilla’, seldom used by Livia following her marriage to Octavian-Augustus.12 The incident is illuminating. It highlights Livia’s influence and tenacity, and her willingness to request from Augustus favours for third parties, as well as her continuing loyalty to her immediate Claudian heritage. Although it demonstrates that Augustus’s compliance was far from certain, it indicates an approach to real power on Livia’s part. On Samos, as at Sparta, Livia must have been struck by the nature and potential of her position since Augustus’s settlement of 27 BC. Thanks to her husband’s respect for her good judgement, the once fugitive daughter of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus found it in her power to win freedom for the island clients of her proscribed father.
The ‘freedom’ of the assembly of twelve cities known as the Ionian League was of a different variety. The cities were granted by Rome the right to mint their own coinage. At some point during Livia and Augustus’s eastern tour, the maritime city of Teos, near Izmir in modern-day Turkey, issued coins commemorating the imperial couple. One such, probably Livia’s numismatic debut, minted between 21 and 19 BC, makes explicit reference to her divine status.13
It was a significant moment not only in Livia’s life but in the history of Rome’s imperial family. Deification was not an aspect of everyday political life in Rome. Although religion infiltrated the institutions of state, Republican constitutional mechanisms had sought to curtail the degree of power which could be vested in a single individual. By this means the Republic denied specific statesmen the ability to reach a position of excessive lionization. Rome’s gods, though frequently ‘human’ in behaviour and appearance, were not the embodiment either of deceased or living leaders. That was an eastern tendency, mistrusted by Rome, a characteristic of Hellenistic monarchy, with its associations of despotism and excess. Cleopatra, as we have seen, enjoyed divine status in Egypt, associated particularly with the Nile goddess Isis. In Rome, Julius Caesar had become a god. But despite graffiti slogans hailing him as such in his lifetime, Caesar, whom Republican Romans feared precisely on account of his inclinations towards eastern-style monarchy, had had to die to achieve immortal status. Not yet forty, Livia was very much alive. She was also, unlike Caesar, an unelected member of Rome’s ruling class, a woman, without official position or constitutional status.
Livia’s official deification remained sixty years away, effected posthumously during the reign of her grandson Claudius. The process which may have begun on a coin minted in distant Teos, issued at the time of Livia and Augustus’s visit to Rome’s eastern provinces, gathered momentum throughout Livia’s lifetime. As in every aspect of her life, however, Livia is unlikely to have been declared a goddess had Augustus not already become a god. The phenomenon of Augustus’s deification – discounting the award to Julius Caesar, an essentially unRoman occurrence – began in provincial centres. It arose out of the native and Hellenistic customs of the eastern empire and provided a template for the relationship between ruler and subject as traditionally understood in those areas.14 Deification was the ultimate trump card of eastern kings, the untouchable social apex of a hierarchical society. Typically, the ruler cults of the east embraced a king’s female relatives, and so it would prove with Augustus and Livia.15 Where Augustus led, Livia was able to follow. She lent strength to her cause through her association at home with carefully chosen Roman cults and, abroad, through such ‘god-like’ actions as bestowing freedom on an island or a gift of territory to a city.
The ten times married Herod did not have a talent for family harmony. Almost alone among his relatives, Salome remained constantly loyal to her difficult brother. Only once did she oppose Herod’s will – in the matter of her marriage. Such was the strength of her feeling on that occasion that Salome appealed to Livia, requesting that her Roman counterpart intercede for her with her brother. Livia demurred. She exercised circumspection in cases where interference in the internal politics of a client kingdom would be inferred at Rome, aware of the imperatives of Roman politics even where the interests of her friends were concerned. Rightly, she surmised that Salome was not a simple victim of thwarted romance, even if the Judaean princess herself did not realize as much.
A man called Syllaeus professed love for Salome. He was the senior minister or vizier of Obodas, ruler of the neighbouring Arab kingdom of Nabatea. Herod suspected Syllaeus of plotting to murder Obodas in order to become king of Nabatea himself. Syllaeus understood that any such action on his part would give rise to unease on the part of the Romans. Marriage to Salome was not a contract of love: in uniting Syllaeus and Herod as brothers-in-law, it promised to bind Nabatea to Judaea, the former sharing by association the latter’s high standing at Rome. Happy that the weak King Obodas continue to occupy the neighbouring throne, Herod quashed the romance without apparently issuing any veto to Salome. Instead he insisted that, in order to marry Salome, Syllaeus convert to Ju
daism. That this condition was impossible, he recognized: the Nabatean Arabs would not countenance a Jewish king. Syllaeus declined Herod’s condition. Lacking an alternative recourse, Salome appealed to Livia.16
Livia’s advice was to follow her brother’s wishes. We do not know how closely she was acquainted with the circumstances of Salome’s ‘romance’ or the extent to which Syllaeus’s cunning was public knowledge. But we know that the policy Livia advocated for Salome was one she had followed herself, however unwillingly, in the matter of Tiberius’s marriage. It is impossible that Livia drew pleasure from either of Julia’s marriages. Perhaps, in the case of Julia’s marriage to Agrippa, Livia went so far as to express her objections to Augustus. Her protests unavailing, she recognized the inadvisability of further complaint. Her role became one of waiting and trusting. It was the counsel she shared with Salome. That Salome accepted Livia’s advice in the long term – despite what we read of the vigour of her initial objections to Alexas, Herod’s alternative choice of spouse for his sister17 – is proved by the munificence of her testamentary bequest: no fewer than three cities of the kingdom of Judaea.
We cannot be certain of Livia’s motives in requesting from Augustus freedom for the islanders of Samos. Nor do we know if the princeps’s beneficence towards the city of Sparta arose at Livia’s prompting or simply by way of tribute to her. Family connections provided Livia with powerful incentives for desiring both events. Claudian clients were scattered across the ancient world. Her changing fortunes facilitated Livia’s vigilance and assistance towards those clients. Her role as Augustus’s wife brought her material gains like Salome’s bequest and presumably further clients of her own. As Augustus grew in power, Livia – freed from guardianship of her financial affairs as long ago as 35 BC – also won an empire.
Chapter 21
‘The man set apart by such an alliance would be enormously elevated’
In northwest Libya, on the Mediterranean coast, survive the ruins of the ancient city of Leptis Magna. Once a Phoenician settlement, Leptis Magna became one of the principal cities of the Roman province of Africa. It grew rich through trade, fat with the profits of slavery, gold and ivory. Its buildings and their embellishments reflect that wealth. In the Old Forum, in the oldest part of the city, archaeologists have discovered portraits and inscriptions relating to Rome’s imperial family in the early years of the first century. Among them is the only surviving portrait identified with certainty as Vipsania Agrippina.1 Carved from pale marble, broken at the tip of the nose, it shows a pleasant-looking woman of sombre expression, her heavy-set features closely assimilated to those of her father’s portrait corpus.
Since the sources are silent concerning Livia’s regard for her first daughter-in-law, we may infer a relationship that was at best affectionate, at worst tolerant. As we have seen in Seneca’s account of Octavia’s hatred for Livia, such silence did not survive even covert antipathy. Yet however cordial the feelings between Tiberius’s mother and his wife, Livia could not delude herself that Tiberius had made an important match. Vipsania’s invisibility in the portraiture of Augustus’s regime – surviving in a single isolated image in a city remote from Rome on the coast of North Africa – provides an accurate measure of her significance. The absence of portraits depicting Tiberius and his first wife – unless such images were destroyed following the couple’s divorce – demonstrates the finality of their exclusion from Augustus’s dynastic schemes.
Tiberius’s marriage to Vipsania, after an engagement of thirteen years, finally took place in 19 BC, the year Livia and Augustus returned from the eastern provinces. Augustus had regained his strength; he had reorganized the client kingdoms of Syria and Asia Minor; he had been received as a living god in territories where local ruler cults imbued kings with divinity. For her part, Livia had erased the ignominy of the past, her helter-skelter dash towards Greece in Nero’s train, fleeing the forces of the Triumvirs; she too had enjoyed intimations of divinity; she had savoured Augustus’s presence away from the crowded intimacy of the Palatine, where Octavia, Agrippa and Maecenas all exercised sway over the princeps. Augustus marked his homecoming, Cassius Dio tells us, by investing Tiberius with the rank of an ex-praetor and allowing Drusus, like Tiberius before him, ‘to stand for various offices five years earlier than was the practice’.2 Drusus was elected to the quaestorship for the following year and Tiberius married his child bride, the fourteen-year-old Vipsania. It was, in its way, a year of celebrations for Livia.
The extent to which we attribute to Livia at this point joyousness or otherwise – in the face of the blanket silence of the ancient commentators – depends on a broader conjecture about Livia’s plans for her sons. If we assume that Livia interpreted Julia’s marriage to Agrippa as representing an end to Tiberius’s eligibility for the succession, we might postulate a chilly satisfaction in Tiberius allying himself with the man who, after Augustus, was Rome’s leading citizen. It is also possible that by way of distraction Livia took pleasure in the promise of Drusus’s senatorial career. She may have chosen to overlook the five-year dispensation Drusus shared with Tiberius, and its memories of a greater award once granted to Marcellus. More than either of these responses, it seems likely that Livia’s thoughts focused on Julia.
Julia’s marriage to Agrippa had proceeded without Augustus and his wife, the second time the princeps had been absent from the wedding of his only daughter. Within a year, in 20 BC, the nineteen-year-old bride gave birth to the couple’s first child. In accordance with Augustus’s hopes, it was a boy. The first of three sons, he was named Gaius Caesar, an unambiguous statement of his grandfather’s aspirations for him. The year of Augustus’s return to Rome, Gaius was joined in the nursery by a sister, Julia, known to history as Julia the Younger.
It was, at the very least, a shadow on the face of the sun for Livia. While Julia remained childless, Tiberius as Agrippa’s son-in-law could hope to occupy the second stage of Augustus’s succession plans. This was the hierarchy Livia had inferred during Marcellus’s pre-eminence, Tiberius riding the symbolic left-hand trace-horse. With the birth of Gaius, Tiberius’s best hope became that of regent for the son of his stepsister following Agrippa’s death. In the eventuality of long life on the parts of Agrippa or Augustus, Tiberius would forfeit even that role. The sources tell us nothing of Livia’s response to the news.
Had she given up hope? A sour-tasting vignette suggests not. In the aftermath of victory at Actium, Octavian despatched two men to visit Cleopatra ‘and instructed them carefully what they should say and do’.3 Cassius Dio identifies the men as ‘Gaius Proculeius, a knight, and Epaphroditus, a freedman’.4 Granted an audience with the vanquished Egyptian queen, the men seized Cleopatra and ‘removed from her any means of ending her life’, before transferring her, a prisoner, to the monument in which she set about the task of embalming Mark Antony’s body. Although, as we know, Cleopatra subsequently outwitted her gaolers to achieve romantic immortality at the fangs of an asp, Octavian was pleased by their diligence. Clearly knight and Triumvir had a relationship of some trust. In his account of ‘the misfortunes of Augustus’, Pliny records momentary ‘desperation’ on Augustus’s part, ‘which caused him even to beg Proculeius to put him to death, when he was hard-pressed by the enemy in a naval engagement’.5 Proculeius’s non-cooperation in this instance contrasts with his service towards Cleopatra. Dio reports that Augustus afterwards held him ‘in the highest honour’.6
In 21 BC that honour did not suffice to persuade Augustus to marry his only daughter to Proculeius – as Tacitus’s Tiberius would later remind the ambitious equestrian Sejanus, when the latter aspired to the hand of his niece Livilla. ‘Augustus, you say, considered marrying his daughter to a knight. But he foresaw that the man set apart by such an alliance would be enormously elevated; and is it surprising, therefore, that those he had in mind were men like Gaius Proculeius, noted for their retiring abstention from public affairs?’7
Proculeius’s champion, it ha
s been suggested, was Livia.8 The reasons ascribed to her are cynical in the extreme. Proculeius did not enjoy good health. In pursuit of relief from his sufferings, he unwittingly brought about his own demise. The gruesome circumstances are recounted in Pliny’s discussion of the properties of gypsum. ‘There is one remarkable fact connected with this substance: Gaius Proculeius, an intimate friend of the Emperor Augustus, suffering from violent pains in the stomach, swallowed gypsum, and so put an end to his existence.’9 If she knew of Proculeius’s affliction, Livia can have had only one motive: by involving Julia in a marriage certain to be of short duration, to win time for Tiberius, at that point still unmarried. Livia may have been encouraged in her bid by the relationship of trust and friendship obtaining between Augustus and Proculeius and the latter’s ‘safe’ reputation for lack of political ambition. But it is surprising that she should propose for Julia a husband of equestrian rank when she herself drew little comfort from Vipsania’s token connection with the equites.
It was not, of course, a solution Augustus favoured – whether for reasons of his own or through the admonishments of Octavia or Maecenas, we shall never know. Livia’s efforts, if such they were, did not succeed. Perhaps Tiberius’s explanation to Sejanus is the likeliest answer. It is an unsettling anecdote, its origins probably with Livia’s detractors. Instead, despite a considerable age gap, Augustus chose Agrippa for Julia, his motives overtly political. The decision made, Livia wisely concurred. When, subsequently, Augustus decided to adopt two of the sons born of the marriage, making them legally his sons as well as his grandsons, Livia seconded his wish.10 Hers was a pragmatic response. It was also perhaps a case of force majeure.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 20
