Livia, Empress of Rome
Page 21
We see in Livia’s failure to marry Tiberius to Julia – if such a failure existed – a reminder of the proscribed nature of her influence. Throughout their marriage, Livia exercised power with Augustus’s complicity. At this point, it would appear, Augustus extended the same tolerance to his sister Octavia. He was in the habit of actively seeking advice from Maecenas and Agrippa, the latter by his marriage enfolded in the very bosom of power. He also trusted his own counsel. The demonized Livia of Tacitus’s account, whom modern readers inherit via Robert Graves, is a figure who has stepped outside the bounds of female passivity to indulge, like Sallust’s Sempronia, ‘many crimes of masculine daring’ and grasp the reins of fate. In truth, Livia’s abilities were heavily circumscribed. Her daring may have been, in Roman terms, ‘masculine’ her opportunities mostly were not. If, as seems likely, her wishes concerning Julia’s second marriage differed from those of Augustus, it was Augustus’s wishes which prevailed. It is impossible that Livia should not have understood this or that she sought to protest against it. She would not – as we have seen Agrippina later try – urge the claims of her case on the strength of her own status. The precepts of a Republican education rooted power firmly in Roman manhood. In 21 BC, under Augustus’s essentially conservative principate, that truism continued to hold good for the most ‘powerful’ woman in Rome.
There is no reason to suspect that Tiberius’s future role occupied Livia’s thoughts at this stage to the exclusion of other matters. If she indulged in ambitious fantasies as we assume – acknowledging that such assumptions are highly speculative – she did so at least in part in order to perpetuate beyond Augustus’s death the position she currently enjoyed. The experience of touring the eastern provinces had revealed to Livia the full implications of her place as wife of the princeps, following Augustus’s settlement of 27 BC. That settlement continued to be refined, each fresh revision and award concentrating greater power in Augustus’s hands. Traditionally patrician matrons had channelled their ambition through their sons. They did so in pursuit of an access to power otherwise denied them by Rome’s constitution and practices. But Livia already enjoyed that privileged access. Despite her frustration at the marriages of Julia and Tiberius, she may have experienced a sense on returning to Rome that she could afford to enjoy the moment, as well as planning for the future in the form of Tiberius’s career. If Livia chose this point to devise the engagement of her younger son Drusus, she acted astutely and with an apparent determination not to be wrongfooted for a second time as she had been over Tiberius’s marriage.
Three years after Livia and Augustus’s return to Rome, Drusus married Antonia Minor. The younger of Octavia’s daughters by Mark Antony, Antonia was Drusus’s near contemporary. The stepcousins already knew one another well, brought up in the same large, child-filled household. Their union smartly side-stepped the possibility of discord between Livia and Octavia. It offered the further recommendation to Livia that any children of the marriage would combine her own blood with that of Augustus, centring Drusus and his children on the princeps’s dynastic radar.
It was probably, as Livia may have acknowledged to herself, too little too late. In 17 BC Julia gave birth to a second son, Lucius Caesar, and, as Dio tells us, ‘Augustus immediately adopted him together with his brother Gaius.’ On this occasion – in contrast to his public evasiveness concerning Marcellus a decade earlier – Augustus made his intentions clear. ‘He did not wait for them to attain manhood, but straightaway appointed them as his successors in authority to discourage plotters from conspiring against him.’11 Adept at preserving appearances, Livia played the role of willing partner in Augustus’s plans. At the very least, the boys’ adoption, and their residence in that Palatine house so recently thronged with a previous generation of children, granted her the opportunity to influence and direct Rome’s designated heirs. There is an element of the tawdry novelette in any suggestion that Livia may have been mindful of the fragility of infant life in Rome. The fecundity of Julia and Agrippa contrasted with her own barren marriage; Lucius would not be their last son.
Augustus’s cult of moderation outlived his defeat of Cleopatra. Rome’s first princeps was measured in his habits. He ate and drank sparingly. ‘Habitually abstemious’, as Suetonius describes him, he was frugal in his tastes. He ‘preferred the food of the common people, especially the coarser sort of bread, whitebait, fresh hand-pressed cheese, and green figs of the second crop’.12 By choice he drank only Raetian wine from vineyards in the Athesis valley, the only wine of the Graeco-Roman world matured in wooden barrels rather than earthenware vats.13 Following Roman custom, Augustus diluted it with water; he also drank it in strictly controlled quantities. On all but special occasions he dressed simply, the purple stripe of his togas ‘neither narrow nor broad’. He lived without ostentation in houses eclipsed by those of Rome’s upper classes, retiring to the unaccustomed luxury of Maecenas’s Roman mansion when ill and in need of a fillip. Although ‘Palatine’ provides the derivation of today’s ‘palace’, there was little that was palatial about the House of Augustus on Rome’s most sacred hill. While satisfactory for the purpose of accommodating Augustus, Livia and the changing cast of children they reared, it proved an inadequate hub of empire, too cramped for the expansive business of administration. After 28 BC official events and large meetings took place in the complex of the Temple of Apollo Augustus built adjoining the house, with its Greek and Latin libraries, and storage space for documents and records.14 Augustus himself accomplished many of the tasks of empire in a small upstairs study, which Suetonius tells us ‘he called “Syracuse” – perhaps because Archimedes of Syracuse had a similar one – or “my little workshop”.’15
In this overcrowded house, its facade decorated as we have seen with bay-leaf wreaths and a civic crown, Livia spent her days in a manner considered insufficiently interesting to merit the attention of Rome’s chroniclers. Undoubtedly much of her time was hijacked by the unwieldy business of household management. Despite not rivalling the palaces of later emperors or the more splendid townhouses of the Roman aristocracy, Livia and Augustus’s house was thronged with slaves. It fulfilled in addition a busy public role, notably in the morning salutatio, which Augustus continued to honour as any private senator.
At the end of the Republic, Cicero’s wealthy wife Terentia had supervised the couple’s houses as she oversaw her extensive property – with as little interference from her husband or guardian as possible. Although Cicero was interested in domestic affairs to the extent of translating into Latin Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Terentia apparently tolerated no meddling on her husband’s part. She relied on the assistance of her steward, the freedman Philotimus, and a subsidiary staff of slaves each entrusted with more or less specialized roles.16
The evidence of the mausoleum dedicated to Livia’s slaves suggests a pattern of household management affiliated to that of Terentia a generation earlier.17 As in aristocratic houses of the late Republic – Marcus and Alfidia’s included – a dispensator or steward oversaw the cumbersome arrangements. The dispensator was accountable to Livia. Beneath him were the household footsoldiers: cooking and cleaning slaves, including a catering officer, who may also have overseen the cellars, with their Pucine wine for Livia and Raetian vintages for Augustus, a storeroom clerk and specialist bakers. Slaves attended to the day-to-day running of that woolworking in which both Livia and Augustus took pride. Livia’s own involvement was almost certainly symbolic, spinners, weavers, fullers, patchers, menders and makers accomplishing the much-vaunted ‘home’ manufacture of the princeps’s clothes. There were secretarial staff, doorkeepers and footmen, waiting staff and specialist positions like that of nomenclator, the slave who reminded Livia and Augustus of the names of clients and petitioners at the morning salutatio. A number of Livia’s slaves took care of that extensive toilette for which Ovid claimed she scarcely had time: dressers, hairdressers, masseuses, perfume-makers, shoe-makers, launderers and wardobe slaves. All save the masseuses and the d
ressers were men. Three of Livia’s dressers – Dorcas, Nice and Gemina – became freedwomen, a detail suggestive of a degree of intimacy between mistress and maid.18 Surprisingly, given Livia’s adherence to Augustus’s code of restraint and the absence of jewellery from her surviving portraits, her permanent staff included a pearl-setter, margaritarius.
This was the busy Roman world of Livia’s childhood writ large. The populous household of slaves ministered to every aspect of patrician life, from menial tasks to artisans’ trades. Such was the ubiquity of slaves in late-Republican and imperial Rome that wall paintings survive in which amorous couples cavort in rooms where slaves are busy, subordinates apparently invisible to their masters. In at least one respect Livia was a generous mistress: she appears – at a higher than average rate – to have rewarded her slaves with their freedom. Augustus’s benignity towards his slaves survives in a well-known anecdote in which he intervened to restrain the cruelty of a fellow slave-owner. A wine-slave belonging to the immensely rich Publius Vedius Pollio broke a valuable fluorspar goblet. In Augustus’s presence, Vedius ordered the man to be thrown to the lampreys in his fish pond. The sentence was one of instant death. Lampreys are blood-sucking, eel-like creatures considered in Rome, as in medieval Europe, a culinary delicacy. ‘The boy,’ Dio records, ‘fell on his knees before Augustus and implored his protection, and the emperor at first tried to persuade Pollio not to commit so appalling an action.’19 When Pollio paid no heed, Augustus ordered instead that all his fluorspar goblets be collected and broken one by one. Pollio ‘restrained himself and said nothing’. The slave escaped his sentence.
The location of the houses to which, following their marriages, Tiberius took Vipsania and Drusus Antonia has not survived. Although both Livia’s sons would spend much of the next decade absent from Rome, since their wives did not accompany them for the whole of their campaigning, they must have maintained establishments in the capital. Like Nero’s house and that of Livia and Augustus, these may have been on the Palatine; at the time of his second marriage, Tiberius is recorded as living in a conspicuous house on the Carinae, on the southwest side of the neighbouring Esquiline Hill, also a fashionable residential district.20 Livia’s sons remained close to her in the early years of their marriage, geographically close to Augustus and the centre of Roman administration, which imperceptibly shifted uphill from the Senate House and the Forum. For the moment, unlike their mother, Tiberius and Drusus existed on the margins of Augustus’s power. The marriage of the former is attested by a single sculpted portrait. It was found in a ruined city of North Africa and postdates not only the death of Vipsania in AD 20, but that of Augustus, would-be architect of the fate of both husband and wife.
Chapter 22
‘Outstandingly virtuous’
‘The wife of Caesar is so outstandingly virtuous that antiquity cannot outstrip our era in praising chastity,’ wrote the poet Ovid to his wife. ‘By having the beauty of Venus and the character of Juno [she] has alone been found worthy of a god’s bed.’1
Livia was approaching her seventies. Banished to the Black Sea in modern-day Romania for transgressions which remain a riddle, Ovid fastened his hopes of recall on the ageing wife of the princeps. The fulsome praise of a desperate man – and a poet to boot – need not be interpreted literally. But Ovid’s blandishments fasten on characteristics Livia had taken pains to annexe for herself: virtue, chastity, the attributes of goddesses. His encomium is testament to the efficacy of a policy of public rectitude which Livia had cultivated through four decades. More than a blameless private life or the carefully considered benefactions of temple restorations, it was a policy she embraced physically – from the Republican understatement of the nodus coiffure, copied from Octavia, to her discreet and simple jewellery and an item of dress she wore until her death: the stola or long tunic, woven mantle of virtuous Roman womanhood.
There was no mistaking the potency of glamorous dress for the elegist Propertius. Tormented by love for his mistress Cynthia, he wrote;
‘You want to know why I keep on writing these poems of love…
All she has to do is enter a room, a dazzle
of flowing silk from Cos, and a book is born.2
That flowing silk was more than a fabric. ‘What good is it, promenading that way, your coiffure amazing, your couture an impressive shimmer of Coan silk, as your skirts swing this way and that?’3 Coan silk was a luxury import, spun on the island from caterpillar filaments in the manner of its Chinese counterpart, iridescent and nearly transparent: a statement of exoticism, allure and availability.4 It was the antithesis of the effect Livia cultivated in dress, cloaking the female sexuality Rome feared in the formlessness of the stola. In the service of those denied an active role in politics, signs and symbols become politicized. Augustus had policies and power; Livia exploited the symbolism of costume, her appearance her manifesto.
The streets of Rome were bright with women’s fashion. In more carefree mood prior to his banishment, Ovid had advised in the Ars Amatoria on the colours women ought to affect in dress – not the costly purple of the Tyrian murex, tortured from the secretions of a sea snail, but shades inspired by nature: the blue of the sky, the green of the sea, saffron, amethyst, Paphian myrtle, pale rose, Thracian crane, acorn and almond.5 Ovid’s advice aimed at helping women to win and hold on to a man. It was the opposite of Livia’s aim. Livia’s choice of dress had nothing to do with flattering her appearance or commanding the attention of the opposite sex. It was not concerned with colour or fabric. Her preferred dress was as much a uniform as that ceremonial garb adopted by Julius Caesar at the zenith of his power. Like Caesar’s wreath of golden laurel leaves and scarlet leather boots inherited from the kings of Alba Longa, the stola was an example of visual language. Livia employed it in Augustus’s service. Inevitably she too benefited from its virtuous connotations.
In the Res Gestae, the account of his life’s work which Augustus requested at his death be engraved on bronze tablets outside his mausoleum, the princeps made much of a programme of legislation which on balance had been neither successful nor popular. ‘By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation.’6 These laws and practices were concerned with nothing less than a moral revolution in Rome. As with Augustus’s claim to have ‘restored’ the Republic, they appeared to nod towards a past golden age of greater virtue, in this case specifically in the domestic sphere.7 The laws themselves were enacted in 18 BC the year of Livia’s fortieth birthday, when she could be said to have attained by Roman standards the rank of ‘matron’. Aside from Augustus’s own ‘exemplary practices’, which he does not elaborate, the weight of embodying this keystone policy fell on the women of the princeps’s family. Foremost among them was Livia.
The legislative programme in question came to focus chiefly on women’s fidelity and the birthrate. It took the form of two principal acts, the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis and the Lex Iulia de Maritandis Ordinibus. The former addressed the sexual constancy of married women, criminalizing adultery for the first time in Roman history; the latter outlined a system of penalties and incentives aimed at encouraging larger families. Both were chiefly concerned with the upper classes, providers of Rome’s administrators and leading soldiers, although they appeared to cast their nets more widely. The former prescribed harsh sentences for errant wives, who faced compulsory divorce, possible banishment and a ban on future remarriage; in practice their correspondents were less severely treated, their punishment secondary to that of their mistresses. The latter act was more evenhanded in its treatment of the sexes, recognizing that the declining birthrate arose in part from the reluctance of patrician bachelors to marry. Unsurprisingly, the legislation won Augustus few plaudits among those fellow members of the senatorial class who were its chief target. Livy had predicted as much. ‘For now we have reache
d a point where our degeneracy is intolerable – and so are the measures by which alone it can be reformed.’8 Augustus made few efforts to sugar the pill.
He faced an uphill task. He lived in an age of moral cynicism. The last years of the Republic and the early principate witnessed a literary flowering among a new young generation of poets. Their subject matter was adulterous love – that of Catullus for Lesbia, Tibullus for Delia, Propertius for Cynthia. They cared neither for marriage nor Augustus’s heavyweight morality. ‘Call no man happy,’ Martial quipped, ‘until his wife is dead – particularly if she is rich.’9 Ovid observed that the man concerned with his wife’s adultery was lacking in savoir faire, a bore without knowledge of the social conventions.10 Augustus – his deathbed claim of transmitting ‘exemplary practices’ aside – did little to lead by example. In a society which, despite its louche posturing, offers few instances of serial philandery, Augustus established a reputation for affairs more roving than any poet, those liaisons with Tertullia, Terentilla, Rufilla and Salvia Titisenia to which Mark Antony once scornfully referred. ‘Here’s a copper coin for the criticism of elderly men with exalted morals,’ Catullus tells Lesbia. It was not a jibe which could be made against Augustus without irony. Two years after proposing his legislation, Augustus left Rome for Gaul. Gossip attended his departure, as Cassius Dio reports. ‘There were some who even suspected that he left on account of Terentia, the wife of Maecenas, and that since Rome was full of rumours concerning their relationship, he had planned to join her abroad beyond the reach of such gossip. It was said that his desire for her was so great that he had once made her take part in a contest of beauty against Livia.’11 The senators present at the debate on the princeps’s new laws did not spare their leading citizen.