Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  ‘The senators…hinted mockingly at [Augustus’s] own relations with a large number of women,’ Dio tells us; they demanded a response from him. ‘When he was forced to reply, he retorted, “You yourselves should guide and command your wives as you see fit; that is what I do with mine.”’12 With Augustus himself unable to fight his corner, Livia was called into the ring. Even by this relatively early stage in the principate, however, she had clearly acquired a reputation for independence and strength of character. Augustus’s listeners balked at this image of the princeps overruling his strongminded patrician wife. ‘They pressed Augustus still more eagerly, for they desired to learn what guidance he professed to give to Livia. Augustus uttered a few words very unwillingly about women’s dress, their other ornaments, their going out and their modesty.’13 In a single sentence, Livia’s clothes became a matter of high politics, as powerfully charged as Cynthia’s filmy skirts of swinging Coan silk, as central to her public persona as the beauty of Venus or the character of Juno.

  The garment Livia chose as the visible means of broadcasting her obedience and fidelity to Augustus was as we have seen, the stola, recorded in literature as early as the second century BC but hitherto rare in daily life. A long sleeveless shift of heavy fabric, it hung vertically from the shoulders, perhaps fastened with ribbons, and reached as far as the ground, even hiding the feet. It covered a woman’s undergarments and effectively shrouded her figure. Over it was worn a large mantle or palla, which further cloaked the figure in folds of impenetrable fabric. The stola was an exercise in concealment, a barrier between the wearer and the viewer, a halt to lasciviousness. That Livia’s beauty outstripped that of Terentia despite the carapace of the stola is a powerful testament. Its one attraction appears to have been its colour – deep red or occasionally purple.14 It was probably made of fine, dense wool. The suggestion that it might have been woven at home enhanced its virtuous connotations, binding a woman’s public appearance to that private domestic task of weaving by which we have seen Romans – and Augustus in particular – set such store.

  The colour of the stola recalled the official costume of Rome’s magistrates, the toga purpurea. Championed by Livia in her role of exemplary Roman matron in response to Augustus’s moral legislation, the stola would acquire similarly distinguished associations. As Livia’s nodus hairstyle came to represent a patriotic choice – renouncing eastern elaboration of the sort previously worn by Cleopatra – so too the unlovely, shapeless tunic hung heavy with symbolism. It became a uniform – as Ovid called it, ‘the badge of chastity’.15 As if to emphasize the point, wearing the stola was forbidden to prostitutes – who, like men, were obliged to wear the toga – or to adulteresses, who were forced to adopt the prostitute’s toga following conviction. This is the explanation for Cicero’s taunt of Mark Antony in the Second Philippic: ‘He took you out of the prostitute’s trade, gave you a stola as it were, and settled you down in steady wedlock.’16 Mothers of three or more children were rewarded by the Lex Iulia de Maritandis Ordinibus with the right to wear a special form of stola.17

  For a critical period at the beginning of Rome’s principate, dress acquired more than ordinary significance. A cumbersome woollen tunic became a reward for state-ordained good behaviour. The policy required the cooperation of Livia and the women of Augustus’s family, whose high public profile – further heightened by these means – invested something essentially unglamorous with an aura of desirability. A symbiotic relationship developed quickly. The more the stola came to be associated with public reward of feminine virtue, the greater by association the appearance of virtue of its most prominent wearers. As it happened, Livia’s private life was beyond reproach – even Tacitus, in his obituary notice of Livia, was forced to concede that ‘her private life was of traditional strictness’.18 Its lustre shone more brightly thanks to the positive implications of her clothes, held up to scrutiny in the Senate House by Augustus.

  In that section of his Natural History devoted to pearls, Pliny cites two famous contemporary pearl-wearers. Although we know that Livia employed a pearl-setter in her household, Pliny’s examples leave us in no doubt that the author disapproved of women’s fondness for the jewels. He refers to Cleopatra and Lollia Paulina. Lollia Paulina was the granddaughter of an immensely rich provincial governor, who was afterwards threatened with prosecution for extortion; she was briefly married to Caligula.

  I once saw Lollia Paulina, the wife of the Emperor [Caligula]. It was not at any public festival or solemn ceremonial, but only an ordinary wedding entertainment. She was covered with emeralds and pearls, which shone in alternate layers upon her head, in her hair, in her ears, at her neck, in her bracelets and on her fingers. Their value amounted in all to forty million sesterces…treasures which had descended to her from her grandfather, obtained by the spoliation of the provinces. Such are the fruits of plunder and extortion!19

  Velleius Paterculus describes Lollia Paulina’s grandfather as ‘a man who was ever more eager for money than for honest action’. In her excessive ostentation, it was clear, the granddaughter had inherited the sins of the grandfather.20 Emeralds and pearls provided a symbol of that dishonesty and sinfulness.

  Disapproval of luxury had a long history in Rome. It was among those factors which had enabled Octavian to demonize Mark Antony and Cleopatra, as we have seen. At moments of crisis in the Republic’s history, virtuous women surrendered their jewellery to the State to be liquidated for funds. By extension, a delight in jewellery was unpatriotic, opposed to the collectivism at the heart of Republican mythology, even dangerous. ‘There is nothing that a woman willl not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds, and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears,’ Juvenal spat.21 Pliny’s misgivings about pearls extended to all precious stones, a mistrust of an impulse that combined vanity with extravagance. Augustus took up the theme on that day in 18 BC when the Senate queried the extent of his authority over Livia. Reluctantly, he uttered ‘a few words…about women’s dress, their other ornaments’, consigning Livia not only to the stola but to a habit of abstemiousness in terms of jewellery, a harsh proscription for one of the richest women in the world.

  Imported precious stones flooded the Roman market, a trade that Pliny estimated as worth a hundred million sesterces a year.22 Wealthy Roman matrons indulged in competitive displays of their jewellery. But Livia, loyal to Augustus’s dictat, remained hors de combat. There is no evidence of jewellery in the portraiture that survives from Livia’s lifetime. Even this apparently insignificant aspect of personal adornment, exploited by Augustus for political ends, had acquired a symbolic dimension. Simply dressed in a stola and palla, without precious stones or the gold jewellery which had earlier been limited by the Oppian Law, Livia continued to distance herself from the golden image of Cleopatra placed by Caesar in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Once items of clothing had served as the virtuous woman’s gifts to the gods, as Hecuba chooses a robe to present to Athene in the Iliad.23 Livia’s splendid robes were sacrificed to Augustus and an impetus for moral renewal which she, but not he, strove to embody.

  Suetonius records that the Emperor Caligula referred to Livia as ‘Ulixes stolatus’, ‘Ulysses in a stola’.24 The modern translation of ‘Ulysses in a petticoat’ captures the scornful disaffection Suetonius tells us that Caligula felt towards members of his family: it fails to convey either the force or the significance of his mordant tag. That Livia’s great-grandson, who had partly been brought up in her Palatine household, couples her name with that garment she adopted to serve legislation passed before his birth indicates how thoroughly Augustus’s wife came to be associated with Ovid’s ‘badge of chastity’. It also partners Livia with a clever and ingenious epic hero, whose adventures testify as much to the faculties of the mind as the more commonplace heroic qualities of bravery, strength or physical stamina. Caligula’s disdainful epithet includes a graceless compliment – perhaps, as has recently been su
ggested, a recognition of Livia’s skill in concealing within the clothes of virtuous femininity a less passive, more incisive mind.25 In 18 BC Livia had no choice but to embrace an outward manifestation of policy-making which Augustus placed at the centre of his domestic agenda. Its implied bondage, if Caligula is correct, may have provided her with unexpected freedoms.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Tiberius closer to Caesar’

  Death came in triplicate as the century pursued its course. The years 12, 11 and 9 BC all witnessed significant losses in Augustus’s family. Each affected Livia’s own position or that of Tiberius. Only one caused Livia lasting sadness. In 9 BC, aged twenty-nine and at the height of his powers, her younger son Drusus died. His death had been preceded by that of Agrippa, in 12 BC, and his aunt Octavia the year after. In quick succession, Augustus lost his principal helpmate, an adored sister and an affable and popular stepson who gave every indication of corresponding closely to the Roman ideal. Livia found herself, nearly twenty years after marrying Augustus, at last uncontested in the role of senior matron or materfamilias of his household. For the second time, despite her youth, Julia confronted widowhood. In all but name, Tiberius became the second male of Augustus’s once sprawling Palatine family. Three splendid funerals set the dead on their final journey. In Drusus’s case, the parade of ancestor masks, including both Claudians and Julians, was particularly extensive; Seneca describes the formalities as more redolent of a triumph than a funeral. Augustus buried all three in his mausoleum on the Campus Martius, Octavia rejoining her beloved Marcellus after more than a decade.

  Drusus’s death following a riding accident in September 9 BC abruptly foreclosed a period of considerable happiness in Livia’s life. In 16 BC Tiberius had attained the praetorship. He was prevented from fulfilling the duties of office by Augustus, who took him with him to Gaul to stamp out German raids in the province. There was credit not disgrace in Tiberius’s enforced dereliction of duty – and satisfaction for Livia in his replacement in Rome by Drusus. At twenty-two Drusus was only months older than Marcellus had been at the time of his first magistracy.

  The coupling of Livia’s sons in office set the pattern for succeeding years. In 15 and 14 BC the brothers fought alongside each other, their task the subjugation of the bellicose strategic German provinces of Raetia and Vindelicia, north of Cisalpine Gaul. Their partnership, according to Velleius Paterculus, was Augustus’s idea. ‘In this work he gave Tiberius as a collaborator his own brother Drusus,’ we read.

  The two brothers attacked the Raeti and Vindelici from different directions, and after storming many towns and strongholds, as well as engaging successfully in pitched battles, with more danger than real loss to the Roman army, though with much bloodshed on the part of the enemy, they thoroughly subdued these races, protected as they were by the nature of the country, difficult of access, strong in numbers, and fiercely warlike.1

  It was a heroic undertaking, which secured the Alps for Rome; and one certain to have given pleasure to Livia. To the record of Claudian achievements listed by Suetonius, and the triumphant iconography of Marcus’s armaria-lined atrium, both her sons would add military victories rewarded by ovations and the insignia of the triumph. On 1 January 13 BC, alongside his brother-in-law Publius Quinctilius Varus, husband of Vipsania’s half-sister Vipsania Marcella, Tiberius became consul, Rome’s highest constitutional office. Not yet thirty, he had achieved more than any Neronian Claudian for two centuries.2 There was little reason to doubt that Drusus would match his brother’s record. Velleius describes him unambiguously as ‘a young man endowed with as many great qualities as men’s nature is capable of receiving or application developing’3 Valerius Maximus consigned him to history as ‘the exceptional glory of the Claudius family and a rare paragon of his country’.4

  Livia’s happiness was more than maternal pride. In either 14 or 13 BC Vipsania gave birth to a son, another Drusus, known as Drusus the Younger. In Livia’s affections he joined Germanicus, the son of Drusus and Antonia born in 15 BC. Between them, Livia’s grandsons combined blood of the Claudii with that of the Octavii, in a heritage that embraced Agrippa and, more doubtfully, Mark Antony, Antonia’s father. Despite Augustus’s adoption of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, it is impossible that Livia abstained from thoughts of the future. In the absence of any child arising from her own marriage, she must have exulted in this mingling of bloodlines in the third generation. Both Germanicus and Drusus possessed a genetic blueprint capable of recommendation to Augustus. The prominence of Julia’s elder sons notwithstanding – Julia gave birth to a third son, whom Augustus did not at this stage adopt, after Agrippa’s death in 12 BC – Livia’s grandchildren were well placed for the future, especially in a regime which, as Livia must have been aware, had yet to win sanctions for the endorsement of any direct hereditary principle.

  But the place of Germanicus and Drusus in their grandmother’s hopes would shortly be eclipsed. In the spring of 12 BC, Cassius Dio tells us, ‘portents were noticed in such numbers…as normally only occur when the greatest calamities threaten the state.’5 Owls flew through the streets of Rome, a comet hovered in the night sky, and Romulus’s sacred hut burnt down as the result of a distinctively Roman accident: crows dropped on to its roof ‘flaming fragments’ of meat snatched from a sacrificial altar. The calamity worthy of such dramatic heralds was the death of Marcus Agrippa. It occurred in Campania in southern Italy, brought about by unknown causes. Agrippa was en route for Rome from Pannonia, a journey cut short.

  Augustus did not allow personal sadness to occlude the demands of politics. Pregnant with her fifth child, Julia was a widow again. There were no dynastic reasons for her to marry for a third time, but in his legislation of 18 BC Augustus had established a timescale for the prompt remarriage of widows. He did not choose to make an exception of Julia. After the birth of her baby – whom Augustus named Agrippa Postumus in honour of his father – he married his only daughter to his elder stepson Tiberius. Velleius, whose account is the most nearly contemporary of the surviving sources, offers no explanation for Augustus’s action. His focus – presumably with an eye on future developments – is the benefit Tiberius obtained from Agrippa’s misfortune. ‘His death brought Tiberius closer to Caesar, since his daughter Julia, who had been the wife of Agrippa, now married Tiberius.’6 Velleius mentions no part played by Livia in Tiberius’s preferment nor any discussion between Augustus and his wife concerning the decision. Livia is notably absent from all the sources’ accounts of Julia and Tiberius’s marriage.

  A tradition has grown up which ascribes Tiberius’s success, third time lucky, to the absence of alternative suitors for the hand of the princeps’s daughter. The same tradition invariably implies a vigorous behind-the-scenes role for Livia, which we have seen is not supported by textual evidence. Dio describes Augustus’s decision as being made ‘with some reluctance’. He explains this reluctance not in terms of personal objections to Tiberius but on the grounds that ‘his own grandsons were still boys’ – a suggestion that Augustus had rather have chosen no one at all, regretting instead the infancy of Gaius and Lucius Caesar which demanded this intermediary stage in the succession.7 At this point proof of disharmony between stepson and stepfather is lacking. In addition, as we have seen, Tiberius had established over the previous decade an exemplary record of service to Augustus and the state. This in itself constituted public eminence equal to that likely to be conveyed by marriage to Julia, as well as a powerful recommendation for his suit. If there are grounds for any theory of ‘victory by default’ on Tiberius’s part, it is possible that, in the absence of any definite antipathy, Augustus did not find Tiberius’s an easy nature – he lacked the amiable manner and apparently untroubled disposition of his brother Drusus. The only conclusion we can reach with complete certainty is that Livia’s elder son was an obvious candidate for the vacancy even without the championing of his mother – the sources express surprise at the speed of the marriage and the strength of Augustus
’s determination, not the fact of its happening. They are less clear about the immediate implications of Tiberius’s second marriage. This did not necessarily at this stage imply his elevation to the status of Augustus’s heir, particularly given the earlier adoption of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, as both Tiberius and Livia would have been aware.

  In the Annals, Sejanus tells Tiberius, ‘I have heard that Augustus, when marrying his daughter, had not regarded even knights as beneath his consideration.’8 Tiberius’s response, as we have seen, is neither concurrence nor disagreement. His argument that marriage to the princeps’s daughter would unnaturally elevate the man chosen and throw him in the way of temptation probably reflects Augustus’s thinking. In the interests of self-preservation and maintaining the claims of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Augustus was safer selecting a son-in-law from within his own family who would not incline to usurping the principate for himself. Inevitably this circumscribed the pool of contenders.

  Tiberius was the frontrunner. Octavia’s stepson and son-in-law Iullus Antonius – the husband of Octavia’s daughter Marcella Major– was stigmatized by his paternity and indeed would later die in unresolved circumstances that appear to confirm Augustus’s wisdom in discounting him. In Velleius’s account the victim of suicide, executed for treason in Dio’s version and adultery in that of Tacitus, in all three narratives, ironically, Antonius is brought to his death by an adulterous involvement with Julia, which may have overlapped with the murky world of political conspiracy. That left Drusus, like Tiberius already married in 12 BC. Unlike Vipsania, however, Drusus’s wife Antonia was not dynastically negligible. Any children of the couple were Octavii through Antonia’s mother, their sons Augustus’s great-nephews as well as his step-grandsons.