If Augustus acted unwillingly, his reluctance was nothing compared with that of Tiberius. Tiberius’s marriage to Vipsania, after an engagement that spanned most of his formative years, proved notably happy. Already the parents of a son, another Drusus, in 11 BC the couple were expecting a second child. Without the intervention of Julia and Augustus, it is possible they would have enjoyed a long and happy marriage like Augustus’s own. We do not hear of inconstancy on the part of either spouse. Certainly, Tiberius cherished neither affection nor illusions in relation to the woman who was at the same time uniquely his stepsister, mother-in-law and proposed second wife. Refusal, however, was clearly not an option. Augustus did not confuse affection with political exigency. In pursuit of his purposes he had persuaded Nero to divorce the pregnant Livia and Agrippa the pregnant Caecilia Attica; now he insisted Tiberius act in like manner. Suetonius describes Julia’s third marriage as ‘hurried’. Tiberius, he tells us, ‘took this very ill. He loved Vipsania and strongly disapproved of Julia, realizing, like everyone else, that she had felt an adulterous passion for him while still married to his father-in-law Agrippa.’9
Julia’s wayward nature, lacking in allure for Tiberius who had known her since childhood, was perhaps among Augustus’s reasons for hastening her remarriage. Eyebrows do not appear to have been raised at this conjunction of step-siblings. Augustus had acted with customary ruthlessness, his focus – traditional in the Roman marriage sphere – political rather than personal, apparently heedless of the likely outcome of a marriage inspired by policy without emotional warmth. Suetonius’s brief account closes with a chilling intimation of the princeps’s thoroughness. ‘Tiberius continued to regret the divorce so heartily that when, one day, he accidentally caught sight of Vipsania and followed her with tears in his eyes and intense unhappiness written on his face, precautions were taken against his ever seeing her again.’10
What then of Livia? Those rumour-mongers whom Cassius Dio reports as attributing Marcellus’s death to Livia’s malign intervention had expressed as early as 23 BC the cupidity of Augustus’s wife for her sons’ advancement. On that occasion, the removal of Julia’s husband had brought no obvious benefits either to Livia or to her sons. The consequence of Agrippa’s death was different. If, as Dio would have us believe, Livia had coveted the prospect of a Claudian principate in 23 BC, how much more zealous must her desire have grown in the intervening decade, as the rich possibilities of princely office revealed themselves more fully.
But this is a one-sided argument. Did Livia let herself dare to hope in 23 BC, only to see those hopes summarily crushed? Did she then set aside such aspirations, confronting apparently insuperable odds, content instead that first Tiberius and afterwards Drusus ascend the ladder of Rome’s magistracies, the cursus honorum? Both men had done so with undoubted success, Tiberius becoming consul at the precocious age of twenty-eight. The question is whether Livia’s make-up inclined more to the Roman habit of pragmatism or to Ulysses-like planning and plotting. If we take into account Caligula’s verdict, the evidence is stacked equally.
It would be surprising, whatever her previous thoughts, if Livia did not conceive definite ambitions for Tiberius in 11 BC. First Marcellus, then Agrippa had married Augustus’s only daughter. In each case, to his intimates if not to Romans at large, Augustus had made it clear that the marriage involved a symbolic aspect, signifying the new role of Julia’s husband as princeps-elect. Circumstances had changed by the time of Tiberius’s marriage, notably with the adoption of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, whom Augustus had openly declared his successors. But the boys were still children, Gaius the elder only eight at the time of his father’s death. Given Augustus’s precarious health, a strong likelihood of regency existed. That regency would fall to Tiberius. In the latter’s case, marriage with Julia may not have held out for him the certainty of succession: but it promised to make Livia’s son, if not princeps, at the least ‘princeps-tutor’.
Livia presumably exerted considerable force on Tiberius to accept Augustus’s plans. At his accession to the principate in AD 14, Tiberius would refuse the appellation ‘son of Julia’ (as Livia was then known), offered by the Senate.11 The tag was an acknowledgement of Livia’s role in making Tiberius emperor. If, as the sources through their silence suggest, Augustus’s decision to marry Tiberius to Julia did not arise at Livia’s prompting, part of her contribution – recognized by the Senate – was perhaps compelling Tiberius’s agreement to the plans of 12 BC. Against this argument is the question of the viability of Tiberius’s refusal.
There are possible grounds for apologists to exonerate Livia from the charge of excessive ambition. The Claudii, we know, enjoyed an unrivalled history of service to the State. Part of Augustus’s Roman revolution was his implicit transference of the concept of the State, Louis XIV-like, to his own person. For Livia, post 27 BC, the service of the State meant attentiveness to Augustus’s wishes. She was, as Tacitus described her without intent to flatter, ‘a compliant wife’.12
We can only speculate on Livia’s response to Tiberius’s resistance. It is doubtful that she was swayed by the sentimental argument of his love for Vipsania or the fact of Vipsania’s pregnancy – she herself had divorced Nero while pregnant and even forsaken her sons in pursuit of her marriage. The foremost concern of aristocratic Roman mothers, of whom Livia can be seen as an archetype, was not the happiness of their sons but, as we have witnessed in the extreme example of Volumnia and Coriolanus, a son’s adherence to his duty to Rome and his success in the magistracies of the state. In the consulship of 13 BC Tiberius had attained the pinnacle of senatorial achievement; he had also won both triumph and ovation. The principate offered one higher prize. It is certain that at this stage Augustus had little intention of extending the promise of that prize to Tiberius; equally certain seems the likelihood of Livia at last allowing herself the indulgence of hope.
There was one further argument Livia may have kept to herself. At best, Tiberius’s engagement to Vipsania arose from the circumstances of the moment, the need of Augustus to flatter Agrippa or of Livia to win Agrippa’s support for Tiberius in the face of Octavia’s pre-eminence. With Agrippa’s death that need no longer existed. The circumstances which bred Tiberius’s first marriage had altered irretrievably. It is possible that Livia considered the marriage forefeit as a result. In this she would appear as much a statesman as Augustus.
In the autumn of 9 BC Livia accompanied Augustus to the ancient riverside city of Ticinum to receive Drusus’s body. There she met Tiberius, who had travelled ‘in wild haste, almost in a single breath’, according to Valerius Maximus, across the Rhine and the Alps from Pannonia.13 Slowly the sorrowful cortege returned to Rome, past burning pyres and crowds of onlookers. It was a gratifying if upsetting spectacle for a grieving mother.
Only once in Livia’s life do we read of her succumbing to overwhelming emotion – on this, the occasion of Drusus’s death. An execrable poem once ascribed to Ovid clumsily sought to offer her consolation. ‘See how Fortune has raised you high, and commanded you to occupy a place of great honour; so, Livia, bear up that load. You draw our eyes and ears to you, we notice all your actions…Stay upright, rise above your woes, keep your spirit unbroken…Our search for models of virtue, certainly, will be better when you take on the role of first lady.’14 The poem probably postdates Livia’s lifetime. In 9 BC she sought consolation from a different source.
Livia consulted an Alexandrian philosopher, who Cassius Dio tells us was known to Augustus. In Seneca’s account, he described himself as a confidant of both husband and wife. His name was Areius or Areus Diodymus and his advice has a decidedly modern ring to it. Areius, Seneca records, explained to Livia her tendency to repress her feelings in public and the need to adopt a less guarded approach to Drusus’s death within the safe confines of her inner circle of friends.15 At the forefront of Livia’s mind loomed the example of Octavia and her black-crêpe orgy of bereavement. At Areius’s prompting she placed portrait
s of Drusus both in her private rooms and in public places; unlike Octavia, she encouraged her friends to talk about the dead man. Augustus shared her grief. Suetonius states that he ‘felt so deep a love for Drusus that, as he admitted to the Senate on one occasion, he considered him no less his heir than were Julia’s sons, whom he had adopted’.16
Impossible, then, that those writers should be correct who, as both Suetonius and Tacitus report, record Drusus’s death as the result of poisoning ordered by Augustus…17 Malign sources portray Drusus as a martyr to belated Republicanism, forcibly removed on suspicion of a retrograde wish to restore Rome’s erstwhile status quo. Rumour takes no account of rank. Nor of probability or rationale. It is a lesson we must bear in mind in assessing Livia’s life.
Chapter 24
‘What more can I ask of the immortal gods?’
Thirty-six crocodiles met their death in the Circus Flaminius in a public spectacle in 2 BC. The Circus, close to the Tiber, had been specially flooded for the occasion. Nearby in the same year a large artificial lake was dug. It too was flooded – to provide the setting for a re-enactment of a naval battle involving thirty ships and three thousand men; ships sank and men were killed. In the arena, Cassius Dio records, two hundred and sixty lions were slaughtered. Gladiatorial contests occupied the Saepta, also claiming their toll of fatalities. It was a year of celebration and festal Rome ran with blood.
The occasion was the long-awaited dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor at the centre of the new Forum of Augustus. Augustus, however, was celebrating more than the completion of handsome building projects. On 5 February, the Senate conferred upon him the title ‘Father of the Country’.1 It was essentially a formality, but an important one nevertheless. ‘Until then,’ Dio reports, ‘he had only been so addressed, without the title having been established by decree.’2 Augustus delighted in his newest honour. ‘With tears in his eyes,’ according to Suetonius, he answered the assembly. ‘Fathers of the Senate, I have at last achieved my highest ambition. What more can I ask of the immortal gods than that they may permit me to enjoy your approval until my dying day?’3 As in the stories of gods and men which Augustus’s life increasingly resembled, that slaking of highest ambition would be followed by a crash. Its fallout provided Rome with a spectacle more unexpected and involving than the slaughter of crocodiles or lions.
At its centre was a woman, Augustus’s daughter Julia. Her behaviour shocked not only her father but popular opinion across Rome. Something of the magnitude of the scandal can be judged from Velleius’s outraged account.
In the city, in the very year in which Augustus…had sated to repletion the minds and eyes of the Roman people with the magnificent spectacle of a gladiatorial show and a sham naval battle…a calamity broke out in the emperor’s own household which is shameful to narrate and dreadful to recall. For his daughter Julia, utterly regardless of her great father and her husband, left untried no disgraceful deed untainted with either extravagance or lust of which a woman could be guilty, either as the doer or as the object, and was in the habit of measuring the magnitude of her fortune only in the terms of licence to sin, setting up her own caprice as a law unto itself.4
Heedless of her father’s moral legislation, Julia had begun her career of sexual liberation at an early age. In the year Augustus dedicated the temple he had vowed as long ago as Philippi, her misdemeanours caught up with her amid a whirlwind of publicity.
By the end of 2 BC Livia and Augustus, happy in their marriage, shared a sense of bereftness. The year that began so well found Augustus by its close ‘father of the country’ but alienated from his only child, whom he had banished to the volcanic island of Pandateria in the Tyrrhenian Sea. If the princeps’s latest honour encouraged Livia to consider herself by association ‘mother of the country’, she too would have acknowledged a bittersweet irony. Her marriage to Augustus, despite the promise of her two sons born to Nero, had proved barren. She had failed to win over to her own course of uncompromising moral rectitude that step-daughter she had looked after from birth. Her younger son Drusus had died following a commonplace-seeming riding accident at the age of twenty-nine. Unexpected as those thunderbolts the Romans read as omens, four years before Julia’s disgrace, in 6 BC, Livia’s elder son Tiberius had abandoned Rome for voluntary exile on Rhodes. His course shocked and confused not only his mother and stepfather but the ordinary Roman in the street. Newly invested with tribunician power and proconsular authority, the highest honours in Augustus’s gift previously shared only by Agrippa, Tiberius had left behind him his wife, his mother and his stepfather, after a petulant hunger strike and an inadequate explanation. Julia’s adultery and Tiberius’s ‘insulting retreat’ both joined Pliny’s list of Augustus’s ‘misfortunes’.5 Livia shared in those misfortunes. Neither the father of the country nor his wife ended the year able to take pleasure in their children or even to think of them with equanimity.
Julia’s fall from grace came as a surprise to readers of poetry. Sometime after 16 BC Propertius had published his final elegies, including a poem in which a deceased woman, Cornelia, consoles her husband and children. Cornelia was the daughter of the same Scribonia whose brief, unhappy marriage to Octavian ended at Julia’s birth. Propertius’s Cornelia acknowledges her kinship with the princeps’s daughter. She also reveals Julia’s status as a paragon of Roman virtues. ‘My mother’s tears and the city’s grief exalt me, and my bones are protected by Caesar’s moans. He laments that living I was worthy sister to his daughter, and we have seen a god’s tears fall.’6
Julia was popular and admired in Rome. As disbelieving as Cornelia would have been had she lived, the people protested vigorously against her banishment, vocal in their demands for her return. 7 Augustus refused to relent. The daughter who had been acclaimed as the living Aphrodite on coins minted in the eastern empire had offended her father too gravely. Julia traduced that moral legislation which Livia made it her life’s study to uphold. Her transgression stimulated prurience and condemnation in equal measure from Rome’s (male) historians. We must decide for ourselves the likelihood of Augustus’s daughter – a woman so proud of her birth, according to Macrobius, that she disdained Tiberius’s Claudian descent8 – offering herself nightly for sale on the rostra of the Forum in view of every passing Roman partygoer or insomniac. ‘Turning from adultery to prostitution,’ Seneca relates, ‘she had stationed herself at the statue of Marsyas, seeking gratification of every kind in the arms of casual lovers.’9 Augustus was initially as incredulous as the Roman crowd; learning more, Cassius Dio tells us, ‘he was overcome by a passion so violent that he could not keep the matter to himself, but actually spoke of it to the Senate.’10 It was Augustus’s response which destroyed the reputation of the Julia of Propertius’s elegy, not Julia’s indiscretions. Historians have debated Livia’s role in informing him of his daughter’s caprices.
As with every incursion of Augustus’s family into Rome’s political arena, there were implications for Livia in Julia’s inglorious downfall. We cannot know the nature or even the probability of Augustus’s discussions of his political agenda with the women of his family, although we know from Suetonius that the princeps was in the habit of ‘first [committing] to notebooks’ statements to Livia which he considered ‘important’.11 Livia in turn, as we have seen, raised with Augustus subjects that particularly concerned her, like the freedom of Samos, and dedicated herself to upholding Augustan policy through the only means available to her – involvement with Rome’s religious life and the promulgation of a carefully calibrated visual imagery. During her lifetime Octavia had behaved similarly, sharing Livia’s reputation for honour and virtue. The best-known of her daughters, Drusus’s widow Antonia, would act in like fashion.
A clear presumption existed that where the women of Augustus’s generation led, their juniors would follow. As the princeps’s only daughter, Julia was the most prominent of that second generation of Augustan women. She had been strictly brought up in her father�
��s household by Augustus and Livia as the inheritor of their moral outlook, and afterwards serially married to those exemplary Romans whom her father designated in turn his preferred successors. In Augustus’s denunciation of his only daughter to the Senate was a powerful exposure of the fraudulence of public appearances and an admission of a very personal failure.
More worrying for Augustus, Julia’s contempt for the laws by which he had sought to reform Rome’s character mirrored the feelings of many upper-class men and women. In 2 BC Julia revealed herself as the worm in the bud, symptom of the degree to which Augustus’s most cherished policies had failed to win either hearts or minds in a loose-living city. It was an act of unforgivable disloyalty. Augustus could not be unaware that it contrasted starkly with Livia’s behaviour: Macrobius preserves instances of the princeps berating his daughter with her failure to meet the standards set by her stepmother, and her cheerful dismissal of Livia’s chilly example. In the tussle between the two women – for Augustus’s heart and for ideological dominance – Livia would emerge victorious. Two decades later, when Augustus’s will was read, it was revealed that ‘he had given orders that “should anything happen” to his daughter Julia’, her body must be barred from his mausoleum.12 To the surprise of modern readers, the same document adopted Livia as his daughter. The relative rewards of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour could not be more starkly expressed.
Julia’s errant behaviour consisted at the very least of repeated adulterous liaisons over a lengthy period. Among her partners was that son of Mark Antony, Iullus Antonius, brought up in Octavia’s household and known to Julia from childhood. He would later die as a consequence of his involvement with Julia, executed perhaps, perhaps committing suicide. Irrespective of her lovers’ identities, Julia’s misdemeanours posed a double challenge to Augustus. More than overruling her father on a political level, by declining to conform to the spirit of his legislation she challenged him symbolically. The ‘father of the country’ had failed to moderate the behaviour of his only daughter. This was a significant weakness in a society which, at least theoretically, ascribed control of women to men. That Augustus survived this onslaught is in part attributable to Livia, whose consistently exemplary personification of the traditional virtues of Romen wives and mothers, coupled with a blanket official silence concerning Julia in the aftermath of her banishment, granted Augustus the appearance of the upright father unfairly crossed by a wayward child. In time Augustus even made light of his tribulations. ‘Among friends, he said that he had two darling daughters that gave him trouble, the Republic and Julia,’ Macrobius relates.13 Such sophisticated insouciance scarcely told the whole story. Suetonius records a bleaker outlook: ‘he would sigh deeply and sometimes quote a line from the Iliad, “Ah, never to have married and childless to have died.”’14 Where Julia was concerned he spoke in earnest; he did not regret his marriage to Livia. But Livia could not undo Julia’s transgressions or erase the stain of her exposure. Her only means of benefiting Augustus was adherence to the unspotted private life she had espoused in 38 BC, remaining the same ‘model of virtue’ she was hailed as in the ‘Consolation to Livia’.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 23
