Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  Livia was temperate in her emotions. At her one recorded moment of emotional crisis – Drusus’s death – she took advice on how best to address her unhappiness, followed that advice and, in doing so, won the admiration of onlookers and writers, among them Seneca. Tiberius’s eccentric flit from Rome in the wake of Augustus’s bestowal of tribunician power and proconsular authority did not rival the anguish of Drusus’s death. Far from collapsing under the setback, Livia governed her response to the extent that the sources felt no need to record it. We do not know her private feelings or details of any communications with Tiberius. There are reasons to assume that Augustus was similarly excluded from her innermost thoughts.

  Not for the first time, Livia embarked on a waiting game. Tiberius did not intend to remain on Rhodes indefinitely. Suetonius and Velleius agree that he had asked Augustus for leave of absence in order to rest. Although implausible, such an excuse on the part of a thirty-six-year-old man of proven stamina, crowned with every glory, appears to indicate an intention of returning at some future date. Livia could not predict the duration of Tiberius’s absence, but she could be reasonably certain that, with Augustus’s sanction, Tiberius would in time return to Rome. In the meantime, sword-toting friends of Gaius notwithstanding, his position of retirement on an unassuming island in the eastern Mediterranean was possibly safer than Rome with its intrigues and power struggles. Four years after Tiberius’s departure, his estranged wife Julia proved the severity of the penalties in store for those who offended Augustus’s government. In the following year Augustus pointedly omitted to renew Tiberius’s five-year grant of tribunician power on its expiry; instead, imperium passed to Tiberius’s elder stepson Gaius. To those like Livia concerned with developments within Augustus’s family, there was a clear inference that, despite his own precarious health, Augustus had decided to bypass the middle generation and entrust his power to those grandsons he had adopted as long ago as 17 BC. Wittingly or otherwise, Tiberius had scored an own goal.

  How Livia responded to this knowledge, which Augustus may have discussed with her, is matter for conjecture. Her own uncertainty, based on daily familiarity with Rome’s shifting temperature, contrasted with that of Tiberius. Tiberius, Dio tells us, shared his exile with an Alexandrian grammarian and expert astrologer called Thrasyllus. Together the two men consulted the stars in the hope of decoding the future. They drew comfort from what they saw. Thrasyllus may have been a charlatan; certainly he issued his predictions with confidence. Dio reports Tiberius as being ‘very accurately informed as to what fate held in store both for himself and for Gaius and Lucius’.14 If the vision afforded to Tiberius and Thrasyllus was indeed accurate, the knowledge promised greater succour to the former than to those children of his exiled wife. Within two years of Augustus relenting and Tiberius’s return to Rome, both Gaius and Lucius were dead.

  The wife of the Father of the Country needed to prove herself. Her elder son had discarded a career of notable distinction in order to stargaze and study on an island more Greek than Roman. He left Rome accompanied not by the trappings of glory but by a single senator, Lucilius Longus, a handful of equestrians and those lictors and viators appointed to attend him in his capacity as tribune of the plebs invested with imperium.15 Livia did not see him off at Ostia. Her other son lay dead. The stepdaughter to whom she had been a mother throughout her life had offended not only specific moral legislation but sensibilities rooted deep in the Roman psyche, flaunting her depravity in Rome’s public places, desecrating the rostra of the Forum in her pursuit of casual sex. So complete was Julia’s rejection of Livia’s example that she behaved in a manner which turned her stepmother’s policy on its head. Where Livia avoided the appearance of any intrusion into Rome’s male arena, Julia embraced it, selling sexual favours at the heart of the men-only zone of the Forum. As she embarked on a lifetime’s exile, Julia took with her to joyless Pandateria Scribonia, her blood mother divorced by Augustus on the day of her birth. For Livia it was the final rebuff. She had failed to make Julia the daughter Augustus wanted; she had also failed to create any relationship of love and affection with her. In adversity, Julia chose the company of the mother she had never had. Only Drusus’s widow Antonia upheld the standards Augustus had made central to his government; Antonia was not Livia’s but Octavia’s daughter. The Senate had acclaimed Augustus Father of the Country. Although Valerius Maximus compared the brotherly love between Tiberius and Drusus to that of Castor and Pollux16 – a tribute either to Nero or to Livia – Livia’s record as mother within her own house did not bear scrutiny or, on this count, invite a corresponding honour.

  Happily, for all her avoidance of public display of the sort responsible for Julia’s downfall, Livia had not, as we know, confined her activities to the domestic life of her own family. She had adopted a policy which, in one sense, placed her in the position of mother and father to all those she benefited. It was a policy earlier practised by wives of the pharaohs and, less contentiously, by wealthy upper-class women throughout Roman history.17 Livia gave allowances to parents to enable them to bring up children who would otherwise have been exposed at birth; she also formed a habit of contributing to young girls’ dowries. Both gifts created bonds between Livia and Romans outside Augustus’s household, extending the bounds of her ‘family’ and the nature and degree of her influence. Dio explains that the parents and daughters in question were drawn from senatorial ranks, adding that, at her death, the Senate voted Livia the unusual honour of an arch, ‘because she had reared the children of many, and had helped many to pay their daughters’ dowries, in consequence of all which some were calling her Mother of her Country’.18 Although Tiberius did not ratify the title, in death Livia had achieved parity with her husband. She had also, through her choice of recipients, helped strengthen ties between Augustus’s government and the ruling class.

  ‘I believe that far more wrongs are put right by kindness than by harshness,’ Livia tells Augustus in Dio’s Roman History. The context for what is presumably an imaginary conversation between husband and wife is a lengthy debate about the appropriate punishment of conspirators.19 A testamentary epitaph discovered in Rhegium, in the far southeast of Italy, the site to which Julia was transferred from Pandateria in AD 4, attests to a freedwoman of Livia’s among Julia’s slaves.20 Mother and stepdaughter enjoyed a relationship of limited concord. But Livia, it appears, continued to assist Julia after her banishment: the gift of slaves was one of the few she might offer the disgraced prisoner with impunity. In AD 4 Livia had reason for generosity. Ten years after his departure for Rome in 6 BC, Tiberius had beeen adopted by Augustus as his heir.

  Chapter 26

  ‘Perpetual security’

  Velleius Paterculus was a worthy spin doctor. Twenty-seven years after Augustus adopted Tiberius, a capitulation chiefly notable for its bad grace, Velleius recorded the events of what he describes as ‘a day of good omen…for all’ – 27 June AD 4. First Marcellus had died, then Agrippa. Their deaths separated by two years, Lucius and Gaius were the latest victims of Augustus’s succession jinx.

  Caesar Augustus did not long hesitate, for he had no need to search for one to choose as his successor but merely to choose the one who towered above the others. Accordingly…in the consulship of Aelius Catus and Gaius Sentius…he adopted him, seven hundred and fifty-four years after the founding of the city…The rejoicing of that day, the concourse of the citizens, their vows as they stretched their hands almost to the very heavens, and the hopes which they entertained for the perpetual security and the eternal existence of the Roman empire, I shall hardly be able to describe to the full…1

  Tiberius’s return to Rome – foreshadowed, Suetonius tells us, by the omen of an eagle which, never previously seen on Rhodes, landed on the roof of his house – ended in a sort of victory. It was almost certainly not accompanied by the public rejoicing of Velleius’s account. The authorship of that victory was attributed by her detractors to Livia, ‘that feminine bully’ c
ondemned for this very reason by Tacitus.2 It would become, in the writing of Rome’s history, an unforgivable incursion of maternal ambition into the male arena of power. The truth, of course, was less simple.

  Augustus had repeatedly sought to choose candidates for the succession from within his own family. Marcellus was his nephew, Gaius and Lucius his grandsons. Each shared with Augustus Octavian and, in small measure, Julian blood. Tiberius lacked kinship with either family, his only connection with Augustus the fact of his mother’s remarriage. In AD 4, unlike the occasion of his marriage to Livia in 39 BC, Augustus took no pleasure in Claudian distinction or patrician descent. Uniquely he explained his adoption of Tiberius as arising ‘for reasons of state’. Ten years later, he reiterated this graceless acceptance of defeat in the wording of his will: ‘Since an unkind fate has robbed me of my grandsons, I make Tiberius my heir.’3 It was a loveless asseveration. A letter written by Augustus to Gaius three years previously demonstrates the pathos of the former’s changed fortunes: ‘My darling little donkey, whom Heaven knows I miss when you are away…I beg the gods that I may spend however much time is left to me, with you safe and well, the country in a flourishing condition – and you and Lucius playing your part like true men and taking over guard duty from me.’4 Ties of affection bound Augustus to Julia’s sons. Unusually, he had overseen their upbringing himself, teaching them literature, how to swim and even to master handwriting modelled on his own. Presumably in time he had introduced them to the finer points of statecraft as he understood it. Although the sources offer no record of a complementary role for Livia in relation to Augustus’s boy heirs, Suetonius preserves an instance of the doting love both Augustus and Livia were capable of feeling towards young children, in this case a great-grandchild. ‘An extremely likeable boy’, a child of Julia’s younger daughter Agrippina and Drusus’s elder son Germanicus, died in early childhood. ‘Livia dedicated a statue of him, dressed as a cupid, to Capitoline Venus; Augustus kept a replica in his bedroom and used to kiss it fondly whenever he entered.’5 Such a combination of whimsy and devotion was not one either spouse chose to express towards Tiberius. In Livia’s case we may assume maternal affection; Augustus’s emotions at this point are less certain, compounded for the most part of regret at the premature loss of Gaius and Lucius.

  Augustus made it plain that his agreement to Tiberius’s return was conditional. Chief among the princeps’s conditions was his son-in-law’s retirement from public life. On Rhodes, Tiberius had forfeited the special powers which elevated him above other members of Augustus’s family. Now those powers belonged to Gaius Caesar, an arrangement entirely satisfactory to Augustus. In the interval since Tiberius’s departure, Gaius, now twenty-two, and Lucius, nineteen, had attained the majority they required to embark on a serious role in Roman power. Their maturity, albeit unproven by experience and lacking Tiberius’s distinction, rendered their erstwhile stepfather obsolete. Consolidating this obsolescence was the fact that Augustus had dissolved Tiberius’s marriage to Julia. In the process, as Livia would have appreciated keenly, he had severed a link between himself and his remaining stepson.

  Tiberius had acted judiciously in ascribing his wish to return to Rome to a desire to see his family. After initial refusals, Augustus’s agreement condoned a continuing family role for the younger man. Shortly after his arrival in the capital, Tiberius celebrated his son Drusus’s formal introduction to public life – swapping the toga praetexta for the toga virilis and inscribing his name on the lists of citizens and those eligible for military service in the Forum. Afterwards, he moved house. He left behind the large house which had previously belonged first to Pompey the Great, then to Mark Antony. In its stead he chose a more modest dwelling place in a less conspicuous district – the Gardens of Maecenas, also on the Esquiline Hill. The move represented a calculated step away from Rome’s administrative centre and political hub, which lay to the northeast.6 Suetonius states that, obedient to Augustus’s proscriptions, he lived there ‘in strict retirement’ for nearly three years.7

  After her fears that his life had been in danger, Livia must have been relieved to have Tiberius back in Rome. She was too shrewd to ignore the pronounced changes in his position following the folly of his retirement. Acquainted with Augustus’s implacability, she may have struggled to reconcile herself to the certain diminution of his prospects – only she can have known the vigour of her efforts on Tiberius’s part over the past seven years and the strength of Augustus’s resistance. If she retained any spark of hope, it lay in the increase in Tiberius’s chances of renewed good fortune which residence in Rome brought. Although it is unlikely that any of those who had ranged themselves behind Gaius and Lucius, as the sources intimate, spared a thought for Livia and her shattered hopes, her position embraced a degree of pathos.

  Possibly at this juncture Livia drew comfort from a sense of regrouping in the wake of recent disasters. Julia was banished, breaking Tiberius’s strongest connection with the principate, but Livia remained married to Julia’s sons’ adoptive father and female head of the household in which the boys had been brought up, a role of some influence. She continued to enjoy an exemplary reputation. Since Julia’s departure, she occupied uncontested the position of first lady of Augustus’s court, which only the marriage of Gaius – engaged in time to Livia’s granddaughter Livilla – or Lucius could now challenge. In addition, after Drusus’s death, in opposition to Augustus’s Lex Iulia de Maritandis Ordinibus, his widow Antonia had chosen not to remarry but to live instead with her mother-in-law Livia. Mourning the loss of one child and what she may have regarded as the lost prospects of another, Livia at least enjoyed the company of a sympathetic and attentive daughter-in-law, a woman whose character and reputation for virtue in some ways mirrored her own. Valerius Maximus expressed this manifestation of Antonia’s fidelity to Drusus’s memory strikingly. ‘After his death, although she was beautiful and in the prime of her life, she lived with her mother-in-law rather than remarrying. Together in one bed, Antonia let her youthful vigour waste away while the other woman grew old as she went through widowhood.’8 Part of the importance of Valerius’s account is its emphasis on Livia’s age. With hindsight we know that, at sixty, Livia had almost a third of her life ahead of her. But to her contemporaries, even perhaps to herself, time was running out for a woman who still had one great purpose to achieve.

  Antonia took with her to the Palatine house her children Germanicus, Livilla and Claudius. Claudius, whom Cassius Dio describes as ‘sickly in body, so that his head and hands shook slightly’,9 was already familiar with Livia’s house. He had probably spent time there during his mother’s absence on campaign with Drusus, considered too infirm to accompany his parents.10 Antonia clearly bore Livia no ill will as a result of the honours showered on her at Drusus’s death, which had not been shared with her daughter-in-law. Arguably, in 9 BC Antonia as much as Livia merited the Senate’s grant of ius trium liberorum, ‘the right of three children’, with its freedom from formal guardianship and increased legal rights of inheritance – a formality in Livia’s case, since she already enjoyed these privileges. Although Livia had been pregnant three times, she had borne only two children – in contrast to Antonia, who gave Drusus two sons and a daughter. Livia’s bereavement, but not that of Antonia, was also noted by the Senate with a vote of statues. Antonia’s strength did not derive from public tokens. The interweaving of the two women’s households after this date is attested by the presence of Antonia’s slaves and freedwomen among those of Livia and Tiberius in Livia’s columbarium; it can reasonably be interpreted as pointing to a degree of domestic harmony between them

  Did Livia importune Augustus on Tiberius’s behalf following the latter’s return to Rome in AD 2? The sources are silent, but the answer is surely not. With Tiberius at home, and happy in her arrangement with Antonia, Livia may have been inclined to count her blessings. Although we cannot prove her actions, it is probable that she had devoted at least part of the l
ast quarter-century to promoting Tiberius’s cause – all, apparently, in vain. It was a moment to enjoy the security and gains of her own position. First Octavia, then Julia had asserted their closer consanguinity with Augustus in the preferment of their sons. Two of Julia’s sons remained Augustus’s nominated successors, while the third, Agrippa Postumus, might be expected to share their good fortune in some measure, but Julia, like Octavia, no longer held sway over the princeps.

  If, however, Tiberius’s return to Rome did indeed once again inspire Livia to lofty aspirations, she would not have long to wait before receiving a glimmer of hope. On 20 August, en route for manoeuvres in Spain, Lucius Caesar died suddenly at the Gaulish port of Massilia. He was nineteen. So swift, unforeseen and inexplicable was his demise that the sources concur in their silence on the circumstances surrounding the death. Dio’s ‘the spark of Lucius’s life had…been extinguished at Massilia’ is typical.11 It would not be long before this unexpected blow to the succession plans inspired a familiar refrain, that of Livia’s involvement – what Tacitus describes, exploiting literary stereotypes with greater dramatic effect than accuracy, as the ‘secret hand’ of his ‘stepmother Livia’.12