Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  A question then arises about Augustus’s intention in creating Livia ‘Augusta’ in his will. Did he deliberately impose on Tiberius a problem he himself had been unwilling to address? Did he intend Tiberius to rule jointly with Livia? Did he imagine that the son would benefit from his mother’s long experience and her close association with himself, his success and his popularity with the Senate and people of Rome? Or did Augustus simply mean to grant his widow a position of public respect and of continuing behind-the-scenes influence in private? Such an intention surely could not be realized through the grant of a title with such explicit political resonance. There are few indications of Augustus’s political acumen failing him late in life. It would be surprising if he had chosen to act naively in a matter as significant as the future leadership of Rome.

  If Augustus failed to discuss his testamentary intentions with Livia, the business of interpretation fell simultaneously to her and Tiberius. As events would prove, their thoughts in this matter were not alike. The Republican son of a Republican father, Tiberius opposed on principle a role for women in Roman public life. ‘He repeatedly asserted that only reasonable honours must be paid to women,’ Tacitus records.6 He also opposed a culture of excessive formal recognition of any single individual, himself included. ‘Of the many high honours voted him, he accepted none but a few unimportant ones,’ Suetonius tells us. ‘He declined also to set the title “Emperor” before his name, or “Father of the Country” after; or to let the Civic Crown…be fixed above his own palace door; and even refrained from using the title “Augustus”.’7 The reputation he desired was the same as that to which the office-holders of Marcus’s atrium had once aspired. ‘They will do more than justice to my memory if they judge me worthy of my ancestors, careful of your interests, steadfast in danger and fearless of animosities incurred in the public service,’ he tells the Senate in Tacitus’s account.8

  Moderate in her habits, her public profile a model of restraint, eschewing any approach to extravagance that might suggest the Cleopatra-like excesses of eastern monarchy, Livia nevertheless does not appear to have shared Tiberius’s regret at Augustus’s overthrow of the Republic. Augustus’s assumption of supreme authority contravened that oligarchic power-sharing which once was central to Roman government. What he maintained in its stead was the Republic’s focus on the civicmindedness of its servants. In this way husband and wife reconciled the apparent contradiction of the restoration of the Republic by a quasi-monarch. In 13 BC Augustus had not balked at presenting himself in a ruler’s guise on the friezes of the Altar of Peace that bore his name. Wreathed and garlanded, he was distinguished from every other figure – princeps, father of his family and the State, godlike in his attributes. Only Livia shared the symbolism of Augustus’s costume. Following his death and his grant to her of the title ‘Augusta’, she showed reluctance in discarding that wreath and garland.

  Livia it was who masterminded Tiberius’s accession, suppressing news of Augustus’s death and surrounding the house at Nola with loyal troops. In this way at least Tiberius owed the principate to his mother. Astute and practical, Livia created an environment in which he could safely take control. This done, the sources momentarily lose interest in Augustus’s widow, their focus Tiberius, his actions and outlook. Alongside the two handwritten notebooks of his will, Augustus had entrusted to the Vestal Virgins three sealed rolls. One contained directions for his funeral. While Tiberius finalized with the Senate the implementation of those directions, Livia disappears from view. Perhaps she made plans of her own. Alongside the official ceremonies of Augustus’s funeral, Livia instituted a personal act of commemoration, according to Dio. ‘Livia held a private festival in his honour at the palace, which lasted for three days.’ Significantly, Dio adds, ‘This ceremony is still carried out by the reigning emperor down to the present day.’9

  At the outset of Tiberius’s reign, Livia’s actions – unwitting or otherwise – were those of a reigning emperor. In matters concerning Augustus, mother and son presented a semblance of concord. Dio describes ‘decrees passed in memory of Augustus, nominally by the Senate, but in fact by Tiberius and Livia…I have…mentioned Livia’s name, because she took a share in the proceedings, as if she possessed full powers.’10 Except in the inference of the Augusta title, Livia did not possess full powers, nor need we accept unchallenged Dio’s opinion that her behaviour gave rise to such an assumption. It may have seemed natural to her to interest herself in Augustus’s funeral arrangements and his posthumous honours. That she did so in a manner which, intentionally ‘private’, became public is indicative of the problems which lay ahead. Those problems were of neither Livia’s nor Tiberius’s making.

  ‘Goodbye, Livia: never forget whose wife you have been!’ Augustus tells his wife with a kiss minutes before dying, in Suetonius’s version.11 His words have been interpreted as a statement of love, imploring Livia to remain romantically constant. Is this likely? Livia was seventy-two and of stern moral outlook; the probability of her conceiving a new emotional attachment at this point was slight. But to a woman whose heredity included the taint of excessive pride, newly invested with a title of unrivalled distinction, an alternative interpretation of Augustus’s farewell may have suggested itself. Was it possible that Augustus admonished her to mindfulness of her status in Rome? In remembering whose wife she had been, Livia clung to the position she occupied by virtue of her marriage. Augustus’s death changed that position. But his investment of Livia with a female version of his own title perhaps sought to prevent the march of time and preserve the earlier status quo. If so, it was an unfair burden to impose on Tiberius. Augustus had circumscribed Livia’s prominence; Tiberius would find the task more difficult.

  One of the three sealed rolls entrusted for safekeeping to the Vestal Virgins alongside Augustus’s will contained, Suetonius tells us, ‘a record of his reign, which he wished to have engraved on bronze and posted at the entrance to the Mausoleum’.12 This was the document known as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the ‘Acts of the Deified Augustus’. Briefer than the thirteen-volume autobiography written during his convalescence in Spain forty years earlier, the Res Gestae lists Augustus’s version of his achievements in the service of Rome. It is a businesslike if vainglorious piece of work, with its tally of triumphs, ovations and salutations as imperator, its census figures and lists of laws passed and territories secured, but its portrait of Augustus’s career is selective. It omits mention of the Proscriptions or the lengthy power struggle against Mark Antony. It omits evaluation of those measures whose success was at best qualified. It also omits any mention of Livia. ‘Never forget whose wife you have been,’ Augustus addressed his wife, confronting death. In Rome, it was impossible that Livia should have said the reverse to him. And so the official record of Augustus’s principate, carved in bronze, despite references to that moral legislation for which Livia became an archetype and the temple restorations she seconded, excludes any contribution by Livia arising from her long marriage. In life, Augustus had exploited the women of his family as political pawns. In death, he overlooked their very existence.

  In tone and outlook, the Res Gestae is a Republican document, a ledger-like account of service to the state. Its tenor may have been more agreeable to Tiberius than that of Augustus’s will, fraught with problems as the latter would soon reveal itself. Tiberius, Tacitus tells us, determined at the very beginning of his principate to clip his mother’s wings. ‘He was jealous and nervous, and regarded this elevation of a woman as derogatory to his own person.’13 In truth, Livia’s elevation – apparently confirmed by the terms of Augustus’s will, and almost certainly more ‘derogatory’ in Tacitus’s mind than that of Tiberius – was not new. The silence of the Res Gestae aside, Livia had devoted fifty years to creating for herself a position of prominence unrivalled in five centuries of Claudian distinction. At the sound of the last trump, Augustus recognized those efforts by bestowing on his widow the blessing of his own divine blood.

&n
bsp; Chapter 30

  ‘His mother Livia vexed him’

  At a still unidentified point in the first half of the nineteenth century, a ring entered the collection of the British Royal Family.1 Little is known about its origins or how it came to be included in the Royal Collection. It was neither particularly old nor new at the time of its acquisition, probably dating from the end of the eighteenth century. It takes the form of an onyx cameo framed in gold. On the cameo are carved three heads in profile, one male and two female. The male head has been tentatively identified as that of Tiberius, the female head closest to it as Livia, the third profile is unidentified but may represent a personification of Rome or an allegorical figure. ‘Tiberius’ wears the laurel wreath of office, ‘Livia’ a form of the nodus hairstyle. The features of the two portraits are closely assimilated, each strong-jawed, with long, straight nose and large, oval eyes. Most likely the jewel was a souvenir of the Grand Tour. It may have been modelled on a Roman original – a similar portrait in Florence’s Museo Archaeologico has been suggested. The head of Tiberius dominates, carved from the darkest layer of stone. The shadowy profile of Livia beneath, tertiary-coloured and translucent, cannot be overlooked.

  As in the eighteenth century, so in the first: Tiberius could not escape his association with Livia. Across the empire, couplings like that replicated in minature on a cameo set in a ring proliferated. At Cumae, near Naples, seat of the famous Sibyl, an ancient Greek colony rich in religious resonance, priests dedicated statues of the princeps and his mother.2 At Tralles, in southwest Turkey, Tiberius and Livia shared a priest; their heads appeared together on the coins of eastern mints. 3 Often Augustus was included alongside his survivors, the source of their claim to honours – a triad of eminence and quasi-divinity. In the theatre at Volterra stood statues of Augustus, Livia and Tiberius.

  The year after Tiberius’s accession, the authorities of the city of Gytheum, a port in the Laconian Gulf, wrote to Rome’s new ruler. Gytheum was in Roman Sparta, an area with close ties to the Claudii, where once, during their flight from Octavian and the forces of the Triumvirs, Nero, Livia and Tiberius had sought sanctuary. In altered circumstances, the city’s authorities proposed a festival dedicated to the newly deified Augustus. They intended to honour not only the deceased emperor but leading members of his family, notably Tiberius and Livia, and set out their intention of commissioning statues or painted images of the imperial family.4 Both the city’s proposed honours and Tiberius’s reply survive as inscriptions, our fullest record of ceremonies of the Roman imperial cult.5 In this case, Tiberius declined images for himself: ‘I myself am satisfied with the more modest honours suitable for mortal men.’ He stated that Livia must make her own reply when she was fully acquainted with details of the honours proposed for her. We do not know the substance of that reply. Perhaps Livia’s response to the Gytheans was less repudiatory than that of her son; perhaps the Gytheans chose simply to ignore the strictures of both princeps and exalted mother. Despite Tiberius’s disclaimer, his own image joined that of Livia in Gytheum’s festival of the Divine Augustus. At the beginning and again at the end of daily processions, offerings of incense were made to painted images set up in the city’s theatre. Those images depicted Augustus the Father, Julia Augusta and Imperator Tiberius Caesar Augustus.6 In the minds of provincial worshippers, the family was united not simply by their shared repute and eminence, but, since Augustus’s will, by a common name.

  In AD 18 the city government of Forum Clodii in Latium inscribed a decree outlining its official celebrations of birthdays within the imperial family. Noting the city’s statues of Augustus, Tiberius and Livia, the decree stipulates, on Augustus’s birthday, a public sacrifice and games held in his honour, a public banquet and sacrifice for Tiberius on his birthday and, on Livia’s birthday, the distribution of wine and cakes to female worshippers of Bona Dea.7 In vain Tiberius resisted these tributes to a divinity which, on his own part and that of Livia, had yet to be attained. Torn between a genuine distaste for the culture of flattery, of which deification was the ultimate manifestation, and a recognition of the benefits inherent in his association with the divine Augustus, he adopted a two-part policy. In mainland Italy he forswore all temples, priests and altars to himself. As Dio reports, ‘no sacred precinct was set apart for him either by his own choice or in any other way…nor was anybody allowed to set up an image of him; for he promptly and expressly forbade any city or private citizen to do so’.8 By contrast he acquiesced in the blandishments of provincial centres. The evidence of Gytheum suggests that he did so with a degree of tactful kindliness which would afterwards appear uncharacteristic. It must nevertheless have seemed a killjoy instinct. From the outset of the principate and even earlier, the empire’s distant subjects made sense of their thraldom to Rome through the cult of Rome’s leader’s divinity.

  There is no reason to assume that Tiberius’s policy of quashing cult fervour arose from a desire to restrict honours paid to Livia. His focus appears genuinely to have been himself. The corollary of his approach would indeed be a curtailment of the worship of any member of the imperial family save Augustus, an approach which inevitably affected Livia but which, at that point, was technically correct. As the cases of Forum Clodii and Gytheum prove, Tiberius’s subtlety met with variable success. Livia’s association with Bona Dea, celebrated in Forum Clodii on her birthday, was not necessarily akin to investing her with divine attributes, nor was it an association within Tiberius’s control. She had enjoyed a long connection with the female-oriented cult, as we know; her publicized restoration of the temple of Bona Dea Subsaxana dates from the beginning of Augustus’s principate.

  Despite the insinuations of ancient sources bent on exaggerating tensions between Tiberius and his mother, the curmudgeonliness of Tiberius’s response to their joint worship was qualified. It was in fact exactly that which he applied to the question of his own worship. The extent and diversity of provincial honours paid to Livia during her son’s reign suggest unconcern on Tiberius’s part at this aspect of his mother’s profile. He did not exploit the issue as a vehicle for point-scoring; his sensitivity, even oversensitivity, was grounded in principle. In AD 23 cities of the Roman province of Asia competed to host a new temple dedicated jointly to Tiberius, Livia and the Senate. The gesture was one of thanksgiving, acknowledging Rome’s punishment of the province’s disgraced former governor, Gaius Junius Silanus, and the procurator Lucilius Capito. Tiberius assented to the proposal, and the temple was built in Smyrna on the Aegean coast, the site of modern-day Izmir. When, two years later, the province of Hispania Ulterior asked for permission to build a similar temple, the princeps reached a different decision. On this occasion, the Senate had been dropped by the Spanish envoys, who meant to dedicate their temple to Tiberius and Livia alone.9 ‘Disdainful of compliment,’ Tacitus reports, ‘Tiberius saw an opportunity to refute rumours of his increasing self-importance.’10 He withheld permission, using the opportunity provided by what he recognized as an apparent inconsistency to explain his position on provincial honours. His speech on the subject was that in which he made claim to a place in the temples of his listeners’ hearts. Whether, as Tacitus suggests, Tiberius regarded the encouragement of the imperial cult as a form of self-importance, we do not know. Nor need we assume he interpreted Livia’s greater enthusiasm as an expression of that vice in her. As time passed, the differences between mother and son would increasingly focus on questions of role and status. With regard to Hispania Ulterior, Tiberius was overly mindful of the Senate’s exclusion, the technicality that neither he nor Livia was yet, by senatorial decree, divine, and the absence, unlike in Asia, of any beneficial political purpose behind the scheme.

  Tiberius, Suetonius tells us, ‘complained that his mother Livia vexed him by wanting to be co-ruler of the Empire; which was why he avoided frequent meetings or long private talks with her…A senatorial decree adding “Son of Livia” as well as “Son of Augustus” to his honorifics so deeply offe
nded him that he vetoed proposals to confer “Mother of the Country” or any similarly high-sounding title on her.’11

  Among principal grounds for the worsening relations between Livia and Tiberius following the latter’s accession was a dispute over the role of Livia in Tiberius’s adoption as Augustus’s heir. The evidence to suggest that this became contentious through the actions of either Livia or Tiberius is inconclusive. Dio claims of Livia that, ‘in the time of Augustus she had possessed the greatest influence and she always declared that it was she who had made Tiberius emperor’.12 We need not accept Dio’s word unsupported. Livia and Tiberius both knew enough of Roman politics to recognize that Livia alone could not have made Tiberius princeps. Dio’s statement, if indeed Livia ever uttered its equivalent, is of a sort that she would surely have made only to Tiberius himself and then only under extreme duress. Throughout her marriage to Augustus, she had behaved with restraint and discretion. Are we to believe that at Augustus’s death she discarded those virtues? Did she demand for herself public acknowledgement of the power which for so long she had taken pains to conceal, knowing that its concealment was its only safeguard? It is more likely that it was the Senate’s misguided decree which sowed the seed of discord between mother and son.