Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  Livia was in overall charge of the family’s clothes, but that she personally spent much time at the loom or with the needle may be doubted. Otherwise how were members of staff designated as wool weighers (lanipendi) and sewing men and sewing women (sarcinatores and sarcinatrices) meant to be spending their time? The sculpted busts of Livia that survive show her wearing no jewelry and, despite the fact that she used the services of a margaritarius, a pearl setter, it may be that she dressed conservatively and liked to be, in Horace’s famous phrase, “simplex munditiis” or “simple in her elegance.”

  Like her husband, Livia would not have washed first thing in the morning; however, her hair needed to be dressed. This could take some time and she will have made use of an ornatrix. The fashionable hairstyle of wealthy women of Livia’s day had the hair drawn forward from the middle of the head, and then pulled back up into a topknot. On the sides, the hair was taken back in plaits to behind the head. Stray wisps of hair might fall over the forehead and down the nape of the neck.

  Roman women used cosmetics, and we may suppose that Livia was no exception. Creams, perfumes, and unguents were widely sold. Makeup for the face consisted of a grease base, often lanolin from unwashed sheep’s wool, mixed on small plates with various colored substances—ocher or dried wine lees for rouge; black from ash or powdered antimony for the eyebrows and around the eyes. Chalk and, dangerously, white lead were applied to the face and arms.

  Livia had a robust constitution. Like her husband, she ate sensibly. Late in her life she attributed her good health to the wine she habitually drank; this was a highly select vintage from Pucinum, a rocky promontory in the Gulf of Trieste where a small castellum used to stand (and nowadays the Castle of Duino).

  Drinking wine was not Livia’s only prescription for longevity. She produced recipes for various ailments, some of which have survived. One of these was for inflammation of the throat and was a concoction of opium, anise, aromatic rush, red cassia, coriander, saffron, cinnamon, and other herbs mixed with Attic honey. Another promised to relieve nervous tensions and included fenugreek, Falernian wine, olive oil, marjoram, and rosemary. This was cooked and strained and mixed with half a pound of wax. It was to be rubbed gently into the body.

  Livia’s interest in homemade medicines, employed (it may be guessed) on reluctant relatives and members of her household, could well have contributed to the reputation as a poisoner that she acquired after Marcellus’ death.

  How exactly Livia passed her time received little attention from contemporary historians. Although a Roman upper-class woman was free to go out, attend public entertainments, visit temples, and play an active role in high society, she was not expected to have a public career; rather, she was to pursue a vocation of looking after her husband and children. She ran the household while her spouse entered politics, fought wars, and governed provinces. In his absence, she would make sure that all was well on his estates and with his finances. Even more important, she would tend the family’s political connections and, when necessary, pull strings behind the scenes.

  Provided she adhered to the rules, an intelligent Roman woman like Livia would have little difficulty in bending them to her purposes. She was well advised to take account of two models of feminine behavior, one to admire and the other to avoid. In the first category was Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi brothers, reformers who lost their lives in struggles with the Senate in the second century B.C. Once, when another woman who was a guest in her house showed off her jewelry, the finest in existence at that time, Cornelia kept her in talk until her children came home from school, and then said: “Here are my jewels.” When the boys were grown, she helped them in their political careers, and she bore their loss “with a noble and undaunted spirit.”

  The alternative paradigm illustrated the grave danger a woman faced if she tried to play too active a part in a man’s world. In the following century, a certain Sempronia, mother of Caesar’s assassin Decimus Junius Brutus, associated herself with the radical politician Lucius Sergius Catilina.

  Among their number [women who joined Catilina] was Sempronia, a woman who had committed many crimes that showed her to have the reckless daring of a man. Fortune had favored her abundantly, not only with birth and beauty, but with a good husband and children. Well educated in Greek and Roman literature, she had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than there is any need for a respectable woman to acquire, besides many accomplishments such as minister to dissipation. There was nothing that she set a smaller value on than seemliness and chastity, and she was as careless of her reputation as she was of her money.

  This is a nearly contemporary assessment of a woman as able and attractive (it would appear) as Cornelia. Lubricity does not sit easily with the roll call of her good qualities, and her sexual history, whatever it may really have been, was evidently a metaphor for political impropriety. Sempronia had stepped out of line and so her personal character had to be blackened.

  Livia had no intention of making the same mistake. She kept a low profile, which won her much respect. She took care not to meddle in what her husband saw as his business and turned a blind eye to his sexual liaisons (not a word was ever whispered impugning her chastity). She was completely discreet and kept silent about all she knew. The princeps, for his part, respected her intelligence and often consulted her. It is a mark of his respect and affection, we can assume, that he did not divorce her and find another wife who might have borne him a son. Many of his contemporaries would have done precisely that.

  Tacitus saw Livia as a feminine bully who controlled her husband, but she is said to have believed that she had no real power over Augustus and that she exerted influence only because she was always willing to give way to his wishes. A number of recorded occasions illustrate Augustus’ readiness to refuse her requests, but he may have followed her recommendations at other times. It seems most likely that he treated her as he did other senior officials in whom he had confidence; like any chief executive of a large organization, he would expect his advisers to make sure that their advice was consistent with his overall policies and, if it was, he would be inclined to accept it.

  Livia’s morning was devoted to handling domestic matters and supervising her substantial business interests. After lunch she took a bath, and it was now that the greatest amount of time and attention will have been given to her toilette. If guests were coming to dinner, she would need to look her best.

  The Roman year was punctuated by holidays during which lavish public entertainments were staged. Augustus was aware that these shows—especially the munera, the gladiatorial displays—were important for the ongoing popularity of the regime.

  The munera were extraordinarily expensive even for the princeps’ deep pockets and he usually limited funding to two regular seasons, lasting between six to ten days in December and up to four in March. Most of the year’s numerous other feast days were devoted to the very popular chariot races at the Circus Maximus and to drama and dance spectaculars at various theaters in the city, including the one dedicated to the memory of Marcellus.

  The Circus Maximus (which was used for gladiatorial displays as well as the races) was overlooked by the steep slope of the Palatine Hill. Augustus had a habit of watching shows from the upper rooms of houses on the Palatine that belonged to friends or his freedmen. Occasionally he sat in the pulvinar, a roofed platform at the Circus on which a couch carrying images of the gods was placed and which was used as a box by him and members of his family.

  Augustus did not always arrive at the beginning of the games or even for the first day or so, but he always presented his excuses and appointed a substitute “president.” He did not repeat Julius Caesar’s mistake of reading papers and dictating replies during performances, a habit much disliked by the crowd. He watched intently “to enjoy the fun, as he frankly admitted to doing.” Augustus’ favorite sport was boxing; in the professional game he liked to pit Italians against Greeks, but he also had a taste for slogging matc
hes between untrained roughs in narrow street alleys.

  The princeps took a friendly interest in professional entertainers of all kinds and got to know some of them personally. However, there were limits of propriety on which he insisted; he banned gladiatorial contests sine missione, that is where a defeated fighter could not be reprieved and so had to be killed by his opponent. Augustus wanted to see bravery, but disliked pointless bloodshed. He also severely punished actors and other stage performers for licentious behavior. Women were not allowed to watch athletic contests (competitors did not wear clothes), and Augustus barred them from sitting alongside men at other entertainments; they were banished to the back rows.

  The picture of virtue, industry, and economy does not tell the complete truth. Away from Rome and out of the public view, Augustus and his family lived in grand and extravagant style. Suetonius claims that his country houses were “modest enough”; he cannot have visited the rocky island of Pandateria (today’s Ventotene) thirty miles or so west of Naples, where the princeps built a palace, now undergoing a major excavation.

  The island’s longer axis lies north–south and runs a little more than one and a half miles. All we know of Pandateria in antiquity is that it was plagued with field mice, which nibbled the sprawling grapes. It has no springs or rivers and large cisterns were built to collect rainwater. A small port was constructed, cut into the tufa, for landing building materials, food, wine, and other supplies. In the north, the island narrows and rises to a small plateau (where today’s cemetery stands). Here lie the remains of a building with many rooms, which were probably reserved for servants, slaves, and guards. The ground then dips and narrows into a small valley, where fountains played and a colonnaded portico with seats created a pleasant spot for conversation. A steep stairway led down to a small quay, giving family members and their guests private access to the villa.

  Finally, the main house was reached by walking up from the valley to where it perched on a rocky promontory overlooking steep cliffs. The building was shaped like a horseshoe with a garden in the middle; it contained dining rooms, a bathing complex, and other living spaces. At the tip of the promontory, a viewing platform offered an uninterrupted panorama of sky and sea.

  Here was secret splendor, where the princeps could entertain his intimate circle in undisturbed privacy. This was as it needed to be, for some of his friends were disreputable, not the kind of people with whom he should be seen in public. His dear Maecenas was a sybarite, but a civilized and able man. The same could not be said of the son of a wealthy freeman, the unappetizing Publius Vedius Pollio, who apparently helped establish a taxation system in the province of Asia after Actium. On one occasion Vedius went too far, even for his august friend.

  Vedius had tanks where he kept giant eels that had been trained to devour men, and he was in the habit of throwing to them slaves who had incurred his displeasure. Once, when he was entertaining Augustus at dinner, a waiter broke a valuable crystal goblet. Paying no attention to his guest, the infuriated Vedius ordered the slave to be thrown to the eels. The boy fell on his knees in front of the princeps, begging for protection. Augustus tried to persuade Vedius to change his mind. When Vedius paid no attention, he said: “Bring all your other drinking vessels like this one, or any others of value that you possess for me to use.”

  When they were brought, he ordered all of them to be smashed. Vedius could not punish a servant for an offense that Augustus had repeated, and the waiter was pardoned.

  Despite his public endorsement of strict private morals, Augustus apparently led (as already noted) a various and vigorous sex life. It was common knowledge, according to Ovid, that his house

  though refulgent with portraits

  of antique heroes, also contains, somewhere,

  a little picture depicting the various sexual positions

  and modes.

  Mark Antony once accused Augustus of dragging a former consul’s wife from her husband’s dining room into the bedroom—according to the startled Suetonius, “before his eyes, too!” Friends, among them a slave dealer called Toranius, used to arrange his pleasures for him, stripping women of their clothes so that they could be inspected as if they were slaves up for sale. Even as an elderly man Augustus is said “still to have harboured a passion for deflowering girls, who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife!”

  The great attract gossip, and it is not mandatory to believe these saucy tales. However, it is worth noting that, according to the sexual mores of upper-class Romans, there was nothing especially out of the ordinary about the behavior attributed to the princeps (consider, at a lower social level, Horace’s unabashed confessions). Antony launched his accusation only because he was on the defensive about Cleopatra. Augustus’ sexual rapacity seems to have been a matter of common report throughout his life.

  After exercising and bathing, Augustus and Livia approached the high point of the day, the cena or main meal. This started at about three in the afternoon and was an important means by which Romans socialized. It was not exclusively a family affair and guests were often invited. Clubs and societies of every kind held regular feasts, and leading aristocrats invited one another to an annual cena.

  Dinner parties took place in the triclinium. This was a dining room furnished with three communal couches, which were covered by mattresses and arranged along three sides of the room with a table in the center (for larger gatherings the triple-couch layout was simply repeated). There were also tables for drinks. Up to three diners per couch reclined alongside one another, like sardines, with their heads nearest the table and their left elbows propped on cushions. Lying down to eat was a highly prized luxury; when Cato vowed to eat his meals upright as long as Julius Caesar’s tyranny lasted, he was felt to be making a real sacrifice. Women sat on chairs, although it was becoming fashionable for them to recline with the men. If allowed to be present, children used stools in front of their fathers’ places.

  An advisory inscription on the wall of a house at Pompeii from the first century A.D. gives a good idea of how lively these social events could be:

  Do not cast lustful glances or make eyes at another man’s wife.

  Do not be coarse in your conversation.

  Restrain yourself from getting angry or using offensive language. If you cannot do so, then go home.

  Augustus gave frequent dinner parties, but in his case there was no need for instructions of this kind. These were rather elaborate occasions and great attention was paid both to social precedence and to achieving a good balance of personalities on the guest list. Usually not greatly interested in eating, the princeps would often arrive late and leave early, letting his guests start and finish without him.

  An usher (nomenclator) announced the diners as they entered. Their hands and feet were washed before they were shown to their places. They were provided with knives, spoons, and toothpicks, as well as napkins. Forks had not yet been invented as tools to eat with; guests helped themselves to food with their hands. Waiters brought in dishes and bowls and laid them on the table. Debris, such as shells and bones, was dropped onto the floor and swept up.

  The meal opened with the gustatio, tasting, during which appetizers were served—various pulses, cabbage in vinegar, pickled fruit and vegetables, strongly spiced mashes of shrubs and weeds such as nettle, sorrel, and elder, and snails, clams, and small fish. A fashionable delicacy was stuffed and roast dormice. A wine-and-honey mixture accompanied the gustatio.

  The main course consisted of a variety of meat dishes; favorites included wild boar, turbot, chicken, and sows’ udders. Fifty ways of dressing pork were known. There were no side dishes, but bread rolls were available. A sauce called garum or liquamen was added to almost everything. Garum was made from slowly decomposed mackerel intestines; its closest (if distant) modern equivalents are Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Finally, dessert consisted of fruit, nuts, and cakes soaked in honey.

  Wines were served with t
he food, but the serious drinking began only when the meal was over. Sometimes people drank at will, but the commissatio, a kind of ceremonial drinking match in which cups were drained at a single draught, was a more organized method of inebriation. A master of ceremonies, the rex bibendi (literally, “king of what is to be drunk”), would be appointed on the throw of a dice. The rex bibendi was in charge of mixing the wine and setting the number of toasts which everyone had to drink.

  Conversation flowed, and Augustus was an excellent and welcoming host with a talent for drawing out shy guests. He often enlivened his cenae with performances by musicians and actors or circus artistes and storytellers. Sometimes he would auction tickets for prizes of unequal value or paintings with their faces turned to the wall. Guests were required to take pot luck and bid blindly.

  Most Romans went to bed early, but the princeps’ day was not yet done. After dinner was over, probably about sunset (some less reputable cenae went on deep into the night), he withdrew to a couch in his study. There he worked until he had attended to all the remaining business of the day, or most of it—reading dispatches, dictating correspondence to secretaries, and giving instructions.

  Augustus was usually in bed by eleven and slept seven hours at the outside. A light sleeper, he woke up three or four times in the night. He often found it hard to drop off again and sent for readers or storytellers. He loathed lying awake in the dark without anyone sitting with him.

  At last, the ruler of the known world drifted into sleep.

  Photo Insert

  THE ROMAN FORUM AS IT WAS TOWARD THE END OF AUGUSTUS’ LIFE

  A. Tabularium, or archive.