The First Ladies of Rome Read online

  Scant traces survive recording Livia’s footsteps as Octavian’s wife over the next decade. But we can sketch a picture of the luxurious lifestyle she, as a Roman matron moving in the first circles of republican Roman society, had access to, thanks to sources such as the correspondence of Cicero, whose letters yield an impression both of the domestic pleasantries and of the glamorous social scene on offer to fashionable, well-connected women like his own wife Terentia – whose enormous personal fortune was used to help bankroll Cicero’s political career – and his daughter Tullia, the one-time object of Tiberius Nero’s courtship.57

  Written in the two decades prior to his brutal assassination in 43 BC, Cicero’s letters, addressed chiefly to his close confidant Atticus, paint a self-gratifying portrait of idyllic family life. On the one hand, we hear references to Terentia and Tullia making long leisurely summer tours of the family’s well-staffed seaside properties in coastal resorts such as Antium, to the south of Rome, a holiday destination particularly popular with the empire’s plutocrats. City life offered plenty of distractions too. Though banned from entering public buildings of office such as the Senate, Roman women had relative freedom of movement, certainly compared to their sequestered Athenian female forebears. Besides women-only religious gatherings, such as the rites of the goddess Bona Dea, there were also plenty of entertainments to attend, plays and public games at which, unlike in later years, women were still allowed to sit with the men. Such occasions were opportunities to socialise with friends as well as watch the shows, as the subversive poet Ovid playfully observed in a poem some years later when he said that the circus was a good place to start an affair and advised his male readers to try fanning the object of their affection with a racing programme to win her smiles.58

  Then there were dinner parties to plan, host and attend, where unlike their classical Athenian sisters, respectable Roman women ate side by side on reclining couches with the men – though excessive wine consumption was frowned upon for females.59 One of our few references to Livia’s whereabouts during the 30s tells us that in 36 BC, she, her children and Octavian were given permission to hold an annual state banquet celebrating final victory over Sextus Pompeius, with whom any illusion of a truce had since been shattered by Octavian’s divorce of Scribonia. Several naval clashes ensued before Sextus’s defeat by Octavian’s lieutenant Marcus Agrippa at the battle of Naulochus. If the celebratory banquet in question had followed traditional dinner-party protocol, then Livia would have invited the female guests, and Octavian the male guests.60 Since men could attend parties on their own with propriety but women had to be accompanied by a male chaperone, male guests probably often outnumbered female guests, and like their counterparts at mixed dinner parties in the nineteenth century, for example, women were encouraged to confine their remarks to acceptable subjects, and not attempt to muscle in on male conversational topics such as the work of the latest poets. But they were sometimes permitted to stay for after-dinner entertainments such as literary recitations, magicians or even appearances by dwarves, though there was disapproval in some quarters of women being allowed to watch these spectacles.61

  Like Terentia’s, Livia’s daily routine would have revolved to a large extent around her husband’s, which was dominated at least during the first half of the day by the salutatio, the obligatory all-male daily levee which started at dawn and witnessed a steady stream of friends and clients trooping across the thresholds of prominent men like Cicero and Octavian, seeking their help or advice in various personal and business matters. Cicero himself claimed to hate these daily duties, protesting to Atticus that the only repose he had was with his wife and children. In the meantime, elite women were expected to spend the morning delegating tasks to the staff and supervising the running of the household. It is not known for certain if during the late republic women of Livia’s and Terentia’s standing received their own deputations of visitors during the morning salutatio, although Livia certainly did during the imperial era. But we do know of invitations extended by women to other women to pay courtesy-calls, and that occasionally women even received trusted male visitors unchaperoned, as Atticus’s wife Pilia did when she borrowed Cicero’s villa on the Lucrine Lake one summer for a vacation without her husband and daughter.62

  Rome’s fashionable families typically maintained several properties for their private use, moving out from their winter townhouses in early spring to their luxurious seaside villas on the shores of fashionable resorts such as Antium, and retreating in the sweltering summer months to the cool of the Alban and Sabine hills around Rome, whose slopes were flecked with the summer hideaways of the privileged.63 As Cicero’s letters illustrate, travel around Italy between family homes without the escort of one’s husband was perfectly de rigueur for the respectable Roman matron, and certain wealthy Roman women of the period, including Terentia, Fulvia and Livia herself, are known to have been considerable property owners in their own right. The jewel in Livia’s own impressive portfolio, probably inherited from her father after his death, was a magnificent rural villa at a locality known today as Prima Porta, 9 miles (14.4 km) outside the city on the Via Flaminia, one of the main arterial roads leading north out of Rome, and a key anecdote locates her here not long after her marriage to Octavian.

  It was not until excavations of the skeleton of this villa, first discovered in 1596, were made in the late nineteenth century that the connection between it and a property known to have belonged to Livia in the region was made, validated in part by the discovery there of the so-called Prima Porta Augustus, the most famous statue in existence of Livia’s husband.64 Set high on a hill, the estate boasted beautiful gardens and breathtaking views of the local countryside from the terrace, with a magnificent vista across the valley of the River Tiber towards Rome in the distance and the Alban mountains whose slopes were littered with sacred shrines. Thanks to the rust-red tufa of the rocky local terrain, which was also used in the masonry of Livia’s house, Prima Porta was once called Saxa Rubra or ‘Red Rocks’ in antiquity, while ancients knew the villa itself by the name ad Gallinas Albas, which translates colloquially as ‘White Hen House’.65

  Roman villa owners placed a premium on cool and shade in their hillside homes. Cascading fountains and fragrant gardens provided a refreshing oasis in the heat, and there was a preference for placing bedrooms and eating areas in the middle of the house away from the warmth of the exterior walls.66 But there were still ways to let the outside in, as proven by the remarkable 1863 discovery at Livia’s villa of a large underground summer dining-room (triclinium), measuring a little under 6 metres by 12 metres (19½ by 39 feet). Here the walls were painted with the miraculous indoor illusion of a Mediterranean garden paradise, richly planted with poppies, damask roses, periwinkles and chrysanthemums. Against a background palette of warm turquoise, blackbirds, nightingales, partridges and thrushes flit among the branches of lemon, orange, pomegranate and cypress trees, and there is even a birdcage perched on a marble balustrade, and a neat lawn enclosed by a cane-and-wicker fence. Cocooned from the scorching summer heat by this cool subterranean bower, which was accessible by a steep staircase, Livia would once have played the part of political hostess to guests of her husband’s who had either come over from neighbouring villas or travelled the distance from nearby Rome, and she may even have been responsible for commissioning the unique design and decoration of the triclinium.67

  Visitors peering closer at this lush botanical and ornithological mural, now illuminated in the cool, air-conditioned museum setting of the Museo Nazionale in Rome, will find an intriguing detail. Nestled among the palms and pines painstakingly re-created on the room’s walls are laurel trees, a common enough sight in a Roman garden but one with a particular resonance in this case. For the presence of laurels in the decoration scheme, coupled with the referencing of ‘white hens’ in the villa’s name, echoes a famous omen said to have befallen Livia while in residence, one that formed a key part of her husband’s self-glorifying win
ner’s story in the years after Actium.

  The story goes, as told by more than one source from antiquity, that one day shortly after her marriage to Octavian, Livia was returning to the villa when suddenly a snow-white hen-chick, dropped from the beak of an eagle flying overhead, fell from the sky into her lap. Clutched in the chick’s mouth was a twig of laurel wood, which Livia removed and decided to plant in the ground, on the advice of augurs. While the hen-chick produced a healthy brood of chicks, the laurel twig multiplied into a thriving grove of trees. The bird plummeting from the sky into Livia’s lap sounds a little too good to be true, but recent excavations at Livia’s villa indicate that the laurel grove was perhaps less mythical. Perforated earthenware planting pots, ideally suited for growing laurel trees, have been found on the south-west corner of the hillside at Prima Porta, fired from the villa’s own kilns.68

  Though the laurel grove itself still eludes excavators to this day, the idea of its existence served as a powerful talisman to generations of Livia’s and Octavian’s heirs. In later years, when Roman emperors descended from Octavian and Livia rode in triumphal processions, they carried and were garlanded with laurel branches which were said to have been plucked from the villa’s grove.69 As long as the laurels still grew at Livia’s villa, the dynasty spearheaded by her husband would continue to thrive, and the laurel – a tree associated with the Roman god Apollo – would become Octavian’s insignia, a logo for his divinely granted right to rule. Thus Livia, still just a sapling herself in historical terms, was given her first role of importance to play as a chatelaine in her husband’s victory myth. She would imprint herself more and more in the Roman public’s psyche over the coming years.

  However, as the decade wore on, Livia continued to play a backseat role to her sister-in-law as far as the annals of the period were concerned. Octavia was still garnering plaudits for her role as mediator between the most powerful men of empire. In the spring of 37 BC, around the time that she was pregnant with her younger daughter Antonia Minor, she was called upon to douse another flare-up between her husband and her brother and act as go-between in a renegotiation of their power-sharing agreement at the Gulf of Tarentum in southern Italy.70 Recalling the role played by legendary female peacemakers Veturia, Volumnia and the Sabines, ancient commentators on the new treaty report that it was only through the calm diplomacy of Octavia that an acceptable compromise was brokered, in which Antony and Octavian agreed to lend each other ships and soldiers for their respective military campaigns against Parthia and Sicily. In tribute, Octavia was toasted as ‘a marvel of womankind’.71 The celebration of her role as peacemaker led to her appearing once more on her husband’s currency, this time with Antony’s and Octavian’s heads conjoined like Siamese twins and facing her profile – the reverse showed an image of three galleys with sails billowing. Other surviving bronze examples display the eroded features of Antony and Octavia facing each other on the reverse side of the coin while on the obverse we can just make out a couple cast in the role of the sea-god Neptune and his wife Amphitrite, riding in a chariot drawn by hippocamps, embracing each other on the waves.72

  But this romantic tableau was little more than a charade. With matters wrapped up satisfactorily at Tarentum, including the renewal of the triumvirs’ power-sharing agreement for another five years, Antony departed Italy once more in the autumn of 37 and returned to the east. Octavia usually spent winters with her husband in Athens, but this time he left his wife and children behind at Rome in the care of Octavian. As an excuse, he offered the pretext of keeping them out of harm’s way while he continued a long-standing campaign against the Parthian Empire in the east. Yet it was less than the truth. In the words of Plutarch, ‘an awful calamity which had been dormant for a long time’ was due to reawaken.73 Rome’s uneasy political and domestic alliance was about to be irrevocably blown apart and the fragile foundations of Antony’s and Octavia’s union fully exposed. To borrow the phrase of another disillusioned royal wife, one might say there were three of them in this marriage.

  The last and most famous incumbent of a Macedonian dynasty of pharaohs who had ruled Egypt for almost three centuries since its conquest by Alexander the Great, Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, had inherited her throne in 51 BC at the age of seventeen. She spent the next decade wrestling with internal family feuds provoked in some part by her willingness to do business with Roman leaders to whom she pledged military and financial support in return for territorial guarantees. During this period she formed a particularly close alliance with Julius Caesar, whose mistress she became, their union producing a son, Caesarion. After two years as a guest in his house on the Tiber, provoking mutterings of disapproval from Cicero, who in a letter to his old friend Atticus wrote that the queen’s arrogance while in residence ‘makes my blood boil’, Caesar’s assassination drove her back to Egypt.74 Three years later, in 41 BC, Cleopatra was visited by a messenger inviting her to diplomatic talks in the city of Tarsus in southern Asia Minor with the triumvir Antony, who had taken charge of the Roman Empire’s eastern holdings as part of his power-sharing agreement with Octavian and Lepidus. The rest – well, the rest was history.75

  Antony’s and Cleopatra’s affair, which began while the former was still married to Fulvia, has been reimagined and re-enacted on countless occasions in literature, art and film, perhaps most notoriously and certainly most expensively in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 film production, Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.76 Other incarnations range from the great eighteenth-century canvases of Renaissance painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to silver watch-casings, snuff-boxes and kitsch, gaudy enamel figurines manufactured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.77 Amongst the literary reconstructions, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra of course stands out, though there are also famous retellings from the likes of Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dryden. The principal source for Shakespeare’s play though was an English translation of the account written at the beginning of the second century by Antony’s biographer Plutarch.78

  Although Plutarch had consulted earlier accounts including that of Quintus Dellius, an eye-witness to Antony and Cleopatra’s first meeting, he clearly also relied on his imagination in the telling of the couple’s tale, plugging gaps in his source material with his own fiction, describing scenes when no one but the protagonists were in the room or putting long speeches in the mouths of characters which could never have been recorded for posterity.79 It is essential both to the history of Antony’s and Octavian’s clash at Actium, and to understanding the stories of the first Roman empresses who rise to prominence in the aftermath of her death, to recognise that Cleopatra, the original model for a kaleidoscopic array of medieval and modern copies of the Egyptian queen, is herself a composite, woven from a miscellany of different sources and judgements crafted, edited and disseminated in the climate of Rome’s victory over Egypt at the battle of Actium and fostered by Cleopatra’s eventual conqueror Octavian. The Cleopatra we know today, summed up by one ancient author as a woman prepared to use her artes meretricae (‘whoreish arts’) to get her way with the Roman Antony, is in fact a wraith, the echo of a phantasm created and sustained by the publicity machine of Octavian, who was intent on casting Cleopatra as the embodiment of barbarian feminine values whom it was Octavian’s duty and destiny to crush, and in the process, win a moral victory both for the masculine Roman values of virtus (‘courage’) and pietas (‘piety’) which he claimed to represent, and for the traditional feminine traits of fidelity and chastity epitomised by his wife Livia and sister Octavia.

  In the tale as told by Plutarch, Cleopatra’s spectacular arrival in Tarsus in 41 BC was followed by an exchange of competitive hospitality between herself and Antony, as each attempted to outdo the other by hosting lavish banquets, an encounter in which Antony came off looking the worst. Cleopatra’s company at the dinner table was nonetheless sufficient to captivate him so thoroughly that she was able to whisk him off to Alexandria for the winter, all thou
ght of his military duties abandoned. A recital of Antony’s Egyptian sojourn follows, an eccentric catalogue of whimsical anecdotes and exploits portraying the couple as inveterate pleasure-seekers and pranksters. Cleopatra encouraged Antony in all manner of pastimes, including gambling and hunting, and they were even said to have formed a drinking club called the ‘Society of Inimitable Livers’, and to have dressed up as slaves to go gallivanting through the streets of Alexandria, much to the delight of the population. They spent money like water, ordering feasts for a party of twelve that would better have fed a hundred. The pair also played practical jokes. Annoyed at his lack of success fishing in the harbour of Alexandria one day while Cleopatra was watching, Antony told one of his slaves to swim underwater and attach some previously caught fish to the end of his line which he duly hauled up in triumph. Cleopatra turned the tables the next day, in front of a large audience of her friends whom she had forewarned, by ordering one of her own slaves to attach a fish clearly not native to the Mediterranean to Antony’s hook, much to his embarrassment when he reeled it in.80

  Whether rumour or fact, tales like this were priceless ammunition for Octavian over in Italy. In 40 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, but news of Lucius’s and Fulvia’s rout by Octavian’s forces in Perusia had already drawn Antony away from his Egyptian second family, back to Italy and his confrontation with Octavian. The result was the pact at Brundisium, ratified by Antony’s marriage to Octavia. Cleopatra was suddenly out of the picture and remained so for the next three years, as Antony, tempted back into line alongside his rival, directed military operations against the Parthians from Athens, where he had set up home with Octavia.