The First Ladies of Rome Read online

  But then in the autumn of 37 BC, while Octavia was still receiving praise for her role in brokering peace between her husband and her brother at Tarentum, Antony headed back to the east for a reunion with Cleopatra. He proceeded to attempt an invasion of Parthia in 36 BC, with Cleopatra as his financial backer, but was driven into a calamitous retreat, tarnishing his military reputation. Meanwhile Octavian had killed two birds with one stone by defeating the triumvirs’ old enemy Sextus Pompeius at the battle of Naulochus on 3 September and simultaneously ousting the hapless Lepidus from the third spot at the triumvirate’s table on a charge of trying to usurp Octavian’s authority in the battle for Sicily. Three had become two and the deck was steadily stacking in Octavian’s favour.

  The ace up Octavian’s sleeve was Octavia. Just as she had been an instrument for peace, she was now to become an instrument for war. In the summer of 35 BC, not long after Antony had suffered his humiliating reversal in the Parthian campaign, Octavia travelled from Rome to her old marital home in Athens, taking with her money, army supplies and troop reinforcements for her husband. Plutarch is again our reporter, describing first Octavia’s reception in Athens, where she found letters from Antony forbidding her from proceeding further, and her self-restraint despite her anger at his dissembling. He then sketches Cleopatra’s mental turmoil at the thought that ‘Octavia was coming to take her on in hand-to-hand combat’ and her strategy of shamming illness as though grief-stricken at the thought of losing Antony. Reproached by Cleopatra’s aides who plaintively censured him for neglecting the woman who loved him so much, Antony was said to have become ‘so soft and effeminate’ that he was persuaded to abandon his latest military project and return to her side in Alexandria. Octavia was forced to return to Rome but refused to leave the home she shared there with her husband, against the wishes of her brother. She elected to remain there caring both for her own children and for Antony’s offspring with Fulvia, continuing to welcome his friends, and in the process ‘hurting Antony without meaning to, because he became hated for wronging a woman of her fine quality’.81

  The portrait of Cleopatra as a deceitful manipulator, of Antony as soft and effeminate and of Octavia as a faithful, wronged wife were all hallmarks of Octavian’s increasingly vociferous campaign to persuade the Roman public that he was the only man to lead them. With typical tactical savvy, he seized with relish the opportunity to make serious political capital out of the trouble in his sister’s marriage, and threw all of his weight behind a strategy aimed at boosting his credentials as a champion of old-fashioned conservative morality while painting Antony as the emasculated puppet of a foreign queen. In the process, a glass ceiling of sorts was broken for women in Roman public life, as Livia and Octavia became increasingly important in helping define Octavian’s image as devoted husband, brother and family man.

  The year 35 BC was the watershed. In a bid to ratchet up his campaign to sell the Roman public an image of his wife and sister as the new Cornelias for their age, Octavian approved the special grant of a series of remarkable honours and privileges to Octavia and Livia. Their new entitlements were threefold: first, they were awarded a protection known as sacrosanctitas, making it an offence to utter verbal insults against them. Secondly, they were given immunity from tutela – male guardianship – which effectively meant they had the freedom to manage their own financial affairs. Thirdly, statuary portraits of Octavia and Livia were to be commissioned for public display.82

  These three marks of distinction put the two women in an extraordinary and unprecedented position. The right of sacrosanctitas was a concession reserved exclusively for the publicly elected male political class of tribunes. The granting of it to Octavia and Livia acknowledged their emergence into a position of public political significance hitherto closed off to women. It also suggests that there had been an escalation of the war of words between Antony’s and Octavian’s camps of supporters, which had led to retaliatory insults being directed at Livia and Octavia – or at least, that that was the impression Octavian wanted to create. The award of tutela was not completely innovatory, as it was a right that had long been shared by the Vestal Virgins. But all other Roman women, even those whose fathers and husbands were dead, were required to accept the supervision of a tutor or guardian, and the honour by association with the Vestals was clear. Octavia and Livia were to be treated on a par with the most revered group of women in Roman society.83

  The grant of statues was potentially even more significant, however. Politicians of the Roman Republic had long proved themselves staunch opponents of the idea of allowing a woman to be venerated in public sculpture. In 184 BC, a speech by the great orator and moral stickler Cato the Elder had caustically disparaged the idea, and prior to Octavian’s announcement in 35 BC, we hear of only a single other example where a real-life Roman woman was publicly honoured in the city with a statue in her likeness – who else but Cornelia, commemorated for her role as mother of the Gracchi with the dedication of a bronze statue which is unfortunately lost.84 But that exception notwithstanding, the idea of women taking their place in the male public gallery of portraits honouring Rome’s mythological and historical leaders was still deeply alien to a senatorial class notoriously wary of permitting women to cross the threshold of politics.

  Octavia of course already had a public portrait profile of sorts in the east, thanks to the coins issued by Greek and Asian mints under her husband Antony’s jurisdiction during the more peaceful years of their marriage. Moreover, while statues of women were taboo in the city of Rome itself, it was not uncommon to erect statues of the wives, daughters and mothers of high-ranking men in the Greek eastern areas of empire. The royal houses of the east also displayed few qualms about granting space to their female dynasts on coins and statuary. In keeping with the portrait practices of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra herself projected her own image across her kingdom, in statuary, on temple reliefs and coins. Perhaps this was the key to Octavian’s motivation in sanctioning such statues of his sister and wife in Rome. In giving the nod to a sculpture programme featuring Octavia and Livia, Octavian was pointedly setting up the women of his own family in direct competition with their eastern counterpart.85

  But there were risks attached to such a ploy, given that public statuary of female family members in the east commonly went hand in hand with kingship, and might lay their sponsor open to the accusation of dynastic aspirations, a touchy subject in republican Rome. Octavian had to tread carefully. His gesture meant that in a single stroke, Octavia and Livia were emancipated from many of the usual supervisory restrictions on their gender, and simultaneously became the most scrutinised women in the entire city. Therefore, Octavian had to get these portraits just right, so as not to offend the traditionalists whose support he needed.

  We cannot identify for certain which, if any, of the catalogue of surviving portraits we have of Livia and Octavia may be prototypes of these earliest statues, but one of the best contenders can be found on the ground floor of the Museo Nazionale in Rome.86 A slightly pockmarked marble bust, just under 40 cm (15¾ inches) high, the face is of a serenely beautiful woman with regular symmetrical features and large heavy-lidded eyes, her neatly combed locks meticulously arranged into the quiff-like nodus hairstyle, with just a few tendrils allowed to escape from the hairline above her ears. Found at Velletri, south-east of Rome, it has been widely accepted as a portrait of Octavia, whose family originated from that region, and the identification is bolstered by the facial similarity to portraits of her brother Octavian and comparisons to her own profile on coins. Moreover, the more old-fashioned style of her nodus, the hair whipped up into a higher peak than was the fashion in subsequent decades, supports the suggestion that this portrait may indeed be a close relative of those original sculptures commissioned of Octavia in 35 BC.87

  The Velletri bust is the most commonly reproduced image of Octavia today. A far larger number and variety of ancient portraits survive for her sister-in-law Livia, thanks to the latter�
�s greater longevity in the spotlight, but during this teething period for female sculpture, the portraits of both women were so similar that distinguishing them with any confidence is sometimes impossible. Coin and statuary portraits do not, regrettably, give us anything like a photographic facsimile of how Livia, Julia and other imperial women actually looked in real life, any more than portraits of Roman men do. Individual facial quirks do sometimes creep in, which can help with identification – for example, some of Livia’s round-cheeked, thin-lipped early portraits betray a slight overbite shared by other members of the Claudian family, while Octavia has the serious expression and aristocratic bone structure which characterise portraits of her brother. But by and large, these were idealised images whose sponsors were less concerned with getting a good likeness than with projecting a blandly appropriate image that could be uniformly produced by artists and sculptors across the empire. This stern regularity in itself articulated the key message being silently preached.88 By portraying Livia and Octavia in inscrutable, perfectly nodus-coiffed uniformity in their early portraits, a vindication of the virtues of traditional, decorous Roman womanhood was proclaimed, and a dignified reproof offered to Antony’s desertion of his Roman wife for Egyptian Cleopatra.

  We should not imagine that the empire’s streets were suddenly flooded with images of women – that would have been to risk offending traditional ideas of a woman’s place in the public sphere. But with a few strategically placed commissions, Octavian issued the Roman world with a clarion call, inviting them to see his wife and sister as muses for his project to resurrect a long-lost golden age of Roman history. A golden age when legendary women like Lucretia sacrificed themselves on the altar of duty. A golden age for which Octavian was tacitly offering himself up as the architect of restoration.

  While Octavian set about projecting images of Octavia and Livia in marble as paradigms of feminine modesty to citizens of Rome, Cleopatra replaced Octavia as the face of Antony’s Roman coinage, issued by mints under his control. Surviving records of one issue of around 33 or 32 BC show that huge numbers of silver denarii, the currency of Rome, were commissioned on Antony’s orders after he finally achieved some military success in the east by defeating Armenia with Cleopatra’s financial help. These coins feature Antony on one side, and Cleopatra on the other, a ship’s prow in the forefront to signal her contribution of naval power towards the victory.89

  Despite the concession of statues to Livia and Octavia, the inclusion of a foreign queen on the official coinage of a Roman general was completely unprecedented and deeply provocative in a political culture so ideologically opposed both to the idea of a woman near the heart of power – a foreign one at that – and to the principle of monarchical government. In 34 BC, Antony took his victory celebrations further by staging a lavish Roman-style triumph in Cleopatra’s home city of Alexandria, during which he was said to have formally given Cleopatra and her children vast gifts of territory, now known as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. Octavian knew exactly which button to press to make the Roman political classes nervous about what was happening in Alexandria. By playing on long-held Roman prejudices against the feminine, weak, immoral, servile and barbarous orient, he continued to aggressively portray Antony as a turncoat against traditional, male, Roman values, a poodle in Cleopatra’s lap.

  Antony directly rebutted at least one of the many charges Octavian levelled at him, that of being a drunkard, a common stereotype of the east, writing an essay titled ‘On his Drunkenness’, which has since been lost. In letters to his former brother-in-law, he also accused Octavian of hypocrisy for trying to score points off him on the grounds of sexual morality by recalling Octavian’s own affairs:

  What has come over you? Do you object to my sleeping with Cleopatra? … what about you? Are you faithful to Livia Drusilla? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you have not been in bed with Tertullia, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titsenia – or all of them. Does it really matter so much where, or with whom, you perform the sexual act?90

  Harking back to his opponent’s nuptials, Antony also claimed that his rival’s marriage to Livia had been conducted ‘in indecent haste’, and reminded Octavian of times when his friends used to arrange for him line-ups of women and girls, stripped naked for his inspection, as though at a slave market.91

  Just as in modern electioneering, making political capital out of the peccadilloes of one’s opponents was a common tactic employed by rivals for office in republican Rome. The most famous grandees of this period – Cicero, Pompey, Julius Caesar – were all accused of seducing other men’s wives at one time or another, so Antony’s charge that Octavian had been unfaithful to Livia was nothing out of the ordinary. But it did need refuting if Octavian was explicitly setting himself up against Antony as the moral guardian of Roman values, and his first-century biographer Suetonius cites the excuses given by Octavian’s friends, who, while admitting his infidelities, claimed none were motivated by unthinking lust. Instead, by tapping up the wives and daughters of his enemies, he was getting inside information that would help his political campaign, and thus defending Roman interests.92

  Many of the most notorious Roman accounts of Cleopatra’s infamy are preserved from poems and stories recorded after the final confrontation between the two sides at Actium. But they give us a flavour of the sort of invective that was aimed against her in the years before, including charges of sexual and culinary gluttony. Pliny the Elder, in the first century, wrote that Antony and Cleopatra had once challenged each other to see who could stage the most lavishly expensive banquet, and that Cleopatra had won the wager by tossing one of her pearl earrings into a goblet of vinegar, letting it dissolve and then nonchalantly swallowing it.93 The story certainly captured the imagination and was one of the most popularly re-created episodes of art from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Such tales reflect a long-standing preoccupation on the part of Roman moralists who bemoaned the gluttonous materialism of pleasure-seeking plutocrats both among their own contemporaries and in previous eras. Pliny the Elder himself lamented that in his day, Romans spent over 100 million sesterces a year on pearls and perfumes imported from the east. Over-expenditure on food was a particular source of outrage.94 Salacious stories of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s gluttonous banquets and wastefulness with money appealed to this moralising streak in Rome’s conscience. Probably one of the most well-known habits of Cleopatra is that she liked to bathe in asses’ milk, to keep her skin soft. The fact that the same bathing habit was said to have been shared by later Roman women who were regarded as profligate and corrupting, such as Nero’s second wife Poppaea, may suggest that the practice was commonly attributed to any woman who was seen to offend morality. 95

  In the summer of 32 BC, after a year or two more of this cat-and-mouse baiting, Antony finally divorced the hapless Octavia, ordering some of his men to go to Rome and evict her tearfully from his house, and Octavian’s propaganda machine swiftly whirred into overdrive.96 He dispatched a delegation to the Vestal Virgins, who commonly acted as keepers of citizens’ important papers, with orders to fetch Antony’s will. When the Vestals refused to give it up, Octavian came to fetch the document himself, already primed as to its contents by two of Antony’s supporters who had witnessed it and then subsequently defected. Once he had his hands on the will, Octavian called meetings of the Senate and the popular assembly, and proceeded to read it out. Among the passages he highlighted was the revelation that Antony was leaving vast sums of money to his children with Cleopatra, and, most devastatingly, that Antony had requested that he should be buried alongside the Egyptian queen in Alexandria.97

  Octavian’s action in publicising another man’s will was illegal and there are different accounts of the Roman reaction to it. Some say Octavian’s claims were treated with unease and some scepticism while others recount that it convinced everyone, even Antony’s closest friends, of their worst fears that Antony was completely under a woman’s thumb and even pl
anning to move the headquarters of Roman government to the Nile.98 But the outcome was the same. Tales of Antony, a Roman general, dressing in oriental clothing and walking behind the litter of a woman in company with her eunuchs could not be stomached. In October, a resolution was passed declaring war. Because Octavian did not want to incur the charge of starting a civil war, however, the official target of his declaration was not Antony, who was after all a fellow Roman citizen, but Cleopatra herself, forcing Antony to show his hand in opting to fight on the side of Egypt.99

  The next few months were spent in preparation for battle. Armies were raised, war chests filled and allegiances traded with promises of land and rewards. On both sides the ongoing battle for the right to claim just cause continued over the autumn and winter of 32 BC. Stories of portents and omens predicting defeat for Antony were circulated, probably by Octavian’s agents. Octavian himself publicly claimed that Antony was on drugs and that when it came to the fight their opponents would be Cleopatra’s hairdresser, her eunuch and her ladies-in-waiting.100 In fact Antony, with the wealthy Cleopatra as his financial backer, started out with a greater number of troops and funds at his disposal.101 But, thanks to the superior stewardship of Octavian’s lieutenant Agrippa, Antony’s advantage was eaten into during initial engagements over the spring and summer of 31 BC. Finally, the bulk of Antony’s naval fleet were pegged back to an anchorage just off Actium, at the narrow mouth of the Ambracian Gulf. On the afternoon of 2 September, after several days of skirmishing and stand-offs, the two opposing fleets steadily advanced towards each other across the glimmering blue surface of the Ionian Sea to decide the destiny of the Roman Empire.102