The First Ladies of Rome Read online

  … on one side was Augustus Caesar, leading the men of Italy into battle alongside the Senate and the People of Rome, its gods of home and its great gods … on the other side, with the wealth of the barbarian world … came Antony in triumph … with him sailed Egypt and the power of the East from as far as distant Bactria, and there bringing up the rear was the greatest outrage of all, his Egyptian wife! On they came at speed, all together, and the whole surface of the sea was churned to foam by the pull of their oars and the bow-waves from their triple beaks … fresh blood began to redden the furrows of Neptune’s fields … But high on the headland of Actium, Apollo saw it all and was drawing his bow. In terror at the sight the whole of Egypt and of India, all the Arabians and all the Shebans were turning tail and the queen herself could be seen calling for winds and setting her sails by them. She had untied the sail-ropes and was even now paying them out.103

  Years after the battle of Actium, the image of Cleopatra hoisting her purple sails and lamely fleeing the scene of the fight with Antony in hot pursuit was an abiding theme of literature written in honour of Octavian’s victory. Actium did not bring down the final curtain, and in fact relatively few casualties were suffered, but it was the pivot on which the fate of Octavian’s and Antony’s contest was decided. After escaping with some of their ships still intact, Antony and Cleopatra resumed life in Alexandria, where they remained for another year until Octavian arrived in the summer of 30 BC and dealt a final knockout blow to their land and sea forces. The final act of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s story became the stuff of legend. After a despondent Antony took his own life and bled to death in Cleopatra’s arms, the Egyptian queen managed to convince Octavian of her pliability, even offering gifts to Octavia and Livia to earn their goodwill. She thus earned permission to visit Antony’s tomb, where she was later found dead on a golden couch, through self-inflicted poisoning either by asp bite, as the most popular report had it, or by a vial of venom secreted in one of her hairpins. One of her dying ladies-in-waiting, Charmion, who had also ingested poison, had the breath to hiss, in response to an angry reproach from one Roman soldier, ‘It is no more than this lady, the descendant of so many kings, deserves’, a line borrowed sixteen centuries later by Shakespeare, in his own staging of the scene.104 Thwarted of his hopes to carry his illustrious prisoner of war back to Rome, Octavian later had an image of Cleopatra carried through the city streets in his triumphal procession, an image which was said to have featured a snake clinging by its jaw to the dead queen.

  The last political rivalry of the republic was over. Unlike her father and ex-husband, Livia had backed the right horse.

  Livia did not find herself empress of Rome overnight. The transformation from republic to monarchy in the aftermath of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s deaths was not instantaneous: Rome was still raw and bloodied from decades of civil war, and Octavian understood the need to tread carefully, all too aware of the fate of his great-uncle Julius Caesar, whose attempts to strong-arm the state into accepting autocratic rule had resulted in his assassination. In 27 BC, three years after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian made a great show of renouncing the extraordinary dictatorial powers granted him as a triumvir, pledging to restore the republic and declining the trappings of despotic kingship. In return for this self-effacing gesture, the Senate, its palm greased by the promised restoration of its former constitutional powers, urged Octavian to become consul-for-life and pressed on him the appellations of Augustus, meaning ‘divinely favoured one’, and princeps or ‘first citizen’, an epithet familiarly used in the republic for a leading statesman. Effectively, they handed him the keys to the empire, a mandate for absolute power carefully cloaked in traditional republican language in order to oil the wheels of transition.

  Livia herself received no official title for the time being. Augustus shied away from giving his wife an honorific name equivalent to his and it was not until after his death almost forty years later that her role in the dynastic set-up was recognised with a variant of his own cognomen, Augusta. The word ‘empress’ is now accepted shorthand for the woman married to the Roman emperor, but there is no equivalent for it in Latin. The Roman public had apparently voiced no opposition to having portraits of Livia on display in public spaces since the grant of 35 BC. But to accord her official status akin to that enjoyed by queens of the eastern royal families, in a society still getting acclimatised to the idea of one-man-rule, where the memory of Cleopatra was still very raw, was one step too far.105

  Augustus’s victory had been won on the back of a campaign promise to clean up Rome, not just its streets and public spaces but its heart and soul. Having castigated Antony and Cleopatra as denizens of the corrupting vice and moral laxity that had so weakened the old republic, Rome’s new ruler pledged himself as the defender of the old-fashioned virtues of a rose-tinted past, an age when men put down their ploughs to go to war and women would die rather than betray their marriage vows. If that illusion was to work, the emperor’s own family closet had to be skeleton-free. Thus while Augustus set about rebuilding neglected temples and passing legislation that promised to restore decency, his elder sister Octavia, his daughter Julia and his wife Livia would be enlisted as faithful reincarnations of the virtuous women of that golden age, the Lucretias, Veturias and Volumnias whose chaste, wise ideals had helped in the past to save Rome.

  But at least one of these women was to prove a far less malleable recruit to the cause than the others. Augustus, as one scholar has phrased it, may have ‘self-consciously fashioned a family legacy as compelling as Jackie Kennedy’s Camelot’.106 But like Camelot, the dream turned sour, the mirage shimmered and faded.

  2

  First Family: Augustus’s Women

  Is there anyone in Rome who has NOT slept with my daughter?!

  Augustus, in the BBC’s I, Claudius (1976)1

  The political agenda of Rome’s first emperor began, quite literally, at home. Determined to prove to his public that he really was ‘first among equals’, a man of the people, a regular Joe just like them, Augustus declined the opportunity of moving to a rich palace in the style of an eastern dynast like Cleopatra, opting instead to remain with his family in their old house on the exclusive but densely populated Palatine hill, where the public could walk right past their front door – the ancient equivalent of a modern media-savvy politician leaving his name in the public telephone directory.2

  Laurel trees flanked the entrance of the emperor’s front door, perhaps grown from cuttings taken from Livia’s Prima Porta estate in an advertisement of the empress’s role as the bountiful chatelaine of the new imperial headquarters. Otherwise an oak wreath given to Augustus by a grateful state was all that outwardly distinguished the house from its neighbours. The egalitarian façade was kept up on the inside, and with its stone-grey minimalist interior and plain furnishings, the home where Rome’s ‘first family’ lived certainly struck at least one future Roman visitor as modest in comparison to the grandiose residences of later emperors:

  [Augustus’s] new palace was remarkable neither for size nor for elegance; the courts being supported by squat columns of peperino stone, and the living rooms innocent of marble or elaborately tessellated floors … how simply Augustus’s palace was furnished may be deduced by examining the couches and tables still preserved, many of which would hardly be considered fit for a private citizen.3

  Suetonius, the author of this description, had the opportunity of visiting the house only decades after Livia’s and Augustus’s occupancy. His description of its relative lack of luxury can be corroborated today thanks to excavations on the Palatine hill between 1861 and 1870 by Pietro Rosa, an Italian architect and topographer who was working under the commission of Napoleon III – himself the scion of an imperial dynasty and obsessed with finding the palaces of the Caesars.4 Rosa’s discovery in 1869 of part of Augustus’s house – thought perhaps to have been the personal quarters of Livia herself, thanks to the uncovering of a lead water pipe in
scribed with her name – proved that it was indeed paved in black and white mosaic rather than the more expensive option of imported marble, a canny use of local stone that eloquently conveyed the modest tastes of the new imperial family to the Roman public.5

  Admittedly, the old estate confiscated from Hortensius had expanded in the last decade. Two years after his marriage to Livia, Augustus had acquired a neighbouring property, a villa formerly belonging to the Roman senator Catulus, once one of the richest men in Rome. The purchase made Augustus the largest landowner on the Palatine, and the combined buildings now did not just house the apparatus of imperial government but provided living accommodation to the entire family circle. Gorgeous wall paintings of mythological characters and rural landscapes in a rich palette dominated by expensive red cinnabar and yellow, advertised the family’s importance and social prominence, albeit in a way that toed the fine line between good taste and offensive ostentation. On becoming princeps, Augustus also added an extension to his home in the form of a temple to his patron god Apollo which covered an area half the size of a football pitch. With a deity living next door, Augustus took care to affect a sober personal aesthetic, encouraging his family members to do the same.

  So while Augustus’s own abstemious personal habits were broadcast for scrutiny, including the information that he slept in the same bedroom on a low bed with simple coverings regardless of the season, subsisted on a frugal diet of coarse bread, fish, cheese and figs and spurned the silks and fine linens worn by plutocrats, new empress Livia also affected to have little time for fussing about her appearance and was said to have shadowed her husband’s example by dressing in an unobtrusive style and avoiding personal adornment.6 This aped the dictum of the admired Cornelia, who had once famously retorted to a female companion showing off her jewels that she herself had no need of such finery, asserting magnificently: ‘My jewels are my children.’7 Even the recipe Livia purportedly used for toothpowder was a frugal concoction said to have been in common use, consisting of dried common garden nettles (a particular species chosen for its gritty, abrasive quality) soaked in brine and baked with rock salt until charred, an unappetising-sounding concoction, albeit one scented in her case with exotic imported spikenard oil.8

  Another of the populist fiats issued from the Palatine was that the emperor’s simple woollen gowns were made personally by Livia, Octavia, Julia, or in later life, one of his granddaughters. Wool-working was thought of as the ideal pastime for a Roman matron, as reflected in Rome’s legends of virtuous women busy at their looms and spindles, and in the custom of draping uncombed wool around the doorway when a bride was led across the marital threshold for the first time.9 Augustus’s encouragement of his wife’s, sister’s and daughter’s cultivation of the skill fostered the illusion of a household of unassuming domestic tranquillity and reassuring moral propriety. Looms were typically set up in the atrium, the most public place in the house, where, in wealthy households like this, slaves would have the best light to work in under the watchful eye of their mistress. Visitors and curious passers-by loitering in the busy street outside the emperor’s home, peering through the large double doors – which were kept permanently and purposely open – would thus apparently have been treated to the sight of the empress and her female cohort in the dark, cool atrium, engaged in this homely act.10

  Augustus’s attempts to paint his female relatives as rustic sisters of the loom, were hard to square with the fact that the Palatine household was staffed by a cast of hundreds, to some of whom was surely delegated the task of making Augustus’s clothes. In fact, we can probably even put a name to at least one of the individuals involved. For in 1726, an extraordinary building was excavated on Rome’s Appian Way, the discovery of which permitted the reconstruction of an almost forensic profile of the staff – mostly male as it turns out – who did the Augustan family’s daily bidding.

  The building was the Monumentum Liviae, a columbarium or funerary vault built near the end of Augustus’s reign. It contained the cremated remains of over a thousand Roman slaves and freedmen, their ashes packed in row upon row of ollae (burial jars) stacked in tiny niches around the vault, like pigeon-holes – hence the name columbarium, which literally means ‘dovecote’. Most of those entombed here worked for the imperial household, and thanks to invaluable recent research into the marble plaques beneath each niche, we now know that approximately ninety of the individuals whose ashes were found worked for Livia herself, making her the principal patron of the vault. Hairdressers, masseuses, doorkeepers, copyists and clerks, accountants, footmen, wool-weighers, window-cleaners, shoemakers, builders, plumbers, furniture-polishers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, bakers, catering-managers, medical staff, wet-nurses, even someone to set her pearls – individuals employed by Livia in all these occupations and more are recorded here. Amongst those recorded by name, we know of a freedman called Auctus, whose job as a lanipendius was to weigh and dole out wool to the slave women of the imperial house to use at their looms.11

  The remains in the Monumentum Liviae represent only a sample of the staff who worked in Livia’s Roman establishment, and do not include those who worked in her various other properties such as the Prima Porta villa. Only the wealthiest in Roman society could afford to keep such staff numbers, and the highly specialised nature of the tasks they performed testified to the wealth and prestige of their owner. Livia’s wardrobe was so bureaucratised that she had two attendants to look after her ceremonial dress, another to put her clothes away, and another, called Parmeno, in charge of just her purple garments. Lochias the sarcinatrix mended her clothes; Menophilus the shoemaker – calciator – kept the empress shod in the thonged sandals and cork-soled shoe-boots commonly worn by Roman women; and the job-title of Eutactus the capsarius suggests his duty was to watch over a box of some sort, either a storage-chest for Livia’s clothes, or a more portable receptacle that served as the empress’s ‘handbag’.12

  We should probably take the image of Livia and Octavia sitting in full view of passing members of the Roman populace lovingly weaving togas for Augustus at the same face value as the cookie-bake-off competition held every four years between potential American presidential spouses.13 Given Augustus’s talent for spin, it is not hard to imagine that the scene of his wife and sister weaving was choreographed on occasion to keep the public entertained and to attempt to convince them that the first family practised what they preached, though the Roman populace would surely have taken the image with a pinch of salt.

  But for all this careful stagecraft, transparency was the watchword of the day. Indeed, so keen was Augustus’s concern on this point that he was still repeating it in his old age, reputedly forbidding his only daughter Julia and his granddaughters ‘to say or do anything underhand or which might not be reported in the daily chronicles’ – the bulletin of daily news issued from the Palatine to the public.14

  In Julia’s case, it was to prove a hollow warning.

  We last saw Julia when she was a squalling day-old infant, newly delivered by her mother Scribonia’s midwives on the eve of Augustus’s departure to set up home with Livia. By the time her father became the ruler of the Roman Empire, she had reached the age of ten and been welcomed into the happy family tableau that Augustus was so eager to promote. On the Palatine, she was not short of playmates, surrounded by a house full of cousins and stepsiblings fairly close to her in age, including her stepbrothers Tiberius and Drusus, her cousin Antonia Minor – the youngest of Octavia’s four daughters – and Octavia’s son Marcellus, the latter three years Julia’s senior.15

  Although we are often told in ancient imperial biographies about the salad days of the boys who grew up to be emperor, the same Roman chroniclers were uninterested in the formative years of their female sisters and cousins like Julia. Based on accounts of the upbringing of other Roman girls of her milieu, we know that childhood for a girl like Julia was over all too quickly. In an illustration of the abrupt transition between infancy and adulthood, bypa
ssing adolescence, if a girl died before reaching marriageable age – which was set at a legal minimum of twelve by Julia’s father – her favourite toys might be buried with her, toys that served as learning aids instilling in a girl the ideal to which she should aspire in adult life. Jointed dolls of ivory and bone have been found in the coffins of young Roman girls, dolls with full child-bearing hips quite unlike the proportions of, say, a modern Barbie, and with their hair styled in the fashions in vogue among elite women of the time.16

  As a child, Julia’s hair would have been styled more simply than this adult alter ego, tied back with woollen bands or vittae until it was long enough to be pinned up in the stiff nodus favoured by her stepmother and aunt, which would have happened just as she was nearing the age of marriage. A long, simple, sleeved tunic bordered with a purple stripe was the standard uniform for both freeborn boys and girls at Rome, and a protective neckchain called a bulla in the case of boys and a moon-shaped lunula for girls (the moon being the symbol of Diana, the Roman goddess of chastity) their only adornment. Despite the Roman fixation on roomy female hips, underneath the tunic girls also wore a breastband or strophium, whose purpose was to strap down their budding breasts, in a bid to make them conform to the otherwise slender Roman ideal for women’s bodies.17

  Prior to marriage, a girl’s upbringing varied widely from household to household, depending on the wealth and inclination of her family. Basic literary skills in reading and writing were taught to most girls of the upper classes but few progressed to the more advanced education in rhetoric and philosophy provided for their male siblings beyond the age of ten or eleven. Instead, as underlined by Augustus’s own educative recommendations to the women of his family, a premium was placed on domestic talents useful in marriage. A slave girl born within her mistress’s house – like Livia’s hairdresser Dorcas – might also be given an education, but of a vocational kind.18