The First Ladies of Rome Read online

  The education of women was a controversial subject during the early imperial period. Some philosophers argued that girls should receive a similar schooling to boys, but a more vocal, traditionally minded seam of opinion deplored the notion and predicted that women who were given too much education either became pretentious witterers or amoral hussies.19 A few elite families however, particularly those with a proud intellectual tradition such as the families of Quintus Hortensius or Cicero, nevertheless encouraged their daughters as well as their sons to emulate their forebear’s educational achievements. Augustus’s old bête noire Hortensia, who famously took on the triumvirs from the rostrum in 42 BC, may have been one of the only women ever to win fame as a public speaker, but tutors in grammar were employed for others such as Caecilia, a daughter of Cicero’s friend Atticus, while the great Cornelia wrote letters which were published as acclaimed pattern-plates of style. Music lessons, once frowned on as inappropriate, crept onto the curriculum in a few households, and some girls learnt to read and write in Greek as well as Latin. Providing such an all-round education was not, however, motivated by any progressive pedagogical philosophy but by the very traditionally minded desire to ensure that girls destined to be the wives of prominent politicians would make suitable partners and hostesses for their husbands in their careers, and good guardians of the education of their sons, which they were expected to oversee.

  Given the evidence that private tutors were employed for privileged girls such as Caecilia, Julia herself in all likelihood benefited from the tuition of Marcus Verrius Flaccus, the grammarian whom Augustus imported into his house at the enormous annual salary of 100,000 sesterces to teach the young male personnel of the Palatine household, though she would certainly have spent some time acquiring the more domestic skills that her father was so determined the women of his family should be seen to have.20 We know that at least one of Julia’s daughters received a literary education and when one also considers Julia’s privileged situation, living in a house that was visited daily by the greatest cultural ambassadors of the day including Horace and Virgil, and with access to the newly built imperial library on the Palatine, it is no wonder that centuries later she was remembered as having had a ‘love of letters and a considerable store of learning – not hard to come by in her home’.21

  But reservations about the extent to which a woman should be educated did not go away. All too often, the description of a girl as docta, or ‘clever’, was a euphemism for something far less respectable. In Julia’s case, this would turn out to be painfully true.

  For the first half of Augustus’s reign, the women of the imperial household remain safely out of the literary headlines. For the vast majority of the Roman Empire’s residents, public portraits were their only point of visible connection with the emperor and his family. Official prototype sculptures of the imperial family were commissioned and created at Rome and then dispatched to the provinces where they served as a model for local sculptors, workshops and coin die-cutters to copy. Variations might result when individual artists or mints took creative liberties, but the basic portrait type remained the same.22 Once publicly displayed in town forums, temple porches or even wealthy private homes, these silent portraits served as a reminder to the empire’s female population of the role models they should be looking to emulate. As she came of age, portraits of the emperor’s daughter Julia showed her with her hair twisted into the same stiff, controlled nodus favoured by her stepmother and aunt, under whose aegis she was now being brought up.23 The overall effect was of conformity with good old republican maxims of domestic purity and faithfulness, albeit advertised through a far from traditional medium.

  Under the radar, however, and despite continuing to model the stay-at-home-matron look in her own public portraits, Livia herself at least was steadily and unobtrusively making a name for herself. Augustus spent much of the period between 27 and 19 BC abroad, touring his imperial holdings in first Gaul and Spain, and then later in the east. Even though a conservative seam of Roman opinion frowned at the prospect of women accompanying their husbands on overseas travel, Livia accompanied the emperor, underlining the importance Augustus was placing on his wife in projecting his image abroad. Though her presence received little acknowledgement from the major ancient historians of Augustus’s reign, the silent testimony of objects dedicated by Livia in the region – including a curious and unexplained gold epsilon (the Greek letter ‘E’) at Delphi in Greece – suggests that she fulfilled various ceremonial duties of dedication roughly equivalent to the ribbon-cutting ceremonies that the wife of a visiting head of state might be expected to perform today.24

  To some extent, Livia was there simply to see and be seen by the crowds who came out to watch the vast, canopied, silk-upholstered imperial litter as it trundled by at a leisurely 20-mile (32-km) a day speed, tracing an itinerary that included appearances at notable tourist sites such as the oracle at Delphi. Roman emperors liked to travel in style, and Augustus’s litter trailed an army of mule-drawn wagons carrying slaves for every contingency, including cooks, maids, doctors and hairdressers. One successor to Augustus went so far as to have a game board fitted in his carriage, and another equipped his with swivelling seats.25 Despite the taboo on travelling females, Augustus’s huge entourage in all certainty contained ladies-in-waiting to act as chaperones to his wife, while more stimulating female companionship was provided by counterparts in the empire’s dependent territories, women such as King Herod of Judaea’s wife Salome, who was to become a lifelong friend and correspondent. Certain stop-offs even resembled something of a homecoming. During one of Augustus’s trips to Greece in the late 20s, the emperor paid the Spartans the tribute of attending their public mess, apparently in recognition of their aid to Livia when she took refuge there with Tiberius Nero, ironically of course while hiding from Augustus himself.26

  Yet Livia’s presence on these trips was about far more than window-dressing, as proven by the evidence of a letter written by Augustus to the Greek islanders of Samos, which was found inscribed into the marble of an archive-holding wall during excavations of the Turkish ancient city of Aphrodisias in 1967. Some time during the early part of Augustus’s reign, the Samos islanders had written to the emperor requesting their independence from imperial control. In his preserved reply, Augustus apologetically explains to the islanders why he must refuse a privilege he had granted to no one but the people of Aphrodisias. He had taken his decision reluctantly, he tells the Samians, despite the vigorous canvassing efforts on their behalf by Livia:

  I am well disposed to you and should like to do a favour to my wife who is active in your behalf, but not to the point of breaking my custom.27

  Livia may have failed at the first attempt. But evidently she could be a persuasive negotiator. For after Augustus’s travelling party spent two winters on Samos between 21 and 19 BC, he finally granted them their independence. That the Samos islanders recognised the empress’s efforts on their behalf is suggested by the fact that statues dedicated to Livia have been found on the island.28

  That a woman could serve as a gatekeeper controlling access to her husband was in one sense nothing new to Roman politics. During the republican era, several elite women did indeed act as patrons and intermediaries between their husbands and outside parties. Cicero, for example, applied to Mucia Tertia when seeking an alliance with her husband Pompey, and even Cleopatra was said to have attempted to get Livia and Octavia onside during her negotiations after Actium with her captor Augustus, offering them a gift of jewellery and expressing the hope that they would be sympathetic towards her.29 But such arrangements had always been conducted very much behind closed doors, and women like Mucia Tertia would never have dreamed of being accorded public recognition for their efforts with the award of statues or other official honours.

  Livia was now acting out a traditional female role in a public political context, and gaining kudos and publicity for doing so. She and her imperial female counterparts were being g
ranted a key role as goodwill ambassadors, promoting the moral values of the new regime through their decorous displays of traditional female behaviour, while simultaneously gaining unprecedented publicity as mediators between the emperor and his subjects. While his first answer to the people of Samos’s plea for independence was no, by publicly advertising Livia’s efforts on their behalf, Augustus hoped to sweeten the pill of his refusal and prevent too large a drop in his popularity among the islanders.

  This apparent willingness to advertise his wife’s role in his affairs testifies to Augustus’s determination to politicise his private life. According to his ancient biographers, his obsession on this point even extended to his writing down all his private conversations in one of the notebooks he habitually carried about his person, including the more ‘serious’ ones he had with Livia, so keenly conscious was he of how his private life might reflect on his public persona. In one such ‘recorded’ conversation that was later widely published, Livia even offered a sleep-deprived and stressed Augustus lengthy advice on how to deal with a conspiracy led by Pompey the Great’s grandson Cornelius Cinna to depose him, urging him to waive the punishment of death in order to avoid incurring a charge of despotism from the public, advice which Augustus duly follows:

  I have some advice to give you, – that is, if you are willing to receive it, and will not censure me because I, though a woman, dare suggest to you something which no one else, even of your most intimate friends, would dare to suggest … I have an equal share in your blessings and your ills, and as long as you are safe I also have my part in reigning, whereas if you come to any harm (may the gods forbid), I shall perish with you … I … give you my opinion to the effect that you should not inflict the death penalty [on these men] … the sword, surely, cannot accomplish everything for you … for people do not become more attached to anyone because of the vengeance they see meted out to others, but they become more hostile because of their fears … heed me, therefore, dearest, and change your course … it is impossible for a man to guide so great a city from democracy to monarchy and make the change without bloodshed, – but if you continue in your old policy, you will be thought to have done these unpleasant things deliberately.30

  The intended effect of preserving her speech may have been to make Livia seem like the voice of feminine compassion, intervening to bring a peaceful conclusion to a potentially violent stand-off, just as Roman heroines of the past had once done.31 But intriguingly, it is clearly also a portrait of a woman with a shrewd political brain, and a canny awareness of what would play best to her husband’s audience.

  Given that she was portrayed as so influential a figure in his life, Livia’s and Augustus’s real personal relationship is naturally a source of fascination. But with only the contradictory evidence of the emperor’s biographers to go on, it is not an easy one to fathom. As we have seen, marriage was typically arranged for prosaic rather than romantic motives in Roman society. Nevertheless, married love was celebrated on funerary epitaphs, and, more convincingly, published letters, for all their rhetorical formality, yield glimpses of close, affectionate, even passionate relationships between couples, and devastated grief at separations caused by death.32 Augustus’s and Livia’s own marriage, embarked on in such controversial circumstances, was one of the longest recorded in Roman history, lasting more than fifty years in total. Predictably, it was advertised in public art and some of the more adulatory literature of the time as a model of marital concord. However, some literary sources suggest that Augustus used his overseas trips as an excuse to make assignations with the wife of his friend and cultural adviser Maecenas, lending weight to Antony’s jibes about his enemy’s hypocrisy in reproaching him for his affair with Cleopatra. One Roman historian writes of Augustus that Livia was ‘the one woman whom he truly loved until his death’, yet intriguingly also includes the information that in his old age Livia herself enabled her husband’s philandering by providing him with virgins, whom he had a passion for deflowering.33 This particular anecdote was the inspiration for a mischievous entry in a 1787 pornographic compendium compiled by the pseudonymous society adventurer Baron d’Hancarville, the Monumens du culte secret des dames romaines, which features a mocked-up Roman cameo image of a naked Livia performing a sex act on Augustus, with the caption: ‘The complaisance of this princess for her husband was extraordinary. Not content with searching everywhere for beautiful girls to amuse him, she also did not refuse to use her beautiful hand for the pleasure and lubrication of the emperor.’34

  Towards the end of her life, Livia was said to have offered up the following explanation to an interviewer asking how she had obtained so much influence over Augustus, saying that she had done so ‘by being scrupulously chaste herself, doing gladly whatever pleased him, not meddling with any of his affairs, and, in particular, by pretending neither to hear or to notice the favourites that were the objects of his passion’.35 Whether we can trust this or any of her lengthy sermon on the Cinna conspiracy as a direct quote from her lips must remain an unanswered question, but as a blueprint for the role of dutiful, chaste politician’s wife that she certainly affected, this matter-of-fact statement could not be bettered, winning her the plaudits of loyalists who called her a worthy successor to the women of Rome’s golden age, and inspiring an anecdote that she once intervened to spare the lives of some men who were going to be put to death for straying into her line of sight while they were naked, saying that for a chaste woman such as herself, naked men were no different from statues.36

  But not everyone, it seems, admired Livia in the role of consort and confidante to the emperor. ‘I have my part in reigning …’ she is supposed to have said in her conversation with Augustus about the Cinna conspiracy. It was a sentiment that was to prove a red rag to a bull for some.37

  One source of disappointment in Livia’s and Augustus’s marriage could not be disguised by any amount of obfuscation. Although both had produced offspring with their previous partners, their own union was destined to remain childless, despite it being the emperor’s ‘dearest wish’, wrote Suetonius, that they should conceive together. A child born prematurely did not survive, prompting Pliny the Elder to claim that theirs was one of those rare unions that had ‘a certain physical incongruity between them’, allowing them to produce children with others but not with each other.38 The couple’s sterility was a piece of ill-fortune mocked by Cleopatra during the war of words in the run up to Actium, and although it may sound like a cheap shot, Livia’s and Augustus’s childlessness had serious and long-term repercussions both for the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the principle of future imperial succession.39

  For dynasties need heirs. Although he was destined to live to a great old age, Augustus’s famously weak constitution drove him repeatedly to his sickbed throughout the first decade of his reign, lending particular urgency to the dilemma of which of his relatives would ultimately replace him. Female primogeniture was out of the question, ruling out Augustus’s only biological child, Julia. Two leading candidates were left – Tiberius, Livia’s eldest son from her marriage to Tiberius Nero, or Marcellus, the eldest son of the emperor’s sister Octavia.

  Octavia had not been forgotten in Augustus’s plans since his succession, far from it. Now in her forties, since the dissolution of her marriage to Antony, she had been living with her brother and sister-in-law on the Palatine, where she had assumed the duty of bringing up at least nine children, not just her own son and four daughters by her marriages to Claudius Marcellus and Antony, but also Antony’s four surviving children sired with Fulvia and Cleopatra.40 As mother to such a vast brood, she evoked the example of that paragon of motherhood Cornelia, herself the mother of twelve, and it was an association that Augustus explicitly encouraged.

  One of the most important legacies of Augustus’s forty-one year reign was his physical transformation of the Roman city skyline. He famously boasted that he had discovered Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and Octavia was to feature
significantly within this process.41 During this period, Rome’s narrow streets and tenement blocks were almost constantly choked with the dust and clattering din of construction work, on projects such as the new Julio-Claudian family mausoleum on the banks of the River Tiber, a vast circular tomb of white travertine whose fat concrete belly was destined to become the eternal resting place for the ashes of the emperor and his successors. Augustus’s self-aggrandising zeal for building was, however, balanced by a commitment to undertake that building work in accordance with his moral revolution. So luxury villas and buildings that went up during the competitive era of the republic for the benefit of the wealthy few were gradually replaced or rebranded as spaces for common use. One such construction project initiated not long after 27 BC was the Portico of Octavia, a public colonnade named for the emperor’s sister and remodelled on the footprint of a previous version constructed more than a century earlier by a wealthy grandee named Caecilius Metellus. Visiting the portico now, one finds only a fragile shadow of its glorious former self. The site fell into sorry neglect post-antiquity, housing a bustling fish market from the medieval period through to the end of the nineteenth century, and today its battered frontage serves as a nesting spot for pigeons and rooks. But once upon a time, this nondescript ruin was an elegant courtyard with cascading fountains and a garden that played host to a gallery of valuable paintings and sculpture.42

  Pride of place was given to a seated statue of Octavia’s chosen role model Cornelia. Based on the testimony of one tourist, Pliny the Elder, who observed the statue some years later and recorded it as having resided ‘formerly in the portico of Metellus, now the buildings of Octavia’, it used to be thought that when Augustus commandeered the portico for Octavia, the statue was already in situ, explaining perhaps why Augustus chose this particular site as a showcase for his sister.43 Since its existence in Metellus’s day would in fact make it the only known statue of a historical Roman woman in the city before the revolutionary grant to Octavia and Livia in 35 BC, Pliny’s testimony is extremely important. But a new theory suggests that Pliny may have been labouring under a misapprehension. In 1878, excavations at the Portico of Octavia unearthed the large marble slab on which this statue of Cornelia rested, inscribed with the words Cornelia Africani f. Gracchorum – ‘Cornelia, daughter of Africanus, mother of the Gracchi’. Recent re-examinations of this inscription suggest that the label shows signs of being a recut of a different original, the implication being that Augustus had another female statue – of a classical goddess, since a seated pose usually denotes divine status in ancient statuary – relabelled as Cornelia and added it to his sister’s revamped portico to underline a connection between them. A statue that Pliny assumed had been in place since Metellus’s day thus may only have been there since the 20s BC.44