The First Ladies of Rome Read online

  The sponsorship of Roman public buildings was an act that prior to Augustus’s reign had been the sole preserve of men in Roman society. In another example of the way that traditional female values were now being broadcast from very untraditional platforms, the Julio-Claudian era saw the practice of female sponsorship take off in a big way, and Octavia’s portico was the blueprint for several of the female-sponsored buildings that followed. She also acted as a conduit between Augustus and the great Roman architect, engineer and historian Vitruvius, whose highly influential treatise On Architecture contained an acknowledgement of gratitude to the emperor’s sister for recommending his employment to Augustus, a note that makes it clear it was not just Livia who was a useful contact in the emperor’s circle. Livia would later overtake Octavia as the more prolific patron of public building works, but for the time being, it was Octavia, with her more visible role in the physical fabric of the city, whose star was arguably the higher in the firmament.

  When Octavia’s son Marcellus and Livia’s son Tiberius emerged as the front runners to succeed Augustus, it looked at first glance as though there was little to choose between them. Both were much the same age and had been given equal billing in their youth. Indeed, they were both chosen to ride the trace-horses of Augustus’s chariot during the triumphal celebrations after Actium. Marcellus, though, said to have been ‘a young man of noble qualities, cheerful in mind and disposition’ in contrast to his pale, silent cousin, had the advantage of being related to the emperor by blood and it was he who enjoyed the faster-tracked career.45 In 25 BC, the Julio-Claudian dynasty celebrated its first ‘royal wedding’ with the marriage of seventeen-year-old Marcellus to his fourteen-year-old cousin Julia.46 The father of the bride could not himself be present, as he was still away on his foreign tour, and so – in a piece of irony that would only be realised later – Augustus’s military supremo Agrippa was commissioned to act in loco parentis.47

  With Julia’s donning of the yellow wedding veil and slippers, the status of Octavia’s son as favourite for the purple was confirmed, elevating Octavia herself to the prestigious if unofficial position of mother to the heir-apparent. But the bubble burst all too quickly. Two years later in the autumn of 23 BC, while the now forty-year-old Augustus struggled to recover from a near-fatal illness, Marcellus himself died suddenly of a mysterious sickness at the age of twenty, widowing Julia and unexpectedly becoming the first occupant of the brand-new family mausoleum, now looming like a 40-metre-high (130-feet-high) wedding cake over the city. Public mourning for the boy was extravagant, and Octavia’s devastation widely broadcast.48 Burying herself in seclusion, she was said to have forbidden all mention of her son’s name thereafter, giving way to her grief only during an audience with Virgil, the great poet and friend of the family, while he read her a passage from his epic poem, the Aeneid, in which the Roman founding father Aeneas, whom Augustus’s family claimed as an ancestor, saw a vision of Marcellus’s ghost in a parade of Roman heroes in the underworld. In his early-nineteenth-century work Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus, the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres captures in oils the moment recorded by Virgil’s ancient biographer, when Octavia swoons in Augustus’s lap at hearing the part of the poem that mentioned her son, her face sallow with loss.49

  Yet Ingres adds another figure to the scene, one whose presence is unreported in the account of Octavia’s faint given by Virgil’s fourth-century biographer Donatus. As Augustus cradles his swooning sister and holds up a hand in signal to the poet to stop, Octavia’s other companion Livia looks on poker-faced. Her hooded eyes betray no emotion as she cups her sister-in-law’s head with one hand and drapes the other languidly over the back of her chair, contemplating with detached interest the grief-stricken face before her, the greys and blues of her clothing reflecting her icy demeanour in contrast to the warm pinks and reds sported by her companions. In a later version of the painting, two anonymous figures stare thoughtfully at Livia from the shadows, their suspicions apparently awakened by her utterly unconcerned demeanour.50

  Ingres’s composition reflects a well-known report that in the wake of Marcellus’s death, ugly rumours were swirling around Rome. Surreptitious fingers of blame were being pointed at Livia, claming that she had a hand in Marcellus’s death, motivated by jealousy at seeing her own son Tiberius passed over for the succession. Even though our source for the rumours, Cassius Dio, notes that the accusation was dismissed out of hand by many who pointed out the high incidence of fatal airborne disease in the city that year, nevertheless, some of the mud stuck and still has not come off. Robert Graves’s novel I Claudius alludes delicately to Livia’s ‘unremitting attention’ to her nephew, while in the television series based on the book, the camera lingers on Livia’s malevolent expression as she promises to take care of the boy on his sickbed.51

  Ingres was never quite satisfied with his composition. He reworked it several times, and his indecision mirrors the inconclusiveness of the ancient accusations against Livia.52 Marcellus’s death was nevertheless just the first of a series of murders by poison that would be laid at her door during the course of her career. While it would be a futile task to try to prove or disprove her guilt in this or any other case, we would do well to remember that the stereotype of the poisoning woman was a stock character in ancient myth and history, epitomised by Cleopatra, the bogeywoman of imperial Roman imagination who not only employed poison to effect her own suicide but tested her medicine cabinet of lethal potions on prisoners of war. Indeed her example influenced the portrait of later femmes fatales like Lucrezia Borgia.53 The image of sorceresses like Medea and Circe, who used their drugs and potions to control and terrorise mankind, helped to establish a fine line between the ministering and murdering female stereotypes, and it was one that Livia would continue to skirt precariously as her profile on the Roman radar steadily rose. Women were the guardians of the domestic realm and keepers of the keys to the kitchen cabinets, and Roman satire caricatured them as the enemy within, knowledgeable in the poisons needed to induce abortions, drug their husbands or eliminate inconvenient rivals to their own sons’ chances of inheritance:

  You fatherless orphans too, who are rather well off, I warn you – watch out for your lives and don’t trust a single dish. Those pastries are steaming darkly with maternal poison. Get someone else to taste first anything that’s offered to you by the woman who bore you.54

  Women’s pharmacological skills could also be directed to positive ends, making medicines that healed rather than harmed. The De Medicamentis Liber, an extraordinary compilation of traditional Roman remedies assembled in the fifth century by a medical writer from Bordeaux, even preserves for us what it claims were the favourite medical recipes of Livia and Octavia themselves, rather like the Hippocratic equivalent of a modern celebrity cookery book. Drawing on the writings of Scribonius Largus, a physician who served the imperial court during the reign of Livia’s great-grandson Claudius, it records that Livia herself recommended a linctus including saffron, cinnamon, coriander, opium and honey to soothe a sore throat, and also kept a salve of marjoram, rosemary, fenugreek, wine and oil in a jar by her bed to soothe chills and nervous tension, an ancient version of Vicks VapoRub. As well as telling us of Livia’s toothpaste formula, it is also our source for Octavia’s own prescription for dentifricium, which like her sister-in-law’s was a simple abrasive blend consisting of rock salt, vinegar, honey and barley-flour, baked into charred dumplings and scented, again like Livia’s, with spikenard.55

  Octavia’s profile spiked briefly in the aftermath of Marcellus’s death. Despite her vow that she would make no public appearances, she emerged from the shadows to dedicate a library to her dead son in her eponymous portico – while Augustus established a nearby theatre in his name, the Theatre of Marcellus – and she continued to make periodic appearances in art commissioned by her brother. But the damage was done. It was said that she never recovered, either politically or personally, from M
arcellus’s death, and wore mourning clothes for the last decade of her life. Amid the chorus of ancient approval that paints her as one of the best, most modest and praiseworthy of Roman women, a dissenting voice appeared some decades later in the person of Seneca, a member of the Emperor Nero’s inner circle who said that Octavia had grieved too incontinently for her son, contrasting her behaviour unfavourably with the restrained conduct of Livia when she had her own maternal sorrows to bear.

  Of course, the differences between the two women ran far deeper than their respective experiences of grief. According to Seneca, they fell out badly after Marcellus’s death. Octavia was said to have nursed a hatred for her sister-in-law, suspecting that now she would get her long-standing wish of seeing one of her own sons succeed Augustus. If Livia did cherish such maternal ambitions, though, they would have to wait a little longer.56

  Augustus was forced to rethink his plans quickly in the aftermath of the events of 23 BC. Marcellus’s death had not only created a vacancy in the dynastic pecking order, it left his teenaged daughter Julia without a husband. To permit his only daughter to remain single for any length of time would have been contrary to the civic ideals that Augustus actively sought to promote – under legislation passed by him within the next few years, one year was the maximum time a woman was allowed to remain an unattached widow before she was expected to remarry.57 But Augustus did not turn to either of his stepsons by Livia, even though as a general rule he tended to keep things in the family as far as the marriages of the children of the imperial household went. Instead in 21 BC, apparently heeding the advice of his friend Maecenas, who advised Augustus that he had elevated his lieutenant Agrippa to so powerful a position that ‘he must either become your son-in-law or be slain’, he married the now eighteen-year-old Julia to the forty-two-year-old architect of the victory at Actium, who in turn divorced Octavia’s eldest daughter Claudia Marcella Maior to make way for his new bride, a marital reshuffle to which Octavia apparently gave her blessing.58

  In 1902, railway workers building a track between Boscotrecase and Torre Annunziata happened to uncover the remains of a magnificent country residence where Agrippa and Julia spent at least some of their married life. Set into a hillside near the ill-fated city of Pompeii, the villa commanded a panoramic south-facing view of the Gulf of Naples, an area littered with the country retreats of the Roman glitterati. Excavations were cut short by the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius which covered the villa’s all too briefly exposed skeleton, but graffiti on amphorae and tiles found in the remains were enough to confirm the property’s original ownership. Thanks to the painting style of the interior decoration, the so-called ‘Third Style‘ which was popularised after 15 BC and was characterised by delicate decorative schemes on monochrome backgrounds, it is thought construction work on the villa probably began in the early years of Agrippa’s and Julia’s marriage.59

  The Villa Boscotrecase was one of the most impressive houses of its day, testifying to the enormous wealth and prestige its owner had acquired since Actium. Words can scarcely do justice to the brilliant frescoes that were found inside, and which are today divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Muzeo Nazionale in Naples. Colour poured through the house like a liquid rainbow, flooding the walls with a richly polychromatic palette inspired by nature: red cinnabar, yellow ochre, turquoise, lime-white, violet and green. Whisper-fine pastoral vignettes chequered the walls of the so-called ‘Red Room’; painted candelabra served as pedestals for landscape ‘postcards’ on the sober walls of the ‘Black Room’; and two paintings 5 and 6 feet high (1.5–1.8 m) depicted the rescue of Andromeda from a sea-monster by Perseus and the one-eyed Cylops Polyphemus’s love for the sea-nymph Galatea in the ‘Mythological Room’. The cool marine greens and blues of their composition lent a sense of peace, tranquillity and fantasy to the ambience of this otherwise red-painted chamber, which may have been a bedroom given that this was often the locus for mythological scenes.60

  We cannot tell if any of these rooms were intended for Julia’s or any other female resident’s personal use. One of the key distinguishing features between Roman houses and Greek houses is that they show no signs of segregation along gender lines. Nothing in the decoration, layout or archaeological remains of Roman houses indicates which if any rooms were given over to solely male or female use. We do not even have clues such as toy remnants that might identify children’s nurseries.61 Instead, while their Athenian counterparts were almost permanently confined to secluded areas of their homes, Julia and her fellow Roman matrons were expected to make themselves visible, albeit in strictly domestic occupations in the atrium where their activities would be on full view, thanks to the open-door policy which Roman male grandees employed to show off their status and encourage the assumption that they had nothing to hide in their personal lives. This principle applied even at their homes outside the metropolis. Thus the Villa Boscotrecase functioned as an extension of Agrippa’s personal political empire in the city, a rural show home where, aided by Julia, he might entertain friends, receive clients and continue to flourish his plumage. However, such sociability only extended so far. Both town and country villas were divided into subtly graduated areas of public and private, the cubiculum (‘bedroom’) being the most private, and the atrium being the least private. The more special and privileged the visitor, the more private and richly decorated the room to which he was admitted. It was a mark of Livia’s unusually elevated status, and the rank of visitor she therefore received, that the empress herself maintained a staff of cubicularii, or bedroom attendants, whose task it was to supervise admittance to her inner sanctum.62

  Such rich gorgeousness as we find in these rooms at Boscotrecase may seem curiously at odds with the mantra of moral austerity so rigorously espoused by Augustus. Like any society, the Romans had their own unwritten codes of conduct, an unspoken understanding of where the line between vulgarity and acceptable ostentation lay, and with its delicate pastoral and mythological decoration themes, Agrippa’s and Julia’s home was in fact quite in keeping with the elegant but restrained style of the imperial residence on the Palatine. Nevertheless, Augustus had serious reservations about the luxurious country mansions that some Romans built for themselves, taking care to advertise the fact that he himself did not decorate his own modest country places with painted panels and statuary but let natural features such as terraces and plantations do the work, and when, many years later, one of his granddaughters, Julia Minor, built a lavish country palace that did not accord with his moral precepts, he had it demolished, an ominous warning sign, if ever it were needed, that Augustus would not tolerate moral hypocrisy in his own family.63

  Julia Minor was one of a tally of five children to whom Julia gave birth during her nine-year union to Agrippa, rewarding the hopes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which seemed now to have settled on Julia and Agrippa as the guardians of its legacy. The eldest, a son named Gaius, was born in 20 BC, followed three years later by a younger brother Lucius, and in a clear signal of intent to groom them as the front runners to their grandfather’s throne, Augustus officially adopted both of them as his own sons. Adoption, whereby one paterfamilias legally took another man’s child, or even another paterfamilias, into his own family, was a long-standing Roman practice, often employed by those unable to produce heirs of their own – Augustus himself owed much of his rise to his adoption as a seventeen-year-old by his great-uncle Julius Caesar.64 In 13 BC, once Gaius and Lucius had reached the age of seven and four respectively, the Roman mint issued a coin featuring the emperor on one side, and on the other, a tiny fleshy-featured bust of Julia, her hair neatly arranged in the nodus, and flanked by the heads of her two infant boys. Julia thus became the only woman to appear on a coin issued by the Roman mint during her father’s reign. Above her portrait hovered the corona civica, the crown of oak leaves that along with the laurel was Augustus’s own particular crest; it marked Julia out as the new queen-mother-in-waiting, just as Octav
ia, mother of Marcellus, had been before her.65

  The birth of two girls, Julia Minor and her younger sister Agrippina Maior, intersected those of Gaius and Lucius, and finally another boy came along, named Agrippa Postumus in recognition of the fact that he was born after Agrippa’s death.66 Like her stepmother Livia, Julia spent much of her time accompanying her husband on foreign tours, and her daughter Agrippina is thought to have been born on the island of Lesbos, near the Turkish coast. Inscriptions and statues along the route that Agrippa and Julia took paid homage to the fertility of the emperor’s visiting daughter, such as one in the Greek city of Priene labelling her kalliteknos, meaning ‘bearer of beautiful children’.67