The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  On the eve of a lavish high-society wedding such as hers, Livia would have undertaken the first of a series of ceremonial procedures symbolising her graduation from childhood to adulthood, and her transition from her father’s house to her husband’s. First, a Roman bride put away childish things – her toys and the miniature-sized toga she had worn throughout infancy and childhood – and dressed herself in a straight white woollen dress (tunica recta) that she had woven herself on a special loom. The next day, this simple white bridal tunic was cinched in at the waist with a woollen girdle whose complicated ‘Herculanean’ knot would eventually have to be untied by her husband. Her long hair, which had been confined overnight in a yellow hairnet, was arranged in an austere style involving the peculiar use of a sharp spear to separate the hair into six tight braids before they were secured with woollen ribbons.12

  The groom and guests typically arrived at the bride’s father’s house in the afternoon. Though Roman weddings were not a religious compact, various ceremonial gestures took place on the day, including a sacrifice of a pig to ensure good omens for the union. Words of consent were exchanged between the betrothed couple, and the marriage was sealed when a married female guest, or pronuba, took the right hands of the bride and groom and joined them together. A contract may have been witnessed and signed, the couple toasted with the salutation Feliciter (‘Good luck’) and a wedding feast then preceded the bride’s final escort to her new home, where her husband had gone ahead to await her. We can imagine the scene as the distant sounds of singing echoed across the city, just above the evening traffic and the babble of traders shutting up shop for the night. Snaking along a route thickly scented with burning pine torches, flute-players piped musical accompaniment as the raucous crowd, well-oiled by the wedding feast they had just left, tramped along in high gig, singing the traditional wedding refrains of ‘Hymen Hymenae!’ and ‘Talasio!’, and tossing handfuls of nuts to scampering children and curious local residents who had come out to watch the cavalcade go by.

  In the middle of the crush, Livia’s striking egg-yolk-coloured wedding veil, or flammeum flared like a beacon in the darkness, draped over a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. Matching yellow slippers or socci, perhaps embroidered with pearls, slipped in and out of view beneath her belted tunic as she was swept along by the two young boys holding her hands, chosen from the offspring of married family friends as hopeful harbingers of the children she would one day bear. A third boy marched ahead with a pine torch, and instead of a bouquet, a spindle was carried for her along the route, a symbol of her new domestic duties. Despite the presence of these innocuous symbols of respectable wedded life, the atmosphere was thick with well-intentioned but ribald humour, and a gauntlet of risqué jokes and innuendo-laden songs had to be endured before the bride could reach her new marital home. When at last Livia’s noisy escorts delivered her up to Tiberius Nero’s front door, she found it judiciously garlanded with flowers by her waiting groom. As was required of her, she ceremoniously daubed the doorposts with animal fat and affixed skeins of uncombed wool to them, rituals designed to guarantee wealth and plenty to herself and her new husband in their married life. Finally she was carefully lifted over the threshold by her young male attendants. Caution was necessary. For any bride to trip as she was admitted through the doorway of her new husband’s home was considered an ill omen. Once inside, after being presented with gifts of fire (a torch) and water (in a jug or vessel) from her husband, symbolising her wifely responsibility for cooking and washing and the overseeing of the household, she was led away by another married woman who escorted her to her new bedroom before admitting the groom for consummation to take place.13

  Livia’s status as a teenage bride was entirely normal. Upper-class girls in the late Roman Republic typically embarked on their first marriage in their early teens, sometimes as early as twelve. This capitalised on their most fertile, child-bearing years in a climate where infant mortality rates were high. The production of children, the asset for which Roman women were most publicly valued, was an imperative for a woman in Livia’s position, and sterility, the blame for which was invariably pinned on the wife rather than the husband, could be cited as grounds for divorce. It comes as no surprise then that the date 16 November 42 BC marks the spot on the Roman time-line on which Livia leaves her first footprint, with the official documentation of the birth of her eldest son, Tiberius, the boy whose cries would later nearly spoil his parents’ cover as they fled through the Greek city-state of Sparta, and who would one day become emperor of Rome.14

  Tiberius’s birth took place at home on the Palatine hill, the most exclusive residential district in Rome. Thanks to its close access to the Roman forum, the hub of the city, and its sacred associations with key moments in Rome’s mythical past, such as the birth of the city’s twin founders Romulus and Remus, the Palatine was the ideal home for an ambitious politico like Tiberius Nero. A veritable Who’s Who of late republican movers and shakers had also chosen to make it their base, from Cicero to Octavian and Mark Antony, and Livia had probably grown up there herself in her father’s house.15

  Childbirth for a woman in the Roman world was a closely scrutinised business. From the moment of conception to the feeding and weaning stages, a barrage of advice was on offer to expectant mothers – some of it based on the theories of respected medical practitioners, some of it rooted in superstitious quackery. Prior to baby Tiberius’s arrival, Livia herself was said to have employed various old wives’ techniques to try and ensure the birth of a son, including one where she incubated a hen’s egg by cupping it in her hands and keeping it warm in the folds of her dress, where it would eventually hatch into a proud-combed cock-chick, in supposed premonition of a baby boy.16 The more pragmatic, though equally unscientific, advice of medical experts like Soranus, writing some years later in the second century, recommended that the best time for conception was towards the end of menstruation, and after a light meal and a massage.

  Home births were the only kind available, and a wealthy mother-to-be such as Livia was attended by a roomful of females, including several midwives, who were kept on permanent staff by the richest households. Husbands were not present in the delivery room – though Octavian’s father Gaius Octavius had reportedly been late for a Senate vote in 62 BC when his wife Atia went into labour – while male attending physicians were almost unheard of. A remarkable terracotta tombstone from Isola Sacra, near the Roman port of Ostia, offers us an extraordinary snapshot of a Roman woman in the process of parturition. A midwife (probably the dedicatee of this roughly hewn funerary relief) crouches on a low stool before a labouring woman who is naked, and gripping tightly to the armrests of a birthing chair, her upper torso supported by another woman standing behind her. From other medical sources, we know what the relief does not show – that there was a crescent-shaped hole in the seat of such chairs, through which the baby would be delivered by the squatting midwife.17 An unpleasant-looking vaginal speculum made of bronze was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii; such contraptions may have been used to examine the birth canal in the event of complications. If the advice recorded by Soranus was followed, hot oil, water and compresses were on hand, and the air scented with herbs such as minty pennyroyal and fresh citrus, to soothe the exhausted mother.18

  Giving birth was a dangerous experience in antiquity both for mother and child. It is estimated that about a quarter of infants died before their first birthday, and funerary epitaphs offer many mournful paeans to mothers who died in labour.19 But in the event of a successful outcome, such as sixteen-year-old Livia’s safe delivery of little Tiberius, the house was soon flooded with congratulatory, back-slapping friends of the proud father, and there is literary evidence that women had post-partum support from female members of their own families too.20 Nine days after the birth, a day of ceremonial cleansing rites called the lustratio was held for the baby, during which he or she was officially named.21 Public scrutiny of the child’s upbringing did not stop th
ere, however. Despite the fact that most members of the elite apparently handed their children over to wet-nurses for suckling, many ancient sources criticised the practice, and insisted that women should breast-feed their own infants themselves. A description from the second century recalls a philosophising visitor named Favorinus criticising a girl’s mother for trying to spare her daughter the exigencies of breast-feeding so soon after giving birth, insisting that the child’s moral character would be harmed by the milk of foreign, servile wet-nurses who might well be addicted to the bottle to boot. He follows the point home:

  For what kind of unnatural, imperfect and half-motherhood is it to bear a child and at once send it away from her? … Or do you perhaps think … that nature gave women nipples as a kind of beauty-spot, not for the purpose of nourishing their children, but as an adornment of their breast?22

  Even though such intellectual critiques failed to stop elite mothers in Livia’s day from handing over their babies for weaning, and Soranus’s gynaecological compendium actually recommended the employ of a wet-nurse for exhausted mothers, the satirising of females who did not want to endure the trials and damage to the figure caused by childbirth played well to auditors with long, rose-tinted memories. For such female narcissism was portrayed by critics of the society in which Livia grew up as a revealing contrast to the good old days of Rome’s earlier history, a period inhabited by female nonpareils such as Cornelia, a much-fêted matriarch of the second century BC who was said to have dispensed with hired help and brought up her children ‘at her breast’ and ‘on her lap’.23

  An ancient biography of Tiberius preserves the information that Livia herself employed a wet-nurse or nutrix to look after her son, one of the very few glimpses we have of this period of her life.24 Yet it is important. For it plugs directly into Roman thinking about the ideal woman, a yardstick against which Livia and her successors as Roman first lady would be judged. Women rarely won praise in the writings of antiquity for acting in their own interests, rather, they were praised for facilitating the interests of their husbands and their sons, and, through them, furthering the glory of Rome. Cornelia, as the mother of populist politician brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, was celebrated for her stewardship of their childhood, bringing them up to be eloquent orators and morally upstanding young men fed on a diet of mother’s milk. In the same way, details of Livia’s upbringing of Tiberius survive because the ancient biographers in question were interested not in Livia per se, but in how her upbringing of young Tiberius might have impacted on the grown man – and emperor – that he would eventually become.

  Those reviews were still unwritten. At this stage, despite her impressive family tree, Livia was still very much one of the giant cast of extras in the grand historical narrative of this tumultuous period in Roman history. But unravelling political events and the aspirations of her husband soon propelled her closer to the centre of the action.

  In the wake of their joint victory over Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC – the victory which resulted in the suicide of Livia’s father – the honeymoon period for arch rivals Mark Antony and Octavian did not last long. The relationship between this charismatic veteran warhorse and ambitious political wunderkind had always been a marriage of convenience. On their return from the scene of their victory, Antony had departed to oversee his allocated share of territory in the eastern Roman Empire. This left the third triumvir Lepidus with responsibility for the province of Africa and Octavian with jurisdiction over Italy, and the unpopular task of repossessing land and redistributing it among the military troops who had been promised a reward for supporting the triumvirs against Brutus and Cassius. Very soon, a cold war set in between Octavian’s and Antony’s camps which showed few signs of thawing over the next decade.

  With Lepidus increasingly sidelined, the battle-weary Roman ruling classes found themselves under pressure to declare their allegiance between two rival candidates for overall power, and soon Tiberius Nero made his choice, deciding to nail his colours to the mast of Antony. Smuggling Livia and their newborn son out of Rome in 41 BC, they made for Perusia (modern Perugia) in central Italy, where they found Antony’s wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius spearheading attempts to foment popular discontent against Octavian among those Italians whose land had been repossessed.25

  Antony’s third wife Fulvia was a highly controversial figure in his campaign, and one whose character assassination in ancient sources gives us a taster of what was in store for the femmes dangereuses of the imperial era. Rome was an aggressively militarist society, one that configured war as a critically – and exclusively – masculine sphere of achievement. The presence of a woman on the front line was anathema, making Fulvia a prime target for Antony’s opponents, who made political capital out of the spectre of a woman managing her husband’s operations in the field. Recent archaeological discoveries at Perugia of missiles thrown during stand-offs between the opposing sides give us a flavour of the kind of rhetoric employed. The finds included slingshots on which derogatory insults aimed at Fulvia had been scratched – slogans such as ‘I’m aiming for Fulvia’s cunt’, and ‘Baldy Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, open your arses’.26 Her press in the annals of Roman history is scarcely more flattering than these crude graffiti.27 For one ancient historian, Fulvia’s macabre pleasure in the death of Antony’s harshest critic Cicero, whose head she demanded to be brought before her in order that she might stab the great orator’s quicksilver but now lifeless tongue with a gold hairpin – a feminine variant on a dagger or sword – crystallised her reputation as a terrible hybrid of male and female characteristics; while Octavian himself was the alleged author of an obscene poem about her, in which he claimed that Fulvia, frustrated by Antony’s affairs with other women, had adjured Octavian to ‘fight me or fuck me’, an invitation which he mockingly declined.28

  For a Roman woman to stray into traditionally male territory, as Fulvia was seen to be doing, did not automatically have to lead to her condemnation. The city’s richly idealised history of its own mythical past was punctuated by stories of females like Cloelia, a young girl lauded for rescuing a group of female hostages from the Etruscan king Porsenna by swimming with them across the Tiber through a hail of enemy spears, and publicly thanked with the erection of a statue on the Appian Way, an honour otherwise afforded almost exclusively to men during the republic. Other women, both fictional and real, were praised for their ‘masculine’ bravery in suicide. Most notable among this group was Lucretia, whose rape by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus, was the catalyst for the overthrow of monarchical rule in 509 BC, and the founding of the republic, on ostensibly democratic principles. Lucretia won everlasting praise as a role model for Roman women for stabbing herself in the heart after her rape, rather than allow her compromised chastity to bring dishonour on her father and her husband. Then there were the ladies who directly intervened to broker peace between warring male factions, like Veturia and Volumnia, who in response to a plea from other Roman matrons inside the city, negotiated the about-turn from the city gates of their respective son and husband, Coriolanus, when he threatened to invade Rome in the fifth century BC; and the Sabine women, whose abduction by the earliest Roman settlers threatened to spark war between the newcomers and their Sabine neighbours, but whose pleas for reconciliation led to peace. All of these stories were set at times of severe flux in Roman history, as tyrants were overthrown or thwarted, and ages of peace restored. The message was, if only all women were as chaste as Lucretia, as brave as Cloelia, and as wise as Veturia and Volumnia, then Rome would never fall into the traps of vice, corruption and despotism that had afflicted it at various points in its historical trajectory.29

  As a rule though, women like Fulvia, and later Antony’s lover Cleopatra, who meddled in the exclusive political and military territory of men, were more usually categorised as harbingers of a world turned upside down. The dividing line between the female sphere of domestic life and the public world
of men was a fixed one, and woe betide any woman perceived to have overstepped it. One such straw woman of the republican era was Clodia Metelli, cited during a lawcourt speech delivered in 56 BC by Cicero, when he was defending her former lover Caelius Rufus on a charge of attempting to murder her. Cicero, who claimed that the allegation had been cooked up by Clodia’s brother Clodius, with whom Cicero had a long-standing feud, undermined Clodia as a witness by claiming that she was a member of a rowdy, drunken and sexually promiscuous social set who hung out at the popular seaside resort of Baiae, south of Rome. The damning word he used was that she was ‘notorious’, implying that Clodia had broken the unwritten rule of Roman society which dictated that a woman’s place was to be seen and not heard.30

  The real targets of such vilification, however, were usually the men who tolerated a woman’s incursion into the public sphere in the first place, and who, according to Roman definitions of masculinity, were thus to be regarded as weak and feminine themselves, unable to keep their own house in order. These at least were the sentiments behind Plutarch’s description of Fulvia as ‘a woman who cared nothing for spinning or housework, and was not interested in having power over a husband who was just a private citizen, but wanted to rule a ruler and command a commander – and consequently Cleopatra owed Fulvia the fee for teaching Antony to submit to a woman’.31 In stark contrast, funerary epitaphs on the tombs of women of the period painted sepia-toned portraits of the occupants as domestic role models who without exception bore children, loved their husbands, kept house, spun wool and could hold a conversation but knew their place.32 To the Roman way of thinking, this wool-working housewife was the ideal woman, moulded in the image of the heroic martyr Lucretia, who had been engaged in spinning at her loom when her rapist Sextus Tarquinius first saw her. The contrast between her and the brazen Fulvia could not have been more acute.