The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  It is difficult to gauge the depth of the attachments between Roman parents and their children without naturally bringing our own emotional expectations to bear. Mothers like Julia, who had already produced five healthy children, could expect to suffer the loss of at least one child in infancy. It is estimated that perhaps 5 per cent of all live-born Roman babies died in their first month, and that almost a quarter of infants died before their first birthdays. The inevitability of such losses perhaps explains why children of this age rarely received funerary monuments, though the evidence of letters such as that between the second-century rhetorician Fronto and the then-emperor Antoninus Pius, on the loss of the former’s three-year-old grandson, indicates that the death of very young children was still an occasion for great grief:

  Be the immortality of the soul ever so established, that will be a theme for the disputations of philosophers, it will never assuage the yearning of a parent … I seem to see a copy of his face and fancy that I hear the very echo of his voice. This is the picture that my grief conjures up of itself.93

  The connection made by Tiberius’s biographer between the death of their child and the breakdown of marital relations with Julia does indicate that this loss was heartbreaking enough to put the final nail in the coffin of their marriage. The death of her grandchild notwithstanding, Livia on the other hand had good reason to be pleased with life in 9 BC as she looked out over the scene of the Capitoline banquet with all Rome’s aristocracy gathered to celebrate the triumph of her offspring, and the city below resounding to the hubbub of ordinary people enjoying their own celebratory feasts. Her sons were bringing home victory after victory from Pannonia, Germany and the Balkans, to great adulation. Drusus in particular was a popular favourite with the Roman public, and his marriage to Octavia’s younger daughter Antonia Minor, which had produced two young sons and a daughter – Germanicus, Claudius and Livilla – had tightened the knot between the Julian and Claudian branches still more securely, cementing Livia’s place as the linchpin between them. With the vaunting of her image as Rome’s materfamilias-in-chief on the nearby Ara Pacis, life must have seemed very sweet just now, particularly if her mind chanced to wander back to her precarious days on the run with Tiberius Nero.

  Tragedy rudely interrupted in September that year, though, with the news of the premature death of Drusus in a riding accident, just as a celebratory banquet was being prepared by his mother Livia and wife Antonia to celebrate his military successes.94 Accompanied by her husband, Livia went as far as the city of Ticinum (Pavia) to meet the procession bringing Drusus’s body home from the campaign trail in Germany, their route illuminated by pyres lit throughout the country to signal Rome’s great mourning for so popular a son. There they met a grief-stricken Tiberius, who had ridden almost 300 kilometres (185 miles) to reach his younger brother’s deathbed, and had led the cortège home. A poem of condolence, the Consolatio ad Liviam, which was written and addressed to Livia by an anonymous figure, re-creates the scene of Drusus’s sad homecoming and funeral, portraying Livia as the epitome of devastated motherhood as she grieves for her youngest boy: ‘Is this the reward for piety? … Can I bear to look at you lying there, cursed wretch that I am? … Now, in my misery, I hold you and look upon you for the last time …’95

  Unlike Octavia, however, for Livia the loss of her beloved son did not result in a maudlin retreat from public life. In step with the Consolatio’s advice that she should master her feelings, she adopted a stiff-upper-lip attitude that won her applause. While Octavia had recoiled from the prospect of seeing images of her son, unable to bear the sight of her dead child’s features set in marble, Livia went the other way, commissioning her own statues of Drusus.96 Livia’s fortitude placed her in excellent company. In an essay written in the 40s, while he was in temporary exile under the reign of the Emperor Nero, the Stoic philosopher Seneca commanded his mother Helvia not to be one of those women who grieves for the rest of her life, recommending she take the great Cornelia for her example, who had refused to give in to tears and recriminations after the death of her sons.97

  More public statues of Livia herself were also ordered by the Senate as a sign of respect. As well as acting as a public reminder of the legal incentives offered by the Julian laws to women who produced three children or more, these statues of Livia carried a new significance, because they were awarded in specific recognition of her contribution as a mother. They were accompanied by the symbolic conferral on the empress of the privileges of the ‘three child rule’ (despite the fact that even before Drusus’s death, Livia had only two children still living). Whereas honorary statues such as these, intended for public display and granted by senatorial decree, had once been the sole preserve of men who had performed great services to the state, now a mother’s contribution of children to society was portrayed as bearing comparison to male achievements in public service, a recognition of the new importance of women and the family in the Roman artistic gallery of power.98

  Livia was also beginning to lend both her name and support to numerous public-building projects that were to become iconic landmarks throughout the city.99 Although Octavia and a few other women had already broken ground here, including Agrippa’s sister Vipsania Polla, who had also had a portico named after her and apparently took a hand in designing a local racecourse, Livia soon left her female contemporaries far behind.100 As part of Augustus’s religious regeneration of the city and its sacred precincts, she was put in charge – at least nominally – of overseeing the rebuilding of certain temples and shrines that had slumped into disuse. Easing her emergence into public life with an emphasis on her role as traditional wife and mother, the temples to receive her patronage honoured goddesses associated with women and the family. Thus under Livia’s aegis, the temples of the goddess Bona Dea Subsaxana and of Fortuna Muliebris were restored, both religious complexes associated with female virtues of fertility and wifely support – Bona Dea was a fertility and healing goddess worshipped in exclusively female religious festivals, while the temple of Fortuna Muliebris (‘The Fortune of Women’) had in fact been built in tribute to Rome’s fifth-century female saviours, Veturia and Volumnia.101 Shrines to Pudicitia Plebeia and Pudicitia Patricia, cults of chastity, are also thought to have been dedicated by Livia, and she gave her name to non-religious edifices such as the public market, the Macellum Liviae, another appropriate commission given its association with domestic management, the Roman housewife’s arena of responsibility.102

  The showpiece of Livia’s building programme though was the Porticus Liviae (‘Portico of Livia’). This was one of the places to see and be seen in the city, described by an ancient tourist as amongst the great spectacles of Rome.103 Like Octavia’s portico, the plot of land on which it was erected had once belonged to a republican fat cat, in this instance a wealthy aristocrat of freedman stock named Vedius Pollio, a financial adviser of Augustus’s who had earned himself a reputation for questionable business practices and feeding unfortunate slaves who incurred his wrath to his pet fish. On his death, Pollio had bequeathed a portion of his estate to the emperor, grandly expressing the wish that it should be used as the site for a magnificent building to benefit the people of Rome. Instead, Augustus ordered Pollio’s sprawling private temple to excess, located within the warren-like residential district of the Subura on the Esquiline hill, to be flattened and replaced with a portico named after Livia, an oasis of sunlit gardens, artworks and colonnaded walkways shaded by thick fragrant grape-vines clambering over trellises, which soon became a popular meeting point for the inhabitants of the otherwise crowdy, smelly Subura. Ovid even cheekily recommended it in his pre-exile days as a good spot to meet girls, not quite the message Augustus had in mind.104

  The extent to which Livia – or indeed Octavia and Vipsania Polla – was actively involved in the planning of such building projects cannot be known, but the portico was yet another instance of the way in which Livia had become a key figure in the emperor’s propaganda. A handful o
f women outside the imperial family was inspired by her example. Eumachia, a public priestess and wealthy member of an old Pompeian family who, after her father’s death, had taken on the management of his wine, amphora and tile export business, used the Porticus Liviae as a blueprint for the construction of a huge portico paid for out of her own funds and bordering the forum of Pompeii, the entrance to which still stands.105 Livia was now clearly a role model for the women of the elite.

  The Porticus Liviae was completed in 7 BC, and its dedication presided over by Livia herself. Also housed in the portico was a shrine devoted to Concordia, a cult in honour of marital harmony, which Livia is thought to have added as a special tribute to her husband on 11 June, a date which was celebrated as a kind of Mother’s Day in the Roman calendar.106 Highly ironic then, given the theme, that also at her side for the dedication was her son Tiberius, still basking in the glory of his first triumph and his appointment to the consulship, but whose unhappy marriage was about to drive him to commit career suicide, to the great consternation of his mother. When in 6 BC, his stepfather offered him a prestigious five-year posting to the eastern province of Armenia, Tiberius rejected it and instead requested leave to withdraw from public life and retire to the island of Rhodes. He excused his decision on the grounds that he was tired of public office, and wished to step aside in favour of Gaius and Lucius. His announcement, however, caused a rift with Augustus, who condemned his stepson’s decision in the Senate, calling it an act of desertion. Livia is said to have strained every sinew to induce her son to change his mind. But he would not be persuaded, and left Rome by the port of Ostia without a word to most of his friends, spending the next seven years in quiet sanctum, attending the lectures of various professors of philosophy.107

  Some ancient biographers insisted that Tiberius was indeed motivated by a genuine desire to advance the interests of Julia’s boys.108 Other reports claimed that he was in fact piqued at their precocious rise through the political ranks and had flounced off to Rhodes in a fit of the sullens. The most popular theory of all though was that in isolating himself on Rhodes, Tiberius was determined to put as many miles as possible between himself and Julia, whose company he could no longer endure.

  How do you solve a problem like Julia? The question was beginning to cause a real headache for Augustus. He was increasingly exasperated at his daughter’s recalcitrance, his sentiments on the matter summarised in a comment made to friends one day that ‘he had two spoiled daughters to put up with – Rome and Julia’. In his determination to steer her on to a more respectable path, he wrote urging Julia to learn from the example set by her stepmother Livia, after differences between the two women’s companions at a recent gladiatorial contest were commented on by bystanders – Livia’s circle of distinguished middle-aged statesmen forming a stark contrast to Julia’s entourage of dissipated young men. But in retort to her father’s aspersions on her friends, Julia wrote impudently – according, once again, to Macrobius’s Saturnalia: ‘These friends of mine will be old men too when I am old.’ In the face of all of Augustus’s critiques, of her immodest dress sense, her rowdy circle of friends, even her vanity-driven habit of plucking grey hairs from her head, Julia refused to conform to the austere living example set by her father, apparently retorting to an entreaty by a friend: ‘He forgets that he is Caesar, but I remember that I am Caesar’s daughter.’109

  Several, or even all, of these pithy sayings attributed to Julia could of course be the invention of Macrobius or his first-century source Domitius Marsus. But they are nonetheless indicative of the terms in which the rift between Julia and her father was perceived, and when the end finally came, Julia’s fall from grace was truly spectacular and left no room for doubt as to the seriousness of her offences. The year 2 BC, in which the blow fell, began auspiciously enough. It marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Augustus’s formal assumption of the mantle of princeps, and pseudo-restoration of ‘the republic’. On 5 February, the emperor was named pater patriae (‘Father of the Country’) by the Senate, and in August, lavish celebrations were held to mark the dedication of the Forum of Augustus. Alongside bronze statues of the great and the good was a magnificent temple to Mars the Avenger, in which was housed a trinity of deities claimed as patron gods by the Julian family – Mars, Venus Genetrix, and Divus Julius. The latter represented the deified Julius Caesar, who had been consecrated as a god in 42 BC, thus conveniently allowing his great-nephew to call himself ‘son of a god’.110

  But a dark cloud loomed over the pageant. Barely was the dedication over, than Augustus issued a statement to be read out to the Senate. The enraged emperor, it was announced, had publicly disowned his daughter Julia, word having reached him that she was suspected of drinking and committing adultery with a series of men. The charge-sheet included the torrid accusation that she had even had sex on the Rostra, the platform from which orators spoke to the crowds in the forum and from which her father had proclaimed his laws on marriage and adultery in 18 BC. There were even fruitier allegations, quoted later from Augustus’s anguished personal correspondence, that a garland had been hung on the statue of the satyr Marsyas in the forum, next to which Julia had turned prostitute and offered to take on all comers, including strangers. Such was Augustus’s shame, that when a freedwoman of Julia’s named Phoebe hanged herself in the wake of the scandal, he is said to have observed that he would rather have been Phoebe’s father.111

  The scandal dealt a devastating blow to Augustus’s attempts to present his family as above suspicion in the moral purity stakes. The penalty for adultery laid down by Augustus’s own legislation was exile. Such was his fury that he was said to have considered killing his daughter, though in the end he contented himself with having her banished to the tiny windswept island of Pandateria, off Italy’s western coast. The fact that he treated her case at the level of treason, referring it to the Senate, reflects the level of betrayal that Augustus felt at her failure to live up to the standards he had set his family.

  Today, the island of Pandateria goes by the name of Ventotene. At a mere 3 kilometres (1.8 miles) long, its pink and white houses and sparkling navy-blue harbours make it popular with holidaymakers. Once, though, it was a place of bleak exile, home to a prison fortress as recently as 1965. Julia was confined to a lonely existence here for the next five years. Forbidden all sumptuary pleasures including wine and male visitors, she was now forced to live in accordance with her father’s political and moral precepts – though she was not quite without company. At her own insistence, we are told, Scribonia, the wife Augustus discarded in favour of Livia, loyally accompanied her daughter into exile. As already alluded to in the case of Livia’s own faithful shadowing of Tiberius Nero, such acts by women in support of banished husbands or children were much admired in Roman literature of the imperial period. Scribonia’s act thus cast her not as the nagging harridan of Augustus’s correspondence, but as a woman who conceived of her duty and most important role in life as that of being a mother to her child.112

  Over the last two centuries, the case against Julia has been reopened, and many classical scholars are now convinced that the charges of sexual immorality laid against her were in fact a cover-up for something more sinister.113 Based on hints dropped by ancient writers such as Pliny and Seneca, it has been deduced that Julia’s real crime was not adultery, but involvement in a political plot against her father. Five men were named as Julia’s partners in adultery – Iullus Antonius, Quintus Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus and Scipio – all of them from noted aristocratic families. One possibility is that their real offence was conspiring in an attempt at regime change, of which there were several during the first emperor’s reign. If this theory is correct, the name of Iullus Antonius – Antony’s and Fulvia’s son, who had been charitably brought up by his stepmother Octavia in the aftermath of his father’s death – must have sent the greatest shiver down the emperor’s spine. The pairing of Augustus’s daughter and the son of his greatest
enemy was an irony not lost years later on Seneca, who referred to Julia as ‘once again a woman to be feared with an Antony’.114

  The evidence that Julia was plotting the overthrow of her father is thin at best. But it was nevertheless impossible to separate the political from the sexual implications of her crimes. Whether true or false, an accusation of adultery against Julia, the offspring of the man who had espoused puritanical new laws against such immorality, carried with it consequences far more serious than mere personal embarrassment, and could never have been stomached by the emperor.115 All the same, angry protests are said to have greeted the well-liked Julia’s banishment. They stirred Augustus to angry retort in the popular assembly, but he did relent after a few years, permitting his daughter’s return to the mainland, though confining her to the city of Regium, on the toe of Italy. In Regium, Julia was at least allowed to venture out into the town and provided with a house and an annual allowance by her father. However, Augustus was never reunited with his daughter, and she remained in his black books to the end. Her father’s will later stipulated that neither she nor her daughter Julia Minor – who was to be exiled for adultery ten years later – should be permitted burial in the family mausoleum, a punishment which, as one writer has put it, ‘constituted a posthumous and highly symbolic revocation of membership in the Julian gens’.116 He also disinherited her, and on his death, the share of his estate that she as a daughter would have been legally entitled to passed instead solely to Livia and Tiberius.117 Although she did not suffer the punishment known as damnatio memoriae, which would have immediately condemned all existing sculptures and artistic images of her throughout the empire to the scrapheap, no images of her survive that can be dated after 2 BC, the year of her banishment.118