The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  Augustus was not, as some have speculated, granting his wife equal billing with Tiberius by giving her the feminine version of his own name.12 Like all other Roman women, Livia was still barred from the all-male political arenas of the Senate, the army camps and the assemblies, and had no official role in Palatine politics. In the latter sense, she had something in common with the modern presidential spouse, whose role is also constitutionally undefined. But she was now, without question, the closest thing to a queen that Rome had ever had, and this soon posed a dilemma for her newly invested son that was compounded when the Senate proposed to bestow tributes on her over and above the ones granted in Augustus’s will.

  The least contentious motion, which was duly passed, was that Livia be appointed priestess of her husband’s cult – Augustus had been posthumously consecrated as a god on 17 September, thus allowing him to be worshipped in the guise of ‘the Divine Augustus’. Religion was one of the few spheres in which Roman women were previously allowed to play any kind of official public role, as attendants in religious ceremonies or mouthpieces of public grief. But with the exception of the Vestal Virgins, no woman was permitted to hold any of the major priesthoods in Rome. In her groundbreaking new capacity, Livia was permitted to call on the services of a lictor, an official usually assigned to act as a minder to magistrates when they were moving through the city. Yet it was only when the Senate also suggested that Livia henceforth be known as mater patriae (‘Mother of our Country’) – a play on the title pater patriae granted a decade previously to Augustus – and, more provocatively, that Tiberius’s official title should be qualified by the description ‘son of Julia’ or ‘son of Livia’ that the new emperor was moved to use his imperial veto.

  Tiberius excused his refusal on the grounds of modesty, and asserted that ‘only reasonable honours must be paid to women’, pointing out that he would also be declining gratuitous tributes on his own behalf. He had good reason to be concerned. Overexposure of Livia’s name and image could, as Augustus himself had realised during his own lifetime, have antagonised traditionalist critics still hankering after the republic. They would be quick to detect the whiff of eastern-style monarchism in the Julio-Claudian regime’s self-presentation. There are those, we are told, who were already complaining at having to be ‘slaves to a woman’. Few doubted though that what really bothered Tiberius was irritation and resentment at what he saw as the promotion of his mother at the expense of his own authority.13 There was no getting around the fact that Livia was Tiberius’s sole legitimising link to his stepfather and predecessor, and it was not just the Senate but the provinces who insisted on reminding Tiberius of this fact. Several showed no compunction in labelling Livia’s portraits with the title that Tiberius himself had officially denied her.14 Thus began Tiberius’s constant struggle to define and regulate the role of his mother within his regime.

  In some respects, the redoubtable Livia carried on just as she had before, showing few signs during the early years of her son’s reign of relinquishing the role of gatekeeper to the emperor that she had played under Augustus. If anything, her presence was felt in the corridors of power even more. She conducted her own correspondence with client kings such as Archelaus of Cappadocia, and official letters and communications to Tiberius from the provinces were addressed to his mother as well as to himself. In one instance, Livia’s old friends the Spartans wrote separately to her and her son, advising them of their plans to inaugurate a festival in honour of the divine Augustus and his family, to which Tiberius in his reply wrote that he would leave it to his mother to respond herself.15 Since before Augustus’s death, Livia had also held her own version of the men’s morning salutatio, which gave her opportunities to bend the ear of senators as well as listen to petitions and requests from clients and friends. If she, as a woman, could not go to the Senate, then they would come to her.16 The Monumentum Liviae was found to contain the ashes of support staff – doorkeepers (ostiarii) and greeters (salutatores) – whose job it was to filter these dignitaries and petitioners seeking entry to the empress’s presence, and though we do not have a specific record of one, a nomenclator may also have been needed to help Livia remember the names of all of these guests.17

  From his exiled vantage point on the Black Sea, Ovid, the poetic bête noire of the Augustan regime, once gave a memorable description of one of these audiences, in a letter to his wife back in Rome. Begging her to go to Livia, whom he gushingly described as having the ethereal beauty of Venus, the character of Jupiter and the virtue of a woman of olden times, and intercede with the emperor on his behalf, he advised his wife to choose her time of approach carefully: ‘If she’s busy with something more important, put off your attempt and be careful not to spoil my hopes by being too hasty. But I would urge you not to wait until she is completely at leisure; she scarcely has time for the care of her own person.’ Reading between the lines of Ovid’s honeyed paean, it becomes clear that the poet is in fact mischievously satirising Livia’s formidable reputation, breezily scoffing at what he anticipates will be his wife’s fears that she may be entering the den of a monster, while managing insidiously to compare Livia to a catalogue of she-monsters from myth: ‘She isn’t wicked Procne or Medea or savage Clytemnestra, or Scylla, or Circe … or Medusa with snakes knotted into her hair …’l8

  Recently discovered copies of a document issued by the Roman Senate in the year 19 reveal that Livia was publicly thanked in the official record for her personal favours towards men of every rank.19 This concurs with other literary testimony besides Ovid’s that Livia was a useful benefactress to many in the senatorial classes. As well as lending money to those who were too cash-strapped to pay for their daughters’ wedding dowries, she brought up the children of some families under her own aegis, an arrangement presumably seen as of great social advantage to those boys – for boys they seem to have invariably been. But Livia’s habit of summoning senators to her own house clearly set backs up in other quarters, where it was viewed less as the prerogative of a respected matriarch than as the self-important act of an interfering female:

  For she had become puffed up to an enormous extent, surpassing all women before her, and would even make a regular habit of receiving in her house any of the Senate and people who wanted. This is a fact that was entered in the public records …20

  It was Tiberius, however, who struggled most with Livia’s accumulating public importance. Early on in his reign, he vetoed her attempts to invite the senators, members of the equestrian classes and their wives to a banquet she proposed to host in honour of the deceased Augustus. Women typically only invited the female guests at dinner parties, and Tiberius was thus actually just restricting her to the role she had played at state banquets under Augustus’s aegis.21 On another occasion though, two years after his accession, he reprimanded his mother for taking charge of efforts to douse a fire which was threatening the temple of Vesta. Tiberius was said to have been angered by news that Livia was herself personally directing not just the ordinary populace but also the soldiers – always a sensitive topic where a woman’s remit was concerned. She had done so moreover without consulting him, as if Augustus was still the emperor and not his stepson.22

  For all this, Tiberius was all too well aware of Livia’s importance to him as the link that bound him to Augustus. It is for this reason that more portraits of Livia survive from the years of her son’s reign than from that of her husband, and as Livia’s public role underwent a metamorphosis, so too did her official portrait. In spite of the fact that she was over seventy years of age when Tiberius became emperor, in dedicated artwork Livia was getting progressively younger.23 Slowly but surely, the round-faced visage of her earlier public portraits underwent a facelift, the severe nodus hairstyle with its bulky pompadour gradually replaced with a softer, more graceful centre parting, her wrinkles filled in, her skin made smoother, her expression calmer and more serene.

  In part, this change was due to a dramatic shift in portraiture styles
generally since the republican period. Before the Augustan age, the more crumpled and ‘realistic’ the features of the sitter, the more gravitas and standing conferred on the subject. Now, though, there was a return to the youthful, idealising contours of earlier Greek and Hellenistic statuary, ensuring that the faces the imperial family presented to the world never grew old. This sold the notion of the current era as perfectly and reassuringly suspended in time, a visual representation of Virgil’s description of the Augustan age as imperium sine fine – ‘power without end’.24

  Livia now appeared on coins of the Roman mint for the first time, with her hair restyled in the new centre parting, a mode usually seen only on statues of goddesses. In fact, one of the most striking differences between male and female imperial portraiture from this point was that while most emperors avoided attracting accusations of egocentric posturing by insisting on sculptures of themselves – at least while still alive – depicting them in their ‘work’ uniform of toga or breastplate, their female dependants were increasingly shown in the regalia of state goddesses connected with motherhood and fertility such as Juno and Ceres, a contrast that presumably found favour because it suggested a blander, more universal, less troublingly individualised role for women in the imperial set-up. Sculptors and gem-cutters across the empire latched on to this trend, assimilating the features of the emperor’s wife with those of favourite divinities. A sardonyx cameo for example, probably a privately owned trinket in antiquity though now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, represents Livia wearing the costume of the cultic mother-goddess Cybele over her stola, and contemplating a miniature bust of her deified husband, which she holds in her right hand. In her left, she clutches an ear of corn, a symbol of fecundity associated with Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest.25

  Tiberius needed people to accept Livia as both kingmaker and Roman materfamilias par excellence. So although he turned down some more honours for his mother, such as an attempt by the Senate to have the month of October renamed Livius, he did allow her birthday to be observed on the official Roman calendar, an unusual honour for a woman. An inscription from Forum Clodii, a village just outside Rome, records that honeyed wine and little pastries were distributed from the temple of the Bona Dea to women from neighbouring villages, to mark Livia’s birthday on this date, 30 January.26

  Since Tiberius never remarried after the death of Julia, remaining a bachelor emperor for the whole of his twenty-three-year reign, Livia in effect filled the vacancy for an imperial consort. That a woman other than the wife of a head of state should take the leading role in his household is a recognisable concept. Within the historical tradition of modern American first ladies, for example, several American presidents, bachelors and widowers or even just those with reclusive wives, turned to their daughters, daughters-in-law and nieces to act as primary hostesses of the White House.27 Livia herself had no peer within the Roman imperial household. The most long-standing female resident of the Palatine besides herself these days was her widowed daughter-in-law Antonia, who some time since had colonised the role of grieving maternal paragon vacated by her mother Octavia.

  Born on 31 January 36 BC, shortly before her parents’ marriage broke up, Antonia could not have had many memories of her absentee father Antony, who died in his lover Cleopatra’s arms in Egypt when she was just six years old.28 Growing up under the roof of her uncle Augustus, alongside a noisy assortment of cousins and siblings, she had been a contemporary of Julia’s, and near the date of her seventeenth birthday, she was married off to Livia’s younger son Drusus – a union celebrated in a court poem by the Greek Crinagoras and unaccompanied by any of the scandalous on dits that dogged the marriages of her risqué older cousin Julia. The partnership produced two sons and a daughter born between 15 and 10 BC – Germanicus, Livilla and Claudius.

  Drusus’s untimely death in 9 BC when the youngest boy Claudius was just a year old, left Antonia a widow at the age of twenty-seven. Her intense reaction, according to the author of the Consolatio written for Livia, was not unlike her mother Octavia’s at the death of Marcellus.29 Unusually and surprisingly, given the social expectation placed on Roman women by her uncle Augustus’s marital legislation to find new husbands as soon as possible after divorce or widowhood, Antonia never remarried, choosing instead to remain, without censure, an univira – literally, a one-man woman. She did, however, have a good precedent for doing so, copying the example set by Cornelia, the highest exemplar of republican womanhood, and since she had already produced the mandatory three children required to benefit from the privileges of the rule of ius liberorum, she could afford to live a relatively independent life, excused from the necessity for male guardianship and the financial scrutiny that went with it.30

  Antonia nevertheless remained on the Palatine, acting as a companion to her venerable mother-in-law.31 Like Livia, she is known to have had her own apartments and highly specialised staff, dozens of whose remains were buried alongside those of Livia’s slaves and freedmen in the Monumentum Liviae, thus affording us a through-the-keyhole look at Antonia’s daily routine. They tell us that she was helped with her toilet by an ornatrix (a dresser) called Pamphilia and that a sarcinatrix (craftswoman) called Athenais mended her clothes. A personal physician, Celadus, tended to her medical well-being, and Eros, a lecticarius (a litter-bearer), chauffeured her about the city. Cold drinks were served to her by a cupbearer named Liarus while a chanteuse called Quintia serenaded her, accompanied in a duet perhaps by a male singer called Tertius. Another key member of her household was the freedwoman Caenis, who acted as her secretary, a woman who was to make far more of an impact on Roman imperial history than her modest origins might predict.32

  Antonia also kept slaves outside Rome and was a considerable landowner in her own right, benefiting from bequests made by wealthy family friends such as Berenice I of Judaea, and also from her father’s career in the east. Papyri miraculously preserved in the dry sands of Egypt testify that Antonia owned estates in the Arsinoite district of that country, possibly received courtesy of the division of Antony’s assets there.33 These same dusty fragments also provide insights into the kind of day-to-day disputes that took place on these estates. In one case, a bailiff called Dionysius complained to local authorities that a neighbouring landowner’s sheep had caused damages to wheat stores on Antonia’s estate, while in a document dated to 14 November 36, a farmer in her employ who signs himself ‘Aunes, aged 35 [years] with a scar on his left thumb’, reports the loss of his red-skinned pig.34

  We have no first-hand correspondence to suggest whether or not Antonia concerned herself much with mundane disputes such as missing pigs, but through the letters of male family members, we do get a sense of her everyday responsibilities on the domestic front, chief of which was the shared education with Livia of the various children living on the Palatine under these two matriarchs’ protection.35 As well as the youngest members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the children of senatorial families growing up under Livia’s supervision, their charges included young princes and princesses from the royal families of Armenia, Thrace, Commagene and Parthia who made long visits to Rome in a show of entente cordiale between the Mediterranean superpowers.36 One such protégé was a grandson of King Herod the Great and the heir to the kingdom of Judaea, Marcus Julius Agrippa. His mother, Berenice, was a great friend of Antonia’s, and consequently Julius Agrippa was sent as a child to be brought up by Antonia alongside her own son of the same age, Claudius. He remained a fixture in Roman circles until 23.37

  Such arrangements made great PR for the Julio-Claudian regime, reinforcing their territorial authority as well as earning Livia and Antonia veneration as the maternal figureheads of the empire. But official praise for the pair as benevolent patrons of other people’s children is offset by the less than rosy descriptions of their treatment of Claudius recorded by the latter’s biographers.38 Famously characterised as the downtrodden, imbecilic black sheep of his illustrious fa
mily, Claudius was hampered from childhood by disabilities including a limp and physical tremors, the effects, it is now surmised, of cerebral palsy. An earnest student of literature, yet requiring the constant, much resented chaperonage of a tutor, Claudius cut a fragile figure on public occasions, swathed chin to toe in a thick cloak, and his appearances had to be carefully choreographed.39 That this involved careful consultation with the boy’s mother and grandmother is revealed by a rare preserved letter from Augustus to Livia, dating from around two years before the former’s death and apparently part of an ongoing correspondence between them on the matter. In the following extract, Augustus debates whether Claudius should be allowed to appear with the family at the upcoming Games of Mars, and in the process permits us an intriguing glimpse of Julio-Claudian family politics at work, for his postscript makes clear that the rearing of children within the Palatine household was very much a family affair, and that while Antonia was permitted to be privy to the arrangements for her son, decisions about him rested principally with Augustus, in close consultation with Livia:

  My dear Livia,

  As you suggested, I have now discussed with Tiberius what we should do about your grandson Claudius at the coming Games of Mars. We both agreed that a decision ought to be taken once and for all. The question is whether he has – shall I say? – full command of all his senses. If so, I can see nothing against sending him through the same degrees of office as his brother; but should he be deemed physically and mentally deficient, the public (which always likes to scoff and mock at such things) must not be given a chance of laughing at him and us. I fear that we shall find ourselves in constant trouble if the question of his fitness to officiate in this or that capacity keeps cropping up …

  As regards the immediate question in your last letter, I have no objection to his taking charge of the priests’ banquet at the Festival of Mars, if he lets his relative, the son of Silvanus, stand by to see that he does not make a fool of himself. But I am against his watching the Games in the Circus from the imperial box, where the eyes of the whole audience would be on him … in short, my dear Livia, I am anxious that a decision should be reached on this matter once and for all, to save us from further alternations of hope and despair. You are at liberty to show this part of my letter to our kinswoman Antonia for her perusal …40