Though Augustus later revised his unflattering view of his grandson’s qualities, commenting in another letter to Livia that he had actually been impressed by the boy’s skills as an orator, Claudius’s disabilities apparently attracted the withering scorn of his female elders, not just his grandmother Livia and sister Livilla, but Antonia herself, who was reported to have disparagingly referred to her younger son as a fool and ‘a monster: a man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun’.41 Livia meanwhile was said to have avoided communication with him except through brief notes, and joined forces with Antonia in stopping the budding young scholar from writing a history of the civil war that preceded Augustus’s inauguration.42
In this last respect, Livia and Antonia were in fact doing nothing less than what every good Roman mother was expected to do for her sons. Although affectionate relationships between mothers and sons were by no means unheard of – as letters between second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius and his mother Domitia Lucilla will later demonstrate – Roman women did not generally receive praise in the ancient historical record for being doting and sensitive. Remember Seneca’s disapproval of Octavia for being too emotional over the death of Marcellus. In the eyes of Roman moralists, the best thing a mother could do for her son, apart from breastfeeding him herself, was to steer him towards suitable intellectual pursuits, and away from potentially dangerous and corrosive areas of study. It was an achievement that Cornelia, among others, had been fêted for, and one that future mothers of Roman emperors would also try to emulate. In an illustration of the disconnect between the colourful behind-the-scenes portraits of life on the Palatine painted by biographers like Suetonius, and the officially disseminated ideal of a woman’s role, Livia actually received praise in official documents posted later in Tiberius’s reign on account of her rigorous supervision of Claudius’s education.43
Though Livia’s accomplice in this and other respects, Antonia understandably had a far more modest public portrait profile than her mother-in-law, reflecting her lesser importance to the men of her family. While over 100 statues and coins survive that can be identified with some confidence as Livia, the same can be said for only thirteen portraits of Antonia, and in contrast to Livia’s ever-metamorphosing public image, they survive in only one relatively static prototype.44 The master portrait for this group is the so-called ‘Wilton House Antonia’, named in honour of the residence of its owner, Thomas Herbert, eighth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. When Herbert bought the bust in 1678, so close was the resemblance to ancient coin portraits of Antonia that the name ‘Antonia’ had already been scratched onto its left shoulder, immortalising its identity.45 The head, which is now in the Sackler Museum at Harvard, depicts a woman past her first youth – though still heavily idealised, given that Antonia was well into her fifties at the time of its creation – with strong individualised features, thin pursed lips and a chin which recedes slightly when viewed from the side.46
A portrait of Antonia conforming to the ‘Wilton House’ example came to light during excavations of the forum of the ancient North African city of Lepcis Magna in modern Libya. Thanks to the 1934 discovery of an accompanying inscription written in neo-Punic, we can deduce that it belonged to an imposing statue group honouring the imperial family set up on the platform of the town’s temple of Augustus and Roma during the 20s. Though the sculpture of Antonia is one of the few originals that have been found from this cluster, the inscription allows the reconstruction of the original composition of the group, which at first glance appears to have been a magnificent snapshot of the new look Julio-Claudian dynasty under Tiberius, untrammelled by tensions and showing a united front. Dominating the centre was a chariot occupied by Germanicus and Drusus Minor, the adoptive and biological sons and heirs respectively of Tiberius. It in turn was flanked by life-sized statues of the two young men’s mothers and wives, so that Germanicus was accompanied by his mother Antonia and wife Agrippina Maior on one side. At the heirs’ back, towering over the junior members of the family group, were four larger-than-life statues of Livia, Tiberius, the deified Augustus and the goddess Roma. The surviving head of Livia’s statue measures 68 cm (27 inches) in height, and that of her dead husband Augustus an even more gargantuan 92 cm (36 inches), giving some idea of the colossal scale, and leaving no doubt of their seniority.47
In showing two budding statesmen, Germanicus and Drusus Minor, accompanied by their mothers rather than by their fathers, the Lepcis Magna group was highly unusual.48 Its primary function was to honour these two great hopes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, born to two women from opposite branches of it. But there is another story here. If the whole survived today, the Lepcis Magna group would capture perfectly in marble the complex, interbred tangle of relationships, rivalries and resentments that were to wreck Augustus’s and Livia’s dynastic legacy and tear the family apart.
The seeds of this division had been sown back in the year 4, when Augustus reshuffled the dynastic pack and forced Tiberius to adopt Antonia’s eldest son Germanicus as a condition of his eventual succession. Barely out of his teens, yet already a dashing contrast to his unfortunate younger brother Claudius, Germanicus had gone on in the year 5 to form what would prove a pivotal union with his cousin Agrippina Maior, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, who was then around nineteen years old – a relatively late age for a girl of the imperial family to be wed for the first time.49 The marriage temporarily unified the two branches of the Julio-Claudian family, since any offspring it produced would be the great-grandchildren of both Augustus and Livia.
Effectively orphaned at the age of twelve when Julia was banished to Pandateria in 2 BC, Agrippina managed to avoid the scandalous pitfalls which befell her mother and younger sister Julia Minor. Growing up, she was known to have been a great favourite of her grandfather Augustus, who maintained an affectionate correspondence with her, and praised her in a letter for her intelligence though he also advised her to adopt a plainer style of writing and speaking, such as he favoured himself.50 For many ancient – and modern – observers, Agrippina, in contrast to her disgraced mother, represented much of what was admirable in the ideal Roman matron. Tacitus’s description of her as ‘determined and rather excitable’ was tempered by his acknowledgement of her ‘devoted faithfulness to her husband’, while to the nineteenth-century historian Elizabeth Hamilton, who wrote a three-volume history of Agrippina’s life in 1804, her subject exemplified the value of an educated woman to society, although the author did not approve of what she portrayed as Agrippina’s ambition to share her husband’s fame.51
In a storyline that bears strong resemblance to the first marriage of her mother Julia to Marcellus, Agrippina and Germanicus quickly became the golden couple of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Although Germanicus’s fellow heir Drusus acquired a wife in his adoptive brother’s sister Livilla, they lacked the glamour of their counterparts, Germanicus a popular paragon of handsome chivalry, and Agrippina proving herself a fine advertisement for motherhood, giving birth in due course to no fewer than nine children, six of whom survived infancy.52 They included two siblings who would eventually rank among the enfants terribles of Roman history – a son Gaius, better known as Caligula, and a daughter, Agrippina Minor (‘Agrippina the Younger’).
Germanicus enjoyed a meteoric rise through the political and military ranks, earning appointment to the consulship in 12 at the precocious age of twenty-six, and subsequently the proconsular command of legions stationed in Gaul and Germany. Agrippina herself accompanied him to his posting, where they were later joined by two-year-old Gaius, who received his nickname Caligula, meaning ‘Little Boot’, from his father’s troops. A few months before Augustus’s death, the old emperor had written a letter to his beloved granddaughter, in which he advised her of the arrangements he had personally made for Caligula’s safe passage in the wake of her departure: ‘I am … sending with him one of my slaves, a doctor who, as I have told Germanicus in a letter, need not be returned to me if he proves
of use to you. Goodbye, my dear Agrippina! Keep well on the way back to your Germanicus.’53
In 14, the news of Augustus’s death filtered through to troops patrolling the Rhine and Danube borders. It sparked a mutiny. Soldiers declared their loyalty to Germanicus over Tiberius while at the same time demanding better pay and conditions. Amid the chaos, Germanicus was urged to send his pregnant wife and son to a position of safety. Yet Agrippina was said to have disdainfully rejected the suggestion that she should flee, reminding her husband ‘that she was of the blood of the divine Augustus and would live up to it, whatever the danger.’ On finally being persuaded to go by a tearful Germanicus, she left in a convoy with other soldiers’ wives, little Caligula in her arms, and her departure shamed into obeisance the wayward soldiers, stirred by the memory of her illustrious lineage and her ‘impressive record as wife and mother’, and embarrassed by the prospect of Roman women needing to seek asylum elsewhere. The immediate crisis was over, and the story served to confirm Agrippina as an heiress to the legacy of female peacemaker occupied most recently by Octavia.54
However, troubles flared up again the following year during a glory-seeking bid by Germanicus to breach German territory and extend the empire’s frontiers. Panic spread as the invading Roman troops were surrounded and the counter-attacking German army threatened to swarm across the bridge the Romans had built over the Rhine. Once more, though, Agrippina saved the day, holding the fort and acting as a nurse to the wounded, all the while pregnant with her daughter Agrippina Minor:55
Some, in panic, envisaged the disgraceful idea of demolishing the bridge. But Agrippina put a stop to it. In those days this great-hearted woman acted as commander. She herself dispensed clothes to needy soldiers, and dressed the wounded. Pliny the Elder, the historian of the German campaigns, writes that she stood at the bridge-head to thank and congratulate the returning column.56
A cinematic treatment of Agrippina’s life would inevitably cast her as the plucky heroine. But to a Roman audience, the sight of a soldier’s wife and would-be empress following the drum, directing military operations on behalf of her husband and helping forestall military embarrassment in the process, aroused more ambivalent emotions. For a start, there was the issue of Agrippina travelling abroad so freely. The question of whether women should be permitted to accompany their husbands to the front line or to political postings, had long provoked strong feelings among certain members of the ruling elite. During a debate in the Senate five years later, while discussing the choice of new governors for Africa and Asia, the senator Aulus Caecina Severus had introduced a sidebar, proposing that no appointee to a governorship should be allowed to take his wife along with him:
The rule which forbade women to be taken to provinces or foreign countries was salutary. A female entourage stimulates extravagance in peacetime and timidity in war. Women are not only frail and easily tired. Relax control, and they become ferocious, ambitious schemers, circulating among the soldiers, ordering company-commanders about. Recently a woman conducted battalion parades and brigade exercises! … They have burst through the old legal restrictions of the Oppian and other laws, and are rulers everywhere – at home, in the courts and now in the army.57
Severus’s cantankerous tirade was swiftly rebutted, one of his interlocutors insisting that the inability of a few husbands to control their wives was no reason to deprive all of them of conjugal company, and Drusus Minor himself pointed out that Augustus had often travelled east and west with Livia. But although Severus’s concerns received little support from his listeners, the debaters did acknowledge that part of the reason for keeping women close by was to maintain a careful watch on the weaker sex: ‘Marriages scarcely survive with the keeper on the spot,’ it was pointed out, ‘whatever would happen with some years of virtual divorce to efface them?’58
Then there was the question of Agrippina actually directing troops on the battlefield. Severus’s outraged description in the Senate debate of ‘a woman’ recently conducting military exercises may not have been a reference to Agrippina herself, but there were other women of course, such as Antony’s wife Fulvia, who in recent years had been the target of such vilification. These prejudices against women on the front line of war were often intricately wound up with fears that women would start making similar incursions into the political arena.59
That the thought occurred to Tiberius too was reflected in reports of his indignant and suspicious reaction to Agrippina’s one-woman rescue mission on the German frontier:
There was something behind these attentions to the army, he felt; they were not simply because of the foreign enemy. ‘The commanding officer’s job’, he reflected, ‘is a sinecure when a woman inspects units and exhibits herself before the standards with plans for money-distributions’ … Agrippina’s position in the army already seemed to outshine generals and commanding officers; and she, a woman, had suppressed a mutiny which the emperor’s own signature had failed to check.60
Over the next four years, the flames of Tiberius’s animosity and jealousy towards his popular young ward and prospective heir continued to smoulder. Germanicus remained on the Rhine for the next two years, inflicting a series of military defeats against the Germans until recalled by the emperor to Rome to celebrate his triumph in a processional through the city on 26 May 17, which the whole population is said to have come on to the streets to witness. An old republican tradition was observed, which decreed that the sons of the triumphant commander should accompany their father in the parade. But in a novel amendment, the daughters of the triumphator, in this case sixteen-month-old Agrippina Minor and her baby sister Drusilla, who were both born on Germanicus’s campaign trail, now rode in their father’s chariot as well, alongside their three brothers.61 It was a clever magnification of Augustus’s old strategy of presenting himself as both a family man and strong protector of the state.
Tiberius’s subsequent decision to dispatch Germanicus, accompanied by Agrippina and other members of his family, on a diplomatic tour of the empire’s eastern provinces with a Senate-approved mandate of maius imperium – supreme authority – over all provincial governors in the region, was interpreted as an attempt to sideline his rival and detach him from his faithful legions.62 The legacy of Actium should surely have warned against encouraging one’s opponents to establish rival authority in the east, and soon the memory of that battle reared its head ominously, when in 18 the imperial entourage made a stop at the site of the great sea fight, so that Germanicus could make a pilgrimage to the location of his grandfather Antony’s camp. Later they visited Cleopatra’s old domain of Egypt and took a cruise up the Nile, taking in views of the pyramids, the Colossus of Memnon – a statue that ‘sang’ when the sun’s rays passed over it – and other remnants of the ancient civilisation of Thebes. Germanicus also enacted popular measures such as lowering the price of corn while on a walkabout tour of Alexandria, and privately commissioned inscriptions dedicated to Antonia have been found along the route they took, honouring her for ‘having provided the fullest and greatest principles of the most divine family’, suggesting that perhaps she formed part of the family party too.63
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the image of three generations of Augustus’s arch-rival Antony sightseeing at iconic locations in their infamous relative’s old hunting-ground was deliberately designed to enrage Tiberius.64 It certainly left the latter distinctly unamused, provoking him to issue a reprimand against Germanicus for infringing a command that no senator or knight should enter Egypt without permission from the emperor.65 Leaving Actium, the party soon stopped at the island of Lesbos, where early in 18, Agrippina gave birth to her third daughter and last child, Julia Livilla. The moment recalled her own delivery in the region just over thirty years earlier, when her mother Julia had accompanied Agrippa on his travels, and in a poignant echo of her mother’s footprint around the Mediterranean, inscriptions have been found in the area of Lesbos, giving Agrippina titles in praise of her child-beari
ng prowess, such as karphoros, or ‘fruit-bearing’, just as Julia had received.66
Agrippina’s fertility was a great selling point for the regime, one expressed in portraits showing a woman with strong, regular facial features, a determined chin and full-lipped mouth, her face framed by a hairstyle that deviated significantly from the vogue established by her female forebears. The middle parting made fashionable by Livia’s late, classicising portrait was still in place, but the rest of Agrippina’s hairstyle was quite different, her thick locks swept outwards into arched waves which were then arranged in thickly clustering ringlets around her temples, like piped curls of cream. These ringlets, each carefully coiffed coil punctured in the centre by the sculptor’s drill to give it definition, were a technical tour de force, but curly hair also stood for youth, vibrancy and fecundity in the classical sculptural tradition, and was thus the perfect way to immortalise a celebrated mother of six, one of whom would in all likelihood prove the keeper of the Julio-Claudian flame.67
Livia and Agrippina, the two leading female lights of their generations of the Julio-Claudian family, were said to have disliked each other intensely, a piece of gossip reported by Tacitus, whose access to the lost memoirs of Agrippina’s daughter Agrippina Minor lends credibility to the report.68 The appearance of striking new portraits dedicated to Agrippina would not have eased such tensions. Through the smokescreen of our sources, it is difficult to ascertain which members of the Julio-Claudian household genuinely got on with each other. Livia obviously had day-to-day dealings with Antonia over the education of the children under their joint aegis, and was said to have been close to her granddaughter Livilla.69 She also accumulated a wider circle of female friends, women such as Salome of Judaea, to whom she had once given pragmatic counsel when the latter expressed a reluctance to marry a man chosen for her by her brother King Herod. Livia advised her friend to abandon thoughts of marrying the man she really desired, the Arab Syllaeus, in order to avoid a serious rift within the Herodian royal family, evidence of a pragmatic strain in Livia that may have represented a lesson well learned in childhood from the Sabine women – those heroines of Rome’s early history who accepted their own forced marriage rather than being the cause of war between their male kin.70
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