Meanwhile Agrippina was also continuing to prove a thorn in Tiberius’s side. That same year, a row broke out when one of her cousins, Claudia Pulchra, was charged with immorality, witchcraft and conspiracy against the emperor. Agrippina regarded the persecution of Claudia and other female friends of hers as a personal attack, and is said to have furiously confronted her uncle while he was in the middle of a sacrifice to his predecessor:
‘The man who offers victims to the deified Augustus’, she said, ‘ought not to persecute his descendants. It is not in mute statues that Augustus’s divine spirit is lodged – I, born of his sacred blood, am its incarnation! I see my danger; and I wear mourning. Claudia Pulchra is an idle pretext. Her downfall, poor fool, is because she chooses Agrippina as friend!’94
In response to her outburst, a tightly wound Tiberius was quoted as replying, ‘And if you are not queen, my dear, have I then done you wrong?’95 Following Claudia’s condemnation, Agrippina became ill, and broke down when visited by Tiberius, begging to be allowed to remarry: ‘I am lonely’, she said, according to the diaries of her eponymously named daughter Agrippina Minor, which Tacitus consulted during his research. ‘Help me and give me a husband! I am still young enough, and marriage is the only respectable consolation. Rome contains men who would welcome Germanicus’s wife and children.’ But Tiberius feared the implied political threat in this plea and chose to ignore her.96
For all the precariousness of Agrippina’s position, underlined by the fact that every movement she made was said to have been spied on by Sejanus’s agents and that she refused to eat food handed to her by her uncle at the table, it seems that Germanicus’s widow was not quite without protection. Despite the well-attested dislike between Livia and Agrippina, and Sejanus’s attempts to foment discord between them, the fact remains that for as long as her stepgrandmother was alive, Agrippina came to no harm.97
But that protection could not last much longer. Livia was now very near the end of her life. In a society in which life-expectancy was below thirty for most people, even the well-born, and in which it is estimated that only 6 per cent of the population made it past sixty years of age, the fact that she had now lived more than eight decades was either a stunning feat of genetic durability or a tribute to the skills of her private physicians – she had at least five working for her at one time or another, according to the record of the Monumentum Liviae.98 Like many age-defying record-breakers, she was said to have sworn by a daily dose of alcohol, in her case a glass of red wine from the Pucinum region of northern Italy, a prescription for the elderly later recommended by Galen, the court physician in Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s day. If the rest of his advice were followed, this would have been supplemented by a diet that included the use of plums as a laxative while excluding cheese, snails, lentils, milk and water, and a regimen of massage, gentle exercise and tepid baths. Old age was a dispiriting time for Roman women, more so than for men. The pages of Roman satire were filled with negative stereotypes of old women as toothless, wrinkled crones addicted to sex, the bottle or futile attempts to reverse the ageing process by applying face packs and thick make-up. Deprived of their fertility and their beauty, old women lost their raison d’être in society, though for a few wealthy women, widowhood had its attractions, bringing with it a certain degree of financial and social independence from male authority.99
Livia eventually died in the year 29 at the age of eighty-six, after more than half a century surveying Roman society from the top of its female pyramid.100 Sympathetic Roman historians reported that Tiberius’s reaction to his mother’s death was one of profound sorrow, though more hostile accounts claimed that the emperor made no attempt to visit his mother’s deathbed, pleading that he had business to attend to, and then ordering the funeral to go ahead without him when Livia’s body had decomposed so badly that the ceremony could not be put off any longer.101 In the event, the eulogy was delivered by the Augusta’s seventeen-year-old great-grandson Caligula, the wag behind Livia’s sobriquet ‘Ulixes stolatus’. The funeral itself was a modest affair, in keeping with the frugal principles laid down by Augustus, and Livia’s ashes were deposited in her husband’s mausoleum, probably in an alabaster cinerary urn of the type found for other female members of her family.102
In homage to Livia, the Senate once more proposed honours completely unprecedented for a woman, including a suggestion that she should be deified and worshipped as a goddess, and voting that an arch, a monument with a distinctly military flavour, should be built in her honour, on the grounds that ‘she had saved the lives of not a few of them, had reared the children of many, and had helped many to pay their daughters’ dowries’.103 They also ordered that all the women of the empire should go into mourning for a year. But Tiberius insisted that business should continue as usual, vetoing the proposal to deify his mother and at the same time refusing to honour certain financial bequests made in her will. He did allow statues to mark her passing and acquiesced to the arch on condition that he was given personal financial responsibility for its construction. It was never built. Tiberius pleaded that in rejecting deification of Livia he was not being petty but simply doing what his mother wanted, and there may have been something in that. Public refusals of honours could then, as now, serve a propagandistic function every bit as useful as their acceptance, a lesson Augustus committed to heart in handing back powers offered him by the Senate when he first came to power. Even after the death of his beloved sister Octavia, Augustus had capped the honours initially voted her by the Senate. Yet few believed at the time that Tiberius had anything other than spite in mind towards the woman who had raised him and whose awe-inspiring authority over him he was widely thought to have resented.104
The portrait of Livia the iron lady of Rome, a cold, clever proponent of petticoat politics, is one of the most enduring of Roman imperial history and has won widespread acceptance in subsequent retellings, both fictional and non-fictional. But it both undersells Livia’s role as a trailblazer for the role of imperial materfamilias and oversimplifies the complexity of her as a personality in Roman public life. All remaining emperors in the Julio-Claudian dynasty who followed in Augustus’s footsteps were descended directly from Livia – only two could claim the same relationship to Augustus – and all clearly recognised Livia’s importance to the legitimacy of their succession.105 Consequently, portraits of her continued to be produced, and despite Tiberius blocking her deification, Livia did eventually go on to become the first Roman empress to be declared a goddess, although she would have to wait some years for that honour to be bestowed retrospectively by one of her descendants. In the intervening years, her acolytes in Rome’s provincial communities such as Lepcis Magna jumped the gun by honouring her with cult statues that explicitly invited her worship as a divine figure.106
She lived on in other ways too. Marriage contracts for couples in Roman Egypt invoked her name, and calendars tell us her birthday was still being publicly celebrated during the time of the Emperor Trajan almost a century later.107 Remarkably, it seems that even some of her clothes and jewels were kept either in storage or on display in the palace, which were ceremonially given as gifts to brides of the Roman imperial family as many as 400 years later. A tradition was thus inaugurated in Livia’s name whereby one first lady would dip into the wardrobe of a predecessor, and thus acquire by association some of the majesty and authority that the garments had bestowed on their first wearer.108
Most importantly, long after her death, Livia’s was still a powerful name to drop in Roman political circles, proof of which will emerge. Even Tacitus, one of her sternest critics, seems to betray a grudging admiration in his obituary for her that, despite all the crimes laid at her door, it is hard not to share:
Her private life was of traditional strictness. But her graciousness exceeded old-fashioned standards. She was a compliant wife, but an overbearing mother. Neither her husband’s diplomacy nor her son’s insincerity could outmanoeuvre her.109
The p
rincipal and most immediate victim of Livia’s death was Agrippina Maior. Soon after the Augusta’s demise, a letter from Tiberius on Capri was read out at Rome, denouncing his former stepdaughter for ‘insubordinate language and disobedient spirit’.110 The accusations were said to have come to light only now because Livia had suppressed the letter while she was alive. Besides demonstrating her clout, this may also have been evidence of the same pragmatic streak that had led Livia to advise her friend Salome to avoid creating a feud in her own family. As a result of the incriminating letter being read, and in spite of protests outside the Senate by loyal crowds brandishing statuettes of Germanicus’s widow in support, Agrippina was eventually sent into exile on Pandateria, the same tiny island where her mother Julia had been banished in disgrace years before. After suffering cruel treatment from her captors, including being beaten to the point of losing an eye and force-fed when she tried to end her life through starvation, Agrippina died there in her forties around the year 33. Her eldest two sons, Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar, were also imprisoned and starved to death, the latter reportedly reduced to chewing the stuffing of his bed in a desperate bid to survive.111 Four surviving children were left behind – daughters Drusilla, Julia Livilla and Agrippina Minor, and the youngest son, Caligula. The future of the Julio-Claudian dynasty now rested in the hands of these four.
Agrippina Maior was one of the few Roman women of the imperial period whose life story was held up in later centuries as an exemplar of how to be a ‘good’ woman. Her emotional journey to Brundisium caught the imagination of neo-classical painters in the eighteenth century, including William Turner, Gavin Hamilton and Benjamin West, whose famous painting Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus was commissioned by the then Archbishop of York, Dr Robert Drummond. During a dinner-party discussion, Drummond had read the relevant passage from Tacitus to an enthused West, who then took it as his template for the painting, unveiled in 1768 to royal approval from King George III.112 The sudden popularity of the image of Agrippina grieving at Brundisium, previously an obscure one in the history of art, arose in part out of a propaganda war raging in British royal politics centred on the undue influence of court favourite the Earl of Bute over Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. In a damage-limitation exercise aimed at improving the public image of the princess, paintings were commissioned of the scene at Brundisium and analogies publicly drawn between the mother of King George III, and this famous Roman mother and grieving widow.113 Thirty-two years later, in 1800, West was one of the guests at a Christmas party given by the notoriously wealthy peer and dilettante William Beckford at his Wiltshire estate of Fonthill Abbey, where the glamorous guest list included Britain’s greatest sea warrior Admiral Nelson, his friend Sir William Hamilton and the latter’s wife Lady Emma – heavily pregnant at the time with Nelson’s child. In coy homage to West’s painting, the company were treated one evening to a special performance by Lady Emma, who had once been an artist’s model and now entered dressed to re-create Agrippina’s famous landing, complete with gold urn. Her display was greeted with delight by her audience, well fortified with sweet confectionery and spiced wines, and described in a contributor’s letter to the December 1800 edition of popular periodical The Gentleman’s Magazine as conveying ‘with truth and energy, every gesture, attitude and expression of countenance which could be conceived in Agrippina herself … the action of her head, of her hands and arms in the various positions of the urn, in her manner of presenting it before the Romans, or of holding it up to the gods in the act of supplication, was most classically graceful’.114 The amusing irony of a notorious professional mistress who was at the time married to one of the onlookers and visibly pregnant with the child of another, acting the part of a Roman woman revered for her uxorious piety, was surely not lost on her audience.
Agrippina was not the last victim of Livia’s death. Plancina did not last long either once her old friend was gone. She died at her own hand, we are told, after the deaths of both Agrippina and her patroness revived the old accusations against her.115
In a telling reflection of the sobering influence Livia was thought to have commanded over him, even Tacitus writes that until Livia’s death, there was some good in Tiberius as well as evil.116 But in the eight remaining years of Tiberius’s reign after his mother’s demise, Sejanus’s influence continued to fester, and the period following the exile of Agrippina and the death of Livia was characterised by a series of witch-hunts and death trials against powerful members of the Senate. But Sejanus’s own downfall was to prove as brutal and owed its conclusion to an unlikely agent. In 31, Antonia Minor received word that a conspiracy against Tiberius was being masterminded by Sejanus, ambitious to interrupt the Julio-Claudian succession and seize power for himself. Summoning her secretary and trusted freedwoman Caenis, she dictated a letter, warning her cousin of the plot, and entrusted it to another servant, Pallas, to be delivered to Tiberius on Capri, under cover of darkness. Subsequently, in October that year, Sejanus was executed, his body thrown to the mercy of a vicious mob and his children put to death as well.117
In a piece of tragic irony, one of the victims of the fallout from this affair was Antonia’s own daughter Livilla, accused in the suicide note of Sejanus’s wife, Apicata, of having conspired not just in this coup against the emperor but in a cover-up of the murder of her own husband Drusus eight years previously by her secret lover, Apicata’s husband. The penalty for Livilla was death – a sentence, according to one account, carried out by her own mother.118 That Antonia’s rigid code of duty would induce her to starve her own daughter, as was claimed, seems brutal to us, but it cemented her reputation as a faithful guardian of the astringent moral legacy laid down by her grandfather Augustus, and immortalised her as the latest woman to save Rome from its enemies.
Livilla subsequently became the first woman in imperial history to suffer the indignity of what has become known as a damnatio memoriae – an order to destroy all statues of her across the empire, obliterating her name and face from public memory.119 She was not to be the last. Her fate was an ominous prelude to the next chapter in the history of the women of the imperial house. If Agrippina Maior was the Roman matron to whom the great ladies of Emma Hamilton’s generation wanted most to be compared, then the women who took over the imperial mantle next were the ones to whom comparison proved most embarrassing.
4
Witches of the Tiber: The Last Julio-Claudian Empresses1
I tried dissipation – never debauchery: that I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina’s attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure.
Edward Rochester on Bertha Mason, in Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre (1847)2
Let him kill me – provided he becomes emperor!
Agrippina Minor, in Tacitus’s Annals3
Two days’ journey south of Rome, a reassuring distance from the increasingly sour and strained atmosphere of the imperial court during Tiberius’s last years, lay the popular seaside spa resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples, holiday home of the Roman jet set. The Bay of Naples was the Hamptons of the ancient Mediterranean, its salubrious climate, epicurean seafood delights and cosmopolitan clientele making it the getaway of choice for wealthy Romans who headed there in their droves once the city began to heat up in March and April. For hedonists, it offered evening boating picnics on pleasure-craft bobbing about the sparkling bay, beach parties, concerts and luxury shopping, while the health-conscious could try the various thermal spa cures on offer, including outdoor saunas heady with sulphurous vapours emanating from the volcanic soil.4
Anyone who was anyone in the imperial age had a summer place in or around Baiae, from Augustus himself, who had disapproved of the drunken antics of the rowdy local set his daughter Julia ran with and once even wrote a curt letter reproving a male admirer for visiting her there, to Antonia, senior matriarch of the imperial family now that Livia and Agrippina were dead.5 Home for Antonia w
as a luxury villa in the small, exclusive enclave of Bauli (modern Bacoli), just south of Baiae. Formerly the possession of Republican grandee Hortensius – the same Hortensius from whose descendants Augustus had summarily appropriated the imperial house on the Palatine – Antonia’s villa was a must-see on the local tourist trail thanks to its tenant’s eccentric habit of keeping a lamprey, somehow adorned with gold earrings, in the ornate fishpond. With its beautiful gardens and stunning views from the colonnade across the bay towards Pompeii, this maritime mansion provided Antonia with a welcome retreat, not just from the searing summer heat of the city but from the internecine feuding on the Palatine during the dark days of Tiberius’s reign, which had resulted in the deaths of two of her three children, Germanicus and Livilla.6
Two decades down the line and under new ownership, this same tranquil villa near Baiae was to be the scene of perhaps the most notorious and colourfully described assassination in Roman history after that of Julius Caesar. That the assassins’ victim this time was a woman signifies how much bigger a political target women had become since the days of the republic. The years leading up to this bloody event were marked by the passing of three emperors and the accession of a fourth who would be the last of the dynasty founded by Augustus and Livia to wear the purple. If the names of these men came to stand, in the accounts of the moralising commentators of the next generation, for the worst that imperial rule could offer in the way of corruption, scandal and abuses of power, then their consorts proved highly satisfactory advertisements for the maxim that the health of the Roman Empire could always be gauged by the conduct of its first ladies.
The First Ladies of Rome Page 16