The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  But an even more startling sight met the excavators’ eyes when they flipped over another heavy, almost perfectly preserved slab, 172 cm (67 inches) in height and 142.5 cm (56 inches) in width, found face-down in the north portico, where it originally would have hung. It was a larger-than-life sculptural relief of Agrippina, standing to the right of her son Nero, on whose head she almost casually places a laurel wreath. Once more, she is dressed in the regalia of Demeter, and in the crook of her left arm is balanced an overflowing cornucopia of pomegranates, apples and grapes. Nero wears military dress, and gazes off into the middle distance while Agrippina’s stance is angled inwards, towards him, seemingly contemplating her son’s profile as she rests the laurel over his carefully ordered locks. It is the first known visual representation of one member of the Roman imperial family crowning another, let alone of a mother stage-managing her son’s coronation. Since Nero’s dress proclaims him a military victor, Agrippina’s appropriation of the role of master of ceremonies, rewarding him for his notional triumphs, is all the more startling, and contrasts sharply with her depiction as a dutiful hand-holding spouse at the side of Claudius. Not even Livia had been given so powerful a role in her son’s iconography.73

  From the day that her sixteen-year-old son stepped out of the imperial palace to be hailed by his troops as emperor, Agrippina was in fact given a standing in Roman public life closer to a man’s than any woman before her had enjoyed. Gold and silver coins minted in 54 to mark Nero’s accession featured the profiled heads of both the emperor and his mother facing each other nose-to-nose on the same side of the coin, inscribed underneath with the words Agripp[ina] Aug[usta] divi Claud[ii] Neronis Caes[aris] mater: ‘Agrippina Augusta, mother of the divine Claudius Nero Caesar’ – Agrippina’s name, note, given precedence. No Roman mother had been previously given pride of place in an emperor’s genealogy as opposed to his father – Tiberius of course had vetoed similar advertisements of the relationship between himself and Livia – while the head-on pose of these facing portraits appeared to give neither seniority.74

  The effect of all these images was to make it very clear to whom Nero owed his authority as emperor. During that first year of his reign, Agrippina was promoted both publicly and privately as her son’s running mate, a ubiquitous companion in the officially sanctioned artistic expression of his authority. She was also a perpetual presence at his side in the popular anecdotes of his principate that did the rounds of Roman society long after his downfall. It was said Nero’s mother reclined next to him while they travelled about in his litter, wrote letters to foreign dignitaries on his behalf and generally managed the business of empire for him.75 When, as was customary, the new commander-in-chief was asked by his personal bodyguard for a password to assist with security arrangements, Nero chose optima mater – ‘best of mothers’.76

  The Senate also contributed unusual honours to Agrippina, voting that she have the right to be accompanied by two public officials or lictores – going one better than Livia who had only been permitted a single lictor in her train – and decreeing that Agrippina become the official guardian of Claudius’s divine cult, ironic given the clamorous insistence of the literary record that she had had a hand in his murder.77 Agrippina was subsequently credited with striking foundations on the Caelian hill for a temple dedicated to her deified husband’s worship. When finished, the structure would be one of the largest temple complexes in Rome, though it had a difficult route to completion: Nero had the building ripped down before it was later salvaged by future emperor Vespasian.78

  The priesthood to their deified husbands was still the only official position women of the imperial household were permitted to hold, and it is not clear exactly what kind of public duties it required. But Agrippina’s apparent ability to wade into the lion’s den of Roman imperial power during the early days of her son’s reign was without precedent, stressing how much Nero’s claim to the throne depended on her. In part, this was an inevitable consequence of Nero being so young and needing advisers around him. His first speech in the Senate made an attempt at appeasement of its patrician members, offering assurances that from now on, the separation of imperial house and state would be respected, and the Palatine would not intervene in the jurisdiction of the Senate as had happened sometimes under the previous incumbent. This promise was somewhat undermined, however, by the fact that meetings of the Senate were now often convened in the imperial palace, precisely so that Agrippina could eavesdrop on proceedings from a curtained-off vantage point at the rear of the room. One wonders whether she had a discreet way of making her feelings on matters known. She certainly tried to involve herself in their decisions, as evidenced by her attempt – and failure – to overturn an old policy of Claudius that aspiring quaestors should be required to finance gladiatorial shows from their own pockets.79

  The fact that Agrippina was not allowed to be seen – or probably heard – at these meetings, does post an important reminder that the ban on women playing an official role in affairs of state remained firmly in place. There were tense moments when a certain amount of hasty diplomatic manoeuvring had to take place to avoid that line being crossed. One such incident took place at the end of 54, when a pro-Roman delegation from Armenia arrived for an audience with Nero concerning the crisis in their country. As Nero began to hear their representations, Agrippina approached the party. But instead of taking up a position on her own separate platform, as she had while receiving the entreaties of Caratacus as the consort of Claudius, she began to climb the steps of her son’s dais, with the apparent intention of taking a seat beside him. It took some quick thinking on the part of the ever-present Seneca to defuse a potentially awkward situation, whispering to his young charge that he should go forward and greet his mother, and thereby smooth over what could have been an extremely provocative political gaffe.80

  Tensions surrounding Agrippina’s influence over imperial policy refused to go away, though. Rome’s political elite voiced scepticism that an emperor, barely past seventeen and moreover, qui a femina regeretur – ‘one who was ruled by a woman’ – could possibly quell insurgencies throughout the empire.81 It was one thing for a woman to undertake the proper supervision of her son’s upbringing and education, as Cornelia, Antonia and Livia had done to great acclaim, and Agrippina took her duties in this regard seriously, with her arrangement of Seneca’s appointment as her son’s tutor, for example, and her personal steerage of him away from inappropriate areas of study such as philosophy, regarded as too idle a subject for an emperor-in-the-making. But it was quite another matter when she openly tried to interfere in politics.82

  Just as Livia’s and Tiberius’s relationship was portrayed as increasingly strained after she achieved her heart’s desire of smoothing her son’s path to the throne, sources depict a cooling between Agrippina and Nero. The first official evidence of a chilling effect came with the sudden disappearance of Agrippina’s portrait and titles from her son’s coinage in 55, less than a year into his reign, leaving Nero to stare out from his coins alone. So abrupt an erasure is striking, in view of the fanfare with which Agrippina’s face was initially blazoned across the official state currency and given a prominence equivalent to her son’s. It may well be that with Nero now securely established on the throne, it was decided that it no longer presented a good image to show him tied to his mother’s apron strings, and that it looked better for him to be seen standing on his own two feet, a ruler in his own right. But literary sources reinforce the point that Agrippina’s power over her son had clearly begun to wane.83

  In one account, the catalyst for their falling-out was Nero’s affair with a freedwoman called Acte. Nero had never shown a drop of affection for his young wife Claudia Octavia. His trysts with Acte were arranged in the face of scolding protests from his mother, who was said to have objected to any female rival for her son’s attentions. These outbursts only succeeded in alienating her son. According to one insider at the Julio-Claudian court, Cluvius Rufus, who
wrote a history of this period which was later drawn on extensively by Tacitus as a research source, Agrippina was so desperate not to lose her hold over Nero that she resorted on several occasions to dolling herself up and trying to seduce her son after long alcohol-fuelled lunches – although another contemporary historian, Fabius Rusticus, countered that it was Nero who made the move on his mother. But Agrippina’s wheedling failed to have the desired effect, and she lost her temper when Nero sent her a gift of a dress and jewels from the palace’s collection of clothing worn by former imperial women, pointing out that his power to make such a gesture derived entirely from her.84

  Consequently, Nero increasingly turned to his tutor Seneca and other court insiders for advice and support. Relations between Agrippina and her son’s two closest mentors, Seneca and praetorian prefect Burrus, who both originally owed their position in Nero’s circle to her favour, had reportedly grown frosty at an early stage as a result of their determination to curb the Augusta’s influence. Narcissus had already dropped out of the picture, an early casualty of the regime change from Claudius to Nero, though whether he had disappeared through suicide, illness or murder is unclear.85 Competition for the young emperor’s favour created tensions within the palace. The empress’s lover Pallas was relieved of his imperial duties, an act which provoked Agrippina into taunting her son that Britannicus had a stronger claim to the throne than he did and, if she chose to do it, the power to reinstate Britannicus by confessing her own crimes, was in her hands. She reputedly threw one last challenge at him: ‘It was I who made you emperor’, the implication being that what she had given, she could also take away.86

  Disturbed by his mother’s threats, the now seventeen-year-old Nero resolved to bring about the death of his younger stepbrother, and enlisted the help of the same poisoner, Locusta, who had reportedly prepared the toxin that killed Claudius. After one aborted attempt, a successful assassination was carried out in February 55, at the family dinner table. Tacitus claims that an unsuspecting Britannicus was handed a drink which sent him into convulsions, depriving him first of speech, then breath. As his stepbrother was carried away to die in agony, Nero casually dismissed this odd turn as a symptom of epilepsy, a display of callousness that his neglected wife Claudia Octavia received without betraying a flicker of emotion, so adept had she become at keeping a close counsel in the face of Nero’s cruelty. But the look on Agrippina’s face, as she stared at her son in dawning horror and shock, told the assembled company that she had no prior knowledge of the scheme.87

  Things went rapidly downhill from this point, and in stark contrast to public images highlighting family unity on early coins of Nero’s reign, open warfare now reigned between mother and son. On one side, Agrippina declared herself a staunch ally of her downtrodden daughter-in-law Claudia Octavia. At the same time, she chaired secret meetings with friends, hosted audiences with tribunes and centurions and collected financial donations as if amassing a war chest for a political campaign. In retaliation, Nero gave commands for the Augusta’s German bodyguard to be withdrawn and ordered that her belongings be moved out of his own house so that she could no longer host her supporters there. Instead she was relocated to her grandmother Antonia’s old quarters on the Palatine. Nero seldom visited his mother, and only when accompanied by an intimidating squad of centurions. On occasions, she retreated to her country estates, but here her rural retirement was disturbed by yobbish gangs hired by Nero to harass her by whistling and cat-calling as they drove or sailed past. Agrippina’s throng of admirers melted away, and she was left in political isolation, visited only occasionally by old friends such as Gaius Silius’s former wife Junia Silana, whom he had divorced in order to pursue Messalina.88

  Even this friendship proved fickle. For Silana apparently bore a secret grudge against Agrippina over the latter’s role in scuppering her prospects of remarriage to a noble suitor, on the grounds that she did not want Silana to have a husband to bequeath her sizeable fortune to, having designs on it herself. This spurred Silana to entrust two of her personal clients, Iturius and Calvisius, with planting a charge of conspiracy against Agrippina, claiming that she was planning to set Rubellius Plautus, a great-great-grandson of Augustus, on the throne in her son’s stead. An inebriated Nero, on hearing the accusation, was thrown into a panic, and hell-bent on having his mother executed. He was restrained by his sage counsellors Seneca and Burrus, who insisted, perhaps in silent acknowledgement that they owed their promotions originally to her, that the emperor’s mother should be given a chance to respond to the charges. Both men proceeded to visit Agrippina at her house, whereupon she offered a fierce and scornful rebuttal of the prosecution, dismissing Silana as a childless woman who could not understand a mother’s emotions towards her son, and pointing out the absurdity of her wanting him dead:

  If Britannicus had become emperor could I ever have survived? If Rubellius Plautus or another gained the throne and became my judge, there would be no lack of accusers!89

  Agrippina demanded that proof of her subterfuge be brought to bear, and riding roughshod over her startled but secretly impressed interlocutors’ appeals for her to remain calm, insisted on an interview with her son. No details are given of what was said in that meeting, but the upshot was that, in an extraordinary turning of the tables, Agrippina’s accusers, among them Junia Silana, Calvisius and Iturius, found themselves sent into exile. Meanwhile friends and supporters of the emperor’s mother were appointed to a series of extremely prestigious imperial posts. It looked like a complete rout for Agrippina.90

  Whether this reversal of fortune was a real wind change, signalling a reconciliation between mother and son, or a story designed by ancient commentators to reinforce her credentials as an overbearing mother and savvy political operator, Agrippina‘s victory did not signal a renewal of her images on Roman coins nor a new wave of public sculpture announcing her return to equal prominence at her son’s side. On the contrary, she seems to have remained in the shadows of public life for the next three years.

  We can deduce where she lived for at least part of that time. Like her great-grandmother Livia and her grandmother Antonia before her, Agrippina owned several estates of her own. She was not the only woman to whom Nero had made gifts of property. His freedwoman mistress Acte was the deed-holder of a sizeable amount of real estate in Egypt, Sardinia and Italy, which she could only have acquired through the largesse of the emperor. Agrippina had already been given Antonia’s house in Rome, and it seems likely that she simultaneously inherited the full package of her grandmother’s properties in Egypt and Italy, many of which Antonia in turn had been bequeathed by her father Mark Antony. One of the jewels in that real estate portfolio was Antonia’s old summer villa at Bauli, with its luxury views of the sea and ornate garden fishpond.91

  It was at this seaside villa at Bauli that matters between Agrippina and Nero reached their fatal, dramatic conclusion. The temporary détente established after Silana’s failed plot collapsed in 58 when Nero began an affair with the married Poppaea Sabina, an eponymously named daughter of Messalina’s one-time rival for Mnester’s affections. This younger Poppaea was the famously beautiful wife of Salvius Otho, a friend and protégé of the emperor who had been dispatched to a foreign governorship to clear any obstacles to his wife’s assignations with Nero.92 Though born a Roman, Poppaea was described in antiquity in terms clearly intended to evoke comparison with Rome’s most notorious foreign nemesis, Cleopatra. She was said to have kept her perfect complexion by bathing daily in the milk of 500 asses, and, like Cleopatra, was credited with a recipe for make-up – an oily concoction called pinguia Poppaeana – which was used by other women. The fact that, in a coincidence made in historiographical heaven, Cleopatra’s and Poppaea’s respective rivals were both called Octavia, also provided Roman writers with food for the imagination.93

  Poppaea’s extravagance and sex appeal were the trademark characteristics of all Roman femmes fatales.94 According to both Tacitus and Cassius
Dio, it was Poppaea who fanned the flames of Nero’s murderous resentment towards his mother, although the historians also acknowledge that the emperor had long been plotting her end. Fearing that Nero would never divorce Claudia Octavia and marry her while Agrippina was still alive, Poppaea was said to have reproached the emperor for buckling to his mother’s will, accusing him of being a lapdog. She claimed that the only reason he had not yet made an honest woman of her was because of Agrippina’s opposition and her desire to prevent Poppaea’s speaking out against the Augusta’s crimes. Her taunts persuaded Nero that his mother had to be put out of the way, and he began to ponder how best to achieve this goal. What followed, as relayed in the account of Tacitus, was an extraordinary piece of revenge theatre.95

  In March 59, a conciliatory invitation was sent by Nero to his mother Agrippina, inviting her to an evening banquet in Baiae, where he was presiding over a festival in honour of the Roman goddess Minerva. He greeted her in person on the shore, seating her in the place of honour and conversing with her as though all enmity between them was forgotten and he had eyes only for her.