The First Ladies of Rome
Page 22
Julia Berenice was born in 28 into the family of the Herods who governed the Roman provincial outpost of Judaea, in a year when Livia’s son Tiberius still ruled at Rome, and a supposed carpenter’s son from Nazareth was causing the local governing elite some inconvenience. The great-granddaughter of King Herod the Great and his beautiful wife Mariamme, her father was Marcus Julius Agrippa – named in tribute to his ancestors’ long-standing friendship with the family of Julius Caesar. Like several others of the Herodian royal clan, Julius Agrippa had lived in the Palatine household at Rome from the age of four or five right through until his thirties, receiving the same education afforded to Claudius’s and Tiberius’s heir Drusus Minor and acquiring a reputation as a happy-go-lucky urban playboy whose spendthrift tendencies were held in check only by his mother Berenice, who doled out his allowance with a watchful eye. After her death, his ruinous spending habits left him heavily in debt, and the death of his friend Drusus in 23, allegedly at the hands of Livilla and her lover Sejanus, led him to flee his creditors and sail to his Judaean homeland. In around 27, a son, Agrippa II, was born to himself and his wife Cypros, and the following year, a daughter, named Julia Berenice after her paternal grandmother.
After spending several years moving his young family between Judaea and Syria and falling out with successive relatives and friends in his failed bids to resurrect his fortunes, in 36 Julius Agrippa decided his only option was to leave his wife and children in Judaea and return to Rome to try and ingratiate himself with the imperial family once more. Once in Italy, his debts caught up with him again, and he was only rescued from his predicament by Antonia Minor, who out of regard for her old friend Berenice, and Julius Agrippa’s friendship with her son Claudius, lent him the 300,000 drachmas he owed to the Roman treasury. This kept Julius Agrippa’s enemies at bay for a time longer, and he used his connections with Antonia to strike up a friendship with her grandson Caligula, a friendship which would later pay dividends. Its more immediate side-effect, however, was to land him in prison later that summer when he was allegedly overheard expressing a hope that Tiberius might abdicate soon in favour of Caligula. His stay in captivity was ameliorated a little by the continued care of Antonia, who obtained a promise from the prefect of the praetorian guard, Macro, that Julius Agrippa should be allowed daily bathing rights and visits from friends who brought him clothes and some of his favourite foods.
Then in 37, Julius Agrippa suddenly experienced a remarkable reversal of fortune. The death of Tiberius duly saw the accession of Caligula, who summoned his ally from prison and appointed him tetrarch of territories including the area north-east of the Sea of Galilee, which had previously been the kingdom of Julius Agrippa’s deceased uncle Philip. Later, he also received the territory of Galilee and Peraea, confiscated by Caligula from Agrippa’s brother-in-law Herod Antipas. In the summer of 38, he returned to take possession of his new kingdom, where he was reunited with Cypros, Agrippa II and ten-year-old Berenice.5
Having spent this first decade of her life being towed around Palestine, Syria and Judaea in the wake of her father’s ambitious schemes for recouping his wealth, the elevation of her father to a kingship resulted in a complete change in Berenice’s circumstances and prospects. While her brother Agrippa II was dispatched to Rome just as his father had once been to receive an education in the imperial household, a suitable marriage was arranged for Berenice with Marcus Julius Alexander, the son of an old family friend named Alexander the Alabarch, whose family was one of the wealthiest in Alexandria. The marriage took place in 41, when she was thirteen years old.6
That year also witnessed the murder of Caligula and his succession by Claudius, Julius Agrippa’s old friend from his childhood on the Palatine. Caligula’s reign had been characterised by a number of tense flare-ups between Rome and its Jewish subjects, notably when Caligula had attempted to have a statue of himself set up in the most holy of all Jewish shrines, the Temple of Jerusalem. As satellite kings appointed by the Romans, the Herods tended to side with their Roman mentors in such disputes, but Julius Agrippa used his personal connections with Caligula to persuade the emperor against such an antagonistic action. Indeed, Julius Agrippa’s influence at the Roman court was such that he is said to have assisted behind the scenes in Claudius’s hastily engineered accession to power, earning his reward when the new emperor extended the territory over which Agrippa ruled to include Judaea and Samaria.7
Berenice’s brief marriage to Marcus Julius Alexander was abruptly cut short in 44 by her husband’s death, and a second marriage was quickly arranged for the fifteen-year-old princess with her uncle Herod, Julius Agrippa’s brother, to whom Claudius duly awarded the tiny kingdom of Chalcis, north of Judaea.8 Not long afterwards, Berenice’s father died of a dramatic collapse while attending games in Caesarea, temporarily ending the rule of the Herods in Judaea, as their imperial masters chose to pass control of the territory to a succession of procurators appointed from Rome. The death of her elderly uncle-husband Herod four years later in 48 left Berenice a widow for the second time at the age of twenty and she now became a resident in the house of her elder brother, who in 50 was given the deceased Herod’s kingdom of Chalcis to rule.9 Since their peripatetic childhood at the heels of their father, this was the first time Agrippa II and Berenice had shared a permanent abode. For the next fifteen years and more, she remained under her brother’s roof, a living arrangement that would in hindsight draw scandalised accusations of incest upon their heads from commentators in Rome. According to the historian Josephus, a Jewish insider at the courts of Vespasian and Titus, the incest rumours shamed Berenice into moving out of the palace in 65 at the age of thirty-seven, and embarking on her third marriage with Polemo, the king of Cilicia, who even agreed to be circumcised and convert to her faith. But Berenice soon requested a divorce, and returned to live under the protection of her brother.10
These are the known facts of Berenice’s life to this point. By the mid-60s, she was evidently a woman of some public standing in the eastern Mediterranean landscape. Like the consorts of Roman emperors, she had established herself as a benefactress and public patron of good works. An inscription referring to her as ‘queen’ or basilissa survives from Athens, originally accompanied by an honorific statue (now lost), and in the 1920s another inscription featuring her name was found in Beirut, recording the gift by Berenice and Agrippa II to the citizens there of marble and columns to restore a theatre first built by the pair’s ancestor King Herod.11 She herself had amassed a great deal of personal wealth, thanks to her acquisition of corn granaries and marriage settlements, and was also to demonstrate the ‘good’ Roman woman’s knack of exerting a pacifying influence on her ruling relations – credited, for example, with persuading her brother not to execute Justus, a Jewish insurgent against Roman rule. Earlier, she made a notable appearance in 60 as a silent witness at the famous audience with St Paul when the latter defended his Christian faith before Festus, the Roman procurator of Judaea, and her brother Agrippa II, an event described in the Bible.12
Yet there was still little in her biography thus far to predict the flurry of interest she was to attract in the seventeenth century.
The events of 66 changed all of that. It was the year in which the First Jewish Revolt began, an uprising by Jewish factions against Roman rule in the province – whose leaders included the aforementioned Justus – lasting four years. Within that time-frame, Agrippina’s son Nero met his death, and no fewer than three emperors came and went in the space of eighteen months before a fourth – Vespasian – restored stability to the empire. Agrippa II and his sister were key players at the heart of these tumultuous political events which in turn set Berenice on a collision course with Titus and her posthumous incarnation as a doomed heroine in dozens of dramas, operas and novels from the seventeenth century onwards.
The troubles of 66 were precipitated by Gessius Florus, the brutal new Roman procurator of Judaea whom Poppaea, the woman for whom Nero had finally exiled
and executed Claudia Octavia and murdered his mother, had recommended for the post in 65. In a highly provocative gesture, Gessius Florus sent soldiers into the Temple of Jerusalem to retrieve taxes he claimed were owed to the Roman purse, and a violent stand-off between Roman troops and Jewish protesters followed. Berenice happened to be in Jerusalem at the time and, according to the first-hand account of Jewish historian Josephus, she was so shocked at the brutality of the Roman soldiers, whose actions she was privy to from the vantage point of her palace overlooking the Temple, that she proceeded to dispatch several senior members of her household staff and personal bodyguard to Florus, petitioning him to stop the slaughter. When all her envoys were rebuffed, she went to see him herself, standing barefoot before his tribunal, but was treated disrespectfully and protected from harm only by her bodyguards.13
Undeterred, Berenice now wrote a letter to Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, asking him to restrain Florus. Her request was eventually answered when Gallus sent a fact-finding envoy who arrived in Jerusalem at the same time as the hastily returning Agrippa II, who had been on a diplomatic mission to Alexandria. In a bid to calm tensions, Agrippa called a mass meeting and appealed to the more militant rebels not to start a war with the Romans, placing his sister on the roof of the Hasmonean Palace, where she could be seen by all those at the meeting below. But his impassioned appeal fell on deaf ears, and despite historic precedents whereby women such as Octavia and Agrippina Maior had defused potentially violent situations by virtue of their calm diplomacy and nobility of bearing, Berenice’s appearance failed to appease the insurgents. Agrippa II and his sister had no choice but to flee the dangerous atmosphere of the city.14
Over the next year, the Jewish rebels inflicted a series of embarrassing defeats on the Roman legions sent to crush them. Then in 67, Nero chose the semi-retired fifty-seven-year-old general Vespasian to head up the Roman response to the rebellion. Vespasian, a highly successful veteran of the British campaigns under Claudius, was grateful for the opportunity, having disgraced himself by falling asleep during one of Nero’s self-promoting poetry readings a year earlier. He was also an old friend of Berenice’s father, their connection stretching back to the days of the elder Agrippa’s sojourn in Antonia’s court, and on being appointed to his command, Vespasian set out for Antioch in Syria, to meet up with a delegation including the Herodian princess and her brother. Just before leaving for Syria, he issued orders to his twenty-six-year-old son Titus, whom he had chosen to act as his deputy in the campaign, instructing him to round up the rest of the legions from Alexandria, and meet his father in Ptolemais.15
The precise time and setting of Titus’s and Berenice’s first meeting are nowhere recorded. They may have encountered each other at Ptolemais as Titus and his father prepared for their campaign against the Jewish rebels, or it could just as easily have been later in the summer of that year, when he and Vespasian spent several weeks as guests of Agrippa II’s at Caesarea Philippi, the city 25 miles (40 km) north of the Sea of Galilee where Berenice’s brother had a magnificent palace.16 The blank canvas at the beginning of their relationship has been filled by a great deal of colourful romantic speculation. Agrippa’s Daughter (1964), a follow-up by the novelist Howard Fast to his bestseller Spartacus – which went on to be famously adapted for film – conjures up an opening encounter worthy of Mills & Boon:
She remembered the first time she saw him, not tall – so few of the Italians were tall – but well formed, like a Greek athlete, short, straight nose, deep brown eyes, a wide sensuous mouth, black, curly hair, close-cropped – twenty-eight years old and so strangely without arrogance, two vertical lines between his heavy, dark brows marking him with a sort of patient despair, as if all his days were destined to be spent in hopelessness. He stood and looked at her, stared at her – until, provoked and embarrassed, she turned on her heel and left the room. Afterward, her brother Agrippa said to her, ‘He’s in love with you – hopelessly, idiotically in love with you’.17
In another, much-loved novel of the twentieth century, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Jew of Rome (1935), Titus looks back on his first meeting with Berenice, and recalls her ‘long fine face’, her ‘golden-brown eyes’, and how ‘there was always just a touch of huskiness in her voice. At first I actually disliked it.’18
Alluring though such reconstructions are, the only concrete historical reference to this developing relationship over the next four years comes in a brief comment in Tacitus’s Histories, where the historian notes that Titus’s reluctance to return to Rome at the height of the campaign in 68 was thought by some to be influenced by his desire not to leave Berenice behind:
Some believed that he turned back because of his passionate longing to see again Queen Berenice; and the young man’s heart was not insensible to Berenice …19
However, the death of Nero in June 68 and the ensuing confusion – because the emperor had left no heir – was the more plausible reason for Titus’s dilemma. The decade since the murder of Agrippina had seen Nero’s reign lunge from one crisis to another; from the revolt in Britain led by the legendary Queen Boudicca in 60 and the great fire that devastated Rome in 64 – for which some blamed Nero himself – to a sequence of alleged conspiracies against the increasingly megalomaniacal young emperor between 65 and 68 which resulted in the vengeful executions or enforced suicides of numerous eminent members of the elite accused of having masterminded them, including the once trusted Seneca. Poppaea, too, was dead, her embalmed, spice-scented body interred in the mausoleum of Augustus with full state honours – a fusion of eastern and Roman burial traditions which were surely in part the invention of a literary tradition determined to cast her as a reincarnation of Cleopatra.20 Ostensibly, her death provoked great grief in Nero, who gave her funeral eulogy, though several sources report that it was in fact he who had caused her death in the summer of 65, by kicking her violently in the belly, while she was pregnant with their child.21
In 66, Nero had made a third marriage, to a noblewoman named Statilia Messalina – no relation to Claudius’s infamous third bride – who kept a low profile, and managed to survive Nero’s brutal demise. This came after a series of breakaway declarations by provincial governors offering a challenge to the emperor’s authority led to his being declared a public enemy by the Senate on 9 June 68. In a panic, Nero fled the city to the sanctuary of a villa owned by one of his freedmen, where he stabbed himself to death at the age of thirty-one, his arm guided by one of his secretaries.22
Into the breach left by Nero’s exit stepped Galba, an elderly governor of the province of Spain who had secured the support of the praetorian guard and the Senate, kick-starting the chaotic period between the summer of 68 and the winter of 69 commonly known as the Year of Four Emperors. Galba’s brief six-month tenure on the Palatine finally severed the umbilical cord that had previously tied all of Augustus’s successors to Livia. The new emperor nonetheless took care to flash around his connections to Rome’s first empress, in whose household he had grown up and in whose will he had been named as a beneficiary. He included her on his brief regime’s coins in a gesture demonstrating all too clearly that Livia’s support, even from beyond the grave, was still seen to carry a powerful cachet.23
It was not enough, however, to secure Galba’s acceptance as emperor. The legions on the Rhine refused to swear allegiance to him, and on 2 January 69, they instead gave their public backing to Vitellius, the governor of Germania and an old ally of the Julio-Claudians. At the same time, Galba faced a challenge on another front from Marcus Salvius Otho, the governor of Lusitania (Portugal), ex-husband of Poppaea and the man at whose seaside villa the fateful dinner party that precipitated Agrippina Minor’s assassination had taken place. Otho himself also had links to Livia through his grandfather, who like Galba had been brought up in her household, and one protégé of Rome’s first empress soon replaced another, when Galba was murdered on 15 January by the praetorian guard, and Otho was duly recognised as emperor in his
place. Yet he in turn lasted barely three months, racking up debts and ordering unpopular executions before a major defeat at the hands of Vitellius’s forces in northern Italy persuaded him to commit suicide on 16 April. The Senate duly recognised Vitellius as emperor in his place.24
Then a new twist. On I July, the Roman legions stationed on the eastern frontiers of Rome’s empire, in Egypt, Syria and on the Danube, declared Vespasian their choice for emperor and gave him their full military backing. Suddenly the unthinkable was possible for the modestly born Vespasian, a man with no ties whatsoever to Livia or any branch of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The names of an influential circle of eastern-based supporters were attached to this attempted putsch, headed by Mucianus the governor of Syria, but also including Agrippa II and Berenice, who was said by Tacitus to have been a favourite of Vespasian’s for her ‘youthful beauty’.25 Some, in a typecast of Berenice as the marital opportunist, have surmised that her actions betrayed her deep-seated ambitions to be empress at Rome, but it seems also reasonable to suppose that the young Herodian royals had understandable domestic political motives for wanting to attach themselves to a winning ticket.26
Leaving command of the Judaean campaign in the hands of Titus, Vespasian headed west and after defeating Vitellius, who was caught and killed in the act of preparing to flee the city, he was acknowledged by the Senate as emperor on 21 December 69, inaugurating the era of the Flavian dynasty which would rule Rome for the next quarter of a century. The following year Titus secured victory over the Jewish rebels by sacking their stronghold in Jerusalem and destroying their holy Temple. The victory helped legitimise Vespasian’s seizure of power, and was followed by a triumphal procession through the streets of Rome in 71, a triumph still memorialised in eternal, painful relief on the Roman forum’s Arch of Titus, which shows the menorah and other sacred treasures of the Temple being carried aloft through the streets of Rome.