The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  For the time being, Domitia’s position as leading lady of the empire was usurped by the emperor’s niece Julia Flavia. Now aged around eighteen, she had some experience of the public spotlight already. Since her father Titus had remained unwed after Berenice’s departure from Rome, she had served as the face of his coinage, depicted in association with the goddess Ceres, the most popular role model for imperial women. Despite surviving sculptures that show her sporting the lavish spiralling head of curls worn by other fashionable ladies of her generation, her official coin portraits show her with a far more modest chignon reminiscent of some of Livia’s later profiles, a nod to the Flavians’ admiration for Rome’s first empress, though in an abrupt departure from Livia’s portrait tradition, both Julia Flavia and her aunt Domitia are sometimes shown wearing what looks to be a crescent-shaped diadem in their hair. Such queenly insignia had not been seen on an imperial woman’s head before.82

  On coming of age, Julia Flavia had been made the bride of her cousin, Flavius Sabinus, but the match was not, if Suetonius’s account is correct, her father’s first choice.83 When she was still a young girl, Titus had urged his younger brother to throw over Domitia and take Julia Flavia as a wife instead in a bid to strengthen the Flavian dynasty, a suggestion Domitian violently repudiated, supposedly due to his passion for Domitia, though the unhappy precedent set by Claudius’s marriage to his niece Agrippina Minor would also have justified his refusal.84 Following the departure of Domitia in 83, Julia Flavia’s assumption of the role of companion to her uncle proceeded to generate just the kind of gossip that Domitian would have wished to avoid. Details are sketchy and contradictory, but it appears that tongues began to wag as the pair were seen living, in the words of one commentator, ‘as husband with wife, making little effort at concealment’.85 Julia Flavia’s husband Flavius Sabinus was executed by the emperor for treason, and the rumours intensified with suggestions that Julia now exercised a special political influence over her uncle, persuading him to raise to the consulship an ex-prefect of Egypt named Ursus, who had only recently been under threat of execution for showing insufficient deference to the emperor.86

  But within as little as a year, the saga of the emperor’s personal life took yet another twist. Domitia staged a comeback. Crowds are reported to have gathered in the streets and demanded the empress’s return, an echo of public protests that demanded the recall of Julia in 2 BC, and of Claudia Octavia following the false charges laid against her by Nero in 62. In contrast to those two sad cases, the result this time was that Domitian, said by some to have been regretting the separation – though conceivably also seeking to quash the rumours about himself and his niece – was reconciled with his wife. Julia Flavia remained on the Palatine, but subsequently died in around 87 or 88 at the approximate age of twenty-two in what was whispered to be a failed abortion attempt, imposed on her by the father of her child – Domitian.87

  This confusing picture of incest and betrayal sits oddly with the subsequent deification of Julia Flavia ordered by Domitian after her death when coins were emblazoned with images showing her being carried to the heavens on the back of a peacock.88 The stigma that had once made emperors like Augustus and Tiberius so cautious about deifying their women had clearly fallen by the wayside – Vespasian’s daughter Domitilla, who did not live to see her father become emperor, was also honoured as a goddess on his coinage.89 But the story that Julia Flavia had aborted her uncle’s child refused to go away. Juvenal, writing obliquely about the affair only a few years later, critiqued the hypocrisy of those who preached morality while behaving in the opposite manner – the ‘adulterer’ here being Domitian and the ‘bitter laws’ a reference to his revival of Augustus’s moral legislation:

  Exactly so was the adulterer of more recent times, defiled by a union worthy of tragedy, who tried to revive bitter laws to terrify everyone, even Venus and Mars, at the very moment when his Julia was unsealing her fertile womb with numerous abortion-inducers and pouring out lumps which resembled her uncle.90

  Amid the obfuscation, one clear fact emerges. Julia Flavia’s fate was eloquent proof that, despite the ease with which the honour of deification was now bestowed on a woman of the imperial family, divine honours were less of a personal tribute than a routine benefit intended more for the glorification of her ruling emperor than the recipient. They jarred, moreover, with her own fragile mortal lot. However important a prop she might be at one time to the emperor’s public profile, she was both disposable and replaceable – a bit-player in a narrative bigger than her own, a narrative which would always threaten to swallow her up.

  The final decade of Domitian’s reign was a tumultuous one, marred by repeated clashes with the Senate, who chafed at the emperor’s autocratic style of government and insistence on being addressed as ‘Lord and God’, and the execution of numerous of his opponents. Among those who were eliminated was the consul of 95, Flavius Clemens, the husband of Domitian’s own niece Flavia Domitilla, on a charge of atheism. Flavia Domitilla herself was added to the long line of imperial women who had been exiled to Pandateria, where she died, though she was later claimed as an adherent of Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and made a saint.91

  So great was Domitian’s paranoia in the face of perceived threats that it was said to have led him to install mirrored walls in his palace so that he could see his enemies coming. But a genuine plot to dispatch him was eventually hatched by his own courtiers, a plot that it was universally assumed the emperor’s wife Domitia was privy to. One source claims specifically that the empress had come to fear for her own life, and, when she chanced to find a ‘death list’ scribbled by her husband of those whom he planned to do away with next, she informed the intended victims, who brought forward their plans for assassination. The emperor was stabbed to death in his bedroom on 18 September 96.92

  Domitian was the last of the Flavians. He and Domitia never did have children to continue the family line. After his death, his body was given to the care of the family’s old nurse Phyllis, who had him cremated in her garden on the Via Latina and smuggled his ashes into the temple of the Flavian gens, which Domitian had established as the family mausoleum on the site of his birth home in Rome’s ‘Pomegranate Street’, on the Quirinal hill. Phyllis chose to mix his ashes in with those of his niece Julia Flavia, whom she had also raised from infancy.93 A later version of Domitian’s obituary had it that Domitia had requested her husband’s body, which had been hacked into pieces, and commissioned a sculptor to model a statue from its reassembled form, a statue which then appeared in the Capitol in Rome. This sixth-century account was perhaps invented to explain cracks in the statue in question, cracks which may have been the partially healed scars of the damnatio memoriae against Domitian.94 An eye-witness description of the unbridled and savage pleasure with which Domitian’s portraits were vandalised by his subjects after his death affords us an idea of the kind of scenes that must have greeted similar mandates to destroy sculptures of damned women such as Messalina.

  It was a delight to smash those arrogant faces to pieces in the dust, to threaten them with the sword, and savagely attack them with axes, as if blood and pain would follow every single blow. No one controlled their joy and long awaited happiness, when vengeance was taken in beholding his likenesses, hacked into mutilated limbs and pieces, and above all, in seeing his savage and hideous portraits hurled into the flames and burned up, in order that they might be transformed from things of such terror and menace into something useful and pleasing.95

  Unlike Messalina’s and Domitian’s defaced portraits, however, Domitia’s remained pointedly intact. Two bronze coins from Asia Minor featuring the facing heads of the emperor and his empress, show signs of deliberate damage to his profile, while hers remains untouched. Portraits of Domitia survive which can be dated to this twilight period of her life, indicating that Domitian’s successors saw some value in promoting her image. It may well be that they perceived the poli
tical capital of venerating the wife who was suspected of having a hand in his downfall, thus ridding the Roman public of an unpopular ruler.96 In this respect, Domitia was able to carve a reputation for herself independently of her husband, defying the historical convention whereby a wife’s fate and reputation was irredeemably tied to that of her spouse.

  Like Livia, the only previous Augusta to have survived her husband, Domitia retained a respectable foothold in society in widowhood. Though, in contrast to Rome’s first empress, she receives no mention in literary sources after her husband’s assassination, there are indications that she maintained an independent source of cash flow in widowhood deriving from brick factories. The year of her death is unknown, though the date stamped on surviving bricks from her factories indicates that not only did she outlive her husband by at least thirty years, she saw two more emperors come and go after him. This would have made her around eighty years old at her death. An inscription on a marble tablet found at the ancient city of Gabii, just outside Rome, records the dedication in 140 of a temple to the memory of ‘Domitia Augusta’, on a plot of land donated by the local town council and financed by one of the empress’s freedmen and his wife, Polycarpus and Europe. They also set up a fund to allow the town to celebrate Domitia’s birthday (11 February) every year with distributions of food, a benefaction that was advertised on a bronze tablet and posted in public for locals to read.97

  The Flavian dynasty marks a caesura in the history of Roman first ladies. In contrast to the first decades of imperial rule, when politics had been the preserve of one family, the circumstances of the Flavians’ rise had resulted in the outsourcing of the throne to a wider circle for the first time, signifying a sea-change in Roman political circles. A new arriviste elite now lined the corridors of Roman power, men who had been given a leg-up by Vespasian and his sons, and it was from this pool of talent that Rome’s next generation of emperors and empresses would be chosen. Berenice, Caenis, Julia Flavia and Domitia, though very different women who stood in very different relationships to the emperor, seemed in some ways to represent a final echo of the old guard: Berenice with her resemblance to Augustus’s old enemy Cleopatra; Caenis with her close links to the Julio-Claudian household; Julia Flavia, another imperial woman tarred by allegations of incestuous influence over her uncle; and Domitia, accused of having conspired in the murder of her husband, like so many of her predecessors.

  Yet this diverse group of women also pointed the way to new models of Rome’s first lady. As the second half of its imperial history unfurled, the city’s consorts began to be drawn from a far more disparate circle of candidates – from families without a long political pedigree; from origins as humble as the peasantry; from provinces as far afield as Syria. No longer would the right to be a member of this elite female club be the exclusive preserve of one family, one class, or one native region.

  6

  Good Empresses: The First Ladies of the Second Century

  The body was burned on the shore, not long after my arrival, as preliminary to the triumphant rites which would be solemnised in Rome. Almost no one was present at the very simple ceremony, which took place at dawn and was only a last episode in the prolonged dramatic service rendered by the women to the person of Trajan. Matidia wept unrestrainedly; Plotina’s features seemed blurred in the wavering air round the heat of the funeral pyre. Calm, detached, slightly hollow from fever, she remained, as always, coolly impenetrable.

  Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951)1

  One dawn morning in November 130, some three decades after the Flavian dynasty had ended, a group of high-profile Roman sightseers assembled together at the feet of one of Egypt’s most popular visitor attractions. The party included the ruling emperor Hadrian, his wife Sabina, and an amateur poet and member of the provincial royal house of Commagene named Julia Balbilla. The object of the tourists’ awe was the ‘singing’ Colossus of Memnon, a 60-feet-high (18-metres-high) seated statue erected as one of a pair at Thebes c.1400 BC to honour the pharaoh Amenophis. It had acquired its tuneful sobriquet thanks to a high-pitched squeal akin to a snapping lyre-string which seemed to originate in the statue’s larynx, though this was probably just the sound caused by overnight moisture evaporating from its sandstone joints as they buckled under the rising desert heat. Nonetheless, several among the hundreds of tourists who made the pilgrimage to the seated mammoth every year had scratched verses on its legs to commemorate the miraculous experience of hearing the statue speak.2

  The atmosphere among the visiting VIPs that November morning was perhaps a little subdued. Just a few weeks previously, Hadrian’s beloved boy companion Antinous, who should have formed one of the party, had freakishly drowned in the Nile. The emperor’s party had already made one pilgrimage to the Colossus the previous day but the statue had remained silent, and the local officials who managed the site could be forgiven for being nervous lest their charge should once again fail to perform its famous party trick for this illustrious audience. But this time, thankfully, as the sun came up and warmed the monument’s craggy stone contours, the trademark wail was finally heard. In tribute, four poems recording the visit of the imperial party were composed by Julia Balbilla and etched on the Colossus’s left leg and foot, alongside the other honorary literary offerings already left there, each a rather more elegant and formal version of an ‘I woz ’ere’ graffito:

  I, Balbilla, when the rock spoke, heard the voice of the divine Memnon or Phamenoth. I came here with the lovely Empress Sabina. The course of the sun was in its first hour, in the fifteenth year of Hadrian’s reign, on the twenty-fourth day of the month Hathor. [I wrote this] on the twenty-fifth day of the month Hathor.3

  Seventy years after Hadrian’s and Sabina’s visit, another emperor, Septimius Severus, made his own family trip to the statue, and in a well-intentioned gesture, ordered that the damage caused to it by an earthquake in 27 BC should be repaired. The unforeseen consequence was that the ‘singing’ stopped, and the stream of tourists dried up. Today, the Colossus of Memnon remains silent, and the poems etched by Julia Balbilla are barely visible, scrubbed away by the swirling sand of the desert.4 Just as these poems have faded, so too has much of our picture of Sabina and her fellow imperial Roman women of the second century.

  Although the Flavian dynasty was succeeded in 96 by an imperial hall of fame, a period famously christened by Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli as an age of five ‘good’ emperors, the women of that era remain relative unknowns. Nerva (96–8), Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–38), Antoninus Pius (138–61) and Marcus Aurelius (161–80) presided over a period of relative political stability, free of assassinations and civil war, which saw Rome unfurl its wings to their utmost territorial limit.5 Yet the women these new emperors chose as their consorts receive little attention both in contemporary accounts of the period and in the works of later artists and dramatists who pounced on the trials and tribulations of their more disreputable and glamorous first-century sisters with such glee.

  The anonymity of Plotina and Sabina, when viewed in a line-up of suspects that includes Messalina and Agrippina Minor, could be read as an indication that the emperors had now managed to get their relatives to conform to their ideals of quiet domesticity and strict morality. Perhaps, in keeping their wives and daughters out of the limelight, Trajan, Hadrian and the other ‘good’ emperors of the second century succeeded where their Julio-Claudian, and to some extent their Flavian, predecessors failed. In part, though, this impression comes courtesy of the new literary terrain in which we now find ourselves. Tacitus and Suetonius, the chief executors of the historiographical fate of Livia and her Julio-Claudian descendants, wrote their histories as insiders in the courts of Trajan and Hadrian, and served these emperors’ interests in commentating on the depravity of previous regimes in felicitous, antidotal contrast to the rulers of their own day. Neither of their accounts extends beyond the reign of Domitian, leaving us to rely on other, less satisfactory writte
n sources for most of our information about second-century imperial history and the place of women within it, such as the late, anonymously authored and notoriously unreliable Historia Augusta, which is riddled with obvious fabrications and invented citations.6

  However, there is another important reason for this apparent anonymity. With the advent of the dynasties that ruled Rome in the second century, a woman’s reproductive capacities were removed as the link in the chain that determined the transfer of power from one emperor to another. Between the accession of Nerva in 96 and Marcus Aurelius’s bequest of the throne to his son Commodus in 180, each successful candidate for emperor would be head-hunted and officially adopted as a son by his predecessor, to whom he bore little or no blood relation. In part, this was a policy forced on the imperial family by the fact that the marriages of Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius all failed to produce sons. But it was spun by loyalists of their regimes as a positive outcome that ensured emperors would be chosen on merit and that Rome would not be saddled with another dynastic disaster like Nero.7

  Yet while ancient literary sources preserve a mostly tight-lipped silence on the activities of Plotina and her second-century cohort, archaeological investigation reveals that official portraits of second-century imperial women on coins and statuary were just as ubiquitous across the Roman Empire as those of their more notorious predecessors.8 Moreover, the suffocating veil drawn over the lives of the second-century empresses in the biographical mainstream is belied by the evidence of more quixotic sources, including private letters and fortuitously preserved inscriptions, which afford us brief but colourful glimpses of the wives of Trajan, Hadrian and company, making their own vital mark on the legacies of their husbands.

  The power vacuum in the wake of Domitian’s murder in 96 was temporarily filled by Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a distinguished ex-consul who was the reluctant choice of Domitian’s assassins in the absence of other candidates. It proved more of a caretaker role for the elderly and childless Nerva, who was compelled to placate disgruntled elements in the army by adopting the popular, hard-drinking governor of Upper Germany, Marcus Ulpius Traianus (‘Trajan’) and anointing him as his successor, thus guarding against another period of instability. Upon Nerva’s death on 28 January 98, Trajan stepped smoothly into his adoptive father’s shoes. His nineteen-year rule established him as one of Rome’s most successful military supremos, whose achievements included increasing the empire’s holdings to encompass Arabia, Armenia and Mesopotamia, defeating Rome’s old enemy Parthia, and winning a great victory across the Danube in the Dacian Wars, commemorated in painstaking detail on his eponymous column erected in the heart of Rome.