The First Ladies of Rome
Page 26
Born in around 53 in the province of Baetica in southern Spain, Trajan was the first Roman emperor to come from outside Italy. His accession represented a breakthrough for the new political class of provincial elites who had been promoted under the Flavians, including men such as Trajan’s own father who had successfully commanded the tenth legion under Vespasian during the defeat of the Jewish revolt and been rewarded with a consulship for his efforts. If Trajan’s accession represented a quantum leap for this arriviste set, the same can be said for the new breed of women who took up the mantle of empress.
Pompeia Plotina was the first of this new wave. Little is known of her background, but she is thought to have come from Nemausus (the French city of Nîmes) in Gaul and to have been born in around 70, just as Vespasian became emperor.9 That she was chosen as a bride for Trajan, the up-and-coming scion of the Ulpian clan, indicates at least that her family, of whom no information survives, came from similarly well-connected senatorial stock. The marriage between this son and daughter of new elite families, heralding from areas hundreds of miles from the empire’s capital, reflected the diverse social make-up of the dominant new political class at Rome.
Plotina was almost thirty years old and had been married to Trajan for at least ten years before he became emperor. But prior to that day when she set foot in Domitian’s old palace as Rome’s newest first lady, not a trace of her life-story survives. This was in part a reflection of the usual indifference to a woman’s upbringing in contrast to that of her husband. But it is also related to the fact that, as a childless woman, Plotina was not even a supporting player in the formative years of a future emperor as Livia was, denying us the kind of anecdotal gems that enrich Livia’s biography, such as the latter’s escape from a Spartan forest fire with her baby son Tiberius in her arms.10
However, when Plotina eventually made her debut in the historical record, she did so with a flourish worthy of Rome’s first empress. Having ascended the flight of steps and crossed the threshold of her new Palatine home for the first time, she is said to have turned slowly to address the sea of faces watching her and grandly uttered the following line:
I enter here the kind of woman I would like to be when I depart.11
It was an appropriate pledge for the female figurehead of a new dynasty determined to wash away the unpleasant taste left by the domestic civil wars of Domitian’s household, just as the Flavians had tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the worst excesses of the Julio-Claudians. For Plotina, the chance to follow in the footsteps of Domitia was something of a mixed blessing. Commonly credited as one of the architects of her husband’s downfall, Domitia was now living in luxurious retirement, enjoying the fruits of the income from her brickwork factories, and continuing to receive deferential honours right up until her death. But the memory of the damage done to the Flavian legacy by Domitian and Domitia’s marital flare-ups, the scandal of their separation and Julia Flavia’s abortion, had not faded. Gossip about the warring couple was still doing the rounds, and Plotina thus found herself in a position where she could provide a refreshing moral contrast, but at the same time she had to negotiate the sinister shadow her predecessor had cast over the role of first lady.12
From day 1 of Trajan’s reign, care was therefore taken to craft an unexceptionable image for Plotina that ran no risk of similarity to Domitia or any of her more disreputable female forebears. After spending his first two years in power on an inspection tour of his armies, Trajan appeared in Rome in 100 for the first time since his accession, and had his arrival trumpeted in a speech of praise by Pliny the Younger, delivered by the author to an audience of the emperor and the Senate.13 Much of it was given over to praising Trajan for his good behaviour in explicit contrast to his tyrannical predecessor Domitian, but Pliny also took care to praise the new emperor’s choice of wife, observing that while ‘many distinguished men of history’ (Pliny did not need to spell out the allusion to previous emperors) had suffered irreparable damage thanks to their ill-considered choice of a wife, Trajan had chosen in Plotina a woman of old-fashioned virtue, modest personal style and approachable demeanour who did him nothing but credit:
From your position she claims nothing for herself but the pleasure it gives her, unswerving in her devotion not to your power but to yourself. You are just the same to each other as you have always been, and your mutual appreciation is unchanged; success has brought you nothing but a new understanding of your joint ability to live in its shadow. How modest she is in her attire, how moderate the number of her attendants, how unassuming when she walks abroad! This is the work of her husband who has fashioned and formed her habits; there is glory enough for a wife in obedience.14
Pliny never once mentioned Plotina by name in his speech. This was quite deliberate, for his encomium of her modest demeanour and devotion to her husband was less about her as an individual than a tribute to Trajan’s schooling of her. Whereas previous emperors had struggled to stand up to the close scrutiny of their private lives that went hand-in-hand with holding high office, Pliny’s paean praised Trajan for ensuring that his whole household fell into line with the spotless standard of moral conduct which he himself maintained. The common thesis remained: a ruler who kept his domestic affairs in order was bound to keep the empire in good order too. The deflection of the credit for Plotina’s conduct to her husband may in part have been down to the inherent traits of panegyric as a genre, but it also advertised the new place of women in this new regime – several steps back, safe in the emperor’s shadow.15
This picture of meek family unity in the house that served as the headquarters of Roman government was reinforced by Pliny’s praise for the harmonious relationship between Plotina and Trajan’s widowed elder sister Ulpia Marciana. Like her sister-in-law, Marciana is an enigmatic figure in the annals of history, her persona utterly subsumed to that of the emperor, and the only morsel of evidence we have as to her character is Pliny’s tribute to a woman who favoured the same ‘frank sincerity and candour’ as her brother. Once again, though, Pliny was less interested in helping out Marciana’s future biographers than in ostentatiously drawing attention both to the concord between brother and sister, and between the two sisters-in-law, in implied contrast to the catfights and rivalries of former female residents of the Palatine such as arch-nemeses Livia and Agrippina Maior, or Agrippina Minor and Poppaea:
Nothing leads to dissension so readily, especially between women, as the rivalry which is most likely to arise from close proximity, to be fed on similarity of status and inflamed by jealousy until it ends in open hatred; all the more remarkable then must it appear when two women in the same position can share a home without a sign of envy or rivalry. Their respect and consideration for each other is mutual, and as each loves you with all her heart, they think it makes no difference which of them stands first in your affection. United as they are in the purpose of their daily life, nothing can be shown to divide them; their one aim is to model themselves on your example, and consequently their habits are the same, being formed after yours.16
From the allusion to their close proximity and based on precedent, we can probably take it that Marciana accompanied Plotina and Trajan to their new residence on the Palatine. Unlike in the days of Livia and the Julio-Claudians, however, the imperial palace of the early second century no longer echoed to the sounds of children running up and down through the corridors and playing in the gardens. Plotina’s union with Trajan remained barren while his widowed sister Marciana had only one child, a grown-up daughter named Salonia Matidia. Salonia Matidia had two daughters of her own, Matidia Minor and Vibia Sabina, but the discovery in the 1950s of a lead water-pipe bearing Salonia Matidia’s name, near the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, raises the possibility that she and her daughters kept to their own property and did not accompany her mother, uncle and aunt to the palace.17
Trajan did not immediately scramble to advertise the existence of his female relations either in state-appro
ved architecture or on his official currency, again in stark contrast to his Julio-Claudian forebears. This reticence was in part a consequence of his mission to monopolise the spotlight as the undisputed strong man of Roman politics. It was also a recognition that for the first time in Roman imperial history, the sitting emperor owed neither his right of accession nor his ability to provide an heir to a female member of his own family. Therefore it was not until 112, fourteen years into his reign, that Plotina was granted a look-in on her husband’s coins. Many of these issues affiliated her with the goddess Vesta, the guardian of Rome’s sacred flame, and Minerva, goddess of warfare and wisdom. Another set publicised her dedication of a new shrine called the Ara Pudicitia – the Altar of Chastity. Plotina was the first woman to be associated with the legend ‘chastity’ on her coins, and neither Vesta nor Minerva, virgin goddesses both, had previously been affiliated with imperial women. There was little point associating Plotina with a goddess of fertility like Ceres, given her lack of children.18
Though Trajan’s female relatives made a late debut on state currency, statues of them appeared just as frequently around the empire as those of their predecessors.19 However, in contrast to previous imperial consorts, whose images often evolved over a period of years, Plotina’s official portrait underwent little change during her lifetime. After the extravagant designs of Flavian women’s hairstyles, Plotina’s coiffure was by comparison modest and controlled, characterised by a rigid visor of stiffly coiled hair arching above a band of tightly packed comma-shaped curls along her hairline, a throwback to Livia’s demure nodus. It dovetailed neatly with Pliny’s description of her as a deferential and modestly dressed spouse, and was mimicked in the hairstyle of her niece Salonia Matidia’s portraits, though the fashion seems not to have found favour with other elite Roman women who showed no signs of adopting it.20 More popular among female social climbers was the arrangement favoured by Plotina’s sister-in-law Marciana, whose locks were strictly sculpted by her ornatrices into a two-tier fan arrangement of overlapping segments shaped like mussel shells. While a more audacious design, the architectural precision of Marciana’s style still served as a metaphor for the discipline her brother was determined to impose on both his household and his empire.21
Trajanic imperial sculpture continued the Flavian trend of opting not to airbrush every wrinkle and blemish out of the sitter’s face in homage to the realism of republican portraiture. To residents of the empire chancing to look up as they wandered through town streets and forums or visited the temples and baths, the sight of Plotina’s, Marciana’s and Salonia Matidia’s realistic, rigid, matronly faces glaring back with pursed lips and frowning severity under their carefully primped tresses offered a reassuring reminder to the empire’s subjects that this dynasty would be stable and scandal-free.
Most of Trajan’s nineteen years on the throne were spent away from the city, in pursuit of military campaigns across the Danube and in the east. In 112, his sister Marciana died, aged in her sixties.22 That same year, dreaming of emulating his all-conquering hero Alexander the Great, Trajan departed for the east in preparation for hostilities with Parthia, taking Plotina and Salonia Matidia with him, the latter now the most senior surviving female member of the emperor’s blood family. No signs of the criticism that was once levelled at the elder Agrippina’s presence on Germanicus’s foreign tours of duty attended Trajan’s wife and niece on their trip. But their return journey was to carry powerful and tragic echoes of that of Germanicus’s ill-fated wife. After capturing the Parthian capital Ctesiphon (just south of Baghdad) in 115 and annexing Mesopotamia, Trajan was forced to withdraw his forces from the east under pressure from insurrections behind his front lines by the Jewish populations of Egypt, Palestine and other border territories. Heading back towards Italy in the summer of 117, he fell seriously ill off the coast of southern Turkey, was forced to draw into harbour at Selinus on the south-west coast of Sicily, and died there on 8 August at the approximate age of sixty-four. The grieving pair of Plotina and Matidia carried the fallen warrior’s ashes in a golden urn back to Rome, for interment in the pedestal base of Trajan’s Column.
But there was a twist in the tale of Trajan’s death. On his deathbed, he sent a bulletin to the Senate naming his second cousin Publius Aelius Hadrianus (Hadrian), the forty-one-year-old governor of Syria, as his adopted son and heir. Suspicions were raised in some quarters by the fact that the letter bore not the emperor’s signature, but Plotina’s. It may simply have been that Trajan was too weak to write himself and delegated the task to his wife. But some observers of the time were unhappy, and concluded that the empress’s signature was the imprimatur of a wider plot to hijack the succession. The principal author of this conspiracy theory was Cassius Apronianus, the historian Cassius Dio’s father. He conducted an investigation into Trajan’s death some decades later while he was a governor in Sicily, and eventually deduced that Trajan’s death had been concealed for several days in order to allow the adoption of the empress’s favoured choice of successor, Hadrian, to be arranged and announced to the Senate. An embellished version of the story even put it about that Plotina had hired a decoy to lie in Trajan’s darkened bedroom and imitate the emperor’s weakened voice, in order to prolong the charade that the emperor still lived.23 Plotina, the silent spouse of the second century, thus joined Livia, Agrippina Minor and Domitia in the gallery of Roman imperial women accused of covering up or conspiring in their husbands’ deaths.24
As in the case of the almost identical charges laid against Livia, one could make the rebuttal that such concealments actually fulfilled a valuable function in ensuring a smooth hand-over from one emperor to another and became part of the political furniture of many monarchical regimes. But two modern parallels provide further food for thought. In 1919, Edith Wilson, the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, was charged with forging his signature on White House documents after a stroke rendered him incapacitated, leading to outraged accusations of her running a ‘petticoat government’. Four years later, when President Warren Harding died from what his doctor said was a bout of food poisoning, some, seeking to discredit this explanation, claimed that his wife Florence was the real culprit, and a bestselling – though obviously mischievous – book was published on the subject in 1930.25 Given the regularity with which such episodes recur in both ancient and later historiography, and with such convenient similarities, the case for treating them with caution would seem particularly strong.
Despite the suspicious nature of his inauguration, the new emperor, Hadrian was well qualified to succeed his second cousin. Born in the late 70s in the same region of Spain as his predecessor, he had passed into the guardianship of Trajan following his father’s death when he was no more than nine years old. Under his cousin’s aegis he had enjoyed a meteoric rise, appointed three times to a military tribune-ship before the age of twenty-one, and was later given a legionary command during the Dacian Wars before being made governor of the key province of Syria shortly before Trajan’s death in 117. In further recognition of the special relationship between himself and the emperor, Hadrian had married Salonia Matidia’s younger daughter Sabina in 100, a union allegedly orchestrated by the girl’s aunt, Plotina.26
Plotina’s hand in bringing Hadrian together with his wife was the overture to a close relationship between her and the new emperor, who spent his first year in power undoing some of Trajan’s military policy decisions and facing down bitter teething problems with a Senate angered by his peremptory promotion. In 118, Hadrian returned to Rome and launched a public-relations offensive. Crowd-pleasing measures including a tax rebate, generous handouts both for plebeians and cash-strapped senators, and the establishment of charitable foundations to provide food for children did much to restore goodwill towards him. Moreover, a lavish building programme which included the renovation of the Pantheon, promised to beautify the city. In 121, he left on a four-year inspection tour of his empire, the same year in which an exchange of letters too
k place between himself and Plotina, letters which were later copied out in marble facsimile and displayed for public viewing in Athens. They offer a rare and remarkable window into communications between Hadrian and his adoptive mother, as well as providing us with the closest approximation we have to a record of her own voice.
Their correspondence revolved around who should be chosen as the new head of the Epicurean school of philosophy in Athens. Taking the side of Popillius Theotimus, the acting head of the school, Plotina’s opening gambit petitioned Hadrian for a change in the current law which would extend eligibility for the post to non-Roman citizens, and would allow the school’s regulations pertaining to the succession to be written in Greek, instead of Latin.
How much I am interested in the School of Epicurus, you know very well, domine. Your help is needed in the matter of its succession; for in view of the ineligibility of all but Roman citizens as successors, the range of choice is narrow. I ask therefore in the name of Popillius Theotimus, the present successor at Athens, to allow him to write in Greek that part of his disposition which deals with regulating the succession and grant him the power of filling his place by a successor of peregrine status, should personal considerations make it advisable; and let the future successors of the School of Epicurus henceforth enjoy the same right as you grant to Theotimus; all the more since the practice is that each time the testator has made a mistake in the choice of his successor, the disciples of the above school after a general deliberation put in his place the best man, a result that will be more easily attained if he is selected from a larger group.27