The First Ladies of Rome
Page 27
Hadrian’s affirmatory response was then reproduced in a brief subscript, and the inscription concluded with Plotina’s congratulatory letter, written in Greek, to the Epicureans: ‘Plotina Augusta to all the Friends, greeting. We have now what we were so eager to obtain.’28
In stark contrast to her passive anonymity in the literary record, this inscription from Athens recasts Plotina as a highly educated woman, active on behalf of causes close to her heart and with the kind of access to the emperor once enjoyed by Livia. Augustus’s letter declining the Samians’ request for independence a century earlier had publicly acknowledged Livia’s efforts on the islanders’ behalf, but this dedication at Athens is the only preserved example of such a petition which gives pride of place to an empress’s own letter on behalf of the applicants.29
Plotina’s role as patroness of a philosophical role is interesting, as a great deal of satire was composed during this period lampooning a certain breed of rich women who fancied themselves as intellectuals and hired philosophical gurus. One such piece described a venerable Stoic philosopher named Thesmopolis having to look after his mistress’s Maltese dog during a journey to her country villa, and suffering the indignity of having it lick his beard and wee on his cloak.30 Such satire would have carried no sting if it did not chime with recognisable currents of complaint about female behaviour at the time. Women’s burgeoning interest in philosophy, and Plotina’s own patronage of the subject, may in part have reflected second-century Roman society’s blossoming love affair with Greek culture, of which Hadrian himself had been a keen aficionado since childhood. Plotina was not the first imperial woman to have shown interest in the subject – Livia had been consoled by a philosopher named Areus after the death of her son Drusus – but she was the first to set herself up publicly as a champion of it, a guise in which she was later emulated to powerful effect by one of her successors.31
Age and social status were the measuring sticks by which philosophy seems to have been judged an acceptable subject for women to engage in. Women who read philosophy without censure tended to be wealthy widows. Widowhood granted breathing space to a lucky few Roman women, those who had produced the three children required by law to free themselves from male guardianship and had personal fortunes of their own to fall back on. Plotina’s own twilight years, which were more peaceful and prosperous than those enjoyed by virtually all her predecessors on the Palatine, placed her firmly in this relatively emancipated category. Bricks stamped with her name have been found scattered around Rome, proving that, like Domitia Longina, she owned factories from which she could enjoy an independent source of income in her old age, while coins demonstrate that Hadrian was meticulous about paying his adoptive mother due honours, depicting her under the new legend, ‘Plotina, Augusta of the Divine Trajan’.32
Plotina died six years into Hadrian’s reign, in 123 – her age and the manner of her death are unknown, but she must by now have been well past her fiftieth birthday. The emperor went into black mourning clothes for nine days and had the magnificent temple built for his predecessor Trajan rededicated to become the temple of Divine Trajan and Divine Plotina, in acknowledgement of her consecration as a goddess. Her ashes joined those of her husband in the base of the Column of Trajan nearby. Hadrian was later heard to pay the following tribute to her: ‘Though she asked much of me, she was never refused anything.’ This may not sound the most fulsome elegy, but according to Cassius Dio, Hadrian simply meant by this that ‘Her requests were of such a character that they neither burdened me or afforded me any justification for opposing them’.33
Plotina’s death was preceded by that of Salonia Matidia in 119 – again, the circumstances are unknown. Salonia’s eulogy was delivered by her son-in-law Hadrian, who also ordered her consecration and commissioned a vast Corinthian temple devoted solely to her in the prestigious locale of the Campus Martius near the Pantheon, making her the first deified woman to be honoured with her own temple inside the city limits of Rome.34 Hadrian’s motives for showering such honours on the woman who linked him through marriage to Trajan are not difficult to read. On the one hand, lavish funeral celebrations gave emperors a useful excuse to throw a public wake and court popularity with their subjects. Salonia Matidia’s consecration was observed on 23 December 119 with a handout of 2 pounds (0.9 kilogramme) of perfume and 50 pounds (22.6 kilogrammes) of incense to the local population and other reports suggest gladiatorial games were held too.35 But Hadrian was also savvy to the fact that by treating Salonia Matidia and Plotina with kid gloves, offering them the same public homage due to an emperor’s own blood relatives, he could engender an image of dynastic continuity within the new system of adoptive succession. Furthermore, by deifying them, he was ensuring that the Spaniards of the Trajanic-Hadrianic dynasty would be well represented in the corridors of heaven, an exercise in one-upmanship over the Julio-Claudian and Flavian clans.36
With Plotina and Salonia Matidia now gone, the latter’s daughters Matidia Minor and Sabina became the new senior women of Trajan’s family. Matidia Minor, who would outlive both her sister and her brother-in-law Hadrian, proved to be the dynasty’s very own maiden aunt, and, as will emerge, a valued and beloved member of the clan who succeeded her brother-in-law. No evidence survives that she ever married, which would make her an extremely curious female in pre-Christian Rome. She was also more than unusually wealthy by male or female standards, possessed of a staggering portfolio of real estate at locations in Italy, North Africa and Asia Minor, while money she and her mother gave to a foundation for imperial statues in the northern Italian city of Vicetia was still yielding funds for the city as late as 242. A prolific philanthropist, she spent millions of sesterces on community projects such as the foundation of a public library at Suessa Aurunca in Campania, the building of a road and the endowment of a charitable foundation for boys and girls.37
The legacy of her younger sister Sabina was a less happy one.
In the absence of a rich literary tradition, we have to sift through fragmentary epigraphic remains for most details of Sabina’s early life. From such piecemeal clues, we can deduce that she was the daughter of Salonia Matidia’s marriage to a senator named L. Vibius Sabinus, thus giving her the full name of Vibia Sabina, and that she probably married her cousin Hadrian at the typical age for an imperial bride of fourteen or fifteen, giving her a date of birth of around 86, and making her around thirty years old when she became empress.38 Described as ‘irritable’ and ‘ill-tempered’ in comments attributed to her husband, rumours of friction dogged the marriage between herself and Hadrian, to the point that one source claims Sabina took precautions not to become pregnant by her husband, a piece of gossip most likely invented to account for the couple’s childlessness.39
Unlike her aunt Plotina, no surviving documentation offers proof of Sabina exercising any influence over the emperor. Nor is there any substantial evidence of her lending her protection or patronage either to individuals or public buildings in the manner of many of her predecessors, although one inscription discovered in Trajan’s forum records that she oversaw the building of some kind of structure for the matrons of Rome, which one of her third-century successors, Julia Domna, later restored.40 A glance through Sabina’s financial affairs does at least provide a glimpse of a more enfranchised woman than her nondescript literary and artistic profile would suggest. Like her sister, she had inherited a great deal of family wealth. As well as a property in Rome, she continued the recent tradition of owning brickyards around the city, and kept a large retinue of freedmen. She is surely also the same Vibia Sabina who around the time of her marriage, is on record as having donated the huge sum of 100,000 sesterces, to a local charitable foundation, or alimentum, in Velleia.41
Much of Sabina’s time as empress was spent on the road, establishing a pattern that was continued by women in future administrations. Hadrian passed more than half of his twenty-one-year reign as emperor on foreign tours, a practice necessitated by the demands of polici
ng an increasingly restless empire. For the first of his long absences in 121, he headed for an inspection of his forces in the Rhineland and then made a rare appearance by a Roman emperor in the northern backwater province of Britain in 122, with Sabina in tow. There, he set to work building his famous Wall, which marked out the empire’s northern border in turf and stone.
The legacy of this visit to Britain was marred by reports of an embarrassing personal incident involving Sabina which led to the dismissal of two key aides. Few details of the episode are given, but it centred on an alleged indiscretion by the praetorian prefect Septicius Clarus and Suetonius Tranquillus – the very same Suetonius whose biographies of the Caesars give us so much of our portrait of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors, and who at this time worked as Hadrian’s private secretary. Both Septicius and Suetonius were apparently dismissed from their posts on the grounds of behaving in too informal a manner with the emperor’s wife, and only a sense of uxorial duty to his position stopped Hadrian from sending Sabina into exile. 42
Although the original source of this report is the heavily fictionalised Historia Augusta, this incident in Britain has inspired fevered speculation among modern historians, who have entered into the spirit by imagining that Septicius and Suetonius somehow forgot themselves with the empress at the equivalent of a ‘wild office party’. By contrast, other modern verdicts on Sabina describe her in more sombre tones, claiming that she had a ‘sour expression’, ‘grim hairdo’ and a ‘tight button of a mouth’ on the evidence of her sculptural appearance, though in actual fact, Sabina’s surviving portraits mimic the bland passivity of all her other female counterparts.43 A hairstyle was gradually evolved for her that broke with the fussy curls and rigid tiered beehives favoured by the Flavian and Trajanic ladies, and instead showed her with thick wavy hair brushed back from a centre parting and wrapped into a loose nest at the back of her head, a style inspired by the goddesses of Greek myth. The second century was a period in which, more than ever, there was a great premium placed on Greek culture within the Roman Empire, and the style of Sabina’s later portraits certainly chimed with these tastes.44 Hadrian himself was well known for being a passionate Graecophile, right down to the beard he sported in contrast to previous clean-shaven emperors.
On his return to the west, and after taking a three-year sabbatical at Rome in the mid-120s, Hadrian and his entourage resumed their hectic travelling schedule, and the years between 128 to 132 were spent zig-zagging between Africa, Greece, Syria and Judaea. There, the emperor’s provocative order to build a Temple to the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus on the sacred site of the Jewish temple destroyed by Titus and Vespasian, together with an attempt to refound Jerusalem as a new colony named after Hadrian’s family, elicited a bitter backlash from the Jewish population. In 130, the emperor headed for Egypt with a travelling entourage estimated to have included as many as 5,000 aides and hangers-on. Among the convoy was Sabina, the poet Julia Balbilla, and a beautiful young man named Antinous, who originally came from Bithynia, in north-western Turkey, and whom literary sources tell us was Hadrian’s lover.45
For a Roman emperor to have male as well as female sexual partners was not unheard of, nor did it automatically lead to his vilification. Roman sexual mores dictated that as long as the penetrated party in a sexual relationship was the man’s inferior in terms of age, gender or social rank, a man’s masculinity need not be compromised – although in the case of Caligula and Nero, their own lovers’ corrupting foreign origins and their shameless public vaunting of their passion, figured as proof of their own depravity.46 Hadrian’s and Antinous’s relationship divided opinion among writers of antiquity, some of whom portray Hadrian’s passion for the boy as too overt. But thanks to the startlingly large number of sculptures that survive of this beautiful Greek boy, images that inspired fevered adoration among art collectors of the eighteenth century, Antinous is fêted today as a gay icon. It is unquestionably his idolisation that has fuelled much of the modern backlash against Sabina as a sour termagant from whose reproaches Hadrian gratefully escaped into the arms of his golden-limbed boy-god.47 In counterpoint, Sabina’s travelling companion Julia Balbilla is nowadays sometimes cast as the empress’s Sapphic consolation prize, a piece of role play lent authenticity by the fact that Balbilla wrote in the same Greek dialect used by the famous poetess of Lesbos.48
Much of the year 130 was spent by the emperor’s travelling party based in Alexandria, venturing out for hunting excursions in the scorching desert, visits to the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and to pay homage before the tombs of the emperor’s heroes Pompey and Alexander the Great. Then a pleasure-seeking cruise up the River Nile one day ended in a tragedy worthy of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel when Antinous was mysteriously drowned – in circumstances said variously to be an accident, a suicide or a case of human sacrifice designed to assist in a spell to make Hadrian live longer.49 Hadrian’s devotion to Antinous’s memory became legendary. After his death, supposedly on the order of the emperor, the entire Roman world from coast to coast was flooded with images of this obscure boy from Bithynia while the foundation stone for a city called Antinoopolis was laid on 30 October at the edge of the Nile, next to where he met his fate. Temples heralded the creation of a new cult in his honour, a gesture that drew mockery from a few who pointed out that the emperor had not gone to so much trouble for his own sister when she died.50 Not long afterwards, the imperial party arrived at the Colossus of Memnon where the four poems composed by Balbilla preserve a record of their visit between 19 and 21 November.51
The presence of an otherwise unknown female poet laureate from Commagene (near the modern Turkish border with Syria) in the entourage of the empress of Rome is intriguing. Female poets had certainly been a fixture in Roman society since the days of the republic, though the only Latin poetry written by a woman that still survives came from the stilus of Sulpicia, an aristocratic contemporary of Augustus’s daughter Julia. Sulpicia’s elegiac compositions on her love affair with a man named Cerinthus were preserved among the writings of her uncle Messala’s protégé Tibullus.52 Love poetry was seen as a suspect occupation for a woman, however. It was presented as a mark against vilified republican matron Sempronia that she was a skilled versifier, and society ladies of the early empire who dabbled in the fashion for composing witty epigrams risked mockery from the satirists, who dubbed them ‘magpie poetesses’ and sneered at them for trying to compete with the great Sappho.53 Balbilla, the royally connected sister of a friend of Hadrian’s, was herself a disciple of Sappho, as shown by her choice of poetic metre. She would surely have come in for similar criticism. The forty-five poorly preserved lines that make up her poetic tribute to Sabina and Hadrian, all that remain of her oeuvre, have certainly garnered poor reviews, one modern critic dismissing them as ‘atrocious’.54 But they are nonetheless precious fragments of an all too rare category of evidence from antiquity – writing by a woman – of which the Colossus of Memnon is a surprisingly rich repository. Three more women, Damo, Dionysia and Caecilia Trebulla, also signed themselves the authors of lines engraved on the statue’s legs.55 Just beneath the last of Balbilla’s four offerings, a short postscript acknowledging the Colossus’s performance was even added by Sabina herself.56 In the silence left by the women of antiquity, such crackles from the past, when just for a moment a female voice can be faintly heard, cannot help but strike a chord of longing, particularly in the light of Sabina’s own murky and contradictory historical persona.
By May 134, Hadrian’s and Sabina’s travels ended with their arrival back in Italy, where an exhausted Hadrian now remained for the last three years of his life, dealing in absentia with a serious insurrection that had earlier broken out in Judaea under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba, during the suppression of which over half a million Jewish insurgents would be brutally slaughtered. From the tranquil vantage point of his magnificent imperial playground at Tivoli, Hadrian began to ponder the choice of who should succeed
him as emperor. His health was poor, and ongoing construction work on the mausoleum in which he would be buried overlooking the Tiber, could only remind him of his own mortality. Like the marriage of Plotina and Trajan, his union with Sabina had remained childless, so he could not deviate from the recent precedent of selecting an artificial ‘son and heir’ from outside his own family. In 136, he decided to plump for one of that year’s consuls, Aelius Caesar. But the death of Aelius two years later forced Hadrian to think again. Close to death himself, the emperor now offered to hand the baton to the well-regarded fifty-one-year-old ex-consul Aurelius Antoninus, on the condition that Antoninus agreed to adopt both his wife Annia Galeria Faustina’s nephew Marcus Annius Verus – a young favourite of Hadrian’s – and Aelius Caesar’s young son Lucius Ceionius Commodus as his reserve successors, a suggestion to which Antoninus in due course acquiesced.
Before Aelius Caesar’s death had upset Hadrian’s plans, Sabina herself died, close to her fiftieth birthday. Hadrian’s stone elegy for his wife, which visitors to Rome’s Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori will find embedded high in the wall of the main staircase, acted like a cool, silent reproof to the kind of lurid claims later made in the Historia Augusta that the emperor had poisoned his wife or even driven her to suicide.57 An exquisite, though now heavily restored, marble relief, its composition shows a recumbent Sabina suspended above the flames of her funeral pyre, her eyes tilted contemplatively into the distance as she is serenely transported on a diagonal flight path into the heavens, borne side-saddle on the back of a female messenger with eagle-wings, who brandishes a flaming torch like a broomstick. In the foreground, feet planted on terra firma, sits Hadrian who crooks his finger up towards the stars, as though pointing the way for his wife.58