Almost exactly 1,000 years later, on 25 June 1458, gravediggers were toiling on the Vatican hill in Rome at the chapel of St Petronilla – a female martyr said to have been converted to Christianity by St Peter during the first century and whose remains had been housed in this chapel, next door to the Church of St Peter’s, since the sixth century. They found a marble sarcophagus containing two silver-coated cypress caskets, one large, one small. Inside the two caskets, the bodies of an adult and a child were found. Gold cloth, weighing a total of 16 pounds (7.25 kg) shrouded the pair. Otherwise, nothing to denote their identity was preserved, save an inscribed cross.
The mistaken assumption at the time was that the bodies were of Constantine and one of his sons. This was despite there being nothing even to indicate whether the individuals found in this instance were male or female, and historical tradition having long since established Constantine’s burial in Constantinople. But there was another reason to be excited by the gravediggers’ discovery. For before its redesignation as the resting place for the remains of the saint, the chapel of St Petronilla was formerly the imperial mausoleum of Honorius. During the sixteenth century, when the building was knocked down to make room for the reconstruction of St Peter’s, more sarcophagi were discovered in the foundations, including, on 3 February 1544, that of Honorius’s wife Maria – daughter of Serena and Stilicho – whose marble coffin was filled with almost 200 precious objects, including gold, agate and crystal vessels, and precious jewellery including an emerald engraved with a bust of the empress’s husband. A pendant inscribed with a cross-shaped inscription listing the names of Honorius, Maria, Stilicho, Serena, Thermantia and Eucherius – all that remains now of the treasure – assisted with the identification of the casket’s occupant. But whose were the bodies found by the gravediggers?
The clue lies in the smaller of the two caskets. Only one child is known from our literary sources to have been buried in the mausoleum – Galla Placidia’s and Athaulf’s infant son Theodosius, whose reinterment here by his mother in a silver coffin is recorded and dated to the year 450. In spite of the sixteenth-century legend of the children playing in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia and setting fire to the woman’s corpse, the body lying next to little Theodosius in the mausoleum beneath St Peter’s – which has never since been excavated – must be that of Galla Placidia herself.95 It is both a thrilling and poignant realisation. For all the elusiveness of their characters, the gloss and gossip of their public personae, Galla Placidia and the entire female imperial cohort were flesh-and-blood women who once lived, breathed and felt. A discovery such as the one below St Peter’s can only make us feel the loss of their voices from history all the more keenly.
Epilogue
Galla Placidia and Pulcheria were the last women to make a significant impact on the annals of Roman history before the respective murders of Aetius and Placidia’s son Valentinian III, in 454 and 455, precipitated the spasmodic breakup of the western empire. Under pressure from barbarian groups such as the Vandals, the Franks and the reinvigorated Goths, emperor after emperor was sworn in at Ravenna, and then almost immediately eliminated, until the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed and replaced in 476 by the German Odoacer, son of one of Attila’s followers. In the interim, women continued to be deployed as marital bargaining chips, lending a seal of legitimacy to the ambitions of the western empire’s new political order. Valentinian III’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, and daughters, Eudocia and Placidia – the daughter-in-law and granddaughters of Galla Placidia – were given a taste of their immediate forebear’s fate when they were abducted from Rome in 455 by Geiseric, leader of the Vandals, after he had subjected the city to its second sack in recent memory. On reaching their destination of Carthage, the Vandals’ stronghold on the North African coast, Eudocia was married off to Geiseric’s son Huneric, to whom she bore a son who would later become king of the Vandals. Licinia Eudoxia’s and the young Placidia’s release was eventually negotiated by eastern emperor Leo I in 462, and through the children of Placidia, who married Olybrius, the very short-lived western emperor of 472, the blood of Galla Placidia continued to flow through the veins of the nobility in the eastern empire.1
For the Roman Empire was not quite dead. The east survived the breakup of its western wing, and lived on under the banner of the Byzantine Empire, the history of which is littered with the colourful stories of empresses such as Theodora – the former circus-entertainer who became the wife of sixth-century emperor Justinian; her niece Sophia, who was said to have taken over the reins of empire when her husband Justin II went insane during the 570s; and Irene, who ruled on behalf of her son Constantine VI in the eighth century. All of them in turn became pathfinders for the medieval queens of Europe. And for the Byzantine empresses themselves, there was no uncertainty about whom they were expected to look to in history for inspiration. Statues of Constantine’s mother Helena continued to outnumber those of all other women honoured throughout Constantinople. A survey taken of the city’s antiquities in the eighth century tells us that of the twenty-eight imperial statues identified throughout Constantinople at that time, Pulcheria, Eudoxia, even Constantine’s disgraced wife Fausta were all accounted for, immortalised with two or three images apiece. But no fewer than six of the statues – almost a quarter, in other words – were of the first Christian Augusta.2
Not surprisingly, the names of Livia, Messalina, Agrippina and Julia appeared nowhere in the document. To all intents and purposes, the wives and women who had established the behavioural blueprint for Rome’s first ladies almost 500 years earlier were little more than a distant memory now – the Roman buildings to which they had once lent their patronage stripped or broken up to provide construction material for the Christian empire; many of their dedicated statues recycled and remodelled to assume the facial features of new female icons; a large proportion of the literary works responsible for the preservation of their names facing the threat of extinction, thanks to the heavily biased allocation of copying resources to the great wave of biblical and liturgical literature produced during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It would be many centuries, in fact, before the attention of authors or artists returned to the women of the early Roman Empire, and then, as we have seen, almost invariably with hostile intent in mind.
The ghosts of these women nevertheless loomed large over the political landscape out of which the empresses and queens of early medieval and modern Europe were born. Though anxieties about the power of women to corrupt the political process had existed long before the arrival of Livia on the Palatine, those concerns had crystallised around her and her successors, and in turn became integral to the moral criteria by which female sovereigns and consorts would be judged for generations to come.
It is a legacy that we live with today. Never before have the wives of prime ministerial and presidential candidates been subject to so much public scrutiny – fêted and mocked for their fashion choices, criticised for their political pronouncements, and called upon to give speeches and interviews promoting their spouses as caring family men. All the while, back-room spin doctors scrutinise their personal and professional backgrounds, looking for weaknesses to exploit. In March 2009, a frenzied media reaction greeted the arrival of the wives of world heads of state attending the G20 conference in London – resulting in more attention being paid to them than the economic agenda of the meeting. In today’s personality-driven political culture, no politician’s wife – or indeed, in certain cases, husband – can expect to escape such scrutiny altogether. Some will embrace it – a few may even prove guilty of taking advantage of their proximity to the political process. Others will hide from it, yet reluctantly allow themselves to be pushed into the spotlight if it will help their partner’s personal approval ratings. The question of what the proper role of a politician’s spouse or family members should be in his or her campaign and administration is one that elicits many different responses. And in that respect, the ‘first ladies’
of the Roman Empire still speak powerfully to us today.
1. Livia supervising the making of clothes for her family, in a drawing by the French artist André Castaigne. Wool-working was the archetypal pastime of the Roman matron.
2. The actress Siân Phillips gives a famously malevolent performance in the role of Livia, in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius.
3. The lush gardenscapes from the summer dining room of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta are among the most magnificent Roman paintings ever recovered.
4. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, detail from Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus (1819). Octavia swoons at hearing the name of her son Marcellus, watched by Livia, who was suspected of involvement in the young man’s death.
5. This portrait bust of Octavia was found at Velletri, just south-east of Rome, her family’s home town. It has strong facial similarities to portraits of her brother. Like Livia, Octavia wears her hair in a nodus style.
6. Mark Antony (right) courted controversy by featuring not just his own profile but that of his lover Cleopatra on coins issued by eastern Roman mints under his control.
7. The miniature image of Augustus’s daughter Julia on the reverse of this issue of 13–12 BC is flanked by the heads of her two infant boys, Gaius and Lucius.
8. This marble bust of Antonia Minor is known as the ‘Wilton House Antonia’, named after the residence of its one-time owner, the eighth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery.
9. The American painter Benjamin West’s canvas Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus was unveiled in 1768, and earned him the patronage of King George III.
10. In Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma, a young boy at the cinema pictures the local pharmacist’s wife, described as ‘worse than Messalina’, greeting customers queuing for sex outside her car, and then gyrating on top of the vehicle in Roman costume.
11. By using a line drawing of a Roman bust thought to depict Messalina as the title-page illustration for their landmark publication on female criminology, La Donna Delinquente (1893), Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero implied that one could read the empress’s propensity for misdemeanour on her face.
12. The Gemma Claudia, possibly a wedding present to Claudius and Agrippina Minor. The jugate heads of Claudius and Agrippina Minor (left) are shown facing the bride’s popular parents, the deceased Germanicus and Agrippina Maior.
13. This relief of Agrippina Minor crowning her son Nero was discovered in 1979 at Aphrodisias, in Roman Asia Minor. She carries a cornucopia of fruit in her left arm, thus associating her with Demeter, Greek patron goddess of the harvest.
14. A story that Nero had his mother Agrippina’s belly cut open after her death, so that he could see where he had come from, gained popularity in the medieval period. This illumination is from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men) by Giovanni Boccaccio.
15. A second-century terracotta tomb relief from Ostia showing a Roman midwife preparing to deliver a baby while another woman stands behind the birthing chair, supporting the labouring mother. Such chairs had crescent-shaped holes in the seat through which the baby could be received.
16. A jointed ivory doll found in the grave of a girl named Crepereia Tryphaena, who lived in the second century. Notice the adult proportions of the doll, with its wide child-bearing hips, and the hair styled in a fashion made popular by imperial women of the time, such as Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina.
17. Roman necklace with amethyst, garnet and topaz elements, dating to the second or third century. The question of how much jewellery a woman should wear was a fraught subject in the Roman imagination. Too much could imply a frivolous and greedy nature, too little could reflect poorly on her husband or father’s status.
18. This painted mummy-portrait of a richly jewelled woman from the Fayum district in Egypt makes a colourful contrast to official portraits of imperial women.
19. An ivory comb from a woman’s grave dating to the third or fourth century. It appears to be engraved with the woman’s name, Modestina. Many such items from Roman women’s dressing tables have been recovered, including scent bottles, make-up boxes and even a calamistrum (curling iron).
20. A portrait bust of Livia, with her hair fashioned in the austere nodus style commonly worn by Roman matrons of the first century BC.
21. The luxurious arrangement of precisely drilled waves and curls sported by Agrippina Maior formed a stark contrast to the rigidly plain nodus worn by her predecessors.
22. This portrait, commonly thought to be of Domitia, shows off to excellent effect the flamboyant style of hairdressing that became popular under the Flavians, during the second half of the first century.
23. The stiff, rigid coiffure of Trajan’s wife Plotina does not seem to have set a fashion among women of the second century.
24. The plaited bun hairstyle of this woman, thought to be Julia Mamaea, was a precursor of similar styles worn by women in the later third and fourth centuries.
25. Howard Fast’s novel Agrippa’s Daughter (1964) casts Berenice as a plucky – and beautiful – flame-haired champion of her people.
26. This image from the Vatican Museums of second-century emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife Annia Galeria Faustina, being borne upwards to the heavens in conjugal unity, represented the first joint imperial apotheosis portrayed in Roman art.
27. The Berlin tondo of Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna and their two sons, Caracalla and Geta, is the only painted portrait of an imperial family to survive from antiquity. The obliteration of Geta’s face was executed on the orders of his brother.
28. In Paolo Veronese’s The Dream of St Helena (c. 1570), two angels carrying the True Cross appear to Constantine’s mother as she sleeps, inspiring her to seek out its hiding place.
29. The moment of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, on which Jesus was crucified. She is accompanied by a female attendant to her left, and Judas Cyriacus to her right. The Judas Cyriacus version of the Cross’s discovery was immensely popular in the Middle Ages.
30. The vast porphyry sarcophagus of Helena, mother of Constantine. It was originally placed in a mausoleum near her estate in Rome, but was removed in the twelfth century to serve as a tomb for Pope Anastasius IV. Its militaristic decoration scheme suggests it may originally have been intended for a male member of Constantine’s family.
31. The Vandal-born general Stilicho, with his wife Serena and their son Eucherius.
32. Pulcheria was a prominent figure at her brother Theodosius II’s court in Constantinople. Coins depict her with the elaborately jewelled coiffure typical of imperial female portraits of the fifth century; on the reverse, an image of the goddess Victory painting the Christian chi-rho symbol onto a shield.
33. The empress Galla Placidia, caught with her children, Honoria and Valentinian III, in a storm that threatened to capsize their boat, utters her prayer to St John the Evangelist.
34. Though Galla Placidia’s remains are almost certainly entombed in the imperial mausoleum beneath St Peter’s in Rome, her body was once thought to lie in a sarcophagus in the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. The building is famous for its exquisite blue mosaic interior, rich in Christian symbolism.
Notes
Introduction: I, Claudia …
1 Plutarch, Caesar 10.8. Mrs Landingham, secretary and doorkeeper to the president, utters this line in the episode ‘18th and Potomac’, series 2 of The West Wing.
2 On the way in which we read portraits of emperors, see Vout (2009), 262. This bust of Faustina Minor is a copy of an original in the Vatican, Braccio Nuovo, 2195. Museum of Classical Archaeology, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge: no. 601.
3 On the writing of I, Claudius, see Spivey (1999), vii, and Seymour-Smith (1995), 227–33. On the reception of the television drama, see Joshel (2001), passim, and 159, n. 35 on the portrayal of Livia in particular. In both the book and televi
sion version, Nero’s mother is actually called Agrippinilla, to distinguish her from her mother Agrippina Maior.
4 Jonathan Stamp, the creative director of Rome, is on record as stating that the Republican Roman matron Clodia Metelli was actually the inspiration for Atia, but the legacy of I, Claudius seems to be clearly apparent in her portrayal: see also Ragalie (2007), 5–7. On Graves’s acknowledged debt to ancient historians, see Spivey (1999), ix.
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