Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  What did he see, the visitor to the atrium of this Roman townhouse on a January day in 58 BC? He glimpsed the populous rollcall of honour of one of Rome’s greatest families. A fire had been lit – for today a child was born. Slaves would tend the fire for eight days, until the child received its names in a ceremony of purification known as the dies lustricus. For eight days the flames of the symbolic fire would lick reflections across the waxy contours of the ancestor masks so proudly displayed in their wooden cases. In vain the armaria sought to shield their splendid contents from the heat of the day and the fire’s dark smoke. The ancestor masks in question represented the family immortalized by Livy as ‘superbissima’, ‘excessively haughty’, a family almost as old as Rome itself and, like Rome, by turns savage and cruel, distinguished and beneficent: the family of the Claudii.

  Its newest member would never be commemorated by a waxen image. She was a girl. Instead, within a century, her cult would be worshipped across the breadth of the Mediterranean world and beyond; her features chiselled from marble and basalt in temples remote from Rome; her name invoked in marriage ceremonies and written histories and inscribed on provincial coinage alongside the legend ‘Mother of the World’ her likeness affiliated to personifications of an empire’s chosen virtues. At the dies lustricus she received from her family two names: Livia Drusilla. For much of her life – and by history – she would be known by the former.

  The name of Livia has survived through two millennia, even into generations unfamiliar with ancient history and Rome’s written sources. It resonates beyond the confines of any armarium or noble atrium, bolder but less easily read than the soft translucency of a portrait carved from wax. It is spiced with accretions of legend and malice…sharp-tasting…contentious…perhaps even dangerous. Its associations embrace good and bad: synonymous with lust for power or the exemplary virtue Romans prized in their women. Livia is a villain; Livia is a victim.

  Ancient historians set no store by childhood. Even the contemporary biographies of great men divulge few details of their subjects’ earliest years. Since the ancients believed that character was static – it emerged fully formed and neither developed nor altered over time – they had recourse only to their subjects’ active years. Childhood simply reflected in a distant, smaller mirror adult truths, as when Suetonius tells us of the Emperor Tiberius, ‘His cruel and cold-blooded character was not completely hidden even in his boyhood.’3

  The whole picture as it appeared to ancient historians is to modern eyes frustratingly incomplete, little more than the terse statements of public office contained in the tituli of the aristocratic atrium. How much less, then, do we know of the lives of Roman women. They were excluded by Rome’s constitution from holding public office and by extension – as well as by custom – from the ranks of the ancestor masks. Restrictions on their public role inevitably limited what writers could know about them.4 As the commentator Asconius indicated as early as the first century, it was often impossible simply to identify, let alone elaborate, the wives of even the most prominent men. Across the gulf of two millennia, Roman women’s early lives have mostly disappeared from view. Livia’s is no exception.

  Neither the time nor the place of Livia’s birth is known to us. Since no other city of the Roman empire afterwards claimed her as its daughter, it seems safe, in the absence of contradictory information, to assume that she was born in Rome. Modern opinion fixes that event in the year 58 BC, though the ancient sources also offer the previous year, 59, as a possibility. Although the Roman calendar differed significantly from our own, the date 30 January can be stated with reasonable certainty.

  The atrium was a place of business, a room of passage and of display, the ‘great grand hall’ that Vitruvius insisted upon for ‘gentlemen who must perform their duties to the citizenry by holding offices and magistracies’.5 Here the citizenry and a senator’s clients – those to whom, as patron, he owed a moral and legal obligation – came to call, to petition or entreat in a morning ritual called the salutatio. Aristocratic Roman townhouses of the Republic, unassuming in appearance, lined the city’s streets and thoroughfares, and opened directly upon the public way. Only one door admitted entrance from the outside, open throughout the hours of daylight. Inside, at the end of a passage, lay the atrium, flooded with light on account of its open roof and lined with ancestor masks, labelled in their boxes like latter-day portraits or the stuffed natural-history specimens of country-house corridors. Painted family trees, also displayed on the walls of the atrium, made clear the relationships of those eyeless forebears. Somewhere near at hand stood a mighty chest, bound with metal and apparently immoveable. The arca contained family papers, some no doubt relating to the faces in the cupboards. It may also have symbolized, and indeed contained, the family’s riches. An altar served to honour the lares, the spirits of dead ancestors which, like the imagines, benignly looked down on the household.

  The nature of the visitor’s business mattered little. He could not doubt where he stood, nor the source of authority of those he visited. At a glance he absorbed twin concerns of Rome’s governing elite: family pride and a microscopic view of Roman history seen through the prism of family greatness. Under the Roman Republic – an oligarchy of office-holding aristocratic families – these galleries of pallid likenesses perpetuated the human scale of politics. They provided too the backdrop of aristocratic childhood.

  Beyond the atrium unfolded more private regions of the house, accessible to intimates: friends and family, favoured clients and colleagues. The master of the house conducted public business in the atrium or the adjoining tablinum, a shop window of a room displaying records of official transactions.6 Here clients requested favours or payment in return for votes – or, like one disaffected poet, presented themselves in their smartest clothes to bolster the master’s prestige: ‘You promise me three denarii and tell me to be on duty in your atria, dressed up in my toga. Then I’m supposed to stick by your side…’7 Private dealings were reserved for the cubiculum, which combined the functions of bedroom and study. It lay beyond the tablinum, on the other side of the peristyle. Privacy meant remoteness from the street – from the clamorous, odoriferous tumult of Rome that lapped about the ever-open doors of the grandest houses.

  There could be no work on a day like this. Outside, Rome the colossus pursued an unceasing roundelay. The streets rang with innumerable noises: the continuous clatter of building work and that seething, vociferous mass that later drove Martial the epigrammatist to the country – in times of plenty, schoolmasters, bakers, coppersmiths and gold beaters, exchange clerks, soldiers and sailors with bandaged bodies, begging Jews and bleary-eyed matchsellers, all at loose in the crowded city.8 In times of famine, intermittent through the years of Livia’s childhood, the baying of crowds bent on slaughter, arson and mischief jack-knifed through busy streets.9 Inside, a semblance of calm prevailed. We do not know the whereabouts of Livia’s father at the time of her birth. A supporter of Rome’s new governing trio of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus – the First ‘Triumvirate’ – he may have been sent in 59 BC on a fundraising journey to Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Had he returned by the end of January of the following year, he would have found himself at home, in a room near to that in which his wife was confined, awaiting the birth of their child.

  His was not a lonely vigil. At the onset of labour, slaves carried messages to relatives and political associates. Their presence alongside Livia’s father fulfilled a traditional requirement that senatorial births be witnessed10 – though from their non-vantage point in a neighbouring room, none of the watchers witnessed anything but the prospective father’s nerves. Five years before the birth of Livia, Suetonius records that Gaius Octavius, the father of Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus and Livia’s second husband, arrived late for the Senate’s debate on the Catiline Conspiracy. The confinement of his wife Atia had detained him.11 Since Octavius felt able to miss so critical a debate, at a moment when not only R
ome but a number of Italian towns were threatened with armed insurrection, it is safe to assume that childbed attendance by fathers was common practice, at least among Rome’s senatorial class.

  A father’s place, however, was not in the labour room itself. There, the expectant mother toiled in a women’s world, attended by slaves, her midwife and often her mother and female relatives. If she was a woman of means, as Livia’s mother was, the slaves who ministered to her would have belonged to her personally, not part of the joint marital property, just as her husband owned outright his valet and secretaries. Their faces at least would have been familiar to their mistress. In anticipation of a happy outcome, it is likely that a wet nurse was also to hand.

  The newborn baby was placed on the ground, ideally in a beam of sunlight. Romans embraced ritual and superstition: they welcomed natural signs which could be interpreted as good omens. Suetonius records a birth in AD 37 that occurred at dawn. ‘The sun was rising and his earliest rays touched the newly born boy almost before he could be laid on the ground, as the custom was.’12 This crowning by nature proved an accurate foreshadowing. The boychild was Nero, who afterwards, by a roundabout route, inherited Rome’s imperial throne.

  Admitted at last to the birthing chamber, the father lifted up his newest infant. Symbolically he raised the child – an acknowledgement of paternity and a statement of intent: the child would be allowed to live. For Roman fathers who were the senior living male of their family possessed by ancient acquiescence a power of life and death. That ability, sanctioned by society, was to decide whether a baby should be tended and cared for or exposed at birth, abandoned to certain starvation. Livia’s father chose life. Among those who made a different decision for the offspring of their family were the Emperors Augustus and Claudius.

  It was cause for moderate rejoicing. In Roman society a daughter could not bestow on her family the prestige a son might bring – even if she became a Vestal Virgin and enjoyed, in addition to a blameless reputation, the highest legal protection of the Roman state, that of sacrosanctity. But daughters had their uses politically, through the agency of marriage. Roman history abounds with fathers and brothers who exploited the marital careers of their daughters and sisters to advance, or even revive, family influence.13 Daughters as well as sons inherited the right to own and display ancestor masks. Into the atria of other powerful, noble houses Roman daughters carried the symbols of their forefathers’ greatness. It was part of belonging to the special club that was Rome’s governing elite. In the century before the birth of Christ, the last of the Roman Republic, blood and ink would be spilled to ensure that club’s survival. The sacrificial victims in this instance were fellow Romans.

  More precarious in January 58 was the survival of the infant Livia Drusilla. Mortality rates in ancient Rome were alarmingly high. One in three babies died before the end of their first year,14 while half of all Roman children failed to reach their fifth birthday.15 Overcrowding and the waves of visitors who flocked to Rome as the centre of a far-flung trading network led to frequent epidemics in the capital. August was the cruellest month, followed by September, weeks of searing heat and flourishing ailments. Aqueducts carried fresh water to parts of the city but standards of sanitation were low. The living conditions of the rich ought to have mitigated these endemic scourges: cooking and bathing were separate in the houses of Rome’s first citizens, which also included private lavatories. Despite this, ignorance of the role of human waste in the spread of disease remained widespread. Food poisoning, too, regularly exacted its tariff.16 The case of Cornelia, celebrated mother of the Gracchi brothers in the second century BC, illustrates the fragility of infant life in Rome: of Cornelia’s twelve children, only three survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was simply a fact of life. It is this which provides the context for an otherwise brutal-sounding letter by Seneca. The philosopher counsels a father to grieve moderately at the death of his young son. The boy, Seneca indicates, was too small to be of any social importance; his loss is less significant than would be that of a friend.17 Possibly Seneca’s view of small boys was shaped by his experience as boyhood tutor to the Emperor Nero.

  For the moment, all was happiness, signalled by the lighting of the symbolic fire in the atrium. Later, Livia’s ‘witnesses’ would light similar fires on the altars of their own household gods. As soon as news of the birth was widely known, other guests arrived, their purpose curiosity and congratulation. In his miscellany of excerpts, Athenian Nights, the Latin author Aulus Gellius recorded one such visit. Friends embraced the new father, asking him for details of his wife’s labour and its outcome. ‘It had been protracted, and the newly delivered young mother was asleep, so they could not see her. Her mother was also present and clearly in charge of the practicalities, for she had already decided to engage wet nurses to spare her weakened daughter the strain of breast-feeding.’18

  Livia’s mother, too, had recourse to wet nurses. By the last years of the Republic the practice was virtually universal among upper-class Roman mothers. The written sources are vocal in their disapproval. Aulus’s hero Favorinus replies to the new grandmother’s assertion of her daughter’s exhaustion and unfitness for the task, ‘Dear lady, I beg you, let her be more than half a mother to her son.’ At length he outlines the philosophical arguments in favour of mothers feeding their children,19 including the striking suggestion that a nurse’s milk contains the equivalent of moral ectoplasm, transmitting her moral character to the child she suckles.20 Other writers dwell on those exemplary women, like Licinia, the wife of Cato the Elder, who bucked the trend and suckled their children themselves. But the sources were written by men. Like the ancestor masks in their wooden cupboards, they embodied an outlook shaped by the certainty of Rome as a man’s world.

  We do not know at what stage Livia Drusilla of the Claudii absorbed this truism. Her future career would show that she had done so and done so well. But the writers were seldom satisfied. It is a feature of much of Livia’s historiography, though not to the same extent of her life, that she consistently inspired in male commentators ambivalence or worse, betrayed in sinister insinuations and dark rumours reproduced with relish. Over time, the grounds of that ambivalence would be made clear. On 30 January, 58 BC she was simply a baby.

  Chapter 2

  In the beginning…were the Claudii

  In ancient Rome there were powerful reasons for marriage aside from love. Chief among them were politics and money. Was it politics, money or the quest for a wife which in 60 or 59 BC took Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, future father of Livia, to the Campanian town of Fundi?

  Inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea, on the Via Appia, the principal route from Rome to Italy’s heel, the ancient Volscian town of Fundi was commended by Livy for the ‘Roman sentiments’ it had demonstrated as early as 330 BC, and would later be colonized by veteran soldiers of the Emperor Augustus.1 The town lay alongside marshy vineyards, the Ager Caecubus, which Pliny remembered for the rich, full flavour of their wine.2 Since Fundi’s only recorded economic role was shipment of this Caecuban wine, it is unlikely that Marcus was drawn there by financial affairs. Nor did Fundi possess, or aspire to, political significance or influence. How, then, did Marcus find himself in Fundi, agreeable home town of Alfidia, his future wife and afterwards Livia’s mother?

  It is possible that Marcus did not visit Fundi at all. Instead, Marcus Alfidius, Alfidia’s father, a man with an eye to a prize, may have chosen to broadcast his daughter’s charms in Rome. Indolent patrician youths could not be expected to travel in pursuit of a partner so far from the capital as Fundi, a journey of more than fifty miles. Yet for the socially or politically ambitious parent, a Roman bridegroom offered richer pickings than any home-grown suitor. Naturally the rich made demands of their own, namely further riches in the form of a substantial dowry, but this Marcus Alfidius was both willing and able to satisfy. There is also the possibility that Livia’s father discovered Fundi while staying close by. Today remains of ancient vil
las litter the vicinity. They are Roman country escapes rather than principal dwelling places, close to the seaside with tranquil lakes and mountains nearby, a retreat for the urban rich.

  For Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus was surely rich. He found himself the happy possessor of a double inheritance. In addition to the wealth of his biological parents, of whom we know nothing save that they were Claudians, Marcus benefited from a second stroke of notable good fortune. He was the adopted son of a man whom the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would afterwards describe as the richest man in Rome:3 Marcus Livius Drusus, senator and tribune. The son of a tribune of the same name, Drusus had exploited his considerable wealth – and the freedom from factional allegiance it granted him – to propose swingeing legislative reform, notably the extension of Roman citizenship into the regions of Italy. Inevitably his plans aroused unease among Rome’s conservative governing body, the Senate. In 91 BC, in the atrium of his house on the Palatine, Drusus was fatally stabbed. The murder weapon was a suitably lethal-sounding leather worker’s knife.4

  Drusus’s assassination has one happy outcome for the modern reader. It offers us a definite pointer to Livia’s father’s age. Adoption was widespread in Roman life. Unlike modern adoption, it did not arise from the unwillingness or inability of a child’s biological parents to take care of it; nor did it imply that the child’s parents had died or divorced. Romans were frequently adopted as adults, even, as would be the case with Livia, in extreme old age. The process was a means of strengthening ties between families and clans – and calls of affection reverberated less insistently than the claims of politics and economics. Marcus may have been adopted in Drusus’s will. The alternative and more likely course – one which would explain his use of the name Marcus, which was not typical of patrician Claudians – was that Drusus adopted his ‘son’ during the boy’s lifetime. This suggests that Marcus was born not later than around 93 BC, placing him in his mid-thirties or upwards at the time of Livia’s birth. Such a relatively advanced age for a Roman noble to become a father might in some instances indicate that the bridegroom had been married before: in Marcus’s case, corroborative evidence is lacking. We can conclude with greater certainty that there was a marked difference in age between Marcus and his wife.