Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  In the event, Marcus Alfidius raised no objections to his daughter’s marriage on grounds of age. He is unlikely to have raised objections at all, but rather opted to play the role of chief advocate and presiding Cupid. Twice over, by birth and by adoption, Alfidia’s husband stood in the first rank of Rome’s great families. It was not a boast Alfidius or his daughter could match.

  Ancient Rome was quite clear about what constituted conferring a favour in marriage. If the alliance were one between wealth and birth, the concessions were made by the party of ancient lineage, that partner who furnished the atrium of the marital home with his or her entitlement of mask-filled armaria. The spouse who was simply wealthy occupied the junior position.

  Half a century before Livia’s birth, Julius Caesar’s aunt married a man who seven times held the consulship. Consuls were the Roman Republic’s highest-ranking executive officers, empowered for twelve-month terms to mastermind Rome’s principal civil and military programmes. Gaius Marius’s unprecedented achievement was to hold repeatedly a position which Roman law had previously forbidden to be held by the same individual twice in a decade. His achievement was doubly impressive. For Marius was the first member of his family to enter politics. This made him, in Roman terms, a novus homo or ‘new man’, and stacked the odds against him: the Roman constitution disdained outsiders. His ascent was copiously rewarded with power, influence and wealth. To this he added status in the form of his marriage to Julia.

  Julia, as her name suggests, was a member of the Julian clan, one of Rome’s oldest aristocratic families. It mattered little whether the Julians at that point retained their wealth or prominence. In marrying a man of obscure origin, it was Julia who bestowed the favour. Marius, endowing Julia with his sumptuous worldly goods – which included a house on the Sacra Via close to the Forum at the very heart of Rome – received the honour. At his aunt’s funeral, Julius Caesar expressed forcefully the way of the Roman world: ‘My Aunt Julia’s family is descended on her mother’s side from kings and on her father’s side from the immortal gods.’5 There was no room to argue. Nor would many in Rome have thought to do so.

  The Alfidii were not patrician. They were also, as we have seen, not Roman in origin. In 60 BC, when Marcus extended the benison of his gentle breeding and multiple armaria, no Alfidius had held the great offices of the Roman state. In Fundi the family were aristocrats, Alfidia’s father a town councillor. Such claims cut no mustard in Rome. There the Alfidii were so little known that subsequent generations confused them with the similarly named Aufidii, giving rise to speculation that Livia’s forebears had been senators, gastronomes and even peacock farmers. In Rome, Alfidia’s only consequence lay in her dowry.

  The Romans were pragmatic about money. Just as they considered a rich woman fortunate to marry a distinguished man, independent of his financial condition, so they applauded the nobleman’s good sense in choosing a rich wife. Her fortune, they saw, would enable him to pursue his birthright, the cursus honorum or ‘course of honours’, that sequence of public offices from which, under the Roman oligarchy, men of non-patrician background (Gaius Marius was an exception) were carefully excluded.6 The Romans did have a concept of mésalliance – a senator marrying a prostitute or freedwoman, for example – but Marcus’s marriage to Alfidia fell outside its bounds. By the end of the Republic, half a century of civil wars had left the ranks of the patricians too depleted to permit marriage exclusively between families of similar standing. Only three patrician families – the Metelli, the Ahenobarbi and the Caepiones – cocked a snook at changing mores and resisted marrying non-nobles.7 Added to this, under the Republic, Romans’ first concern was with paternal descent, making Alfidia largely insignificant in Livia’s make-up. When Mark Antony poured scorn on the humble origins of Octavian, Livia’s future husband, it was his father’s family who concerned him: ‘one great-grandfather who was a freedman and a rope-maker from the country round Thurii and another of African extraction who first sold scent and later bread at Aricia.’8 Antony ignored Octavian’s mother, Atia. Comfortably patrician, she was also, through her relationship to Julius Caesar, niece to a god.

  Although Livia and Mark Antony would occupy opposing sides in the battle for supremacy in Rome – a battle won as much with words as through armed combat – it is significant that, Alfidia’s municipal origins notwithstanding, Mark Antony did not disparage Livia’s ancestry. In Roman terms the background of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus and his daughter was unimpeachable.

  In the beginning, more or less, were the Claudii. Seven years after the expulsion of Rome’s seventh and last king, with the advent of the Roman Republic arrived in the city a Sabine leader described by Livy as ‘harsh by nature’. He was Attus or Attius Clausus, founding father of the Claudii. Clausus evidently combined harshness with determination: within a decade the immigrant from Regillum had been appointed consul. During the next four and three-quarter centuries – the lifespan of the Republic – Clausus’s family would attain twenty-seven further consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs and two ovations in Suetonius’s reckoning of their exceptional tally. It was an achievement none could match. The Claudii became one of only five families said to occupy a special, elevated subgroup of their own, the ‘maiores’ – along with the Aemilii, Cornelii, Fabii and Valerii. A Claudius was among the ten patricians or ‘Decemvirs’ who, in 451 BC, took the place of that year’s consuls, entrusted with the task of codifying Rome’s ancient laws. Livia’s family found themselves authors of Rome’s first written legal charter, the Twelve Tables.

  In the following century, the Claudii branded their physical imprint on Rome – and on the Italian mainland at the same time. Appius Claudius Caecus, censor, consul and dictator, provided Rome with her first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia. He also spearheaded construction of the road which bore his name, the Via Appia. That southerly thoroughfare connected Rome to Capua via Aricia and Fundi, slicing through the foul-smelling malarial swamps of the Pomptine Marshes whose night-croaking frogs were audible to Cicero and Horace.9 Among Appius’s children were a brace of sons: Publius Claudius Pulcher, Claudius ‘the Fair’, and Tiberius Claudius Nero, the surname, Nero Suetonius tells us, Sabine for ‘strong and energetic’.10 From them descended the family’s twin branches, the Claudii Pulchri and Claudii Nerones. Most historians accept Suetonius’s assertion that Livia’s paternal grandfather, Marcus’s biological father, was a Claudius Pulcher, either Gaius or Appius. Both held the consulship. In time Livia would marry a Neronian cousin and reunite in the blood of their children the twin threads of the earlier Appius’s legacy.

  It would be fanciful to expect that legacy to be one of virtue uncorrupted. As if the tag of excessive haughtiness were not enough, Livy went a step further and labelled the Claudii in addition ‘crudelissima’, ‘exceedingly cruel’. Suetonius, who prided himself on the rigour of his investigations into family history, consigned Livia’s family to posterity as ‘violent and arrogant’11 we do not know the extent to which he had Livia in mind. Stories of unedifying Claudian hauteur shadow the ancient sources. Through works by Livy, Suetonius, Cicero, Cassius Dio and even the sycophantic Valerius Maximus marches the parade of offenders: the Decemvir Appius Claudius, whose unrelenting lustful harassment of the youthful Verginia resulted in her father stabbing her to preserve her honour; Publius Claudius Pulcher, to whose contempt for the gods was attributed devastating naval defeat in the First Punic War, with loss of life and ships; Appius Claudius Pulcher, denied a military triumph only to stage it himself independently, taking with him as protection in his chariot his daughter Claudia, a sacrosanct Vestal Virgin; and Publius Clodius Pulcher, arch-enemy of Cicero, accused of incestuous relations on a grand scale.

  How far can we trust such accounts? With the exception of Cicero’s letters and speeches, most were written comfortably after the event. If we are deceived in them, what is their authors’ intent? Is their purpose to present an accurate portrait of a prominent family? Do t
hey deliberately denigrate the Claudian inheritance at a time when the Claudians best known to their readers were Livia, her son Tiberius or the three Julio-Claudian emperors who succeeded him? Such a purpose illuminates the reputation of later Claudians and cannot be discounted from our ultimate evaluation of their characters. Suetonius’s tag of violence and arrogance is one which would raise its head more than once in the lives of both Livia and her elder son.

  On 30 January 58 BC expectations for the infant Livia Drusilla were straightforward. If the gods spared her, she would grow up to become the wife and mother of upstanding Roman men devoted to the good of the state. No one present in Marcus’s house the day Alfidia gave birth anticipated Livia wielding the power of a decemvir or holding a naval or military command – and indeed she did none of these things. In her education there would be precepts from the past. She must learn from the women of her family. Through their ranks, too, flowed ebb tides of good and bad.

  At a point between high and low tide on an April day in 204 BC, the people of Rome gathered at the harbour of Ostia, west of the city. The Second Punic War against Carthage, referred to by Romans as the war against Hannibal, had already lasted fifteen years. On that April day, a metaphorical sun was shining. The Sibylline Books had advised the transfer to Rome of a black stone emblem of the goddess the Romans called Cybele, the ‘Great Mother’, a deified personification from ancient Phrygia of the Earth Mother. An oracle of the Books had promised that, close on the heels of the goddess, peace would come to Rome. Later, Roman authorities would regard Cybele’s cult with antipathy, wary of the frenzy of her worship: clashing cymbals, beating drums and howling eunuch priests, the Galli. In 204 BC the Senate requested the man considered Rome’s vir optimus (‘best man’), Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to greet the statue at the harbour-side. He was accompanied by a deputation of the city’s most virtuous matrons. Among them was a woman of the Claudii, Claudia Quinta. We do not know the grounds for her inclusion. Her beauty, Ovid recalled, was a match for her high birth.12 Her reputation, as Livy recorded, was doubtful.

  What happened next is uncertain, lost amid the romantic impulses of later chroniclers. The harbour at Ostia was prone to silting – today the town stands at a remove of several kilometres from the sea, cut off by centuries of sandbanks. The ship bearing the Great Mother ran aground on silt or sand. Every effort made to move her failed. Until Claudia Quinta stepped forward. ‘They say I am not chaste…If I am free of crime, give by thine act a proof of my innocence and, chaste as thou art, do thou yield to my chaste hands.’13 The ship proceeded on its course. The statue was borne triumphant back to Rome, passed along the line of matrons to the Temple of Victory on the Palatine. Claudia’s virtue, once questioned, was set in stone. Her own statue would shortly be erected in the temple porch, close to that of the Great Mother. As if to silence history’s doubters, the statue twice survived destruction by fire. Three years later, the Second Punic War ended in victory for Rome.

  The legend of Claudia Quinta proved long-lasting. A medieval woodcut depicts a wimpled Claudia accomplishing her feat of strength singlehanded, pulling the ship to shore with no more than a silken girdle. At the end of the fifteenth century the Sienese painter Neroccio de’ Landi chose Claudia Quinta as one of seven literary and biblical paragons for a domestic commission illustrating the nature of virtue.

  But if Claudia’s virtue was not forgotten, it suffered a temporary eclipse in the year of Marcus and Alfidia’s marriage.

  In 61 BC a woman of the Claudii became the mistress of an unmarried man six years her junior. Their affair lasted three years. It terminated acrimoniously in 59, when the woman took a new lover. He was younger still, twelve years younger than she was. He was also, unfortunately, a friend of the woman’s former lover. His name was Marcus Caelius Rufus, an ambitious aristocrat from Picenum. His sights were set not so much on his high-born mistress as a future senatorial career which he afterwards pursued with vigour. His friend’s ambitions were not political, although he too was of equestrian rank and, lovelorn, would serve on the staff of the governor of Bithynia. His name was Gaius Valerius Catullus. In a sequence of poems which continues to be read more than two thousand years later, Catullus charted the progress and collapse of his affair with his Claudian mistress. He called her Lesbia. She was almost certainly Clodia Metelli, a descendant of Appius Claudius and wife of Quintus Metellus Celer, praetor and Governor of Cisalpine Gaul. Thanks to Catullus she is, after Cleopatra, the most infamous love object of the ancient world.

  Clodia was one of six siblings. Each enjoyed a reputation for erratic behaviour and sexual unorthodoxy. In addition to her affair with Catullus, which began while her husband was alive and ended in the year of his death (this, some said, caused by poisoning at Clodia’s hands), Clodia was suspected of incest. Her sibling paramour was her youngest brother, that Publius Clodius Pulcher who, like Clodia herself, earned Cicero’s opprobrium. According to her brother-in-law Marcus Lucullus, Clodia shared her brother’s favours with both her sisters.

  Were their friends sympathetic to Marcus and Alfidia, as they waited to witness Livia’s birth in January 58? Seldom had the Claudian name been of greater prominence. Clodius, despite his aberrances, rode the crest of a wave. As tribune of the plebs, he was responsible for four bills passed in the month of Livia’s birth. One in particular earned him widespread popular support. It involved reorganization of the State-subsidized supply of grain throughout Italy: chief among its provisions was the award of a regular free dole of grain to citizens in Rome.14 By birth, of course, Clodius was disqualified from occupying the powerful position of tribune of the plebs. But in April 59 he had forsworn patrician status to be adopted by a plebeian and become himself of non-senatorial, plebeian rank.

  Vengeful and unforgiving, Cicero was poised to demolish for ever vestiges of Clodia’s reputation. Pungent rumours of her dire doings circulated throughout Livia’s infancy. Cicero’s chance came in April 56. His speech in defence of Caelius Rufus broadcast Clodia’s disgrace across Rome – and across the divide of the centuries to modern readers. There are powerful reasons for doubting that either sibling had enhanced the Claudian name.

  Happily, Marcus belonged by adoption to a different family. The Livii Drusi had achieved distinctions as great as the Claudii if fewer of them, in their case a total of eight consulships, two censorships, three triumphs and a dictatorship.15 Marcus’s adoptive father, Marcus Livius Drusus, had won popular acclaim for his proposal to extend Roman citizenship without forfeiting or denying his patrician rank. For his troubles he had been murdered. Kinship with a martyr to the cause of the common man would hinder neither Marcus nor his infant daughter.

  As he lay dying, Velleius Paterculus records, Marcus Livius Drusus gave voice to a characteristically Roman last utterance: ‘When will the State have another citizen like me?’16 Not, certainly, in the person of his granddaughter Livia. Throughout her long life Livia resisted martyrdom to any cause. Cautious of controversy, careful to circumvent censure, she bent her instincts on survival. Not for her Drusus’s contentious public utterances. Perhaps she drew inspiration from her namesake, her great-aunt Livia, wife of the consul Publius Rutilius Rufus. That Livia, Pliny tells us, survived to the remarkable age of ninety-seven.17

  Chapter 3

  ‘Innocent of guilt’

  Livia was just months old when traces of her inheritance were erased from the streets of Rome. This came about through a combination of gang violence, animosity between leading citizens and a voluntary exile.

  The house of Livia’s adoptive grandfather stood on the Clivus Victoriae on the northwest side of the Palatine Hill, Republican Rome’s favourite residential quarter. It had been built earlier the same century by an architect whose remit was clear. ‘If you have any kind of skill,’ Marcus Livius Drusus had instructed him, ‘you will build my house so that no matter what I’m doing, everyone can see it.’1 Grandiloquent as such a sentiment may have sounded, Drusus’s insistency on transpar
ency would cost him dear. Within years of its completion, as we have seen, the house became the site of his murder.

  It probably did not, however, immediately devolve upon his adopted son, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus. Rome had no principle of primogeniture. Even if Marcus were his ‘father’s’ foremost heir, he would have been legally prevented from receiving the latter’s fortune outright. Instead Drusus’s house was sold. Its site retained for the moment associations with its builder and, indirectly, with Marcus and his fledgling family.

  But it was not to last. In 62 BC, the house was sold again, on this occasion for the considerable sum of three and a half million sesterces.2 The vendor was Marcus Licinius Crassus, the purchaser Cicero. Whether either rebuilt Drusus’s house – a frequent undertaking among the contemporary Roman elite – we do not know.

  It was in the same year that Cicero had embarked on a collision course with Livia’s troublesome kinsman Publius Clodius Pulcher. He destroyed the latter’s alibi in a scandalous trial involving all-female religious rites and Clodius’s secret affair with Julius Caesar’s wife Pompeia. The ill feeling of that trial harrowed fertile ground which, as we know, six years later erupted into ugly bloom. Clodius and Cicero stood as prosecution and defence at the trial of Clodia’s former lover and Cicero’s erstwhile protégé Marcus Caelius Rufus. Cicero, on that occasion, emerged the victor. In the intervening years, however, Clodius had exploited his position as tribune of the plebs to make the waters of Rome as hot as possible for his opponent, and in the spring of 58 Cicero had departed the city for voluntary exile. His absence was of short duration – but long enough to enable a pro-Clodian rabble to raze his house, formerly the home of Livia’s grandfather, scatter his furniture and statues, and annexe areas of the site for projects of Clodius’s own, including, in Cassius Dio’s account, the dedication of a temple of Liberty.3