Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  Chapter 14

  ‘A charming view with minimal expense’

  The old man of Corycia described by Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics as ‘happy as a king’ owns ‘a few poor acres/Of land once derelict, useless for arable,/No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines’.1 In this unpromising plot the old man lays out a miraculous kitchen garden. He does not neglect flowers, sowing ‘white lilies, verbena, small-seeded poppy’. He keeps bees. Poetically he is not restricted by the plot’s small compass or the factors underlying its unsuitability for cereal crops, grass or vines. He grows pine trees, lime trees and elms. Pears and black-thorn fruit for him. ‘His is the first rose of spring, the earliest apples of autumn’.2 Hyacinths brighten his winter. His few poor acres are a paradise, an idyllic enclosure of nature perfected as the ancient Persians understood the term, a precursor of Eden.

  Nature occupied Livia’s thoughts in the aftermath of Octavian’s defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. In September 31 BC, close to Octavian’s thirty-second birthday, Mark Antony surrendered to his fellow Triumvir. The occasion was a naval battle – at Actium on the coast of northwest Greece, a quiet pearl-fishing centre in the grip of tall mountains. Octavian’s fleet was commanded by Marcus Agrippa, the friend of his boyhood and foremost among his generals. It was Octavian, not Agrippa, who was the real victor, supreme at last. In its wake, his victory brought lasting peace to Rome.

  Mark Antony committed suicide. Cleopatra followed suit. In an interview with Octavian, she had struggled to save herself. The sources’ reports vary; so, too, do their writers’ interpretations. Possibly the vanquished queen girded herself for one final seduction of a ruler of Rome: first Caesar, then Mark Antony, but not, as it happened, Caesar’s heir, who resisted her practised charms. Depending on the source consulted, Cleopatra may have invoked Livia’s intervention on her behalf. Possibly she sought to placate Octavian with precious jewels from the royal treasury earmarked for Livia and Octavia. All in vain. She died, famously, from the poison of an asp. Hindsight, in the form of familiarity with the Book of Genesis, shapes our perception of that painful detail as akin to the enemy within another idyllic garden, itself a parallel of Virgil’s few poor acres.

  Livia was planning decorations at that villa near Veii which Suetonius describes as ‘hers’.3 Among the schemes she had in mind was a treatment as unprecedented as Octavian’s youthful ascent to power or that grant of sacrosanctity which gave Livia the freedom to administer her own estates without male guardianship. Her plans focused on a partly subterranean room usually considered to have functioned as a summer dining room or triclinium. It was housed in a classical pavilion close to the peristyle of the main villa complex. The long rectangular room was lit by high windows at either end of a barrel-vaulted roof. Cool in summer on account of its underground position, it would be decorated with a single, continuous mural in which spring, summer and autumn merged in a vision of natural bounty. Like Virgil’s lilies, verbena and poppies, everything in Livia’s summer dining room flowers and fruits together. It is an impossible, perfect moment in nature and, at the same time, with its serene palette of aquamarine and beryl, a direct refutation of Seneca’s later assertion that ‘the place where one lives…can contribute little towards tranquillity’.4 The effect of that blue-green stage-cloth, even today, after removal to a museum in the cacophonous centre of twenty-first-century Rome, is astonishing, impressive and undeniably tranquil.

  Livia had already espoused a hairstyle and a moral code inspired by opposition to Cleopatra. Now her vision of nature offered a further verdant contrast. In place of Cleopatra’s deadly serpent, Livia’s mural depicted nature at its most generous and life-giving. It was surely a metaphor for Octavian’s rule in Rome and perhaps, even at this stage, given Livia’s relative youth, a prayer that she too might bring forth fruit in the form of children.

  It was the work of an artist probably called Studius, like Octavian an innovator. We know almost nothing about Studius – even his name is disputed – beyond a passage in Pliny’s Natural History in which the author credits him with the invention of landscape painting in Rome.

  It was he who first instituted that most delightful technique of painting walls with representations of villas, porticoes and landscape gardens, woods, groves, hills, pools, channels, rivers, coastline – in fact, every sort of thing which one might want, and also various representations of people within them walking or sailing, or, back on land, arriving at villas on ass-back or in carriages, and also fishing, fowling or hunting or even harvesting the wine-grapes. There are also specimens among his pictures of notable villas which are accessible only through marshy ground, and of women who…are carried on the shoulders of men who totter along beneath the restless burdens which are being carried, and many other lively subjects of this sort indicative of a sharp wit. This artist also began the practice of painting representations of seaside towns on the walls of open galleries, thus producing a charming view with minimal expense.5

  The charming view in the case of Livia’s summer dining room at Prima Porta did not exercise Studius’s ‘sharp wit’. It falls into Pliny’s earlier category of ‘landscape gardens, woods, groves’. All four walls are decorated in identical fashion. Behind a low lattice cane fence in the foreground, an area of neatly tended grass is contained within a similarly low, decorative stone wall. At regular intervals this smooth sward is punctuated by tall trees, accommodated by recesses in the wall, and isolated specimens of low, shrubby plants. Beyond the wall arises a dense grove of further trees and plants, their details crisp against a shadowy backdrop of generalized foliage. Branches bend under the weight of fruit, stems arch with flowers. Everywhere birds perch and flutter, unable to believe their luck in finding themselves in this multi-season gastronomical extravaganza. Only the fence and the wall, and a single large, domed birdcage containing a captive nightingale, indicate a human presence, felt but not seen. The painting does not include figures. Nor does it incorporate the sort of architectural element more typical of Roman mural painting of gardens: columns and pilasters. We surmise that the foreground area is a garden on account of its neatness; there are no urns or fountains as we might expect. Real beauty is rooted not in the garden but in the borrowed landscape beyond. Expansive in its fecundity, it will surely overwhelm the thin green line of lawn. Birds dart, injecting a note of movement. The cerulean blue of the painted background has grown chalky and patchy over two thousand years, suggesting the clouds that certainly never marred this smiling sky.

  The effect must have been startling on Livia’s guests. The room was almost certainly restricted to seasonal use. Gentle breezes cool the villa’s hilltop site, but the Italian sun is pellucid to the point of harshness. Here, below a steep flight of steps, an oasis of tranquillity masquerades as nature. Such gardens may not have been unusual in the fertile valley of the Tiber, but none could manage to screen out the heat of the season, nor to induce quince trees to bear fruit while oleander and myrtle blossom. In her sculpted portraits after 35 BC, Livia combined native and classical elements. The nodus hairstyle formed one component of an idealized, ageless vision remote from the often harsh verism of Republican portraiture, more akin to an earlier style of Classical goddess portrait. In her country villa, Livia introduced a decorative scheme of a sort which Pliny states was new to Rome. To date, archaeological evidence indicates it had no exact parallels. But it is possible that such large-scale scenographic mural painting echoes scenographies of the Hellenistic period and depictions of those eastern pleasure gardens known as paradeisa. Like Livia’s statuary, her summer dining room is a characteristic example of the innovatory manner in which Octavian’s visual culture at this date combined moving forwards with looking backwards, radicalism with reassurance.

  We must reach our own conclusion on Pliny’s statement that Studius’s ‘charming views’ could be had for ‘minimal expense’. Vitruvius, in his De Architectura, provides instructions on the preparation of plastered and stuc
coed wall surfaces preliminary to fresco painting. He also offers information on the laborious and arcane processes employed in deriving colours, as well as the steps necessary to safeguard the results. These include rubbing passages of vermilion ‘with a hard brush charged with Punic wax melted and tempered with oil’.6 There is nothing half-hearted in Vitruvius’s directions. Undoubtedly Livia’s domestic commission was less extensive than schemes intended for public porticoes or colonnades, but the room is large and largely covered by Studius’s work. Studius was presumably assisted by a team of assistants, perhaps including that painter subsequently granted his freedom who is attested among the slaves in Livia’s columbarium.7 Both the preparation and the work itself must have been time-consuming and costly.

  Such is the quality of that work and the accuracy of its details that it is still possible to identify species of trees, plants and birds. A botanical analysis made in 2003 pointed to the strawberry tree, bay laurel, oleander, holm oak, English oak, Cornelian cherry, myrtle, hart’s-tongue fern, early dog violet, crown daisy, stinking chamomile, Italian cypress, quince, stone pine, opium poppy, pomegranate, cabbage rose and date palm.8 Other authorities have identified box, viburnum, periwinkles, chrysanthemums, ivy, iris and acanthus, alongside birds including pigeons, quails, blackbirds, thrushes, orioles, warblers, jays, magpies, buntings and sparrows – as well as the nightingale confined within its cage.9

  At the centre of Livia’s peristyle garden, archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the base of a fountain.10 Its reflected light, sound and movement would have animated a small formal enclosure of box-edged paths, statues and aromatic Mediterranean shrubs. Marble Ionic columns supported a sheltered walkway paved with elegant mosaics; surviving black and white marble tesserae preserve fragments of lost figure motifs. Further from the house was the larger garden terrace where, as we have seen, the remains of terracotta pots testify to ancient methods of propagation. It may also be the case that the villa gardens included additionally a hanging garden, irrigated by an aqueduct which extended from a hilltop north of the villa. Remains of the previously unknown aqueduct were revealed during excavation of a modern road tunnel.11

  These varied and extensive gardens at Livia’s villa provide the context for Studius’s murals. It is likely that the scheme developed as more than a purely decorative treatment. The plants and trees featured include indigenous species alongside varieties already within garden cultivation, suggesting the possibility that the painter worked in part from life, using as models cuttings found close to hand in the villa gardens. Ancient authors point to Livia’s enjoyment of horticulture. Her decision to plant the laurel sprig dropped by the white pullet known afterwards as the Prima Porta portent may not have been inspired solely by superstition or ambition. Pliny describes the laurel as ‘remarkably ornamental to houses’,12 indicating an established tradition of its domestic cultivation. In addition, at some point in her life, Livia is credited with developing a variety of autumn-ripening fig afterwards known as the ‘Liviana’. The description by the third-century Greek writer Athenaeus, of Liviana figs growing near to Rome may point to the villa near Veii.13

  Why then did Livia choose to decorate this room – designed, from its scale, for public entertaining – with images of trees, birds and flowers arranged in a format that appeared wholly new in contemporary Rome? The dynamic was more than a delight in novelty. The choice, we may assume, was Livia’s own, although it is impossible to rule out Octavian’s influence. In his grant of sacrosanctity of 35 BC, Octavian had bestowed on Livia authority over her own property. As with the related grant of public statuary, it is likely that he anticipated nevertheless a continuing interest for himself. From Suetonius, we know that the Prima Porta villa was regarded as belonging to Livia in her own right. Archaeologists date its first structures to around 50 BC.14 As there is no record of Livia’s purchase, this may indicate that the villa and its gardens originally belonged to her father Marcus and were a present to Livia before her wedding to Nero or as part of her dowry on that occasion – which, by Roman custom, Nero would have returned to her on their divorce. An early donation on Marcus’s part would explain the property having escaped the forfeiture of the Proscriptions.

  In 29 BC, after seven years writing, Virgil published the four books of his Georgics, and Roman readers discovered for the first time the old man of Corycia, ‘happy as a king’ in his abundant garden, as we have seen. The poem may have been written under the patronage of Maecenas, Octavian’s friend and arbiter elegantiarium. Maecenas was the principal patron of Octavian’s court, a friend not only of Virgil but famously of Horace too. Works enjoying Maecenas’s sponsorship would almost certainly have been known to Livia. Given the impossibility of stipulating an exact date for the decoration of her summer triclinium, we cannot know if she was influenced in her choice by Virgil’s poem, with its idealization of that old man remote from worldly concerns, who defeats the seasons to pluck hyacinths in winter and even cocks a snook at nature by successfully transplanting mature trees. It is enough that Livia broadcast to a small invited coterie her love of gardening, proclaimed in vibrant shades of blue and green.

  Perhaps she hoped to associate herself with husbandry, fertility or regeneration; perhaps she intended the compliment not for herself but for Octavian and his fledgling regime. Alternatively, the scheme may have been intended as a celebration of the lush fecundity of the estate itself, as forecast in that portent of the falling pullet with its sprig of laurel. Livia may have acted disingenuously to suggest that she, too, like the old man of Virgil’s poem, stood outside politics, remote from Rome’s all-male centre of power. Did she mean to assert, through the unassuming medium of floriferous fresco, her claim to be a woman without ambition, domestic in her focus, no threat to the status quo of a city rent by change, and happy in her garden on a hilltop close by the Via Flaminia?

  If so, Livia was not as clever as she thought. From a love of gardening derives knowledge of plants, a knowledge traditionally associated with women. Plants in early societies held a key to life, the ingredients of simple medicine. Misapplied, however, plants had the power to harm as well as heal. It is a short step from gardener to poisoner. The proud boast of Livia’s summer dining room – one of the great enduring achievements of Roman art – would return to haunt its patron. Then the cost of its charming view appeared anything but minimal.

  Chapter 15

  ‘A man and his family should live together as partners’

  In August AD 14 Livia’s elder son Tiberius, dressed in grey, delivered a funeral oration on the rostra of the Temple of Divus Julius in the Forum. The subject of the eulogy was his adopted father Octavian, the recently deceased Emperor Augustus. It was not the first time Tiberius had spoken publicly at the funeral of his ‘father’. The previous occasion had been almost half a century earlier when Tiberius was only nine years old.

  Livia’s first husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero, died in 33 or 32 BC, at most six years after bestowing his wife on Octavian. He left behind him the two children of his marriage to Livia, Tiberius and Drusus, and a reputation for political ineptitude. It is not to be wondered that, as Dio tells us, he entrusted his sons’ guardianship to Octavian. The bequest reunited the boys with their mother and offered them the chance of an upbringing in the household of the most prominent man in Rome. At the eleventh hour, the hapless Nero had finally backed a winner.

  Characteristically, the decision posed a dilemma in the short term. In AD 14, the tone of Augustus’s eulogy was unashamedly celebratory. ‘Who does not realize that not all mankind assembled together could worthily sound his praises?’ Tiberius asked the mourning people of Rome.1 Nero’s career required more careful handling. As we have seen, he had devoted considerable energy to opposing the man he now entrusted with Tiberius and Drusus’s future. If Nero’s quicksilver loyalty lay anywhere, it was with Mark Antony. In 33 BC the second five-year term of the Triumvirate expired and was not renewed. Mark Antony and Octavian locke
d horns in enmity. With Nero’s funeral meats scarcely cold, Octavian would decisively vanquish Nero’s former champion. The mentors of the nine-year-old Tiberius needed to tread cautiously in composing his father’s eulogy. They would have been wise to focus on the early years of the dead man’s career, his naval victory at Alexandria in 48 BC and subsequent foundation of veterans’ colonies in southern Gaul.2 Both were safely unambiguous achievements in the service of Octavian’s adopted father Julius Caesar.

  Livia had been separated from her younger son Drusus since the first week of his life. Tiberius had last lived with his mother when he was three years old. The sources do not record Livia’s reaction to being reunited with her children, but there is no reason to assume her response differed from that of any mother in so extraordinary a situation. In Rome, it has been argued, the bond between a mother and her son superseded in loyalty every conceivable relationship, including that of husband and wife.3 Livia’s future behaviour would demonstrate the depth of her maternal instinct and the strength of that bond, restored after a caesura of six years.

  Despite enjoying the patronage of Octavia, Vitruvius, in his treatise De Architectura written in the years after Actium, is occasionally out of sympathy with Octavian. The writer delineated a correspondence between status and accommodation, a principle of the house reflecting its owner’s role in society.

  Houses for moneylenders and tax collectors must be spacious and attractive and safe from ambush; for lawyers and rhetoricians they must be stylish and sufficiently large to hold meetings; but for gentlemen who must perform their duties to the citizenry by holding offices and magistracies, great grand halls must be made, courtyards and very large peristyles, woodlands and wide open walks, all finished off as an ornament to their noble status.4