There is no record of Livia travelling with Augustus that year – nor any denial in the sources that she did so. Under the Republic, wives had traditionally remained in Rome to watch over the interests of their absent husbands, a custom with which Augustus was largely in sympathy. Later, he required that those legates whom he himself appointed to the provinces confined time spent with their wives exclusively to the period outside the campaigning season, but Augustus was capable of making exceptions in his own case. On this occasion, he entrusted care of his affairs to his fellow consul and oldest friend, Marcus Agrippa, who stayed behind in the capital. With Augustus on campaign, Tiberius at his side, and Agrippa at the helm in Rome, Livia would have been right to consider that, Drusus excepted, all her interests lay for the moment in the provinces.
Unlike Octavia, Livia’s maternal role was small in scale. She was responsible for her younger son Drusus, then twelve years old, and her step-daughter Julia, Drusus’s exact contemporary. Since both children probably remained in the schoolroom full-time, Livia’s was not an onerous burden, nor sufficient in responsibility to justify separating husband and wife for the whole of Augustus’s three-year absence. It is reasonable to conclude, as a recent biographer has done, that the assertion fifty years later by one of Livia’s grandsons that she had accompanied Augustus on journeys ‘to the West and to the East’ encompasses this journey westwards to Spain at the outset of Augustus’s principate.3 A detail may corroborate this contention. In 11 BC Octavia died. Her funeral, following a period of public mourning, was an event of some grandeur. For the first time in Rome there were two orations.4 The second was a private eulogy delivered by Augustus in the Temple of Divus Julius. The first, spoken as tradition demanded from the rostra in the Forum, was given by Octavia’s nephew Drusus. His prominence in the ceremony points to a relationship between Livia’s younger son and his aunt. This may have developed during the period Livia spent in the provinces with Augustus in the years after 27. At the time Drusus was still a child. Temporarily without father, mother or brother, he must have welcomed the affection of his kind and motherly aunt.
There were potent incentives for Livia’s presence in Spain. Not only did Tiberius make repeated forays into the political arena during his absence from Rome – including successfully addressing Augustus on behalf of Archelaus of Cappadocia, a client king whom Tiberius may have inherited from his father Nero – but Augustus himself fell ill. Although the nature of his illness is unclear, it appears to have been of considerable duration, lasting perhaps as long as a year. Augustus used the opportunity offered by a protracted convalescence in the Spanish coastal town of Tarraco to write his autobiography.5 Subsequently lost, on publication in 22 BC it extended to thirteen volumes.6 We do not know Augustus’s motives, but it is possible to interpret the writing of autobiography as a valedictory undertaking. Perhaps Livia heard alarm bells ringing. Aside from love, she did not overlook her entire dependence on Augustus’s survival.
On 24 April 27 BC, months before Augustus’s departure for Gaul, Tiberius had undergone one of those rites of passage, like the depositio barbae, by which Romans charted a young man’s progress towards eligibility for senatorial office. Accompanied by Augustus, his legal guardian, Tiberius formally exchanged the toga praetexta worn by children for the uniform of Roman manhood. The appropriately named toga virilis was an entirely white garment of some complexity, which Augustus would afterwards take measures to promote. The ceremony took place in the Forum, at the very centre of Rome, and involved the recording of Tiberius’s name on the rollcall of citizens. It was potentially an intimidating initiation into Roman public life, and an emotional one too for the young man’s mother. As babies, aristocratic Roman children received a gold amulet or bulla, which they wore around their necks. Before his departure for the Forum, Tiberius dedicated his bulla at an altar in the atrium, accompanying the surrender with an act of sacrifice. The objects of his piety were those spirits of dead ancestors, the lares, who in the case of Claudians were so numerous. For Livia the day combined pride with sadness, an ending and a beginning.
Seneca offers a clearcut explanation for Octavia’s later dislike of Livia. He does not discuss that rivalry between the sisters-in-law in the matter of their children’s marriages of which we will discover more, or suggest that antipathy was anything but recent, arising from the single factor of Marcellus’s death. Livia after all had modelled her portraiture and even her appearance on those of her sister-in-law. What then were her feelings in April 27 BC, witnessing Tiberius complete the initiation ceremony Marcellus had presumably only recently undergone? Livia, we know, had longed to become a mother of sons as early as 42 BC, warming an egg in her hands and cradling it against her breast. Brought up in the intensely political environment of the late-Republican aristocracy, she may have dreamt of bearing sons who attained high office, but she could not have conceived of the inheritance Augustus appeared to extend to Marcellus. Did she experience jealousy on Tiberius’s part? Was her disaffection directed against Octavia, whose son enjoyed the preferment Tiberius’s parternity denied him – or against Marcellus himself? Was she angered by her own inability to conceive an heir for her husband? Or did Augustus’s settlement, conferred by the Senate at the beginning of the year, serve to stimulate that maternal ambition we have assumed as part of Livia’s make-up? Were Augustus’s unconstitutional dreams of hereditary authority matched from the outset by Livia’s? It seems probable. Livia as well as Augustus benefited from his election to the principate. It was in both their interests to perpetuate the revolutionary settlement. With Tiberius’s symbolic discarding of the toga praetexta, Livia was free at last to give rein to any aspirations she harboured for her first-born son. Always a step ahead, giving the lie to her plans, was her nephew by marriage, Marcellus.
Livia understood her husband’s purpose in taking Marcellus and Tiberius with him to the provinces. Some historians have suggested that Augustus sought to test the two boys and select whichever fared better as his heir. But two years previously, in the most splendid public spectacle of the decade, Augustus had made clear that it was Marcellus to whom he accorded higher rank. The sources record no intervening event which could have provided grounds for altering that precedence. We know nothing of Marcellus’s achievements, only the record of Tiberius’s political initiation, ‘his defence, against various charges, of the Jewish King Archelaus, also the Trallians and the Thessalians, at a court presided over by Augustus’, as Suetonius reports.7 The sources’ relative silence concerning Marcellus may not amount to a commendation, but it appears to rule out the possibility of disgrace.
Augustus’s purpose in Spain was to introduce both boys to the legions whose loyalty underpinned imperial power. To make sure of his aim, he sponsored games for the soldiers, ‘a number of spectacles to be held within the military camps, and these were organized by Tiberius and Marcellus’, according to Dio.8 Augustus ensured that the legions recognized the authorship of their entertainment.
In 25 BC, at a ceremony in Rome at which he himself was not present, Augustus gave incontrovertible proof that the dispositions of the Egyptian triumph had not been altered. The princeps married his only daughter Julia to Marcellus.
In itself this did not amount to a public nomination of Marcellus as his uncle’s successor – Augustus recognized the impossibility of so explicit a gesture. To his intimates, however, it offered a clear statement of Augustus’s considered priorities in an heir. Through Octavia Marcellus shared Augustus’s paternity. Children of the marriage would thus be doubly related to the princeps. They would also share his kinship with Julius Caesar, the importance of which must have become clear to Tiberius as well as Marcellus during their time spent among the legions in Spain. We have seen that, latterly, Augustus had soft-pedalled his relationship with Rome’s last dictator, his purpose in part to disguise his own monarchical intentions. But he had not renounced Caesar’s legacy outright. He continued to derive benefits from his great-uncle’s extensi
ve client base, his fortune and the loyalty the Caesarian name inspired among Rome’s soldiers. More than this, Augustus recognized the benefits, albeit largely intangible, of his association with Caesar’s divinity – as Virgil would express it, ‘Born from a god, himself to godhead born: His sire already signs him for the skies.’ 9 During his lifetime, Caesar had asserted divine forebears for the Julians, the same Venus Genetrix to whom he erected a temple and whose maternity he invoked in his oration at the funeral of his aunt Julia. After his death, he himself became a god, a nomination ratified by the Senate. Symbolically Augustus reiterated Caesar’s highfalutin claims, placing busts of Octavia and Livia alongside the statue of the goddess in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. In his chosen successor, he wanted a man of his own family. For the secure perpetuation of the settlement of 27 BC, he preferred a candidate who shared with him that intimation of divinity other Romans could not claim. Fifty years later, Julia’s youngest daughter Agrippina berated Tiberius. She discovered the then emperor sacrificing to the deceased Augustus, himself also by then a god. ‘The man who offers victims to the deified Augustus,’ she said, ‘ought not to persecute his descendants. It is not in mute statues that Augustus’s divine spirit has lodged – I, born of his sacred blood, am its incarnation!’10 Agrippina’s consciousness of divinity is an attitude which arose later in the principate. It is not wholly removed from Augustus’s own philosophy.
If Livia’s ambition for Tiberius already at this point fixated on his succeeding as princeps – and such a supposition is wholly conjectural – the marriage of Marcellus and Julia must have been a bitter pill. Theirs was not, insofar as the contemporary accounts record, an engagement of longstanding. Julia, we have seen, despite being only fourteen, had been engaged twice before – to a son of Mark Antony and a foreign client king. Both were politically motivated alliances. In marrying his daughter to Marcellus, Augustus gave equal weighting to politics and genetics. Although a similar attitude in 39 BC may have accounted for Livia’s own attraction in Augustus’s eyes – her embodiment of the patrician and Republican connections of the Claudii and Livii Drusi – it was not an argument calculated to appease her more than a decade later. Genetics was quantifiable and inarguable. It left no room for Livia’s plans for Tiberius. No matter that Tiberius had been engaged since 32 BC to Agrippa’s daughter Vipsania Agrippina. Engagements, as both Augustus and Julia had proven, were easily broken, and Vipsania was still only a child. Neither Livia nor Tiberius gained from Julia’s marriage to Marcellus. It was cold comfort indeed that Agrippa had improved his position in the seven years since his daughter’s engagement, having won victory at Naulochus and Actium and afterwards shared Augustus’s consulships of 28 and 27. Agrippa found himself at the very heart of Augustus’s regime. Such achievements did not compensate the ‘super-bissimi’ Claudii.
In his account of Marcellus’s death, Velleius Paterculus pinpoints tensions within Augustus’s inner circle.
People thought that, if anything should happen to Caesar, Marcellus would be his successor in power, at the same time believing, however, that this would not fall to his lot without opposition from Marcus Agrippa…After his death Agrippa, who had set out for Asia on the pretext of commissions from the emperor, but who, according to current gossip, had withdrawn, for the time being, on account of his secret animosity for Marcellus, now returned from Asia…11
It is impossible to state with certainty the architect of Tiberius’s engagement to Vipsania. Livia’s wounded pride notwithstanding, the alliance promised benefits to Augustus. If we believe Velleius, Agrippa’s resentment of Marcellus’s promotion was well founded. Agrippa was responsible for almost every major victory by which Octavian defeated Mark Antony to become Augustus. His loyalty demanded recompense. Augustus denied him the possibility of challenging either his own authority or, hypothetically, that of Marcellus by binding Agrippa to his own family through ties of marriage. Tiberius was his chosen instrument; Livia bore the cost.
In 20 BC Tiberius married the thirteen-year-old Vipsania. Eight years previously, at Augustus’s request, Agrippa himself had married the princeps’s niece Marcella, a daughter of Octavia. Livia’s thoughts on a political marriage for her elder son motivated by the need to placate an army commander of unknown family are not known. Perhaps she drew comfort from the double guaranteee of protection for Tiberius which his marriage surely earned him – from Augustus, but from Agrippa too, trusting in that love between fathers and sons-in-law with which Catullus upbraided Lesbia: ‘I loved you then not only as the common sort love a mistress, but as a father loves his sons and sons-in-law.’12 She is likely to have discounted the argument propounded by the contemporary historian Cornelius Nepos, that Tiberius and Vipsania’s engagement cemented the friendship of Augustus and Agrippa’s father-in-law, Atticus.13 Livia was not so sentimental as to rate Augustus’s friendships above her ambitions for her sons.
In 25 BC, in a gesture perhaps intended to silence rumours of a rift, it was Agrippa who gave Julia away at her marriage to Marcellus. Ill health detained Augustus in the provinces – that, and it was suggested, fear of explaining himself to Livia.14 From a distance Augustus and Agrippa clearly reached an understanding that restored former amicability. When, later, Agrippa’s house on the Palatine burnt down, Augustus invited his friend to share his own house. Agrippa’s future son-in-law Tiberius lived under the same roof.
Another year passed before Augustus was sufficiently recovered to undertake the journey back to Rome. His homecoming was marked by further privileges granted by the Senate. Among them, Dio tells us, ‘Marcellus was given the right to sit in the Senate among the former praetors, and the right to stand for the consulship ten years earlier than the normal age, and Tiberius the right to stand for each office five years before the normal age; the former was at once elected aedile and the latter quaestor.’15 Riding Augustus’s coat-tails, both young men had achieved concessions unthinkable in the ordinary course of Republican politics. As Livia would undoubtedly have been aware, the discrepancy between the twin awards inclined heavily in Marcellus’s favour. Her protest, if any, was in vain.
In the years since Livia’s marriage, the stakes had risen significantly. Octavian the triumvir had emerged as sole ruler of Rome in the aftermath of victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC. Four years later, his unprecedented power was formalized. He was Augustus, emperor, even if he chose to call himself ‘first citizen’ and to think of himself as such. Within this timespan, the possible scope of Livia’s ambitions not only for her sons but for herself increased exponentially in a manner neither she nor anyone else could have predicted. Rome, the historians tell us, was reborn. ‘Agriculture returned to the fields, respect to religion, to mankind freedom from anxiety, and to each citizen his property rights were now assured; old laws were usefully amended, and new laws passed for the general good.’16 Velleius Paterculus found himself defeated by the business of panegyric: ‘the enthusiasm of Augustus’s reception by men of all classes, ages, and ranks, and the magnificence of his triumphs and of the spectacles which he gave – all this it would be impossible adequately to describe even within the compass of a formal history, to say nothing of a work so circumscribed as this.’17
Excluded for the most part from the public celebrations of Augustus’s success, Livia could not fail to be touched by the prevailing mood of euphoria. It was a short step to desiring that euphoria for one of her sons. No precedent existed for Augustus’s ‘revolution’, nor for the expectations it imposed upon members of his family. In its early stages the principate was a constantly evolving entity. In 29 BC provincials in Asia and Bithynia received permission to build temples to the deified Julius Caesar and to Roma, Rome’s presiding goddess. Greek provincials followed suit. They consecrated not temples but precincts to Roma – and, in a development new in Roman history, to Augustus.18 There were lofty implications in such acts of piety and commemoration offered to a living politician. The most ambitious mother could scarcely have aime
d so high.
Chapter 18
‘Her sacred office’
In Ancient Egypt a geographer called Ptolemy drew a map of India. He included among its features ‘the Sardonyx Mountains’. Sardonyx is an agate sport prized for its lustrous striations of brownish-red and white. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Sumerians once coveted the stone. In Rome cameo carvers carefully manipulated its striped contrasts. In their painstaking gewgaws, rich red-brown provides a foil for opaque or translucent elements of snow-white and cream.
In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there is an example of a sardonyx cameo from Livia’s lifetime. An exquisite objet de vertu probably intended for private circulation, it depicts Livia in the years after the death of Augustus. Gazing right to left, she contemplates a bust of her deified husband. She too is invested with elements of divine iconography. A posy of wheat ears affiliates her to Ceres, goddess of agriculture, earthly plenty, nurture and marriage, the favourite deity of Augustus’s programme of moral legislation, with its emphasis on encouraging the birthrate. She wears the crown of Fortuna, the Roman personification of luck; and on her shield are visible the lions of Cybele, that atavistic figure of the Earth Mother whose image – beached on the sandbanks of Ostia – a woman of the Claudii once miraculously dragged to shore.1
Following Augustus’s death, the Senate took action quickly. Cassius Dio records that it ‘declared Augustus to be immortal, assigned to him sacred rites and priests to perform them, and appointed Livia…to be his priestess. They also authorized her to be attended by a lictor whenever she exercised her sacred office.’2 Readers whose perception of Livia is shaped by Robert Graves’s villainess of I, Claudius may be surprised by her promotion to the priesthood. By the time of Augustus’s death, Livia’s association with Rome’s religious life spanned half a century. It was a connection her contemporaries applauded, and became a cornerstone of her exalted reputation within her lifetime. Despite his propensity for hyperbole, Tiberius’s apologist Velleius Paterculus caught the popular feeling when he described Livia as ‘a woman pre-eminent among women…who in all things resembled the gods more than mankind’.3 Livia garnered rewards from her long years of visible piety.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 17