In 90 BC a woman of the upper classes brought peace to Rome in the form of an end to the Social War. Caecilia Metella had a dream. It concerned a temple in the Forum Holitorium dedicated to Juno Sospita, Rome’s warlike patron goddess. The temple had fallen into misuse. At the foot of a statue of the goddess, a bitch gave birth to her litter in a basket. Women abused the temple – either as a haunt for prostitutes or a public lavatory, the sources do not specify.4 Unsurprisingly, given Roman gods’ predisposition towards anger and their disinterest in any gospel of redemption, the goddess asserted that, in her displeasure, she had decided to abandon both the temple and Rome itself. In her wake she forecast disasters for the godless city. But Caecilia successfully implored her not to leave.5 In response to the dream, depending on the source consulted, the temple was restored by Caecilia herself or, on the instructions of the Senate, the consul for the year. Thereafter the fortunes of war, we are told, again favoured Rome.
The incident illustrates the role of women – earthly and divine – in Rome’s wellbeing. At a time of crisis, the Senate accepted the veracity of Caecilia’s dream and acted promptly. With the temple restored by the intervention of an aristocratic Roman matron, the goddess remained in situ. She exercised her extraterrestrial powers to safeguard the state. Caecilia played the heroine’s part. Renewed piety, in the form of the restored temple, brought about a reinvigoration of Roman power and military victory. A woman’s dream successfully upheld Rome’s masculine vigour.
We do not know if Livia was familiar with the example of Caecilia Metella, though it is possible. Among the causes of the outbreak of the Social War of 90 BC was the murder of the same Marcus Livius Drusus who adopted Livia’s father. Livia, like Augustus, restored a number of shrines and temples in Rome. Although her benefactions did not rival Augustus’s impressive tally of eighty-two temples renovated or rebuilt, it was a task she embraced early on. Even before Augustus’s settlement of 27 BC, Livia had restored the shrines of Patrician and Plebeian Chastity.6 For the remainder of her public life she would continue to favour religious sites associated with women. Among them were the Temples of Fortuna Muliebris (‘womanly virtue’) and Bona Dea Subsaxana (the ‘good goddess Subsaxana’), that cult whose all-female rites Livia’s kinsman Clodius had violated at the time of Livia’s birth in pursuit of an illicit assignation with Caesar’s wife.
Caecilia Metella is proof of the extent to which, even under the Republic, aspects of Rome’s religious life were considered an appropriate sphere for women’s interest. Roman religion was a crowded pantheon. Some of its deities personified abstractions, others were epic heroes and heroines on the grandest scale; several, like Fortuna Muliebris, specifically addressed concerns of one sex. Rome applauded religious observance, which had an active omnipresence in the city’s life on account of the daily practice of animal sacrifice – an offering of spilt blood and baked meats – common in many households. Religion permeated every aspect of the state’s life. Priesthoods, no less than magistracies, were offices for politicians. Many were male appointments, sacrifice being a man’s business. But prominent women won praise for their involvement with respectable Roman cults. Just as Caecilia Metella had ‘rescued’ the cult of Juno Sospita, so Augustus and Livia recognized in religion an aspect of Roman public life in which Livia could involve herself with impunity and even praise, to the ultimate benefit of her husband. That their instinct was correct appears to be proved by the record of Livia’s religious activities preserved in Ovid’s Fasti, the poet’s unfinished treatment of Roman legends structured around the religious festivals of the year. Far from attesting disapprobation, the Fasti applauds Livia’s efforts.7 Although the poem adopts an adulatory tone towards Augustus’s family, this does not negate its value as a source. That Ovid felt able to commend Livia’s religious activities within such a context indicates the extent to which they were considered both appropriate and laudable.
Livia benefited from Rome’s confusion of gods and family. In the aristocratic atrium, as we have seen, an altar served the lares – those divine spirits who represented a family’s ancestors and watched over their daily lives. In sacrificing to the lares, Romans made a show of pietas, a virtue understood in its broadest sense as respect not simply for the gods but also for the family itself.8 Roman women may have been responsible for overseeing the religious lives of their husbands’ houses. A new bride asserted her status as mistress of the house in an act of dedication to her husband’s household gods the morning after her wedding. Although women were prevented from taking part in religious sacrifices – they were forbidden either to slaughter the sacrificial victim or to prepare the spelt flour which ceremoniously was sprinkled over it9 – it was a small step to transpose dutiful domestic religious observance into the public arena.
In Livia’s case, as with so much of her life, her actions complemented those of Augustus. Augustus cherished a lifelong ambition of moral renewal in Rome. His assessment of the decay in Roman standards was a textbook example of Rome’s rosy view of its own past. Sallust had attributed the defeat of Carthage in the mid-second century BC to Roman love of luxury: ‘Lust for money grew, then lust for power; these were the foundations of all evils.’10 For his part, Augustus found in modern laxity and luxury foundations of a plethora of social ills, including the falling birthrate among the upper classes, the prevalence of divorce, ‘easy’ adultery of the sort encapsulated in the poetry of Catullus and Propertius, and the reluctance among men of senatorial rank to marry and produce children.11 For Augustus these were not the signifiers of a sophisticated, affluent and socially relaxed society, but of a world given up to corruption and self-gratification, the vices, as Cleopatra had fulsomely demonstrated, of non-Romans – like Sallust’s Carthaginians.
His thoughts probably turned to possible remedies as early as 28 BC. That year he dedicated the Temple of Apollo adjoining his Palatine house. Its lavishness contrasted with the simpler decoration of the dwelling place next door, a trio of statues by the distinguished Greek sculptors Scopas, Cephisodotus and Timoteus proof of the earnestness of Augustus’s piety.12 He would return to the fray a decade later, with a legislative programme that criminalized adultery and sought to enforce through proscriptive measures glaring double standards of sexual probity for men and women. Though his efforts proved largely unsuccessful in practice, the princeps claimed long-term victory. His legislation, as we shall see, established a hypothetical blueprint of patrician virtue. Its principal focus was female chastity. Rhetoric exploited the example of virtuous women of Rome’s past in addition to religious and mythological exempla. It was a policy that could not fail to have implications for Livia.
What Augustus did in the Senate House, Livia echoed in the city’s temples. Ovid states explicitly that Livia’s restoration of the Temple of Bona Dea Subsaxana was undertaken in imitation of her husband: ‘The heiress of the ancient name of the Crassi dedicated this, who with her virgin body had submitted to no man; Livia restored it so that she might not fail to imitate her husband and in every way follow him.’13 Denied an official role, she worked to reinforce by visible precept the spirit of Augustus’s schemes. It was surely not by accident that in the year in which Augustus first made concrete plans to set his moral revolution in motion, Livia restored two shrines dedicated to female chastity. Since one of Augustus’s targets was women’s immorality, he needed to provide Roman women of all ranks with a focus for chaster aspirations. By entrusting the task of restoration to Livia, Augustus offered Romans a visible example to follow. The cults of Patrician and Plebeian Chastity applied only to women: Augustus could not himself embody either. Livia not only did what Augustus was prevented from doing, she reaped the benefits of association with so virtuous a cult, which was essential to the success of her husband’s programme of reform. She did so exactly a decade after her second marriage. By sharing in Augustus’s political life in this manner, Livia took a significant step towards expunging the scandal of 39 BC. That such a step was possible sugg
ests the extent to which Livia’s good behaviour of the intervening period had erased the smirch of former indiscretions. She had learnt important lessons.
Her reward was a public platform that did not exist in the constitution or by custom; that platform, inevitably, brought with it an increased degree of prominence. Livia’s built legacy is small compared with Augustus’s, although it outstrips that of successive imperial spouses, rivalled only by the contribution to Rome’s cityscape of her sister-in-law Octavia. It enacts on a larger scale the pattern of patronage and benefaction expected of patrician women. In this respect – although it could not be acknowledged as such – Livia’s behaviour conformed to that tradionally advocated for female consorts: her actions were those of any prominent Roman woman writ large.14 All that differed were Livia’s motives: on the one hand, a calculation of how to benefit Augustus without asserting an unorthodox role for herself, on the other – perhaps – the deliberate creation of just such a role, independent and remote from Republican strictures on women’s position.
Augustus’s principate witnessed a revival of religious cults. Many were concerned with female deities, feminine virtues and women’s spheres of interest. Annual festivals celebrated Ceres, Flora, Vesta and Juno Lucina, goddesses whose associations comprehensively embraced the feminine arena of fertility, childbirth, maternal love and the home.15 In the religious acts of these festivals, it was women who served as celebrants. Such developments did not increase the personal freedoms of Roman women – on the contrary, they reinforced concepts of an ‘appropriate’, compartmentalized female sphere. But in the cases of Rome’s most prominent women, Livia above all, they facilitated an association with aspects of divinity which, skilfully exploited, could become an approach to power. We do not know how far Livia involved herself in these celebrations and the sources are mostly silent on her religious life. But in 7 BC, six months after Livia and Tiberius jointly dedicated the covered public walkway known as the Porticus of Livia, Livia separately dedicated a shrine within that portico. It was the Shrine of August Concord, celebrating the harmony Augustus had brought to Rome and the political life of the city and, more obliquely, the harmony of Augustus and Livia’s marriage. It was, at one level, Livia’s celebration of herself, a public statement of virtue and achievement, an assertion in the public arena of private life and personal fulfilment. It became, on a purely visual level, one of the great sites of Rome. ‘If…as you go to the ancient Forum, you should see the others set parallel to it one after the other, and the basilicas and the temples, and you should also see the Capitoline and the art works there and on the Palatine and in the portico of Livia, you would easily forget about anything existing anywhere else,’ wrote Livia’s contemporary, the Greek historian and geographer Strabo. ‘This, then, is Rome.’16 Strabo’s vision was of a new Rome. With circumspection and discretion, Livia became one of its builders.
On the sardonyx cameo housed in Vienna’s Kunst historisches Museum, Livia holds a bust of Augustus outstretched in her right hand. Wife and deceased husband both display attributes of the gods. In Augustus’s case, following posthumous deification in AD 14, divine attributes are his by right; Livia’s divinity at this point is associative. It arose from long involvement with carefully chosen religious cults and further benefited from a document written on 3 April AD 13. Augustus adopted Livia in his will. After his death she became his daughter, renamed Julia Augusta.
That startling action, through testamentary paternity, imbued the princeps’s widow-daughter with a spark of his divinity and drew her closer to her own eventual deification. But the image of the sardonyx, in which a mortal Livia dwarfs her immortal husband, is misleading. Livia’s achievements – in the religious sphere and elsewhere – do not challenge those of Augustus. The towering scale of Augustus’s public contribution is not rivalled by those ancillary undertakings Rome thought fit to permit its women. The relative sizes of Livia and Augustus in the Vienna sardonyx reverse the mirror of history. Like her divinity, Livia’s achievements too were associative, arising from opportunities created by her status as Augustus’s wife. Her influence was that of Shakespeare’s Volumnia, the mother of the wayward hero Coriolanus, who exploits her family relationship to attain results: ‘Thou shalt no sooner march to assault thy country than to tread…on thy mother’s womb that brought thee to this world.’ Volumnia’s aim was nothing less than the preservation of Rome, against which Coriolanus planned to march at the head of an enemy Volscian army. Her success was commemorated in the building of a temple. ‘O my mother, mother, O! You have won a happy victory to Rome…you deserve to have a temple built you: all the swords in Italy, and her confederate arms, could not have made this peace.’17 The temple in question was that of Fortuna Muliebris, restored by Livia.18 To its associations of womanly virtue was added the gloss of patriotic duty. Five hundred years after Coriolanus’s death, it was an appropriate combination for association with the wife of Rome’s first citizen.
Livia exploited the limited possibilities safely available to her to create a public persona sufficient in magnitude to inspire images like this richly coloured agate cameo. The origin of the deception at the centre of that image can be traced to Livia’s skilful involvement in Roman public life, which began in 28 BC with the restoration of the shrines of Pudicitia Patricia and Pudicitia Plebeia. Her continuing involvement, spanning her lifetime, would prove unprecedented among Roman women.
Chapter 19
‘If you come to any harm…that is the end of me too’
‘If you come to any harm…thi. of me too’
There is a surprise in Augustus’s longevity. At the time of his death the princeps was weeks short of his seventy-seventh birthday, an age significantly in excess of that of the average contemporary Roman. It was a record unrivalled by any in his family save Livia. Livia enjoyed robust health. Throughout her nine decades, the sources record only one bout of serious illness and that in extreme old age. Augustus’s health, however, was less certain, less predictable; it could not, like that of his wife, be guaranteed by daily draughts of Pucine wine. Suetonius outlines ‘seasonal disorders’ which plagued Augustus all his adult life: ‘in early spring a tightness of the diaphragm; and when the sirocco blew, catarrh. These so weakened his constitution that either hot or cold weather caused him great distress.’1 His skin was marked by hard, dry patches that resembled ringworm. In his left hip, thigh and leg he experienced an unspecified ‘weakness’ which resulted in something approximating to a limp; ‘sometimes the forefinger of his right hand would be so numbed by cold that it could hardly serve to guide a pen, even when strengthened with a long horn finger-stall’:2 later he suffered from rheumatism. In winter, he shrouded himself in layers of woollen clothes; in summer, he hid from the sun’s glare beneath a broad-brimmed hat. It was unsettling for Livia. Only when she had secured the principate for Tiberius was her position safe against Augustus’s ailments and the threat of his death. Until that moment, she must bend all her energies on his survival. Cassius Dio attributes to Livia a speech in which she outlines to Augustus her dependence upon him. In Dio’s account, Livia’s motive is personal gratification – her desire, through Augustus, to exercise power in Rome. The historian does not indicate the source of his evidence. Possibly the statement is one of many in which the ancient commentators demonized Livia through insinuation. A fabrication or otherwise, it explains Livia’s position neatly: ‘I have an equal share in whatever happens to you, good or bad: so long as you are safe, I also take my part in reigning, while if you come to any harm, which heaven forbid, that is the end of me too.’3
On this account, as we have seen, the year 23 BC was an anxious one for Livia. Only recently recovered from that illness which had detained him in Spain for over a year – a period he devoted, as if prey to intimations of mortality, to the composition of a lengthy autobiography – Augustus fell ill again. This time his illness was not less but more serious, the worst, the sources agree, of the ‘several dangerous’ afflict
ions by which Augustus’s life was sporadically threatened. Suetonius attributes his suffering to abscesses on the liver. It was not a condition contemporary medicine could be expected to treat with accuracy or indeed efficacy.
There are signs, however, that Suetonius’s diagnosis fell wide of the mark, not least the patient’s recovery in the hands of Antonius Musa. Musa, as we have seen, successfully advocated a course of cold baths and cold fomentations. This treatment reversed conventional medical thinking, with its studious avoidance of anything cold – ‘for nothing is more harmful to the liver,’ as the Roman encyclopaedist Celsus asserted in his first-century treatise, On Medicine.4 Perhaps the sickly princeps was suffering from smallpox, scarlet fever, influenza or tyhoid fever: all were recorded by contemporary writers as the cause of the plague then devastating Rome. Against this is the fact that Augustus does not appear to have infected any of his immediate circle with his illness, perhaps a point in Suetonius’s favour.
Clearly Augustus’s condition was grave. Livia’s response to this latest health scare is not recorded, but it is probable that she experienced genuine fear on her husband’s behalf. He had returned to Rome only a year before, previously detained in the provinces, as we have seen, by afflictions sufficiently severe to summon Livia to his side. We cannot know how fully his volatile health had recovered before this second collapse. In this instance, Augustus himself appears to have doubted his recovery. ‘He arranged all his affairs as if he were at the point of death,’ Dio tells us, ‘and gathered around him the officers of state and the most prominent senators and knights.’5 At this moment of crisis he symbolically renounced his leadership of Rome. The recipient of his vast inheritance came as a surprise to some of those gathered in the house on the Palatine. ‘People thought that if anything should happen to Caesar, Marcellus would be his successor in power,’ Velleius Paterculus tells us.6 Livia may have thought the same, following Marcellus’s marriage to Julia and almost a decade’s conspicuous preferment. But it was not his son-in-law to whom Augustus handed his signet ring carved with the head of Alexander the Great. Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s true right-hand man and the husband of his niece Marcella, received the imperial seal. At the same time, a memorandum of the State’s financial and military resources was entrusted to the princeps’s fellow consul for the year, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso.7
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 18