Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  It is reasonable to assume that Livia shared the general surprise at this turn of events. The signs are that Augustus was too unwell to summon the strength to discuss his plans with her prior to taking action. If despite being, as Dio says, on the brink of death, he paused to consider the alternatives from Livia’s point of view, he may well have concluded that neither course touched her closely. If anything, inheritance by Agrippa was preferable to Livia than that Marcellus should assume Rome’s throne. Tiberius’s longstanding engagement to Vipsania would make Livia’s son the new princeps’s son-in-law, Livia a fellow parent-in-law alongside Rome’s first citizen. Marcellus’s succession gave Livia the doubtful position of stepmother of the princeps’s wife. It was hardly the access to power the sources would argue she craved. Against this argument must be weighed the conceptual defeat Agrippa’s inheritance represented. In appearing to favour Agrippa as his successor, Augustus implicitly denied genetic and dynastic principles. Although neither Tiberius nor Drusus shared direct blood links with Augustus, their claims of legitimacy as potential heirs rested on kinship with their stepfather – not, as Agrippa could boast, the recommendations of experience, merit and proven ability.

  Shrewd as she was, Livia probably recognized that Augustus had acted, even in extremis, with sound political common sense. In the company of members of his family, officers of state and Rome’s leading senators, he had behaved in a manner that appeared to take account not of the former but the latter. It was an appropriate course for the man who had claimed only four years previously to have restored the Republic. Ruffling family feathers, the failing Augustus remembered constitutional propriety. He entrusted public affairs to his fellow consul, his private concerns to his leading general, discounting nepotism.

  Perhaps he understood that Marcellus was still too young and green, and his hand was forced. Perhaps Marcellus already showed the first signs of succumbing to the same illness as Augustus. Perhaps Cassius Dio’s assessment is correct and Augustus was swayed by the claims of old affection, Agrippa ‘a man whom Augustus loved for his virtue and not through any necessity’.8 Possibly his behaviour was simply cynical, dictated by that instinct for self-preservation Edward Gibbon later attributed to Rome’s rulers. ‘The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.’9 Whatever Augustus’s motives, it seems to be the case that he felt himself close to death. In that eventuality, the reasons for his decision would be of little consequence.

  For Augustus, succession to the principate became so significant an issue on account of his failure to produce a male heir. For Livia, as much as her maternal ambition, it was Augustus’s repeated serious illnesses which kept the issue at the forefront of her mind. While Marcellus lived, Livia cannot have entertained Tiberius as a serious contender for the principate. Marcellus had married Julia: his children would be Augustus’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren by adoption of Julius Caesar. Even in the event that Marcellus and Julia themselves failed to produce a male heir, Marcellus could look sideways to the progeny of his two sisters, the Claudia Marcellas, to supply a candidate. Through their grandmother Octavia, any such children would share Augustus and Marcellus’s link with Caesar, as great-great-great-nephews and nieces of the deified dictator. In 23 BC Livia found herself in a dilemma. Augustus’s death threatened her own hold on power, but in the event of Agrippa’s succession and Tiberius’s marriage to Vipsania, probably advanced Tiberius’s cause; Augustus’s recovery, and Marcellus’s restoration to centre stage, guaranteed Livia’s position for the remainder of Augustus’s life but marginalized Tiberius. If, as Velleius afterwards suggested, Livia already at this point clung to dreams of being both wife and mother to the princeps, her position was impossible. Unless, of course, Augustus recovered and Marcellus died. As we know, this is precisely the course fate directed for Rome. But no one in attendance at Augustus’s death bed, awaiting Musa’s miracle, could have known that.

  Recovery when it came kept Augustus busy but did little to grant Livia equanimity. Augustus offered to read his will aloud in the Senate House. He meant to demonstrate conclusively that he had not named in it any successor, an undertaking contrary to the Republican principles he so recently professed to have restored. In the event, probably for superstitious reasons, the Senate declined Augustus’s offer. At the same time, the convalescent princeps struggled to defuse the rivalry of the brothers-in-law Agrippa and Marcellus. Recent family ties notwithstanding, there was evidently no love lost between the two men whose claims to Augustus’s legacy were so divergent. Marcella, unlike her mother Octavia in the previous generation, does not appear to have acted with any success as intermediary between husband and brother. Suetonius states that Agrippa resented Augustus’s preferment of Marcellus; Cassius Dio reverses the offence, attributing to Marcellus resentment at Augustus’s public acknowledgement of the older man’s claims in handing him his signet ring.10 Augustus’s chosen resolution despatched Agrippa to Syria – one of the territories within that unwieldy province he himself had received from the Senate in 27 BC – leaving Marcellus free to bask in the princeps’s adulation in Rome. By this means, Agrippa, as Augustus’s legate, received the singular distinction of proconsular imperium, while Marcellus enjoyed the temporary solace of his rival’s absence and, as Dio explains, ‘no occasion for friction or quarrelling might arise through their being in one another’s company’.11 Neither Livia’s position nor that of Tiberius was materially affected either by the two men’s squabbles or Augustus’s solution.

  It is impossible to conjecture Livia’s thoughts at this juncture. She cannot fail to have been relieved by Augustus’s recovery, while her hopes for Tiberius stood neither challenged nor changed. Undoubtedly, she must have derived limited pleasure from Marcellus’s prominence in Rome, balanced though this was by Tiberius’s burgeoning senatorial career. For every advantage granted to Marcellus, Tiberius received a corresponding lesser grant. The year of Marcellus’s aedileship saw Tiberius elected to the quaestorship. The meticulous even-handedness of Augustus’s behaviour towards his son-in-law and stepson served merely to reinforce the discrepancy in their relative positions. Tiberius’s pride may have revolted at the indignity as greatly as his mother’s. In the short term, there could be no way out.

  The short term, as it happened, proved to be of short duration indeed. Before autumn turned to winter, Marcellus had died at Baiae. Irresponsive to Musa’s cold comforts, he probably fell victim to the same nameless fever by which Augustus was laid low. A devastated Octavia put on the mourning weeds she would wear until her death, incapacitated by sorrow and disappointment and, as Seneca tells us, envenomed against Livia above all other mothers. At sixteen, Julia became a widow for the first time. Augustus found himself without a son-in-law or the immediate prospect of heirs of his blood, and temporarily lacking any nominated successor from within his family. Of the young men who remained in that large household on the Palatine, only two shared Marcellus’s political neutrality, related neither to Mark Antony nor Cleopatra: Tiberius and Drusus.

  Augustus probably ordered public mourning for Marcellus. It served as a preliminary to the first of the really grand ‘imperial’ funerals the princeps exploited for propaganda purposes, a model for the sepulchral spectaculars by which he later commemorated Agrippa, Octavia and Drusus. Despite the undistinguished status of the Octavii, the funeral included a parade of ancestor masks, bolstered no doubt by the young man’s distant connection with Julius Caesar. Augustus himself delivered an emotional oration. Servius recorded that a phrase from that oration was afterwards used by Virgil, laureate of Augustan Rome, to describe Dido falling in love with Aeneas in the Aeneid.12 The publication of Augustus’s family eulogies would afterwards become a feature of Rome’s public life, and many enjoyed extensive circulation. Marcellus became the first member of Augustus’s family to be buried
in the princeps’s new mausoleum, erected in 28 BC to the north of the Campus Martius between the Via Flaminia and the Tiber.

  Wretched though she may have been, there is a suggestion that Octavia was not reduced by grief to utter helplessness. From the depths of her sorrow, she mustered the energy to smother at birth the incipient hopes Marcellus’s death may have inspired in Livia. Her thoughts turned to her stepson Iullus Antonius, that son of Mark Antony and the much vilified Fulvia who would afterwards serve as consul and proconsul of Asia. As both Livia and Octavia were quick to realize, for Augustus the most pressing consequence of Marcellus’s death was the need for a new husband for Julia. Augustus was forty, by Roman standards no longer young. Twice in the last three years ill health had brought him to the brink of death. Realistically he could not hope now to live to witness the majority of any grandson Julia bore him. But there was still time for him to put in place a son-in-law who would serve as a loyal and trustworthy regent during that grandchild’s minority. The question was, who?

  Were Livia’s thoughts of Tiberius? It would be surprising if, at this point, the answer to that question were negative. In 25 BC common sense must have guided Livia’s concession of Marcellus’s prior claim to Julia’s hand. Now death had voided that claim. Since Marcellus was Octavia’s only son and Augustus himself had given birth only to Julia, Augustus’s family could supply no alternative to Tiberius. For his part, Tiberius had already embarked on that senatorial career which would eventually equip him for supreme office, while his attendance on Augustus in Spain in 26 BC, alongside Marcellus, had provided him with an introduction to Rome’s legions. Tiberius possessed distinguished Republican ancestry shared by none of Augustus’s family. He was also Julia’s near contemporary.

  But Livia appears not to have counted on her sister-in-law. If Plutarch is to be believed, Octavia’s intervention ran directly and deliberately counter to Livia’s plans. To thwart Livia, Octavia was prepared to sacrifice the happiness of one of her four daughters. That she succeeded is in part testament to her continuing influence over Augustus and the esteem and affection with which the princeps regarded his sister – ‘quite a wonder of a woman’, as Plutarch described her. It is also undoubtedly the case that Octavia’s scheme, whatever its motivation, had the recommendation of political expedience.

  Julia’s second husband was neither a member of Augustus’s family nor of Julia’s own generation. He was Marcus Agrippa. ‘Since Marcellus died very soon after his marriage and it was not easy for Caesar to select from among his other friends a son-in-law whom he could trust, Octavia proposed that Agrippa should take Caesar’s daughter to wife, and put away her own,’ Plutarch writes.13 Agrippa returned from Syria in the mourning months after Marcellus’s death and divorced his wife Marcella, Octavia’s daughter. The following year, 21 BC, he married his dead brother-in-law’s widow and became the son-in-law of his oldest friend. With hindsight it appears the obvious corollary to that symbolic surrender of his signet ring made by Augustus two years earlier at a moment of fear for his life. Marcella, the first of many women of the imperial family to find herself reduced to the status of pawn in Augustus’s political matchmaking, was married to her stepbrother, the still unmarried Iullus Antonius.

  Again, the sources do not comment on Livia’s response, indicating that at this point her reaction was not considered noteworthy, itself grounds for refuting any claim of unseemly ambition, but she may have felt herself for once outnumbered in Augustus’s household. A solution the sources attribute at least in part to Octavia was the means of further exalting Augustus’s right-hand man at Tiberius’s expense. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the plan found an eager second in that other friend of Augustus’s childhood, Maecenas. Dio tells us that Maecenas offered Augustus hard-hitting advice concerning Agrippa: ‘You have made him so powerful that he must either become your son-in-law, or be killed.’14 The second option, as Maecenas surely realized, was neither desirable nor viable. Agrippa was recalled to Rome. Octavia, Maecenas and Agrippa presented a united front. Agrippa married Julia and, his authority enhanced by his august bride, applied himself to the task of quashing disaffection in the capital. Augustus took the opportunity of leaving Rome for a second tour of the provinces. This time his destination was the east. Livia almost certainly accompanied him. Behind them, Augustus left disturbances and discontent as a result of his earlier curtailment of the cult of Isis and his renunciation, in 23 BC, of the consulship which he had held consecutively for the last nine years. Livia abandoned for the moment hopes of any public statement of Tiberius’s preferment on Augustus’s part. She left behind her the knowledge of her outwitting and the perpetrators of that adroit manoeuvre, as well as accusations – if such there were – of her malign role in Marcellus’s death. In truth, she would be able to put behind her neither ambition nor popular suspicion.

  Chapter 20

  Three cities of Judaea

  In her late sixties, Livia received a bequest that included three cities of Judaea. The donor was a Judaean princess called Salome, not John the Baptist’s vengeful nemesis, but the sister of Herod the Great. Salome died around AD 10, six years after her brother. From Herod himself, that notorious pro-Roman client king reputedly responsible for the Massacre of the Innocents of St Matthew’s Gospel, Livia had already received five million silver drachmae; on her death, Salome added the cities of Iamneia, Phasaelis and Archelais.1 The extent of the princess’s generosity can be judged from the fact that, in AD 4, Salome was considered a major beneficiary of Herod’s will on the strength of her inheritance of the income of Phasaelis, north of Jericho, an area rich in date palms.2 Livia’s bequest represented a tripling of that of the King to his sister, including as it did two further cities of the eastern Mediterranean kingdom on the site of modern-day Palestine, together with estates and a balsam plantation. It was a grand tribute to a friendship of long standing.

  The most likely explanation for the origin of Livia’s friendship with Salome of Judaea is a meeting that took place in the spring of 20 BC.3 Augustus and Livia were in Syria, then a large province briefly under Agrippa’s recent legateship. The journey was part of a three-year eastern tour that kept them absent from Rome until 19 BC. They had spent the winter on the island of Samos in the north Aegean before travelling to Asia Minor. Strabo lists the Judaeans as one of the seven tribes of Syria.4 Apprised of Augustus’s arrival, Herod and his sister travelled across country. In inspiration, their journey was an act of homage. Herod owed his throne to assiduous long-term courting of Rome’s leaders; he was neither Jewish nor a member of the Hasmonean dynasty who were Judaea’s rightful rulers. An ally of Mark Antony, in 30 BC he successfully transferred his allegiance to Octavian. Evidently he secured the approbation of his new protector. On the occasion of Augustus and Herod’s meeting in Syria in 20 BC, Cassius Dio reports that Augustus ‘transferred to Herod the tetrarchy of one Zenodorus’, whom Strabo clearly regarded as little better than a robber baron.5 That ‘tetrarchy’ – literally, the fourth part of a country or province – included the territory of Ituraea, like Judaea Jewish in religion, which ran south from the Lebanon/Anti-Lebanon valley as far as Jordan. This handsome gift no doubt oiled the wheels of friendship. Herod remained loyal to Rome and Salome conceived a lasting affection for Livia. Thirty years later that affection bore splendid fruit.

  Livia’s whereabouts as spring turned to summer are not recorded. On 12 May 20 BC, we presume, she awaited – at first with anxiety, afterwards with pride – Augustus’s return from the Parthian frontier. The princeps would not be alone: he was accompanied by Tiberius. Stepfather and stepson had taken joint action in the latest development in Rome’s ongoing struggle against Parthia’s eastern empire. Augustus demanded the return of Roman standards lost by Crassus and Mark Antony. Tiberius led troops against Armenia Major, where a Parthian protectorate had been established under the nominal rule of Artaxes. Even before Tiberius reached the Armenian border, pro-Roman forces within the country revolted aga
inst Artaxes and killed the puppet king. While Augustus accepted the return of Roman standards, Tiberius crowned Rome’s newest client king, Tigranes.6 Cassius Dio adopts a sardonic tone in describing the double victory: ‘Augustus received the standards and the prisoners as though he had defeated the Parthians in a campaign; he took great pride in the settlement, and declared that he had won without striking a blow what had earlier been lost in battle…Tiberius achieved nothing that was worthy of the scale of his preparations, since the Armenians killed Artaxes before the Roman expedition could arrive. Still, he put on a lordly air, especially after sacrifices had been offered up to commemorate the event, as though he had accomplished something by martial prowess.’ 7