Such an explanation ignores the possibility – conjectural but plausible – that it was Livia who brought about Julia’s downfall.
Although Tiberius’s behaviour differed from that of his wife, Livia and Augustus must have shared a sense of exasperation through these troubled years. Each confronted the apparently senseless folly of an adult child and their own powerlessness in the face of wilful nihilism. In adopting Gaius and Lucius Caesar in 17 BC, Augustus had implicitly elevated Julia’s status. He even offered her proof of her centrality to his plans in a coin issue of 13 BC, on which her portrait appears between those of Gaius and Lucius.15 It was a unique example of official numismatic commemoration of a female member of his family by Augustus, a compliment he never extended to Livia. Daughter of one princeps and mother of his chosen successor, Julia had good reason for satisfaction with her lot. Yet she deliberately jeopardized her marriage and acted in a manner certain to offend her father’s sensibilities.
Tiberius had twice held the consulship: in 7 BC, the year of his second term of office, he celebrated Rome’s first triumph for twelve years; the following year Augustus granted him extraordinary powers. But he preferred to live as a private citizen in retirement on Rhodes, fruitlessly absorbed by passions for astrology and Greek philosophy, remote from the politicking of the Senate, distant from the provincial battlefields on which he had repeatedly demonstrated his worth to Augustus and Rome’s legions. Pre-empting Julia’s disgrace, Tiberius’s behaviour arose perhaps from the unhappiness of his marriage, perhaps from his disaffection at the prominence accorded by Augustus to Julia’s sons and the adulation lavished upon the two young boys by the Roman crowd. To Livia, the action of turning his back on the centre of power at a moment of preferment must have seemed an inexplicable perversity. It also imposed on his mother the unenviable task of brokering a reconciliation with her stubborn and unforgiving husband.
Augustus’s policies, as we have seen, merged distinctions between Rome’s public and private spheres, in particular in relation to his own family. On behalf of the Senate, Valerius Messalla addressed Augustus on 5 February: ‘May good and auspicious fortune attend you and your [house], Caesar Augustus, for in praying for that we are praying for lasting good fortune for the state; the Senate and People of Rome hail you as Father of your Country.’16 Livia, Octavia, Julia, Tiberius, Drusus and Marcellus all served at different moments as torchbearers of the Roman virtues extolled by Augustus’s regime. As early as 17 BC, reviving the Saecular Games as the symbol of the dawn of a new age, Augustus had publicly offered prayers which included his family: ‘For the sake of these things, as this ewe is sacrificially offered, may you be and become willingly propitious to the Roman people, the citizens, the College of the XV Viri, me, my house and family.’ 17 In gestures large and small Augustus’s family had consolidated that emergent public profile – from the installation of portraits of Livia and Octavia in the Temple of Venus Genetrix to the permanent monuments of the Forum of Augustus and the porticoes of the princeps’s wife and sister. Augustus dedicated the Theatre of Marcellus following his nephew’s untimely death; on his death in 12 BC Agrippa bequeathed to the people of Rome the city’s first public baths. In 7 BC Livia dedicated her shrine to Concordia. By celebrating in a single structure Augustus’s triumph over civil discord and the harmony of her own marriage, Livia had declared in the centre of Rome her place in public life. Even if the truth were less anodyne, she did so in the very manner Augustus’s politics outlined for his family, by emphasizing her non-political role of wife. The day she chose for the formal dedication was 11 June, the Matralia, Rome’s nearest equivalent to Mother’s Day, when married women and widows who had been married only once offered to the dawn goddess Mater Matuta cakes baked in earthenware pots.
These actions provided the context for Julia’s promiscuity and Tiberius’s abandonment of his marriage. Husband and wife each undermined Augustus’s legislative programme, with its pink-tinted ‘Republican’ ideal of happy, faithful, fertile marriage. Both had behaved in a manner antithetical to Livia, whose public life was a blameless endorsement of her husband’s official morality. In truth, Julia’s behaviour – considered by Romans shocking in a woman – was not so far removed from Augustus’s own, those repeated dalliances which Livia had learned to ignore. The scandal of her fall from grace exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of Augustan policy-making.
Pliny records the agonies suffered by Agrippa on account of Julia’s infidelity during the course of their marriage. Suetonius, we know, attributed Tiberius’s reluctance to marry Julia in part to her attempt to seduce him while married to his father-in-law. Julia’s downfall in 2 BC represented the culmination of more than a decade’s lawlessness. Inevitably questions arise about the timing of her disgrace and the part played by Livia in her expulsion from an increasingly depleted Palatine household.
Unusually, however, given the opportunity for historiographical mischief, the sources attribute no role to Livia in Julia’s downfall, an omission which is almost certainly significant. This is not to deny the occasionally uncomfortable nature of the women’s relationship. Rather, it suggests that any malevolent intent on Livia’s part was sufficiently skilfully disguised to elude even Rome’s busy gossips. Certainly it would appear that the women had little in common. In Macrobius’s testament, recorded four centuries later, despite Livia having brought Julia up from earliest infancy, their relationship appeared to lack both warmth and mutual understanding. Yet, this scarcely amounts to malice or the motive for such drastic and potentially self-defeating action. Only a powerful wound to her own family pride and a mother’s love for Tiberius could have forced Livia’s hand, surely? Did she blame Julia for Tiberius’s departure for Rhodes? If so, it was Julia who had jeopardized Tiberius’s hopes of the principate at the very point when Augustus had endowed him with greatest power. In 11 BC Livia may have felt gratitude towards Julia as the means, through marriage, of Tiberius’s preferment. Ten years on, she may have considered her stepdaughter dispensable.
Tacitus tells us that Julia ‘looked down on [Tiberius] as an inferior’.18 Is this how she drove him away? It has been suggested that Julia’s point was not her own eminence as Augustus’s daughter, but contempt for Tiberius’s descent from the undistinguished Claudii Nerones, Nero’s family.19 She had recently taken a lover. He was also a Claudian, like Livia one of the Claudii Pulchri. His name was Appius Claudius and he was a great-nephew of that infamous Clodius who figured so prominently in the Rome of Livia’s birth, a man unlikely to have featured among the ancestor masks of Marcus’s atrium or the proud legends of Livia’s childhood.
Livia eschewed acts of political rashness. If she facilitated Julia’s removal from Augustus’s household, her motives were Augustus’s best interests, Tiberius’s best interests…or her own best interests. Throughout her marriage she had striven to uphold the strictures of Augustus’s moral legislation. Her efforts had won her public plaudits and an unrivalled reputation. But they did not win her the respect of her ebullient step-daughter, who scorned Augustus’s attempts to encourage her to emulate Livia’s behaviour, her dress, her friends. In the year in which Augustus, hailed as ‘Father of the Country’, at last became Rome’s absolute ruler, his wife may have grown weary of this unbeliever in their midst.
From distant Rhodes Tiberius wrote what Suetonius describes as ‘a stream of letters’ to Augustus, requesting that the princeps forgive his daughter and reconsider her exile, ‘though well aware that Julia deserved all she got’.20 Over time he changed this position. Shortly after Tiberius’s accession, Julia died. The cause of her death was malnutrition or starvation, sanctioned by Tiberius. This does not amount to the forgiveness he had once begged of Augustus. In the interval, Tiberius’s heart hardened towards Julia. There is no justification in the sources to attribute that hardening to Livia’s influence.
Chapter 25
‘Try not to guess what lies in the future’
Virgil’s reading of extracts f
rom the Aeneid in front of Augustus and his family was noteworthy not on account of the poet’s skill in recitation, described nevertheless as ‘sweet and strangely seductive’,1 but for the effect of his work in progress on one of his listeners. In response to Marcellus’s death, Virgil incorporated Augustus’s nephew into his epic account of Rome’s foundation. Discovered in the underworld, Marcellus is saluted in tones of heroic lamentation. ‘Alas, poor youth! If only you could escape your harsh fate! Marcellus you shall be.’ As the words were uttered, his mother Octavia fainted.
This anecdote – afterwards painted by the French neoclassicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar, with Livia catching her milk-white sister-in-law as she falls – demonstrates the place of poetry in Augustan court life. Augustus’s dinner parties were frequently accompanied by a form of entertainment: storytellers, musicians, actors, even circus performers diverted the princeps’s guests.2 As with Virgil, it is probable that Maecenas, artistic maestro of the regime, organized readings of the work of his other protégé, Horace. Livia, we know, left behind her no trace of bookishness. Given the likelihood of in-house readings of Horace’s work, she did not need to read poetry to be familiar with the poet’s thoughts. In the decade following Tiberius’s retirement to Rhodes, Livia would have done well to abide by an injunction from the first book of Horace’s Odes, published in 23 BC. ‘Try not to guess what lies in the future, but as fortune deals days enter them into your life’s book as windfalls, credit items, gratefully.’3 The ten years of Tiberius’s absence, commencing at the low point of 6 BC, would transform Livia’s life. The reversal of her fortunes came about only in part through her own doing.
In 13 BC Augustus had returned to Rome cloaked for the last time in the garb of conquest. He had spent the previous three years, as Cassius Dio reports, ‘dealing with the multitude of problems which faced him in the various provinces of Gaul, Germany and Spain’.4 Aided by Tiberius and Drusus, he oversaw Roman gains across the central and eastern Alps. Today, a ruined monument survives above Monaco commemorating Augustus’s defeat of no fewer than forty-eight Gaulish tribes.5
At home, on 4 July, the Senate voted Augustus an altogether more splendid monument. The Altar of Augustan Peace, ‘Ara Pacis Augustae’, remains one of the great sites of Rome. Excavated in 1937 as part of Mussolini’s government’s fascination with a lost imperial heyday, it stands today, reassembled and pristine, at the centre of a purpose-built museum designed by the American architect Richard Meier.
Originally conceived, Dio tells us, as an altar for the Senate House, it ultimately took the form of a freestanding monument erected in the northern part of the Campus Martius. It took three and a half years to complete, and was finished in time for dedication in 9 BC. It consists of a wide stone altar surrounded by high-walled precincts, lavishly decorated to the exterior with foliate panels, mythological vignettes and a processional portrait of the dramatis personae of the Augustan regime. It is approached by steps from the east and west sides. Its principal decorative features are the friezes on the long north and south sides, depicting members of Augustus’s family in the company of priests, officials and senators at a formal religious ceremony, probably an idealization of the dedication of the altar itself.6 The best-known of its panels shows the figure of Mother Earth, Tellus, surrounded by symbols of fertility. Recent scholarship has suggested an alternative identification of this female figure as the dynasty’s adopted deity, Venus Genetrix.7 This appealing explanation points to a deliberate attempt on the part of the altar’s builders to assert in marble an association between Augustus’s family – in their guise as descendants of the goddess, the Julians – with idealized, fertile Roman motherhood.8 In addition, the recognizable presence of so many of Augustus’s family on an altar of peace grants to each of the featured individuals an associative role as a protector of that peace which Augustus had brought to Rome. As if to underline the altar’s family focus, the date of its dedication was set for Livia’s forty-ninth or fiftieth birthday on 30 January. This subtle but significant compliment emphasizes Livia’s association with peace above that of anyone other than Augustus. In years to come, Ovid indicates, sacrifices were also offered on Livia’s birthday rather than the anniversary of the altar’s foundation, a further example of her ‘safe’ infiltration of Roman public life through religion.9
As Tiberius’s self-imposed exile gave way to the scandal of Julia’s fall, did the Ara Pacis continue to delight Augustus and his wife? This grandiose gesture of family unity soon became as much a souvenir of a vanished moment as the stiffly posed groups of old wedding photographs. First Agrippa, then Drusus, died. Tiberius departed for Rhodes. Iullus Antonius died in uncertain circumstances that reflect little credit on either himself or his associates. Julia was banished to Pandateria, debarred from male company, even her intake of wine supervised. Of the inner circle of Augustus’s family broadcast on the friezes of the Ara Pacis, only Augustus and Livia, Antonia Minor and Gaius and Lucius Caesar remained. The boys, of course, were legally Augustus’s children, although Gaius is depicted between the figures of his parents Agrippa and Julia. Antonia had her own children with whom to busy herself, among them Germanicus – contender in adulthood for the most popular figure in the early empire, admired even by Tacitus – and the physically infirm Claudius, afterwards a surprisingly successful emperor.
Having lost one son, Livia was understandably vigilant in the service of the other. She appears to have made it her purpose to plead Tiberius’s case to Augustus. She did so, however, less frequently than we might imagine and with a sense of fulfilling a duty she regretted. It was demanding work. Augustus was autocratic in his management of his family. The omens were dark for Tiberius the day Augustus explained his departure to the Senate as an act of desertion. Livia balanced knowledge of her husband with anxiety about her son’s future. Suetonius describes her, not wholly appealingly, as being forced on one occasion to resort to ‘wheedling’ Augustus in Tiberius’s name. Even in that instance she attained success of a strictly limited nature – persuading him to grant Tiberius ‘the title of ambassador…as an official cloak for disfavour’.10 She did so probably against her own better judgement: according to the sources, Tiberius could hardly persuade her to broach the subject with Augustus.
Suetonius’s account of Livia’s behaviour during Tiberius’s absence confounds expectations. It forces us to pause in our assumption that, following Agrippa’s death, Livia dedicated herself singlemindedly to securing the principate for her elder son. In Suetonius’s account, Livia intervenes on Tiberius’s behalf when the latter expressly requests her to and, finally, when she feels that Tiberius’s life is at last in danger. Once a friend of Gaius Caesar’s had offered to sail to Rhodes and ‘fetch back the Exile’s head’ for Gaius – happily a souvenir the latter declined – both Tiberius and his mother were forced to recognize the very real precariousness of his position. No longer content with astrology and philosophy, ‘Tiberius pleaded most urgently for a recall to Rome; Livia supported him with equal warmth.’11 At that point, we read, ‘Augustus at last gave way,’ although even then he left the final decision to Gaius. This cavalier dismissal shows the extent to which Augustus allowed his anger at Tiberius’s ‘desertion’ to overwhelm any affection he felt towards Livia’s son or gratitude for his previous sterling service to the State. Evidently Augustus did not at this stage share Velleius Paterculus’s opinion of Tiberius: ‘the most eminent of all Roman citizens save one…the greatest of generals, attended alike by fame and fortune; veritably the second luminary and the second head of the state.’12 It was not an opinion to which, during the years of Tiberius’s absence, Livia was able to win over her husband. As a result – worryingly for Livia? – those years witnessed Tiberius’s certain eclipse as second luminary and second head of state; even fame and fortune temporarily bypassed ‘the Exile’.
It is clear that in Suetonius’s account the parameters of Livia’s life are broader than simple maternal ambition for Tiberius. Suetonius
is writing from Tiberius’s point of view and does not concern himself with Livia’s state of mind. Nevertheless, there is no indication that it is Tiberius who occupies Livia’s every waking thought. Perhaps Livia was angry with her son, realizing that she had wasted in vain her ‘express pleas’ for him not to leave Rome in 6 BC. She may have considered that, in leaving Julia, Tiberius had weakened his nearest tie to the principate, thereby undoing any progress either she or Tiberius himself had made towards that elusive goal. Perhaps she understood the extent to which Tiberius’s recalcitrant nature demanded time and space to make its own decisions; she recognized the conditions necessary for Tiberius to relent. In the wake of Julia’s downfall, it may be that Livia was concerned not with Tiberius at all, but with Augustus. The revelation of Julia’s offences may temporarily have appeared to Livia sufficiently grave to unsettle the princeps’s regime. Was her concern with her own position? Did Augustus attribute Tiberius’s stubborn determination to pursue his own course to that Claudian pride that came to him partly through his mother? Perhaps Augustus made clear to Livia at the point of Tiberius’s departure that he considered the subject closed. A rumour reported by Dio that Tiberius travelled to Rhodes not of his own volition but because Augustus had exiled him on the grounds that he was plotting against the youthful Gaius and Lucius seems to indicate a degree of anger on Augustus’s part which may have been slow to dissipate.13
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 24