Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  Livia’s weapon was either long-distance poison, the same rumour that attached to Marcellus’s death, or the services of a paid assassin. While the former was in all likelihood physically impossible, the latter points to a degree of reckless risk-taking wholly out of character for Livia, particularly given the minimal gain Lucius’s death represented so long as Gaius remained alive. None of the ancient authors who report the accusation provides either evidence or even comment; nor do they trouble to specify the particulars of Livia’s feat of cross-border malevolence. Excluded from the public formalities of Lucius’s funeral, Tiberius, Suetonius records, instead composed a commemorative lyric poem entitled ‘A Lament for the Death of Lucius Caesar’.13 Had he suspected any involvement of his mother on his own behalf in Lucius’s death, it would have been a remarkably cynical gesture.

  Less than two years later, again confronted by family tragedy, Tiberius refrained from writing poetry. On 9 September AD 3 Gaius Caesar was wounded during a ceasefire in the siege of Artagira in Armenia. Velleius describes the outcome in unrevealing shorthand: ‘his body became less active and his mind of less service to the state.’14 Weakened and suffering, possibly unsettled as a result of recent revelations of duplicity among his advisors, Gaius decided to forswear his position and, like Tiberius before him, retire from Roman life – in his case to Syria. Augustus persuaded his ‘son’ to postpone any decision-making until his return to Rome – advice of the sort he may have discussed with Livia. Unlike Tiberius, Gaius did not live to make good his return. He set sail for Lycia in modern-day Turkey in a cargo vessel and died in the town of Limyra at the beginning of AD 4. His death caused widespread dismay – in the town of Pisa, commercial and religious activity was suspended while the townsfolk devoted their days to mourning.15

  The coincidence of the deaths of Lucius and Gaius – together clearly advantageous to Livia’s ambitions – proved more than Roman gossips could swallow, at least in those accounts which postdate Livia’s lifetime. ‘And so suspicion fell upon Livia of having been involved in the deaths of both men,’ Dio tells us from the safe remove of several centuries, ‘particularly because it was just at this time that Tiberius returned to Rome from Rhodes.’16 That Lucius and Gaius, both so young, should die so close together – Velleius elides the interval to ‘about a year’17 – gave rise to suspicions of foul play irresistible to ancient authors bent on mischief-making.

  A decade had passed since Tiberius’s ill-advised departure for Rhodes. Then rumour had attributed his disappearance to jealousy of Augustus’s unreasoning fondness for his stepsons, and he in turn had confessed his anxiety to avoid any suspicion of rivalry. In justifying his return to Augustus, he had invoked Gaius and Lucius again. ‘Now that both were fully grown and the acknowledged heirs to the throne,’ he explains in Suetonius’s account, ‘his reasons for keeping away from Rome were no longer valid.’18 By AD 4, two years after Augustus finally relented and sanctioned Tiberius’s homecoming, those acknowledged heirs to the throne were both dead.

  This was not Livia’s doing and it need not have benefited either mother or son. Augustus had indicated clearly as early as the marriage of Julia and Marcellus in 25 BC that his preference was for an heir of his own blood. In AD 4, Julia’s third son, Agrippa Postumus, survived his brothers as Augustus’s last grandson. Augustus’s sister Octavia bequeathed her brother two grandsons, Germanicus and Claudius, who shared blood links with their great-uncle. Claudius’s physical disabilities did not recommend him as a successor – even his mother, Antonia, referred to him as ‘a monster: a man whom Mother Nature had begun to work upon but then flung aside’.19 Germanicus, by contrast, like his father Drusus, was an attractive boy of ability and winning ways. The year after Gaius’s death he married Julia’s younger daughter Vipsania Agrippina, known as Agrippina. In a fourteen-year marriage, they produced nine children. All shared not only Augustus’s but Octavia’s blood and even that of Livia, repeated intermarriage within Augustus’s extended family making husband and wife at last joint great-grandparents in the fourth generation. With Gaius and Lucius dead, both Livia and Tiberius, accustomed by now to being overlooked in the succession stakes, ought realistically to have expected Augustus’s choice to fall on Agrippa Postumus or Germanicus.

  Augustus’s track record of fortitude in the face of family misfortunes perhaps failed him at Gaius’s death. Although Suetonius is at pains to indicate that ‘the deaths of Lucius and Gaius did not break his spirit’20 – presumably to reassure the reader that his subsequent actions were not taken in a state of derangement – Augustus was approaching his sixty-seventh birthday. This was a greater age in AD 4 than today, particularly for a man with a long history of indifferent health, who had begun work on his mausoleum more than thirty years previously. He could not know how much longer he had left to resolve the issue of the succession which, on balance, appeared to have consumed as much time and energy as any of his policies of Roman rule. Genetic egotism promoted Agrippa and Germanicus; common sense dictated a resurrection of Tiberius’s once illustrious career. As always, Augustus behaved sensibly and for the good of the State. He said as much in the act of Tiberius’s adoption on June 26, trumpeting the sinking heart with which he invested Livia’s son with his ultimate prize. He attached two qualifications to Tiberius’s triumph: Tiberius shared his adoption with Agrippa Postumus and was required, before that adoption was formalized, himself to adopt Germanicus as his heir in preference to his own son Drusus. As Tacitus expressed it with customary waspishness, ‘although Tiberius had a grown son of his own, he ordered him to adopt Germanicus. For Augustus wanted to have another iron in the fire.’21 In due course a son of Germanicus did indeed become ruler of Rome, though the Emperor Caligula was a credit to neither of his great-grandparents nor to the principle of hereditary succession to which Augustus clung so tenaciously. In AD 4 Tiberius received anew those powers he had forfeited on Rhodes. Augustus despatched him promptly to campaign in Germany. It may have been proof of the extent of his ambivalence on a personal level towards his heir and stepson; it demonstrated clearly the keenness of Augustus’s need for Tiberius.

  How much was this Livia’s doing? Tacitus’s account lays responsibility squarely at her feet. Once, he claims, Livia had plotted by ‘secret machinations’ to manoeuvre her son into a position of power. He does not elaborate those ‘secret machinations’, allowing the reader to assume the worst about a woman he consistently demonizes. Failing, and seizing the advantage of Augustus’s age – which, we conclude, brought with it a decline in either his acuity or his resolve – she now changed her approach. ‘This time she requested it openly.’ That she succeeded after decades of failure, and at a moment when Tiberius’s currency had plummeted to an all-time low, indicates the shifting balance of power in the couple’s relationship. Naturally that shift wears a sinister aspect. ‘Livia had the aged Augustus firmly under control…’22 All the faults of Tiberius’s future government can be attributed to that control. Controlling wife, aged husband – both wear the taint of Tacitus’s contempt. Tiberius, too, is corrupted by the ‘ingrained arrogance of the Claudian family’. ‘So we have got to be slaves to a woman,’ Tacitus records people as saying. That no other source reports such expressions of popular disaffection is not matter for surprise. There is a gulf between masterly storytelling and reliable history.

  Two other allusions are persuasive. Suetonius refers to Livia as ‘begging’ Augustus to adopt her son,23 while Dio describes him at this point as a man who ‘had reached a state of exhaustion through old age’.24 Both confirm Augustus’s own implicit statement that Tiberius’s adoption was not a matter of choice but something forced upon him. Livia would not have been the woman to inspire such hostility in Roman writers had she not understood when to seize an opportunity. With Augustus tired by the repeated frustration of his plans and the Herculean effort of three decades of supreme power, Livia, it seems, made a final push. The result – Velleius’s ‘day of good omen…to all’ – was the f
ulfilment of the ultimate ambition a Roman mother could conceive. As we have seen, it did not represent Livia’s life’s work and could not have come about without Augustus’s concurrence. Nor is Livia likely to have regarded it as reason to relax her vigilance. At the forefront of her mind were the examples of Octavia and Julia. She was most likely unaware of those rumours of plotting and poison which have since besmirched her reputation – if indeed they existed at all.

  Chapter 27

  Purer than Parian marble?

  The statue of Augustus discovered by archaeologists at Livia’s villa of Prima Porta in 1863 is carved from Parian lychnites marble, the purest of all white Greek marbles.1 Given the degree of official control exercised over Augustan visual propaganda, the choice of stone cannot have been accidental. ‘The beauty of sparkling Glycera, purer than Parian marble, sets me on fire,’ Horace wrote, establishing in poetry a symbolic correspondence between the stone’s luminescent whiteness and a sense of moral purity.2 Perhaps Glycera merited the associations of Parian marble. Did Augustus? Archaeologists have generally assumed that the Prima Porta statue replicates in stone a bronze original erected in the centre of the city. Augustus may have displayed moral purity, in the sense of fidelity, towards Rome; his track record where Livia was concerned is less sparklingly white.

  ‘As an elderly man,’ Suetonius records, ‘Augustus is said to have still harboured a passion for deflowering girls – who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife!’3 Famously Livia attributed the success of her long marriage to being ‘scrupulously chaste herself, doing gladly whatever pleased Augustus, not meddling with any of his affairs, and, in particular, by pretending neither to hear nor to notice the favourites of his passion’.4 There is no reason to discount Suetonius’s statement of Augustus’s enduring libido, however convincingly Livia chose not to notice it. We have seen that the princeps was probably repeatedly unfaithful to his second wife. Evidently Augustus was untroubled by the gulf between his own behaviour and that outlined in his programme of social legislation of 18 BC, embraced by Livia in the symbol of the stola and a private life impervious even to Tacitus’s septic scrutiny. We may approach with greater scepticism the suggestion that Livia supplied her husband with nubile virgins. Such an undertaking was not only at odds with her stance of public rectitude but one she may accurately have considered too fraught with risk of discovery. There were limits to Livia’s fondness.

  And yet husband and wife loved each other. Augustus’s last words, in one version of the tradition, were spoken to Livia: a commendation that she remember their marriage. The very length of that marriage, coupled with its childlessness, offers proof of affection, at least on the part of Augustus, who so easily might have divorced his barren bride. The statue of Augustus discovered at Livia’s villa more than a century ago may indicate how fully that love was reciprocated.

  In 20 BC, assisted as we have seen by Tiberius, Augustus had returned to Rome military standards lost in Parthia by Crassus. In thanksgiving for that victory – reversing a notable disgrace in Roman eyes – a public monument was erected. It incorporated a statue of Augustus. Some thirty-five years later, with Augustus dead, Tiberius commissioned a copy of that statue, which he presented to his mother. Associated with Tiberius and Augustus’s collaboration in the eastern empire, it was, at one level, a statement of the men’s closeness, reiterating even in private Tiberius’s right to succeed his stepfather. But Tiberius may have had less egocentric motives in offering his mother such a gift in the first year of her widowhood. Faithful to the idealizing impulse of Augustus’s public imagery, the statue is one of great beauty. It was perhaps as Livia chose to remember Augustus, a desire she may have confided in Tiberius.

  ‘When the most famous sculptors or painters wished to carve or paint the most beautiful bodies possible,’ Quintilian tells us, ‘they rightly judged [as proper models] the well-known Doryphoros, suitable as it is for either military and athletic figures, and other physically beautiful bodies of youthful warriors or athletes.’5 The Doryphoros, or ‘spear-bearer’, was the best-known work of a fifth-century BC Greek sculptor from Argos called Polyclitus. The sculpture Quintilian almost certainly had in mind is the Prima Porta Augustus or its bronze original. It is an example of Rome revisiting and reinterpreting Greece, Polyclitus’s naked athlete translated to the martial world of an imperial triumph. It presents Augustus as a military leader, in the guise of a breast-plated imperator or ‘supreme commander’. In depicting Augustus barefoot, traditionally a signifier of divinity, it hints at his more-than-human status. The figure of Cupid riding a dolphin beside his right foot consolidates this impression: in the Roman pantheon, dolphins were associated with Venus, claimed by Julius Caesar as an ancestress of Augustus’s adoptive Julian clan. Although Augustus was more than forty when the original statue was produced, his appearance is that of a young man at the height of his physical prowess, perhaps as Octavian appeared to Livia, newly shaved, in the first years of their marriage. One arm extended in a gesture usually associated with public speaking, Augustus becomes the archetype of Quintilian’s ‘military and athletic figures, and other physically beautiful bodies of youthful warriors or athletes’. As such, his position of supreme power in Rome is ordained both by nature and the gods. The Prima Porta Augustus, cherished by a grieving widow in the privacy of her country estate, offers proof in pristine white marble of Velleius Paterculus’s assertion that ‘flattery always goes hand in hand with high position’. 6 At another level, thanks to its findspot, it is a statement of enduring affection – love capable of idealization even in the face of repeated betrayal. The statue may also have served Livia as a totem. Following Augustus’s death, and with the deterioration of her relationship with Tiberius, its quasi-divine, militarily all-powerful Augustus was the surest safeguard of her own position of eminence, and a continuing justification for the respect and privileges she enjoyed throughout old age. Heroic, it stood within a stone’s throw of that grove of laurels Livia cultivated for imperial triumphs, progeny of a distant portent of her own high destiny.

  Cruelly the passage of time exposed the emptiness of public gestures of family solidarity like the Ara Pacis Augustae. Livia and Augustus’s indifferent record in bequeathing to their family a model of that marital concord Livia had proclaimed at the shrine within her portico portended serious consequences. These operated not only in the long term, to shape Roman imperial history, but within their own lifetimes, in Augustus’s protracted search for an heir.

  It was an instance of sowing and reaping. In the case of their children’s marital careers, both spouses would find that they had led by example. Augustus’s well-known philandering found an echo in Julia’s serial adultery. What the princeps discounted in his own behaviour, he accorded shorter shrift when the culprit was both a woman and his daughter, particularly when her sexual exploits entered the public arena in a context which may or may not have encompassed a political aspect and suspicion of conspiracy. Both Livia’s sons made happy marriages, characterized, like their mother’s marriage to Augustus, by personal loyalty and sexual fidelity. We have witnessed Tiberius’s reluctance to divorce Vipsania Agrippina in 12 BC and his sadness at accidentally encountering her again. His love proved of long duration. In AD 30, ten years after Vipsania’s death, her second husband, Asinius Gallus, perished – in Cassius Dio’s account murdered to satisfy Tiberius. ‘For Gallus had married the former wife of Tiberius and claimed Drusus as his son, and he was consequently hated by the other even before this incident.’ 7 Livia’s younger son Drusus earned the praises of Valerius Maximus for his sexual continence and the devotion he inspired in his wife Antonia the Younger. ‘It is well known that he restricted his sexual pleasures to those he enjoyed with his beloved wife. By her famous deeds, Antonia…repaid her husband’s love with her exceptional loyalty to him.’8 In the next generation, the record grew increasingly patchy. Drusus’s elder son Germanicus enjoyed a fruitful and happy marriage to Julia’s youngest daug
hter Agrippina. Germanicus’s sister Livilla, however, became one of several villainesses of imperial Rome. Acting in partnership with her lover Sejanus, she murdered her husband, Tiberius’s son Drusus the Younger, by slow poisoning. In doing so, she unwittingly exacerbated Livia’s posthumous vilification by a host of later historians, by forging a proven connection between imperial women and poison. Livilla died for her sins, although the sources are unclear whether she was executed at Tiberius’s behest or, startlingly, that of her appalled mother Antonia.9

  Drusus and Antonia’s third child, Claudius, was married four times. Since two of his wives were those she-wolves of imperial Rome, Messalina and Agrippina the Younger, he cannot be held entirely culpable for his busy record. Of his remaining cousins, both Agrippa Postumus, adopted by Augustus at the same time as Tiberius, and Julia’s first daughter, Julia the Younger, met unfortunate ends. Both died in exile after banishment by their grandfather. The result was a family tree which, like that of the celluloid D’Ascoynes, came close to being chopped down, and family circumstances which conspicuously failed to mirror the reproductive programme outlined in Augustus’s social legislation. From the happy marriage of Livia and Augustus, and the model of virtuous, family-minded Roman matronhood Livia had successfully projected over three decades, emerged a family chiefly remarkable for its pronounced dysfunctionalism.