Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  At its simplest, the fault lay in Augustus’s failure to produce a male heir. Post-27 BC, this created a lacuna of instability at the heart of the principate. Suetonius described the period of Tiberius’s adoption: ‘by this time it had become pretty clear who the next Emperor must be.’10 Members of the princeps’s family could be excused a sense of déjà vu. On every previous occasion, the gods had willed otherwise. In the face of such long-drawn-out uncertainty, opportunism was inevitable. Augustus’s own declared preference for a successor of his blood made every near male relative a potential candidate. His emphasis on the claims of kinship created an environment in which his family members inevitably regarded themselves as distinct from the body of ordinary Romans. Like Julia, they considered themselves governed by different rules, subject to a different authority. Livia’s personification of old-fashioned virtues lacked persuasion confronted by such a licence to lawlessness. Given Augustus’s less than blameless behaviour and the widespread unpopularity among the upper classes of those reforms Livia made her benchmark, it is not surprising that she succeeded in winning only a handful of devotees among the women of Augustus’s family. The presumption of maternal ambition perhaps weakened Livia’s case among her nearest relations: while she espoused the virtuous associations of the stola, all suspected her desire for Tiberius’s advancement. They in turn trained their sights on personal goals. Augustus’s Roman revolution was complete: as a single family squabbled for power, the public good enshrined in Rome’s once cherished respublica slipped from view. The brutality of Augustus’s behaviour towards relations he regarded as political pawns – those divorces he forced on Agrippa and Tiberius, his refusal to allow Julia a period of mourning her husbands – generated predictable responses.

  On a tiny, empty island off the coast of Apulia in southeast Italy, called by Tacitus Trimerum, a baby briefly cried. It had been separated from its mother, a prisoner. Trimerum and the other rocky outcrops which make up the archipelago today known as the Tremiti Islands have a chequered history of harbouring prisoners. At the end of the eighteenth century, Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, built a penal colony on San Nicolo; later, these islands were among several used by Mussolini for the internment of political prisoners. The baby of course had not committed a crime. Through exposure it must atone for the sins of its mother – adultery, with a suspicion of conspiracy – and that of its father, almost certainly conspiracy. In AD 8 Augustus sentenced to death his newest great-grandchild, a son or daughter of Julia the Younger and either her husband Lucius Aemilius Paullus or her lover Decius Junius Silanus. The younger Julia, it seemed, was cut from the same cloth as her mother. That year, like her mother before her, she had been despatched to end her days in banishment. Like her mother, she would be debarred from burial in Augustus’s mausoleum.

  The year Julia’s baby died in agony on that barren outcrop, its only surviving uncle continued his pointless existence equally remote from Rome. Insolent, brutish, even mentally deficient, Agrippa Postumus – all too briefly co-heir with Tiberius of Rome’s Empire – frittered away futile days on the island of Planasia. Distant from the coast of Tuscany, suspended from Elba like an afterthought, Planasia is currently uninhabited following the closure a decade ago of its maximum-security prison specializing in Mafiosi. Two thousand years ago, the island was the site of a villa belonging to Augustus, a tiny open-air theatre and some baths.11 But it is not to be expected that Agrippa Postumus, fond as he was of fishing, found the life there either agreeable or diverting.

  The circumstances of the downfall of brother and sister are unclear. Agrippa Postumus’s banishment came hot on the heels of a formal abdicatio. The process by which a father threatened a son with disinheritance, this was an early warning sign which Postumus surely ignored since Dio attributes his subsequent exile to a failure to mend his ways. Unconvincingly his bad behaviour, as recorded, consisted of unfitness for military command, violent fits of anger, railing against Augustus for withholding his inheritance from his father and ‘[reviling] Livia as a stepmother’.12 In Tacitus’s version, of course, it is all the fault of the ‘stepmother’ and her firm control over her ageing husband. ‘Through stepmotherly malevolence [she] loathed and distrusted the young Agrippa Postumus.’ Later she gets rid of him ‘at the first opportunity’.13 Tacitus even finds a negative construction for the financial assistance we learn that Livia gave to Julia throughout the twenty years of her exile. It is a form of hypocrisy, scheming for the downfall of her enemies, then affecting the appearance of virtue by rallying to their aid once their fortunes falter. At an interval of two thousand years the truth cannot be recovered, obscured rather than elucidated by the cloak-and-danger insinuations of ancient writers. It is impossible to overlook the likelihood of a political aspect to both banishments. This being the case, Livia’s obvious role is one of revelation, the harbinger of bad news to Augustus.

  For the ancient authors it all came back to Livia. Tiberius had been adopted as Augustus’s son and Augustus, as must have been increasingly obvious, had entered his final years, but still this was not enough for the villainous Livia of the sources. At all costs she must eradicate any child of Julia’s who might yet threaten Tiberius’s claim. For this reason, in AD 6 Agrippa was disinherited; the following year he was banished. One year later, his sister joined him in oblivion. Of the five children of Julia and Agrippa, two were dead and two in exile. Only one remained in Rome, and she was married to Livia’s grandson Germanicus. It was surely a cause of sadness for Augustus. For the monstrous Livia of the sources, it was reason to rejoice. To the modern reader, it offers proof of the vulnerability to slander to which Augustus’s need for a male heir exposed Livia. Only the absence of an heir of Augustus’s blood, and what retrospectively appeared a lengthy search for a suitable successor, allowed the ancient authors to demonize Livia so conclusively as a scheming, ambitious mother hellbent on power. This is the central facet of Livia’s posthumous reputation. But it is wholly unproven.

  Livia commemorated her love for Augustus in a statue. Copied from a public monument, it was a private object, displayed in a house visible only to invited friends and family. It bore witness to her own eminence, of course, but showed the human face of that public position. The Prima Porta Augustus survives today, powerful and impressive, a reflection of the princeps’s careful self-presentation as much as an image of the handsome, successful man Livia married in 38 BC. In its suggestion of love given and returned, it is a more attractive testament than the sources grant to Livia. As with Livia’s own portraiture, its heroic iconography conceals as much as it displays.

  Chapter 28

  ‘Blood-red comets’

  It is not to be expected that Augustus would be allowed to die without a full complement of portents. Cassius Dio recalls one particular instance of such heavy-handed ominousness that it is hard to believe it was not the work either of a practical joker or, less amiably, parties grown weary of the ageing princeps. ‘During a horse race which took place at the festival of the Augustalia, held in honour of Augustus’s birthday, a madman seated himself in the chair dedicated to Julius Caesar and, taking his crown, put it on his own head.’1 Combining gravitas with disingenuousness, Dio offers the inevitable interpretation: ‘This episode caused universal alarm, since it seemed to have some significance for the destiny of Augustus, as indeed proved to be the case.’

  When the end came, it merited more than madmen in fancy dress. Nothing less than a total eclipse of the sun would serve for Augustus’s demise. Even nature obligingly added her pyrotechnics to underline the importance of this unprecedented event. ‘Most of the sky seemed to be on fire; glowing embers appeared to be falling from it and blood-red comets were seen.’2

  If Dio was right, there was solace for Livia in these meteorological effusions. Her common sense and instinct for political survival did not desert her at Augustus’s death. As in life, she must define her position in relation to that of her husband. No one benefited more than Livia from the possi
bility of Augustus’s deification, foretold in falling embers. She embraced those quirks of nature which seemed to point towards Augustus’s death as something outside the common run, indisputable proof of his divinity. Aware of potential challenges ahead, the princeps’s widow welcomed the safety net of associative godliness. It was a sort of comfort in the face of a sorrow whose extent we cannot gauge. On this occasion, unlike at Drusus’s death, Livia does not appear to have consulted Areus or to have betrayed in public unguarded expressions of grief. Her widowhood inspired remarkable honours on the part of the Senate, as we shall see. It did not generate a poem like the ‘Consolation of Livia’, intended to salve a suffering heart. Augustus’s death lacked the suddenness of Drusus’s or the pathos of youth slain in its prime. It was an event for which Livia had prepared herself on a number of levels.

  Augustus’s final decade is overshadowed in several sources by Livia’s assumption of a central role in imperial politicking. At best, this is an interpretative approach. Since it is frequently the work of hostile authors writing after the event – Tacitus above all we must measure its value with care. Evidence of Livia’s involvement, whether it took the form, as Tacitus claims, of ‘secret machinations’ or open requests, is scant. We are on firmer ground in viewing the ten-year period following Tiberius’s adoption as one of physical decline on Augustus’s part, matched by a partial loss of control in both domestic and foreign policy, and a gradual move towards a complete powershare by princeps and designated successor. Again there is no evidence of any role for Livia in this last process, although it is extremely likely that Augustus consulted his wife in matters relating directly to Tiberius. Letters written by Augustus to Tiberius, quoted by Suetonius as proof of the warmth of the men’s relationship, refer to Livia in a manner that suggests husband and wife were indeed mother and father, as in law they were, acting and thinking in concord: ‘I beg you to take things easy,’ the older man wrote during one of Tiberius’s later campaigns abroad, ‘if you were to fall ill, the news would kill your mother and me.’3 This is not, of course, the same as attributing to Livia any role as intermediary between the two men. Such a suggestion would have been as unwelcome to both as unnecessary. Tacitus’s insinuations aside, it is hard to envisage any increased role for Livia at this point save in the case of Augustus’s failing faculties. Although Tacitus hints at this, repeatedly referring to Augustus as an ‘old man’ in language suggestive of senility, other sources, as we shall see, are at pains to refute such an inference.

  What had changed in AD 4 was not Livia’s area of responsibility but her position. No longer was she simply the princeps’s wife, she was now also the mother of the future princeps. At a moment when Augustus’s household had been purged of several members, this accorded Livia unprecedented prominence, unrivalled in Rome’s past even by Republican paragons like Cornelia, whose public profile was largely symbolic. Livia found herself one of a reduced handful of imperial women, alongside Antonia the Younger and Augustus’s granddaughter Agrippina, and indisputably their senior. Held in the highest esteem by the Roman people, she already possessed divine attributes in the provinces, alongside extensive clients and valuable estates. This alone was more than sufficient grounds for Tacitus’s hatred.

  Not until the moment the Senate formally acclaimed him, and the army demonstrated its loyalty, could Livia consider Tiberius’s succession safe. Undoubtedly, however, the years after Tiberius’s adoption saw a lessening of her anxiety about Augustus’s ill health. Once, as we have seen, Livia had expressed her entire dependence upon Augustus’s position, her survival bound up with his. With Tiberius acknowledged as princeps-in-waiting, unmarried and apparently disinterested in female society, she could relax, confident that her position would survive the regime’s change of leadership. This confidence gave Livia buoyancy during Augustus’s recurrent health scares, notably in AD 9. In AD 12, partly blind in one eye and no longer capable of public speaking, Augustus took a step away from the formalities of government, forswearing his visits to the Senate House and discontinuing the salutatio he had maintained even as princeps. Furthermore, as Dio tells us, ‘the emperor requested the senators…not to pay their respects at his home, nor to feel offended if he ceased his practice of attending their public banquets’.4 Augustus remained of sound mind – ‘Despite these disabilities,’ Dio hastens to reassure us, ‘he fulfilled his duties no less meticulously than before’ – but the end had begun. Livia must surely have made her plans. In the event, Augustus’s semi-retirement from public affairs did not diminish either his own profile or that of his wife.

  Augustus’s fulfilment of duties had included a return to the fray in the form of further moral legislation. Undaunted by the spectacular falls from grace of the two Julias, or perhaps encouraged by their waywardness to further zeal, in AD 9 Augustus revisited the laws of 18 BC dealing with marriage and adultery. The Lex Papia Poppaea is named after the consuls responsible for its authorship; its contents are Augustus’s own. The law is chiefly a qualification of its earlier counterparts, but extended the period within which widows and divorcees were required to remarry and distinguished between married and unmarried men without children, imposing differing scales of penalties. It also increased the inheritance rights of certain women. Again the law enforced the Augustan belief that weaknesses within the family engendered similar flaws in the state, and focused attention on Augustus’s own family. The achievements of the princeps’s remaining female relatives provided only a partial endorsement of his programme. Livia was the mother of two children, while Antonia had refused to remarry after her widowhood. At this stage, Livia, Antonia and Agrippina – the last-named later revealed as a termagant in the Fulvia mould – could all convincingly pose as virtuous Roman matrons dedicated to the good of the state. At the end, as at the beginning, Livia’s principal political service to her husband was her parade of virtue, a boldly Republican statement that confined women’s place to the home and family.

  That confinement was, of course, a case of mummery as Augustus’s principate drew slowly to its close. Almost half a century had passed since a radical grant of sacrosanctitas awarded Livia public representation in the form of statues and portraiture. On the friezes of the Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated on Livia’s birthday and annually commemorating that anniversary with sacrifices, two figures were distinguished from the remainder by their dress. Each wore a wreath and veil – Augustus and Livia. In crisp-carved marble they appeared in the semblance of ruling couple, Livia the materfamilias of a politicized family which existed in a public parade of private life.5 In the absence of equality between the princeps and his wife, Livia enjoyed nevertheless a highly unusual prominence far removed from that traditional domestic confinement she advertised in the stola and a life of careful religious observance. Appropriately, it would be in the religious sphere that the couple came closest to parity.

  ‘A Caesar arrived with a Caesar, for me…those that you’ve sent me…the gods: and Livia is there, joined with her Caesars, so that your gift could be complete, as it ought to be…It’s something to gaze at gods, and consider them present,’ wrote the exiled poet Ovid to the orator Cotta Maximus.6 It was late in Augustus’s reign and Ovid longed to escape his banishment to the Black Sea coast. With questionable tact, given the authorship of Ovid’s downfall, Cotta, who later held the consulship under Tiberius, sent him silver figures for his private altar. Those figures depicted Augustus, Tiberius and Livia. Increasingly, even in life, Augustus acquired the trappings of divinity. ‘Wooed with prayers and bowls of unmixed wine,’ Horace had written, ‘your godhead shares his worship with the Lar that guards familial peace.’7 The inclusion of Livia and Tiberius within this partial metamorphosis was a tribute to lives of prominent service and an association sufficiently powerful to survive Augustus’s death. The existence of such small statues or busts cannot have displeased the princeps’s wife. By an unforeseeable irony, the woman excluded from her family’s gallery of imagines on account of her sex had m
ade her way into Roman atria in a form that would outlive those perishable wax likenesses. No funeral mask for an actor, she did so in the guise of a silver goddess.

  From a distance we can recognize such instances as stages on the route to Livia’s eventual deification. Livia herself could not have been so certain. Instead, such signs composed the building blocks of a future without Augustus. Livia, like her husband, understood the extent to which the principate, with its impulse towards hereditary monarchy, contravened deeply held Roman beliefs. The period of transition from Augustus’s rule to that of Tiberius posed potential problems. Any intimation of divinity on the parts of Livia and Tiberius promised to oil troubled waters. Divinity provided both Livia and her son, each unrelated to Augustus or Julius Caesar, with a form of legitimacy.

  In AD 10 Tiberius celebrated a triumph for earlier victories in Pannonia. Suetonius describes the scene. ‘He broke his progress through the city at the Triumphal Gate, where Augustus, who was presiding over the ceremonies, waited for him at the head of the Senate. He then dismounted and knelt at the feet of his adoptive father before proceeding up the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter.’8 This touching piece of theatre united father and son in full view of the Senate and the Roman crowd. It is likely that Augustus, accepting Tiberius’s homage, raised him to his feet. That symbolic gesture conveyed graphically to his onlookers Augustus’s plans for the future. He had earlier outlined those plans in an explicitly monarchical statement, which in itself indicates Augustus’s confidence of Rome’s acceptance of his successor. Vetoing an award to Tiberius of a title to commemorate his military victories – ‘Pannonicus’ (‘Pannonian’), ‘Invictus’ (‘the Unconquered’) and ‘Pius’ (‘the Devoted) were all proposed – Augustus ‘promised on each occasion that Tiberius would be satisfied with that of “Augustus”, which he intended to bequeath him.’9