The plans Augustus formulated for Tiberius’s rule became reality for the most part before Augustus’s death. Although Augustus and Tiberius divided the empire between them, the former continuing to administer Rome, the latter to mastermind military campaigns in the provinces, their communication included extensive movement between the two spheres. Tiberius regularly returned to Rome; Augustus met Livia’s son at points near the front.10 In AD 13 Tiberius received from the Senate a renewed grant of tribunician power alongside a new grant, that of consular imperium. At the same time, Dio records, Augustus, with a show of reluctance, accepted a fifth ten-year term as head of state. Save in name, the two men’s powers were equal. As if to confirm this development, gold coins issued in the same year by the provincial mint at Lugdunum in Gaul coupled Augustus’s head on the obverse with that of Tiberius on the reverse, a compliment previously only shared by Marcus Agrippa.11
These were the powers on which Tiberius’s claim to succeed Augustus rested. They owed nothing to Livia. In the Senate’s gift, they could not have been bestowed arbitrarily by any individual, most of all a woman. Nor were they such as might be won by poison or murder of a perceived opponent. Half a century after Octavian’s defeat of Mark Antony at Actium, the formal powers of Roman government remained the nominal preserve of the Senate, an exclusively male assembly. Augustus had not presumed to rule without them and nor would Tiberius. In the first instance, Augustus required senatorial endorsement to uphold his claim of having restored the Republic. In Tiberius’s case, inherited Republican sympathies probably made an adherence to age-old formalities a prerequisite of taking up office. Tiberius was Livia’s son and owed to Livia his proximity to the princeps. He did not owe his mother those formal awards by which he became, ahead of AD 14, second princeps of Rome, as Livia herself understood. Did she seek to counter this claim? Only, it seems, in unguarded private moments in sources which cannot be verified. A daughter of the Republic, she understood the mechanics of power. Undoubtedly she facilitated Tiberius’s progress; but she was not the architect of his principate.
Murder formed the substance of the sources’ accusations against Livia when at length Tiberius succeeded his adoptive father on 19 August AD 14. Not one murder but two. The seventy-two-year-old’s victims were Agrippa Postumus, that difficult last son of Julia and Marcus Agrippa, and Augustus himself. In the latter case, as with Marcellus forty years previously, Livia’s alleged means of disposal was poison.
Every circumstance of the death of Agrippa Postumus remains subject to debate, the only certainty being that Augustus’s grandson did not die of natural causes. He was killed, unarmed in his island exile, by a staff officer probably acting on written instructions. Those instructions originated with Augustus or Livia or Tiberius, depending on the source consulted. Their despatch to Planasia arose alternatively as a result of a trip made to the island by Augustus in the spring of AD 14; on account of Augustus’s fear that supporters of Julia would rally behind the exile to unsettle Tiberius’s succession; or from Livia’s ‘stepmotherly malevolence’, loathing and mistrust. Whether Augustus was sufficiently strong early in AD 14 to travel to Planasia, two years after excusing himself from the effort of visits from senators, and how disposed either to order the murder of his last-remaining grandson or to reinstate that grandson – described by Suetonius as ‘becoming more mad day by day’ – are unclear. The sources do not record Livia’s reaction to the young man’s death, although Dio offers her fears over the possibility of Agrippa’s reinstatement as the motive for her murdering her husband. Tiberius for his part explicitly denied issuing the death warrant. Afterwards he pointedly abstained from any public discussion of the matter in the Senate. Ovid supplies information on how Livia found out about what we assume was a secret visit by Augustus to Planasia. The poet’s eleventh-hour appearance in the ring fails to clarify a murky incident that reflects well on none of its players, actual or conjectural. Given Tiberius’s formal powers, granted by the Senate in advance of Augustus’s death, as we have seen, and his unrivalled record of service to the state, Agrippa’s death is probably a sideshow. If the Roman people sought an alternative to Tiberius in AD 14, their choice was more likely to fall on Livia’s grandson Germanicus than Julia’s wholly inexperienced youngest son, with his ungovernable anger and propensity for brutality. At twenty-nine, however, Germanicus could not rival Tiberius’s qualifications for power.
The murderous Livia was apparently untroubled by any perceived threat from Germanicus at this stage. Leaving her grandson unharmed, she trained her sights on Augustus instead. Why Livia should wish at this moment to kill her husband of fifty-two years, a man already in failing health, is not known, unless Augustus had indeed decided to restore Agrippa Postumus to favour at Tiberius’s expense. We cannot conclusively rule out this possibility, although it exists only as an inference in that source most virulently opposed to Livia, Tacitus’s Annals. If Livia nurtured a long-term desire to rid herself of Augustus, she acted sensibly in waiting until Tiberius had received both tribunician and consular imperium. That she chose to take action in mid-August AD 14, a period when Tiberius had already departed for Illyricum on the eastern shore of the Adriatic and was not on hand to smooth the succession, appears less sensible.
Husband, wife and son ought to have known the time was ripe as spring turned to summer. Lightning melted the first letter of Augustus’s name on the inscription of his statue on the Capitol. It was no ordinary storm damage, as Suetonius and Dio are at pains to explain. ‘This was interpreted to mean that Augustus would live only another hundred days, since the remainder of the word, namely AESAR, is the Etruscan for “god” – C being the Roman numeral 100.’12
Despite the brevity of this life sentence, Augustus decided to accompany Tiberius on the first stage of his journey to Illyricum. With Livia, he set out for Beneventum, more than a hundred miles south of Rome on the Via Appia. At Astura, he modified his plans, choosing to travel instead by boat. Departing at night, he caught a chill combined with diarrhoea. The party headed for Capri, where it made an unscheduled but apparently successful convalescent stop, before resuming its course. After a detour to Naples to witness an athletics competion held every five years in Augustus’s honour, Rome’s first family continued as planned to Beneventum. Their destination reached, Livia and Augustus turned back towards Rome, while Tiberius maintained his course for Illyricum.
But Augustus never returned to Rome. Plagued by a recurrence of the same illness, he made a detour with Livia at his side to Nola, where he owned a house. It was, by chance, the same house in which his father had died. Comforted rather than otherwise by this coincidence, Augustus moved into the very room in which Gaius Octavius had breathed his last. More than thunderbolts or blood-red comets, this was the omen Livia could not ignore. Immediately she sent messengers entrusted with Tiberius’s prompt recall.
The weakness of Roman emperors in the face of wives intent on murder has become proverbial. Agrippina the Younger, Augustus’s great-granddaughter, famously despatched Livia’s grandson Claudius with a mushroom she had earlier entrusted to the ministrations of a convicted poisoner called Locusta. The exact manner of Claudius’s death is not known. Perhaps it was the emperor’s doctor, Xenophon, who gave the fatal dose; possibly Claudius’s death was caused not by a mushroom but a deadly enema. What appears to be beyond dispute is Agrippina’s intent to kill and her success, through whatever agency, in realizing that aim. She sacrificed her husband in order to ensure the succession of her son by a previous marriage, Nero, in place of Claudius’s son Britannicus.
In Dio’s account of the death of Augustus forty years previously, Livia takes drastic action. She is prompted by fear that Augustus plans to reinstate Agrippa Postumus as a candidate for the succession. ‘So she smeared with poison some figs which were still ripening on trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the poisoned fruit to him.’1
3 Obligingly Augustus died, and Livia’s son, like Agrippina’s son in years to come, succeeded his stepfather as princeps.
Thanks to the inclusion of this incident in the televised I, Claudius, Tiberius’s succession will for ever be attributed to a deadly fig and a scheming mother. It is surely significant that alone of the ancient writers, Dio records this version of Augustus’s death. In the account written by Velleius Paterculus, the only version to survive from the lifetime of any of the protagonists, Livia is entirely absent from the deathbed scene, Augustus’s death the result simply of old age. ‘Since no care could withstand the fates, in his seventy-sixth year…he was resolved into the elements from which he sprang and yielded up to heaven his divine soul.’14 Untrustworthy in many ways, Velleius is the only author to bequeath us an account of Augustus’s death not coloured by knowledge of Agrippina’s murder of Claudius as a preliminary to Nero’s accession.
Livia acted with greater circumspection than to risk so late in the day a crime of such magnitude and easy detection. She summoned Tiberius at the earliest opportunity. Then, like Agrippina after her, she sealed off Augustus’s house and the surrounding area with troops. Whichever source we choose to follow next – whether we prefer Augustus’s last hours to be spent in earnest discussion with Tiberius, joking among friends or saving his final words for his wife – Livia controlled firmly the dissemination of facts about his condition. She allowed news of her widowhood to escape the barricades only once she was wholly certain of sufficient support for Tiberius to implement his immediate nomination as princeps. At that point, she surrendered control. As so often in the past, she had kept her head while those around her might have lost theirs.
Chapter 29
Augusta
In her eightieth year, Livia dedicated a statue of herself to her father. The recipient of this courtesy was not, however, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus but Augustus. In his will, dated 3 April AD 13, Augustus, as we have seen, had adopted his wife as his daughter. Like Augustus before her, adopted in the will of Julius Caesar, Livia found herself by testamentary adoption a member of the Julian clan. Accordingly, at the age of seventy-two, she changed her name to Julia. At a stroke, her husband of fifty-two years became, by law, her father.
The sources maintain a degree of sangfroid surprising to modern readers in relation to this procedure, which is probably unprecedented in Roman history. The ancient writers discount the emotional ramifications of such altered relationships, diverted instead by a twin development; its radicalism encompassed not emotional but political implications. Augustus’s will bequeathed to Livia not only a new name but a title, ‘Augusta’. As intimated before AD 10, the same document conferred on Tiberius the masculine equivalent, ‘Augustus’. Livia’s name henceforth – Julia Augusta – announced not only her membership of a new family but, for the first time, in a feminization of a title once awarded Octavian by the Senate in recognition of outstanding services to the state, a suggestion of a formalized position. Augustus’s decrees of 3 April would have long-lasting consequences for Livia and especially for Tiberius.
From the outset, a number of the sources maintain, the new principate included at its heart a struggle between mother and son. A focus of their differences was their interpretation of Augustus’s intention in creating Livia ‘Augusta’. Octavian’s receipt of the title ‘Augustus’ had underscored the ratification of his supremacy in Rome. Inheritance of the same title marked out Tiberius as the Empire’s second princeps. What then were the implications for Livia? Disenfranchised by virtue of her sex, could she remain hors de combat as the bearer of this highly politicized moniker? Did she want to? For more than half a century she had moderated her behaviour in line with Augustus’s wishes. Her future conduct would depend on her interpretation of the wishes of the dead man whom she now called father.
Livia applied herself at once to the letter of Augustus’s will. Although Tiberius, Suetonius tells us, ‘refrained from using the title “Augustus”, though his by right of inheritance, in any letters except those addressed to foreign monarchs’,1 Livia embraced it: those slaves to whom she granted freedom – her freedmen and women – took the name Julius or Julia.2 Perhaps the shared title suggested to her an ongoing relationship with Augustus to which she clung for emotional reasons as well as political expediency. Like adoption into the Julian clan, it expressed her proximity to the man the Senate was quick to declare a god. Perhaps Livia regarded it as a guarantee of inviolability.
If, however, she chose to consider the nomination as a green light to involvement in Roman public life, we discover a further piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Livia’s posthumous vilification in the ancient sources. The ancient writers opposed on principle the emergence of a woman into the public arena. Augustus’s opposition, as Octavian, to Cleopatra, his failure to produce a male heir, and his programme of moral legislation had all accorded Livia a degree of prominence unknown among women of the Republic. Now the testamentary award of a political title encouraged her to independent public activity. It was an affront to sexist sensibilities. Writers whose perception of Livia was shaped by her place in Tiberius’s principate revisited her actions of the preceding half-century in the light of septuagenarian transgressions. In place of Livia’s constructive role as Augustus’s helpmate, they saw only ambition, an impulse to be feared among prominent women. It was a small step to accusations of poison and murder, the ultimate arsenal of aggressive ambition. As Octavian had demonstrated in his treatment of Cleopatra, the demonized enemy is a defeated enemy.
Cassius Dio describes the aftermath of Augustus’s funeral. ‘When these ceremonies had been completed, all the others departed, but Livia remained on the spot for five days, attended by the most distinguished of the knights; then she had his bones gathered up and placed in his tomb.’3 We cannot state confidently that Livia’s lonely vigil arose from devotion, nor on the contrary that it represents an exercise in keeping up appearances, behaving as Roman precedent demanded. At some point during those five days in which Augustus’s pyre smouldered and Livia kept watch, an obliging senator, the ex-praetor Numerius Atticus, witnessed the deceased princeps’s ascent to heaven in the same way, as tradition maintained, as occurred in the case of Romulus. Livia rewarded him with a payment of a million sesterces. She could afford to be generous. Augustus’s will divided his estate between his wife and his adopted son, one third to Livia, the remainder to Tiberius. The financial element of Livia’s share amounted to fifty million sesterces. Such was the unprecedented magnitude of the bequest that the Senate was required to waive in Livia’s favour the Voconian Law restricting female inheritance.
This represented a resounding victory for the Claudian element of Augustus’s family. The death of Agrippa Postumus at the beginning of Tiberius’s rule eliminated the late princeps’s final grandson. Any successor in the next generation could be at best Augustus’s great-grandchild through Agrippina the Elder. Not only would such an heir share minimal quantities of Octavian and Julian blood, but through his father, Agrippina’s husband Germanicus, he too would be a Claudian. In the meantime, Augustus’s accumulated wealth, including his slaves and freedmen, passed in its entirety into the hands of a family to which he was unconnected save by marriage. How the leading players of that family chose to share their inheritance became an important dynamic of the early years of Tiberius’s principate. Inevitably, the sources portray Livia and Tiberius as a family at war. Their picture is one of personal animosity between mother and son. In truth those differences, such as they were, were ideological as much as personal.
Augustus, we know, had behaved assiduously in restricting the scope of Livia’s influence. Favours were not hers for the asking, as Livia discovered when Augustus refused her first appeal for freedom for the people of Samos or, on another occasion, her request that a Gaul be granted Roman citizenship. In their unprecedented position, negotiating a compromise between Augustus’s declared republicanism and the realities of sovereign power, husband and wife maint
ained a cautious balancing act. Both, we assume, were aware of the rules of engagement. That Augustus valued Livia’s advice appears to be proven by his discussion of political matters with her. That he prepared for such conversations by making notes in advance, careful to clarify his opinion in his own mind, may equally suggest he feared her ability to persuade him to her point of view against his will. Livia may have regarded Octavian’s position as princeps and ‘Augustus’ with a degree of reverence; there is no evidence that her feelings for the man himself encompassed elements of awe. Propriety demanded discernible clear blue water between Augustus’s public life and his domestic relationships. Both husband and wife maintained the semblance of that distinction. In practice it had frequently been an artificial divide.
Suetonius preserves letters from Augustus to Livia concerning the latter’s grandson, the future Emperor Claudius. ‘As regards the immediate question in your last letter, I have no objection to his taking charge of the priests’ banquet at the Festival,’ Augustus writes on one occasion.4 We do not know if Augustus and Livia were separated at the time of this discussion, Augustus absent on business or Livia at her villa at Prima Porta. If not, we see clearly the shared habit of committing to paper requests that touched on the public arena, even if, as in this case, the issue concerned the couple’s family as much as the official life of Rome. In this instance, having set out his opinion, Augustus entrusts the matter to Livia’s judgement: ‘In short, my dear Livia, I am anxious that a decision should be reached on this matter once and for all, to save us from further alternations of hope and despair.’5 Although Augustus denied Livia official recognition in his lifetime in the form of any public position, these are letters written between equals, opinions canvassed, considered and, on occasion we must assume, accepted and acted upon. It is possible that Augustus discussed with Livia her continuing exclusion from Roman politics. Given her background and upbringing, this may not have been necessary.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 28