We have seen that only Augustus, acting with the support of the Senate, could have elevated Tiberius to the position of princeps-in-waiting. It was Augustus who entrusted Tiberius with the military commands on which his reputation rested, and Augustus who possessed by senatorial grant the quiverful of powers which would eventually be formalized in the institution of the principate. In point of law Tiberius was ‘son of Augustus’, as he had been since AD 4. It was only by virtue of his kinship with Augustus, expressed in the relationship of father and son, that Tiberius was able to become his predecessor’s principal inheritor.
Tiberius overlooked at this point the fact that Livia’s marriage of 38 BC was the single condition which created the opportunity for her son also to become Augustus’s son. He stamped on the Senate’s suggestion that he be hailed ‘son of Livia’ – or ‘son of Julia’, as Tacitus and Cassius Dio more correctly report it. He understood the impossibility of such a concept in Rome, where legitimate filiation derived exclusively from the father.13 Undoubtedly, he was also reluctant to elevate Livia to the status of ‘king-maker’. Perhaps he misunderstood that, in creating Livia ‘Julia Augusta’, Augustus meant to enhance Tiberius’s own legitimacy, eliminating at a stroke any suggestion that he owed his position to his mother’s scandalous affair and remarriage.14
It was not a mistake Livia herself made, whatever the inference of Dio’s account. She was surely behind the commission of a cameo produced shortly after Augustus’s death.15 Reversing the hierarchy of that eighteenth-century ring, she is the larger, dominant figure.16 In her hands Livia holds a bust – that of her son Tiberius. She is portrayed in the guise of Venus Genetrix, kinswoman goddess of the Julians, her own new family and, since AD 4, that of Tiberius too. By a quirk of fate, she and her son share the same legal father. In the topsy-turvy flattery of the cameo, presumably a private commission intended for limited circulation, Livia’s status is the higher: daughter, wife and goddess. It was a delusion which could be humoured only in private. Time would prove that a mother’s place did not outstrip that of the princeps and that deification did not arise from simple association. The cameo is an exercise in make-believe. It is also the earliest surviving image of a living empress masquerading as a goddess.17 Had Tiberius known of it, it might have provided him with cause for concern.
Livia was in her thirties, accompanying Augustus to the eastern empire, when the provincial mint in the Ionian city of Teos issued coins asserting her divine status. Since that point, her cult had gained significant momentum. Overseas she was associated with a gaggle of goddesses, from Ceres to Cybele, in addition to personifications embracing peace and concord. That Cotta Maximus was able to buy a silver statuette of Livia to send to his friend Ovid suggests that at home too her profile had acquired aspects of divinity. None of these developments, however, rivalled the radicalism of an appointment made in Livia’s favour in the immediate aftermath of Augustus’s death.
‘At the time,’ Dio relates, ‘the Senate declared Augustus to be immortal, assigned to him sacred rites and priests to perform them, and appointed Livia…to be his priestess. They also authorized her to be attended by a lictor whenever she exercised her sacred office.’18 Augustus had bequeathed his widow a title, ‘Augusta’. In the establishment of the deceased Emperor’s cult, the Senate outstripped that distinction. Having appointed a college of priests to serve the new god and Germanicus to the role of chief priest, it created a further vacancy – for Livia, who became priestess of the Divine Augustus. The Senate not only conferred on Livia an official position but, in the award of a lictor – a freedman attendant employed on public occasions – visible acknowledgement of that position. It was the first grant of its sort in Roman imperial history to a woman who was not a Vestal Virgin.
Unsurprisingly, Livia applied herself to Augustus’s cult with the wholeheartedness she had earlier brought to her embodiment of his programme of moral and social reform. Together she and Tiberius agreed to build a temple to Augustus in Rome. It was a speaking gesture, indicative of Tiberius’s endorsement of Livia’s new role. ‘Priestess and daughter’, as Velleius Paterculus described her, Livia understood the benefits to herself of Augustus’s divine honours: a reaffirmation of her right to respect and a continuing role in Tiberius’s Rome.19 She staged festivals in honour of Augustus and dedicated his image in her house on the Palatine. Indirectly her efforts also benefited Tiberius, son of Rome’s newest god. But there is no evidence that Augustus’s cult forged a lasting rapprochement between mother and son.
The year after his accession, Tacitus records, Tiberius ‘had been annoyed by anonymous verses. These had criticized his cruelty, arrogance and bad relations with his mother.’20 It was not the first time lampoons of this sort had circulated in Rome. In the decade before his death, an exasperated Augustus took decisive action in condemning such verses as treasonable.21 But their taunts failed to disappear. ‘You cruel monster!’ ran one preserved by Suetonius, ‘I’ll be damned, I will, if even your own mother loves you still.’22 In the years before Livia’s death, Tiberius would abandon Rome for a second retirement, his destination on this occasion not Rhodes but Capri. Among explanations given for his withdrawal was his desire to escape from his mother.
As in the sources’ portrayal of Livia’s poisoning of Augustus, Tiberius and Livia suffer from a correspondence drawn, but not acknowledged, between their position and a later imperial parallel, in this case that of the Emperor Nero and his mother, femme capable de tout, Agrippina the Younger. In each case the ambitious wife of an emperor is attributed with positioning her son on Rome’s throne by misdeeds. In the case of Nero and Agrippina, good relations between mother and all-powerful son ‘of naturally cruel heart’ proved of short duration.23 The emperor made an unsuccessful attempt to kill his mother in a staged accident at sea. Equally unsuccessfully, he tried to poison her and to crush her in her bed by means of a collapsing ceiling made of lead. Thwarted but determined, he finally ordered her execution by hired assassins. His actions – extreme even by the standards of Julio-Claudian dysfunctionalism – did not echo those of his predecessor Tiberius.
But the topos of the ambitious mother and ungrateful son proved irresistible to Roman historians. There is no evidence to suspect Tiberius of harbouring murderous intentions towards Livia. Evidence of animosity between mother and son is mostly conjectural. Each understood their mutual dependence and the limits Rome set on their behaviour. The venom of Nero and Agrippina provided richer pickings for storytellers than the more moderate emotions of their wiser forebears. In the written record all are tarred with the same brush.
Chapter 31
Above the law?
The funeral of Livia’s grandson Claudius in AD 54 was an event of some splendour, similar in scale to that of Augustus. Its solemn grandeur, Tacitus asserts, was attributable to Claudius’s widow, the same Agrippina who would shortly meet a bloody end at Nero’s hands. ‘For Agrippina,’ we read, ‘strove to emulate the magnificence of her great-grandmother Livia.’1
At least in part, Tacitus’s inference is misleading. The magnificence of Augustus’s funeral, with its imagines of legendary Romans from Romulus onwards and parade of allegorical images of subject nations, was not Livia’s but his own doing. Augustus enumerated its details in one of those three sealed rolls he entrusted to the Vestal Virgins alongside the notebooks containing his will. Livia’s magnificence was of a different variety. She disdained extravagant gestures. Her own funeral would be a modest affair – if the sources are to be believed, a valedictory attempt on Tiberius’s part to cut her down to size for one last time; perhaps in fact a ceremony in keeping with that sense of propriety which characterized all her appearances on Rome’s public stage.
Yet at the end of her life, Livia found herself a woman of notable wealth, at the head of an impressive household of an estimated thousand retainers and a network of clients which spanned the Roman world. Her portfolio of land holdings included Salome’s bequest of cities in Judaea, e
states in Egypt boasting vineyards, papyrus marshes, vegetable farms and granaries,2 an estate close to Thyateira on the Lydian border in Asia Minor and her villa at Prima Porta, where she cultivated a crop of symbolic richness in the laurels used for imperial wreaths. She also owned commercial property: brickworks in Campania, a copper mine in Gaul, apartment blocks in Rome. Her wealth extended to hard cash: in her will she would bequeath the future emperor Galba the significant sum of fifty million sesterces.
But these were private possessions, perhaps little-known to the ordinary Roman who, like us, might express surprise at Livia employing a pearl-setter when her appearance was so studiedly free of ostentation. As a member of Livia’s family, Agrippina could have seen what was hidden from ordinary eyes. Agrippina’s memoirs – now lost, but used at points by Tacitus – painted a negative picture of Livia. Did the younger woman, herself ambitious and acquisitive, consider that Livia’s knowledge of her own regal riches, the eminence of her position as Augusta and the innate pride of the Claudii together engendered in her a sense of personal magnificence that did indeed shape her behaviour?
Livia’s record under Tiberius appears to differ from her previous conduct. Repeatedly, if sporadically, she behaved in a manner which suggests consciousness of her unique position. She resumed the morning salutatio, which, we have seen, infirmity forced Augustus to abandon. She did so not as Tiberius’s deputy – itself a highly unusual proposition – but apparently in her own right, perhaps in the so-called Casa di Livia which, while close to Augustus’s Palatine house, is nevertheless discrete. Livia’s salutationes were published in the acta publica, the public record, alongside the names of those attending.3 This official sanction raises the undertaking above that of a private individual. It is presumably an example of Livia exploring the possibilities of the undefined role encompassed by the Augusta title, in this instance behaving in a manner later associated with widowed consorts who maintain the routine of their late husbands’ courts. As if to emphasize her continuing public significance, Livia’s birthday was celebrated by several of Rome’s priestly colleges, not simply in the sacrifices made on the Ara Pacis Augustae. In addition, her name was included alongside that of Tiberius in annual vows made for the welfare of the princeps.4
It was a significant leap from that position Cassius Dio states she outlined for herself in relation to Augustus, almost a refutation of her claim that she avoided meddling in any of the princeps’s affairs. In Rome the salutatio, as Livia must have been well aware, was a masculine forum. It provided an opportunity for members of the public to make requests of senators, trusting in the power invested in senatorial office to satisfy those requests. But Livia possessed no such office, nor, we might assume, did she possess access to such power. Events would prove that, with Tiberius’s blessing, not only she could achieve results equivalent to the personal intervention of senators, but her friends assumed as much of Livia.
Two years after Augustus’s death, Livia and Tiberius together intervened in the legal process in aid of one of Livia’s friends. Their joint intervention was sufficiently irregular to attract the attention of the ancient commentators. Livia’s friend Plautia Urgulania owed a sum of money which she showed no inclination to pay. In Tacitus’s account, but for the intervention of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who adopts towards Plautia the role of avenging angel, she would have succeeded in reneging on its payment since ‘her friendship with the Augusta had placed her above the law’.5 Piso, however, had set his sights against the corruption of the capital and determined to make an example of the older woman. ‘Defying the Augusta, he…dared to hale her friend Urgulania into court from the palace itself’.6 Plautia had ignored Piso’s summons, instead setting off for Livia’s house where she assumed, it seems, she would benefit from something akin to sanctuary. Her thoughts were apparently seconded by Livia. They differed from those of Piso, who followed her to Livia’s house to repeat his demands. Since Livia supported Plautia’s chosen course of resistance, it fell to Tiberius to mediate by upholding the formalities of the rule of law. Livia asserted that her dignity had been compromised. Resorting to language associated with the laws governing the preservation of the princeps’s majesty or ‘maiestas’, she stated that Piso’s persistence both humiliated and violated her.
Wisely, Tiberius dodged the issue of Livia’s assumption of majesty. He decided that, ‘without acting autocratically, he could back his mother up to the point of promising to appear before the praetor and support Urgulania’ and set off from the palace to walk to court in the company of his military escort.7 Deliberately hindering his own progress by stopping to greet members of the public along the way, Tiberius gave Livia sufficient time to relent. In the time that elapsed, honour intact, Livia, not Tiberius or Plautia, paid Plautia’s debt.
It was an incident in which all involved successfully made the point they wished to make. Piso had demanded and achieved the removal of a legal irregularity. Plautia had flaunted friends in high places in order to resist an unwanted summons. Livia had asserted with grandiloquence the eminence and power of her position. Tiberius had defended the processes of law. On this occasion it was Tiberius, not Livia, who won popular plaudits. Unless mother and son had devised together their joint response to Piso’s challenge, Tiberius cannot have derived from the incident any surety about Livia’s future submissiveness. It would appear to be an unusual instance of Livia misjudging the behaviour required of her – resorting to the rank pulling to which she felt entitled in place of the carefully modulated behaviour by which she had attained that rank.
In AD 17 Livia and Tiberius acted together under happier circumstances. Travelling from Nicopolis in Achaia to Syria to quash unrest in the east, Tiberius’s adopted son and Livia’s grandson Germanicus broke his journey on the island of Lesbos. For the ninth and last time, his wife Agrippina the Elder was due to give birth. With the safe delivery of her baby, a daughter, Julia Livilla, mother and son supplied a wet nurse to the status-conscious woman who was respectively their step-granddaughter and step-daughter-in-law. The wet nurse chosen, Prima, apparently gave satisfaction: she may later have been rewarded for her services with her freedom.8
It was a gesture of family feeling which would subsequently be overlooked. Within two years of Livilla’s birth, to widespread sadness in Rome, Germanicus was dead. He was the latest in a lengthening line of affable young men of Augustus’s family to be struck down in their prime. ‘The loves of the Romans seemed brief and ill-omened,’ Tacitus commented, drawing parallels between Germanicus’s unexpected death and those of his father Drusus and uncle Marcellus.9 It was, inevitably, a short step to accusations of poisoning directed against Livia.
Livia was seventy-eight years old at the time. Germanicus was the elder son of that son whose death had caused her such paroxysms of grief that she had resorted to consulting the philosopher Areus to mitigate her pain. In time, in the event that Augustus’s strictures were followed, Germanicus would have succeeded Tiberius as princeps, a second Emperor born not of Augustus’s blood but of that of Livia and her favourite daughter-in-law Antonia. Livia’s motive for this her final crime was her fear that Germanicus, like Drusus before him, intended instead to restore the Republic. Since Livia would almost certainly be dead at that point, it was a less than convincing argument. Nor was it one that was widely held in AD 19.
Germanicus himself believed he had been poisoned by the recently appointed Roman governor of Syria, Gnaeus Cornelius Piso, and his wife Munatia Plancina. Surviving trial documents indicate that he specifically testified against Piso.10 ‘Examination of the floor and walls of his bedroom revealed the remains of human bodies, spells, curses, lead tablets inscribed with the patient’s name, charred and bloody ashes, and other malignant objects which are supposed to consign souls to the powers of the tomb,’ Tacitus relates with a note of grim satisfaction. ‘At the same time agents of Piso were accused of spying on the sickbed.’11
For the historian like Tacitus, bent on Livia’s posthum
ous damnation, there were telling details. Plancina was a close friend of Livia’s, her father the author of Octavian’s ‘Augustus’ title in 27 BC.12 By adoption, Germanicus and Agrippina stood in relation to Livia as step-grandson and step-granddaughter, a variant on that relationship of stepmother and stepchild which Tacitus consistently exploits to Livia’s detriment. At the trials of Piso and Plancina in AD 20, Livia intervened on the latter’s behalf, requiring Tiberius to address the Senate in her place in order to secure Plancina’s pardon. Given the strength of feeling in Rome and the weight of evidence against Piso and his wife, it was an unwise, even ignoble act on Livia’s part, which quickly gave rise to negative comment. The Senate’s response suggests its sympathies lay elsewhere. Only the consul Cotta Messalinus in any way seconded Tiberius’s appeal.13 When, inevitably, the Senate acceded to the princeps’s request, it bestowed its pardon on Plancina without enthusiasm, as a favour to Livia ‘for having served the state excellently’.14 That service did not encompass the current instance. The Senate resisted the conclusion that Livia’s partiality proved her own guilt and publicly continued to laud the woman it had for so long extolled as a model of female virtue. Inscriptions found in Spain, dating from the year of the Piso/Plancina trials, reiterate Livia’s praiseworthiness for ‘her many great favours to men of every rank’. In a remarkable break with Republican precedent, the inscriptions attest, ‘She could rightly and deservedly have supreme influence in what she asked from the Senate, though she used that influence sparingly.’15
Great age does not always sharpen political sensibilities and seventy-eight was indeed a great age in AD 20. Undeniably, there is a sense as Livia’s life drew to its slow close of her losing her sureness of touch and that legerdemain which once had characterized her exploitation of issues and events to her own benefit. Certainly the events surrounding Germanicus’s death and the trials of Piso and Plancina served Livia ill. At Germanicus’s funeral, from which Livia and Tiberius were both pointedly absent, all eyes focused on the grieving Aggripina. Tacitus describes the torch of Roman womanly virtue, once Livia’s assured possession, passing ineluctably from Augusta to step-granddaughter. ‘The glory of her country they called her – the only true descendant of Augustus, the unmatched model of traditional behaviour.’16 That final tribute had formed the basis of Livia’s reputation for more than half a century. To her credit – or perhaps because Tacitus’s statement is without foundation – she exacted no revenge. Agrippina would afterwards suffer a dramatic fall from grace. Among her contemporaries, it was considered significant that her banishment to Pandateria, the vicious beating at the hands of a centurion in which she lost an eye, and her slow death from self-induced starvation, occurred only once Livia had died. Then, so the story ran, this ambitious, politically active granddaughter of Augustus lost the safety net of her step-grandmother’s protection.
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