Livia, Empress of Rome

by Matthew Dennison

  Despite tensions, the relationship of Livia and Tiberius remained amicable as late as AD 22, when, for the first time in her life, Livia succumbed to serious illness. ‘Either mother and son were still good friends or, if they were not, they concealed it,’ Tacitus comments of Tiberius’s visit to his mother’s sickbed.17 That Rome shared Tiberius’s opinion at this point is confirmed by the honours voted Livia on her recovery – a statue dedicated by the equestrians to the goddess Equestrian Fortuna and many of the privileges of Rome’s highest-ranking women, the Vestal Virgins, including the right to sit with the Vestals at public games and in the theatre and to travel within Rome in a carriage, the ‘carpentum’. How much use Livia made of these privileges depends on the fullness of her recovery, information impossible to retrieve. Not for the first time she largely disappears from the sources following her illness. Although this may indicate a life of increasing retirement, it is also attributable to the ancient authors’ preoccupation with current political developments, namely the rise and rise of the would-be princeps Sejanus.

  Livia, however, continued to involve herself in small-scale petitions. It was just such an application for Tiberius’s intervention in legal procedure which finally drove a lasting wedge between Livia and that son whose future had consumed so many of her energies. The matter was a request concerning the advancement of a man only recently granted citizenship. Tiberius – correct in his assessment of the legal issue at stake – declined Livia’s petition and, as Suetonius records, ‘quarrelled openly with his mother’. Livia reacted furiously. In her anger, she ‘produced from a strong-box some of Augustus’s old letters to her commenting on Tiberius’s sour and stubborn character’.18 It was a dramatic but self-defeating gesture. Tiberius’s anger matched that of his mother, its source not the contents of Augustus’s letters but the fact that Livia had kept them and used them to taunt him so long after the event. This incident, Suetonius cautiously claims, ‘is said to have been [Tiberius’s] main reason for retirement to Capri’. Tacitus offers the alternative explanations that Tiberius wanted to escape from Sejanus or to conceal the cruelty and immorality of his conduct. Unable to resist a chance to denigrate Livia, however, he ultimately attributes his departure in AD 26 to ‘his mother’s bullying’.19

  Certainly Tiberius showed no signs of missing his mother in his self-imposed exile. During the remaining three years of Livia’s life, Tiberius would visit his mother only once. In AD 29 he omitted even to attend her funeral, interesting himself in the business of her death only to the extent of capping those honours voted to her by the Senate. He annulled her will and vetoed her deification. A dozen years would pass before Livia’s grandson Claudius formalized that metamorphosis. In the interval a troubled psychopath known to history as Caligula, the Emperor Gaius, decreed the divinity of his sister Julia Drusilla, the great incestuous passion of his short life. So unworthily did Livia escape becoming the first woman of the Roman Empire to be declared a goddess.

  There were perhaps compensations of a form more familiar to us for the eighty-six-year-old widow. In 19 BC Livia and Augustus had visited the Greek city of Eleusis, west of Athens. Eleusis was the site of one of the ancient world’s most sacred rituals, the Eleusinian Mysteries, shrouded in impenetrable secrecy but focused on the worship of Demeter and Persephone. We do not know if Livia became an Eleusinian initiate in 19 BC but the possibility certainly exists. Later, Eleusis would attract the scorn of the early Christians. An offshoot of an ancient pantheism characterized by the lofty vengefulness of its deities, it offered its initiates unusually the promise of rebirth – and the hope of a happy and joyful afterlife.

  Epilogue

  ‘You held your course without remorse’

  Propertius opens Elegy 3.11 with a bang: ‘Why are you astonished if a woman drives my life and drags, bound beneath her own laws, a man?’1

  The question is deliberately provocative. The subject of Propertius’s poem is contentious and highly charged – a lover’s submission to his mistress. In Rome, no honourable template existed for such an impulse. Male submission was disgraceful, a source of contempt, the reason Romans tolerated active but not passive male homosexuality, the bar to a Roman soldier’s surrender even in the face of certain defeat. The principal virtue of Rome’s governing elite – its administrative, and military but also overwhelmingly its literary class – was ‘virtus’ itself. Derived from the Latin word for man, ‘vir’, virtus was not understood, as today, as an ethical concept of goodness but a definition of manliness in the form of a man’s ideal behaviour.2 Virtus became the Romans’ defining quality, ‘the badge of the Roman race and breed’, as Cicero described it.3 So close was the association of tribe and trait that the cult image of Virtus exactly matched that of the goddess Roma. Confusingly, women too could embrace virtus. In doing so, they accepted Rome’s idealization of maleness and subscribed to their own subjection. They did not, like Propertius’s mistress, drag a man ‘bound beneath [their] own laws’.

  Writing in the decade after Octavian’s victory at Actium, Propertius defends his pose of submissiveness through comparison with Rome’s recent fear of Cleopatra.4 His point is simple. Although Romans seek to deny it, women have power. The poet’s bondage to Cynthia reflects in miniature Rome’s terror at Cleopatra’s perceived expansionist threats. In each case, mistress and monarch exploit the wiles of their sex, the Queen of Egypt as meretricious as any Roman femme fatale.

  We do not know if Livia was familiar with Propertius’s poetry. The elegist would become one of Maecenas’s stable of poets invited to hymn Augustus’s regime. Whether or not such sponsorship yielded a public reading of the third book of elegies, Livia understood too clearly the concept Propertius sought to stand on its head in 3.11. She devoted her public life to the Augustan status quo, that conservative romanticizing of a Republican golden age of political stability and domestic harmony. If Augustus exploited the rhetoric of virtus in pursuit of a better Rome, it was Livia who repeatedly acted as exemplum of its very specific requirements.

  Her touch was sure. She took from Octavia the austere Roman nodus hairstyle and made it her own. She wore the stola, the shapeless ‘noli me tangere’ of a garment made from woollen homespun which Augustus liked to maintain she wove herself in their Palatine atrium. She associated herself with recognizably female religious cults. Her charitable activities included contributions to the dowries of young girls and to parents of newborn babies. She assisted the victims of fire, the natural disaster most likely to rob Romans of their homes, implicitly strengthening her own associations with domesticity. ‘In the domestic sphere,’ as even Tacitus was forced to acknowledge, ‘she cultivated virtue in the time-honoured fashion.’ Mindful of the spirit of Augustus’s much-vaunted legislation concerning marriage and the family, she donned a shining carapace of chastity, ‘pudicitia’. This ultimately earned her Horace’s commendation as an ‘univira’, Rome’s cherished concept of the one-man woman, despite it being common knowledge that she had married Augustus in haste after embarking on an affair with him while still married to her first husband, Nero. ‘Once, when some naked men met her and were to be put to death in consequence,’ Dio relates, ‘she saved their lives by saying that to chaste women such men are no whit different from statues.’5

  Such statements were not spontaneous effusions. They arose as part of a larger policy of appearing to embrace the traditional parameters of Roman women’s lives. Livia capitalized on the new possibilities generated by Augustus’s politicization of private life to create a public existence in which she seemed to confine herself to the private sphere of home and family. It was an accomplished balancing act, a puppetry of smoke and mirrors. It demonstrates the extent to which she recognized the restrictions of her position, even as the wife of Rome’s leading citizen. In many ways her arena mirrored those two inches of ivory with which, eighteen hundred years later, Jane Austen concerned herself, the unchanging limitations of women in a male environment. From that tiny springboard, Liv
ia created for herself a position of greater prominence, over a longer period of time, than had previously been enjoyed by any woman of the Republic.

  Politically astute, she recognized that appearances were more important than reality. In private she discussed a range of topics with Augustus. The princeps prepared himself for their discussions by committing his thoughts to paper in advance. Although Dio might claim of her, ‘She occupied a very exalted station, far above all women of former days,’ for the most part both she and Augustus took considerable pains to conceal the nature and degree of that exaltation.6 It is reasonable to assume that Augustus both invited and, on occasion, accepted Livia’s guidance in matters of a political complexion. Unlike Propertius, the princeps resisted broadcasting what in Roman terms amounted to role reversal. Although hostile sources insist that Livia demanded equality with Tiberius once the latter attained the principate, she maintained a stance of public deference towards Augustus. It was Ovid, not Livia herself, who claimed for her the title ‘princeps femina’, ‘first lady’. A daughter of the Republican aristocracy, Livia had absorbed enough in her father’s house to understand the impossibility of such a label.

  Livia’s behaviour during her marriage to Octavian-Augustus and the years of her widowhood under Tiberius demonstrates her exploitation of the art of the possible. She was not, as Tacitus would claim of Tiberius, ‘disdainful of compliment’. As a priestess of the deified Augustus, she encouraged the development of the imperial cult from which she too benefited; there are no records of her attempting to restrict her own cult, which flourished outside mainland Italy even within her own lifetime. Later historians have successfully darkened Livia’s reputation: the silent testimony of nameless provincial worshippers is a powerful riposte. For the most part her approach was cautious. She understood the bounds of acceptability and the limitations imposed on feminine advancement by Romans’ ongoing engagement with the Republican concept of virtus.

  Romans adopted a black and white approach to transgression. Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia sought to exercise masculine powers, notably in a time of war. Her recompense was to forfeit her femininity. As Velleius Paterculus consigned her to posterity, nothing was womanly about Fulvia save her anatomy.7

  Livia was a young woman at the time of Fulvia’s prominence but evidently digested the lessons of her downfall. Not even Tacitus would deny Livia’s womanliness. Her success was to create for herself a sphere of influence that arose directly from her woman’s status as wife and mother but, unlike Propertius’s Cynthia or his fearsome Cleopatra, included no sexual element. Livia’s beauty was proverbial, but commentators refrain from mentioning it in connection with her public role. The ‘Consolation to Livia’ described her as ‘one woman who has given so many benefits through her two offspring’8 the Senate sought to create her ‘Mother of her Country’, and worshippers in a western province took the final leap and acclaimed her ‘Mother of the World’. Was it Claudian pride which encouraged Livia to accept their homage – or a recognition that in such titles she had transcended the achievements of the heroines of Rome’s past and could climb no higher? Her record would prove stubborn. Even Agrippina the Younger, Augustus’s great-granddaughter who, as wife of the Emperor Claudius, came closer than Livia to playing a man’s part, legitimized her pretensions through her status as ‘the sister, wife and mother of men who ruled the world’.9 Perhaps Tacitus’s obituary notice of Livia, delivered with such invective, contains an unintended compliment. ‘A compliant wife, a good match for the intrigues of her husband and the hypocrisy of her son’, she was defined in death as in life by her relationship to men who occupied the highest public office. Adapting her behaviour to suit theirs may have been cynical; it demonstrated an assured grasp of the realities of Roman politics.

  And what of Livy’s assessment of the excessive cruelty and pride of the Claudii or Suetonius’s record of a family tarnished by violence and arrogance? Did inherited failings direct Livia’s life, as ancient biographers would insist they must?

  Tennyson did not spare his own cruel heroine. ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere, There stands a spectre in your hall: The guilt of blood is at your door…You held your course without remorse.’

  Are there spectres in Livia’s atrium, shadowy figures of Marcellus, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Marcus Agrippa, Augustus, Agrippa Postumus, Germanicus and the two Julias? The list is not a short one. But the answer, insofar as trustworthy evidence survives, is no and again no. Despite the best efforts of authors from Tacitus to Robert Graves, we cannot with certainty place the guilt of blood at Livia’s door. That she held her course without remorse comes closer, grounds for a different history – the life of that woman who, as wife of Rome’s leading citizen for half a century, unguided by precedent, became Rome’s first, best-known and greatest empress.

  Bibliography

  Primary Sources

  Works by the following Classical authors were consulted during the research and writing of this book. Where appropriate, details of editions and translations used are provided in the endnotes. It is important to remember that, although termed ‘primary’ sources, a number of these works postdate Livia’s life.

  Appian

  Aulus Gellius

  Cicero

  Diodorus Siculus

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus

  Horace

  Juvenal

  Livy

  Lucan

  Macrobius

  Martial

  Nepos

  Ovid

  Plautus

  Pliny

  Plutarch

  Propertius

  Ptolemy

  Quintilian

  Sallust

  Seneca

  Statius

  Suetonius

  Tacitus

  Valerius

  Maximus

  Velleius Paterculus

  Virgil

  Vitruvius

  Secondary Sources

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  Barrett, Anthony A., Livia, First Lady of Imperial Rome (Yale University Press, London, 2002)

  Bartman, Elizabeth, Portraits of Livia (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999)

  Bauman, Richard A., Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (Routledge, London, 1992)

  Beard, Mary, Pompeii, The Life of a Roman Town (Profile, London, 2008)

  Bourgeaud, Philippe, Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2004)

  Bradford, Ernle, Cleopatra (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1971)

  Broudy, Eric, The Book of Looms: A History of the Handloom from Ancient Times to the Present (Farnsworth Art Museum, Maine, 1993)

  Clark, Gillian, Women in the Ancient World (Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics No. 21, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989)

  Cramer, Rev. J. A., A Geographical and Historical Description of Ancient Italy (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1826)

  Dalby, Andrew, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (Routledge, London, 2002)

  —, Food in the Ancient World from A–Z (Routledge, London, 2003)

  D’Ambra, Eve, Roman Women (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007)

  Dixon, Suzanne, The Roman Mother (Croom Helm, London, 1988)

  —, Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres and Real Life (Duckworth, London, 2001)

  Edmondson, Jonathan and Keith, Alison, Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2008)

  Everitt, Anthony, The First Emperor: Caesar Augustus and the Triumph of Rome (John Murray, London, 2006)

  Falkner, Thomas M. and De Luce, Judith, Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature (State University of New York Press, NY, 1989)

  Flower, Harriet I., Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996)

  Forsythe, Gary, A Critical Study of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University of California
Press, Berkeley, 2005) Frantantuono, Lee, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil’s Aeneid (Lexington Books, NY, 2007)

  Fraschetti, Augusto, Roman Women (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2001)

  Galinsky, Karl, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005)

  Gardner, Jane F. Roman Myths (British Museum Press, London, 1993)

  Gardner, Jane F. and Wiedemann, Thomas, The Roman Household: A Sourcebook (Routledge, London, 1991)

  Goldsworthy, Adrian, Caesar (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2006)