Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  The final agreement did little more than confirm what everyone knew to be the unstable status quo. Sextus was officially installed as governor of what he had already captured—Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily. To these was added the Peloponnese (southern Greece). He was honored by membership of the College of Augurs, the committee of senior statesmen who were charged with taking the auspices at Rome, and he was nominated for the consulship in the following year, 38 B.C. Sextus’ followers in Sicily had their personal positions secured: all the exiles from Italy in his army (excepting, always, Julius Caesar’s assassins) were to have their civil rights restored; the buyback offer to proscribed senators and equites was confirmed; the runaway slaves in Sextus’ force were to be freed; and Sextus’ soldiers were to receive the same demobilization awards as those serving the triumvirs.

  Sextus could claim that this was a reasonably good deal for him, in that he was no longer an outlaw. The Treaty of Misenum brought him inside the political fold. Privately, though, he already regretted rejecting Menodorus’ advice to avoid coming to terms with the triumvirs.

  By contrast, Antony and Octavian had every right to be pleased with themselves. They had given Sextus nothing essential to their interests, but had won something beyond price. Although they may not have realized it at the time, they had initiated the process of detaching opposition politicians from Sextus. Once it became clear that the triumvirs were not planning a new bloodbath, many began trickling back either to Italy or to join Antony when he returned to the east. To Sextus’ alarm, the Pompeian constituency was set to decline.

  The principals celebrated the peace with a series of banquets. They drew lots to decide the order. Sextus acted as host first, on his flagship (“My only ancestral home left to me”). The two sides did not trust each other; the triumvirs had their ships moored nearby, guards were posted and the dinner guests carried daggers underneath their clothes. On the surface all was smiles and friendship. Sextus gave a warm welcome to Antony and Octavian. The atmosphere softened and the conversation became coarse and convivial. Jokes were made about Antony’s passion for the queen of Egypt, a topic that Octavia’s brother and husband would ordinarily have found embarrassing.

  As at Brundisium, the bond between the parties was incarnated in a marriage union. At the dinner table, Sextus’ infant daughter was formally engaged to the three-year-old Marcellus, Antony’s stepson and Octavian’s nephew.

  According to Plutarch, Menodorus came to Sextus and spoke to him out of the hearing of his guests. “Shall I cut the cables and make you master not just of Sicily and Sardinia, but of the whole Roman empire?”

  Sextus thought for a moment, and then burst out: “Menodorus, you should have acted, not spoken to me beforehand. Now we must be content with things as they are. I do not break my word.”

  This famous anecdote has a suspiciously glib quality, yet it may be true, for it illustrates two facets of Sextus’ character. When he called himself Pius, “Dutiful” or “Honest,” the reference was primarily to his father’s memory, but it also indicated that he saw himself as a Roman of the old school, honorable and straightforward. In addition, the story points to a certain passivity that can be detected throughout his career, an absence of the killer instinct that marked out, in their different ways, Antony and Octavian.

  On the following two days, Antony and then Octavian entertained Sextus, erecting dining tents on their sea platform. After this they left for their respective destinations—Octavian to Gaul, where there were disturbances; Antony to the east and the Parthians; Sextus back to Sicily. Most of the refugees in Sextus’ entourage said goodbye to him and left for Rome.

  With the onset of autumn Octavian did something that, on the face of it, was out of character: for once letting his heart sway him, he fell passionately in love. The object of his affection was Livia Drusilla; about nineteen years old, she was intelligent and beautiful, although with a small mouth and chin. However, she suffered from one signal disadvantage: she was already married, to an aristocrat and cousin of hers, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Not only that, but she was heavily pregnant.

  To add to the complications, Octavian’s wife, Scribonia, gave birth to her daughter, Julia, sometime in 39 B.C. Despite the happy event, the marriage—a political union if ever there was one—was not going well. As was pointed out earlier, Scribonia was substantially older than her husband; too, she was reputed to be a gravis femina, a dignified or serious woman. This did not much suit a young man with a reputation for copious adultery. On the very day that Julia arrived in the world, her father divorced her mother. “I couldn’t bear the way she nagged at me,” he explained.

  In September—perhaps on his birthday, the twenty-third—Octavian conducted a rite of passage. He did not have a hairy body, and at twenty-four had still not found it necessary to shave: now the moment had come. Being prone to devise a ritual for almost every aspect of daily life, the Romans made a ceremony of their first shave—the depositio barbae, which in most cases took place about the time a boy came of age, usually at sixteen or seventeen.

  Octavian made a great to-do over the ceremony, throwing a magnificent party and paying for a public festival. The event could be seen as a statement that, with the arrival of peace, the “boy who owed everything to his name” had attained his political as well as physical maturity. But it was whispered that his true motive was to please Livia.

  Livia had an impeccable family background. While Octavian was unquestionably smitten, it is also true that marriage with her would give him a valuable connection to the Claudii, one of Rome’s most aristocratic clans. The triumvir’s father had reached the praetorship and so qualified as a nobilis. He himself had been enrolled as a patrician; however, he was still regarded as something of a provincial upstart. The union afforded Livia’s family access to her lover’s political power, in return for which she contributed her ancestry.

  Livia Drusilla’s life, although short, had been full of incident. She was born on January 30, 59 or 58 B.C., probably at Rome. Not long after the Ides of March in 44 B.C., a husband was found for her. At fourteen or fifteen years old, Livia was approaching the upper limit of a girl’s customary marriageable age. Most marriages were arranged by the parents and love (“friendship gone mad”) was not expected to enter anybody’s calculations. A daughter was often a pawn in the alliances—social, economic, or political—that a great family struck to maintain its position in Roman public life. Husbands could be much older than their wives, and for the physically immature the wedding night must have been a savage introduction to sex.

  Despite the potentially inauspicious opening to her married life, the Roman wife was a powerful figure in the household, being its domina, or mistress. Old forms of marriage in the early Republic, according to which she lived in complete subjection to her husband, the all-powerful paterfamilias, had given way by the third century B.C. to a new and freer arrangement by which the woman remained under her father’s authority and from the age of twenty-five held possession of her own property.

  The man Livia married was Tiberius Claudius Nero, from another branch of the Claudian clan, the Claudii Nerones; he was probably in his mid- to late thirties. Of impeccable birth, he had great promise, but (as it turned out) poor judgment.

  Tiberius took a stand against the First Triumvirate during the fifties B.C., but then, with the onset of the civil war in 49, turned his back on his optimate friends and sided with Julius Caesar. His services were recognized generously and Tiberius must have felt that fortune was smiling on him, but then on the Ides of March 44 B.C. the Caesarian regime came crashing down. Tiberius immediately returned to his old optimate allegiance. When the Senate voted for an amnesty for the assassins, he went an obsequious step further and supported a proposal to reward them.

  In 42 B.C., Livia became pregnant. She was very anxious to have a boy, and to find out in advance what the sex of her child would be she took an egg from under a broody hen and kept it warm against her breast; also, she and her attend
ants held it in turn in their hands. In due course, she hatched a fine cock chick already with a comb. The prophecy was exact. On November 16, Livia gave birth to a son at the family home on the Palatine Hill at Rome. As was the Roman custom with first-born males, he was given his father’s praenomen, Tiberius.

  After the defeat of the republican cause at Philippi, Tiberius agilely changed course again. He now became a supporter of Mark Antony; in that capacity, he was elected praetor for 41 B.C., the same year in which Antony’s brother, Lucius, was consul.

  Although we have no idea what opinion Livia held of her husband, she demonstrated a personal quality he certainly did not share: a steady loyalty, even, or perhaps especially, when under pressure. When Tiberius, with his usual poor judgment, decided to follow Lucius Antonius’ star, Livia and the infant Tiberius went along with him to Perusia. The family endured the terrible privations of the siege, and after Perusia fell Tiberius was the only Roman officeholder in the city to refuse to capitulate.

  He somehow managed to escape with mother and child; the family went on to Neapolis, where Tiberius tried to foment a slave revolt by promising them freedom. Octavian’s forces soon broke into the city and the family had to flee again. Following bypaths to avoid the soldiery and accompanied by only one or two attendants, including a nurse to carry Tiberius, they secretly made their way to the coast. The baby twice started crying and nearly gave them away. The family found a ship—it must have been arranged for in advance—and sailed to Sicily, where the elder Tiberius expected a welcome from Sextus Pompeius.

  In fact, Sextus received him coolly and was slow to grant him an audience; doubtless he was considered something of an embarrassment. Soon he and Livia set off again, this time to Greece. But what to do now? Antony was no more interested than Sextus in having anything to do with this undependable nobleman. He sent Tiberius to Sparta, which had long been in the Claudian clientela. Here the family at last received a warm welcome. However, some unrecorded danger arose, and a hurried departure once more became necessary. According to Suetonius, Livia and the baby nearly lost their lives when, fleeing by night, they ran into a sudden forest fire and were encircled by it. In this mysterious incident, Livia’s hair caught fire and her dress was scorched.

  At the Treaty of Misenum, Sextus eventually placed Tiberius’ name on the list of exiles to be restored, and so, at long last, he, Livia, and little Tiberius were allowed to abandon their nomadic life. At some point in the late summer of 39 B.C., they returned to Rome. They found themselves in comparatively reduced circumstances. As an exile and opponent of the Triumvirate, Tiberius had forfeited his property, including the grand house on the Palatine. The deal struck at Misenum promised only to return one quarter of it.

  It was at or about this moment of bittersweet celebration that Livia learned that she was pregnant again. It would be unwise to conclude from this that she was content with her lot. Livia must have felt that she had done her best for her husband under extremely trying, even harrowing, circumstances. It was time she looked out for herself.

  It is easy in the light of hindsight to criticize Tiberius’ behavior. Many of his contemporaries in the ruling class faced the same dilemmas and were equally uncertain and inconsistent in their responses. Where, they wondered desperately, were the old, fixed points of guidance in a political landscape made unrecognizable by successive earthquakes?

  Where Livia was concerned, Octavian was determined to let nothing stand in his way. He met her very soon after her return to Rome; indeed, she may have been introduced to him by Scribonia. He quickly made up his mind to marry her, and she decided equally quickly to say yes. Tiberius complaisantly agreed to a divorce.

  It is likely that, soon after the depositio barbae, in late September or early October, Octavian and Livia became engaged. It was a slightly scandalous event, but a grand betrothal banquet was held. Like other fashionable people of the time, Livia owned little slave boys called deliciae, or darlings (often Syrians or Africans), who ran around naked and amused people with their chatter. Like court jesters, they had license to say the unsayable. On this occasion, one of these boys saw Livia and Octavian sharing a dining couch and Tiberius lying on another alongside a male guest. He went up to Livia and said: “What are you doing here, mistress? For your husband [pointing to Tiberius] is over there.”

  The couple paused before translating their engagement into marriage. The problem was Livia’s unborn child by Tiberius. Octavian went to consult the appropriate religious authority, the pontifices: could he marry Livia while she was pregnant?

  The pontifices offered their seal of approval and it seems that Livia now moved in with Octavian in his house on the Palatine. However, the wedding did not take place until after the birth of her second child, who was born on January 14 and given the praenomen Drusus.

  People suspected that he was the product of adultery with his step-father. This was obviously wrong, for Octavian had not met Livia when she conceived in the spring of 39. Nevertheless, the story was too good to disbelieve, and Suetonius records that the following epigram went the rounds:

  How fortunate those parents are for whom

  Their child is only three months in the womb.

  The birth of Drusus cannot have been a very difficult one, for three days later the couple wed. The Roman marriage ceremony, a changeless ritual, dramatized the bride’s removal from her father’s house to the groom’s. Livia’s father was dead; apparently, Tiberius gave her away. She must have spent the night before the wedding at his home.

  On the day itself, Livia gathered her hair in a crimson net and put on an unhemmed tunic, secured at the waist by a woolen girdle tied with a double knot. Over this she wore a saffron-colored cloak; she was shod in saffron-colored sandals and fastened a metal collar around her throat. Her hair was protected by six pads of artificial hair separated by narrow bands; a veil of flaming orange covered the top half of her face. It was crowned by a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram.

  In this spectacular outfit, Livia stood surrounded by family and friends and greeted the groom when he arrived with his people. An animal sacrifice to the gods was then offered (probably a pig, although it could have been a ewe or even an ox).

  Livia then said to Octavian, in an age-old formula, “Ubi tu es Gaius, ego Gaia”—“Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”

  This was the heart of the ritual, and everyone present shouted “Feliciter,” “Congratulations.”

  Octavian now led Livia in a street procession from Tiberius’ house to his own, not a long journey as they both lived on the Palatine Hill. Flute players led the way, followed by five torchbearers. As they walked along, people sang cheerfully obscene songs. Three boys whose parents were still alive accompanied the bride; one held a torch of hawthorn twigs and the other two took Livia by the hand.

  On reaching her new home, garlanded with flowers for the occasion, Livia was obliged to conduct an inconvenient and messy ritual: she wound wool around the doorposts and coated them with lard or (harder to find, one would imagine) wolf’s fat. Then, men who had been married only once lifted her through the front door; this was to avoid the risk of her tripping on the threshold, a very bad omen. They were followed by three bridesmaids, two of whom carried the symbols of domestic virtue, a distaff and spindle for home weaving.

  After a wedding breakfast and some more rude songs, Livia was led to the bridal bed. Octavian took off her cloak and untied the girdle, after which the wedding guests made their excuses and left.

  The law gave the paterfamilias absolute authority over his children, so the little Tiberius, a toddler of three, stayed behind with his father. Octavian also handed over the newborn Drusus. Livia’s feelings about this are unknown, but a story told about her suggests that her attention was fixed, rather, on the future splendor of her position.

  Apparently, when she was returning shortly after the wedding to a house she owned at Veii a few miles from Rome, an eagle flew by and dropped into Livia’s lap a white pullet i
t had just pounced on. Noticing that it held in its beak a laurel twig with berries on it (the laurel was a sign of victory, and generals wore a laurel wreath at their triumphs), she decided to keep the bird for breeding and to plant the twig. Soon the pullet raised such a brood of chickens that the house became known as Ad Gallinas Albas, White Poultry, and the twig grew so luxuriantly that Octavian plucked laurels from it for his official wreaths.

  Five years later, in 33 B.C., if she had not negotiated their earlier return, Livia was able to reclaim her sons, for her former husband died, from what cause is unknown—his last stroke of bad luck.

  Octavian’s political situation was by no means secure, but he had managed to hold on to the gains of the Treaty of Brundisium. Through cold-blooded courage he had survived the anger of the mob and of the soldiers, his two fundamental bulwarks. The agreement at Misenum had settled nothing, but had at least won him a breathing space and measurably weakened Sextus’ position. His willingness to risk his life was a sign of a growing self-confidence, of a conviction that he was owed respect for his achievements as much as for his inheritance.

  Octavian’s marriage is the first occasion for which we have evidence when he gave priority to his feelings. The union had its political importance, too. Livia was one of many exiles who had gathered around the last forlorn hope of the defeated Republic, Sextus Pompeius, given up on him, and returned home to Rome. That she was willing to wed the Republic’s archenemy is interesting evidence that the ruling class was beginning to reconcile itself to an altered world.

  X

  FIGHTING NEPTUNE

  38–36 B.C.

  * * *

  However, the most important development by far was the defection of Sextus’ admiral Menodorus, who was in Sardinia. The former pirate was losing confidence in his master’s strategic ability and long-term chances of survival. Menodorus delivered to Octavian Sardinia and Corsica, three legions, and some light-armed troops.