Hostile and sometimes brilliant literary tradition made Livia into a witch. She was, it was claimed, a poisoner who murdered one by one the males of Augustus’s line as well as her grandson and finally Augustus himself—all so that her son by her previous husband, Tiberius, could inherit the empire and she could be the power behind the throne. Although it makes for delicious novels and television dramas, that is myth. Strong women were part of Roman culture, but so was misogyny. A powerful female often attracted slander, none more so than Livia.
She was subordinate to her husband but carved her own place in the public sphere. Her image was a very distant second to Augustus’s in the Roman public eye, and yet she made the most of it. An art historian describes her as “the first woman in the history of the West to be depicted systematically in portraits.” Livia copied and popularized a new hairstyle, a nodus, or forehead roll, first worn by her sister-in-law, Octavia. Livia helped the new style overtake Cleopatra’s tightly braided coiffure in popularity in the Roman world.
Livia certainly knew how to use publicity; for example, making public a miracle that supposedly took place not long before her marriage to Octavian. She was returning to her estate north of Rome when an eagle is said to have dropped into her lap a white hen holding a laurel sprig in its beak. Considering this a great omen, Livia decided to raise the bird and to plant the laurel sprig. The bird had so many chicks that the villa became known as the “Hen Roost.” The laurel flourished, and Augustus began the practice, continued by his successors, of carrying a branch from the grove in which it stood when celebrating his triumphs.
Livia depicted the miracle in the famous Painted Garden, a painting that covered the walls of an underground chamber of the Hen Roost villa, a room probably used for dining in the heat of summer. A powerful woman, Livia may well have played up the miracle to increase her authority. At least one later historian in ancient times, Cassius Dio, saw it that way when stating: “Livia was destined to hold in her lap even Caesar’s power and to dominate him in everything.”
PLANNING FOR THE SUCCESSION
Like any good family businessman, Augustus thought long term and planned for the succession. His own experience as Julius Caesar’s heir underlined the need for such thinking. Augustus made plans, but he found it harder to build a dynasty than to defeat his fiercest warrior or shrewdest political foe.
Livia gave Augustus only one stillborn child. Her two sons from her first marriage, Tiberius and Drusus, grew up to be excellent soldiers, and while Augustus made full use of them, he had other plans for his succession.
If a family is a business, then its members have to set their personal wishes and desires aside for the sake of the firm. That takes its toll, and more than one person was scarred by Augustus’s dynastic needs. No one paid a higher price than Julia, his only biological child. She was the product of divorce, since her father divorced her mother, Scribonia, the day of Julia’s birth. Scribonia never remarried, and Julia was raised in the home of her father and stepmother, Livia.
In spite of her difficult background, Julia grew up to be bright and witty. She was popular with the public, who saw in her a kind and gentle spirit. She was also conceited and proud of her unique status as Augustus’s blood. Unfortunately for her, she was also his broodmare.
Augustus married Julia first to the ambitious young son of his sister, Octavia. But when he died before the couple had any children, Augustus next married the eighteen-year-old Julia to Agrippa—making his advisor divorce his wife first. He and Julia proceeded to have three boys and two girls together. In 17 BC a happy Augustus adopted the two oldest boys, his grandsons Gaius, three, and Lucius, an infant. Soon he began grooming them as his successors.
About a decade later, Augustus showed off his family on the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace. A white marble structure originally painted in vivid colors, it is one of the most famous and beautiful monuments of the ancient world. Dedicated in 9 BC, the altar is carved in exquisite relief with scenes of fertility and sacrifice while highlighting the imperial household marching in a stately procession. It shows Rome’s first family as Augustus wanted them to be seen: patriotic, dignified, and united, as well as a living symbol of peace, prosperity, and piety. The reality was quite different.
Agrippa is depicted among the family members, although he’d died in 12 BC at the age of fifty-one. Augustus honored him by delivering the funeral oration and burying Agrippa’s ashes in the mausoleum of Augustus. Meanwhile, Julia was a widow again.
Augustus now married her to Livia’s son Tiberius. But the marriage failed, and Tiberius went into self-imposed exile on the Greek island of Rhodes. Julia traveled with a smart set, and she took a series of lovers, apparently not her first. When Augustus complained about her spending too much time around young men, Julia supposedly told him not to worry because she would soon make old men of them. When asked on another occasion how she managed to conduct love affairs while bearing children who resembled her husband, Julia supposedly replied that she only took on passengers when the ship was full (that is, when she was already pregnant).
Today we might see such behavior as a response to the tremendous pressure that her father put on Julia for an heir. Augustus found her behavior embarrassing, but there was worse still to come.
THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY—AND OF JULIA
In 2 BC the Senate and people voted in a new title for Augustus: Father of His Country. He was sixty years old. It was a great honor, voted before only to Julius Caesar and, informally, to Cicero. It capped his program of putting the Julian family at the center of the Roman state. It was also a bitter irony, for later the same year, Augustus was forced to confront the evidence of his daughter’s betrayal.
Julia and her young men hurt Augustus politically. Various sources claimed that she behaved scandalously with them in public but we can’t rely on such gossipy and misogynistic tales. What is certain is that one of her lovers was Iullus, Mark Antony’s surviving son (by Fulvia). The thought that Julia might want to divorce Tiberius and marry Antony’s son threatened to give Augustus’s old rival a victory from beyond the grave.
Augustus responded with the steel of a paterfamilias and the chill of a potentate. He had most of Julia’s lovers exiled; he condemned Iullus to kill himself. As for Julia, Augustus brutally divorced her in Tiberius’s name (without consulting Tiberius) and exiled her to a small and barren island off the Italian coast—today, ironically, a resort. Her mother, Scribonia, Augustus’s ex-wife, loyally followed Julia into exile. Augustus’s behavior could be cruel now that Julia had produced sons to serve as heirs. She was dispensable.
Five years later, in the year 3, Augustus allowed Julia to return to the Italian mainland but only to an out-of-the-way southern Italian city. Tragedy followed her. Her son Lucius died of an illness in the year 2, and her son Gaius died two years later of a war wound. Their deaths deprived Augustus of his planned successors. As for Julia, she did not suffer an official erasure of memory, unlike other Romans who fell from grace, but the image makers of the empire seem to have gotten the message about her status. She was honored with many statues and inscriptions until her fall in 2 BC, after which that stopped. The complete silence is a backhanded compliment of sorts to Roman women, who were barely noticed as individuals outside the household before the end of the republic.
Augustus encountered many great women in his life, but the three closest to him were his mother, Atia, who raised him; his wife Livia, who inspired him; and his daughter, Julia, who betrayed him.
THE END
Augustus regrouped. In the year 4, he adopted two more sons. One was Agrippa Postumus, the sixteen-year-old son of Agrippa and Julia. Augustus had not adopted him before, allowing the boy to carry on Agrippa’s family name, but now he needed him, so Postumus became a Caesar. The other was Livia’s surviving son, Tiberius, who had returned to Rome from Rhodes. Livia’s younger son, Drusus, had died earlier in an accident in Germany. Tiberius was a mature man of forty-five
, while Postumus was only sixteen. As it turned out, Postumus was also hopeless; he had a strong body but a weak mind. Augustus had ice in his veins when it came to the survival of his regime. So even though Postumus was his biological grandson, Augustus rescinded the adoption and, as he had done with his mother, sent the boy into exile. That left Tiberius. He had no biological connection to Augustus, but he was capable, experienced, and could keep the dynasty going.
When Julius Caesar had adopted Octavian years earlier, he set an unintentional precedent and laid the groundwork for the empire’s future success. Romans were relatively relaxed about adoption compared with modern people and used it frequently as a way to continue a family’s name. While they preferred to adopt a blood relative and to adopt an adult rather than a child, they didn’t insist on either. Because the emperor was free to adopt a son rather than having to pass power on to his birth child, he had flexibility in choosing a successor. The upshot was to open the succession to talent.
At the time he sent Postumus into exile, Augustus was sixty-six. He began to make serious plans for imperial transition. When he adopted Tiberius, Augustus also gave him a share of his legal powers. In addition, he used Tiberius as he had once used Agrippa—to command his armies. Augustus sent Tiberius to hold the violent frontiers in Central Europe and the Balkans, where Tiberius spent most of the time between the years 6 and 12 in a series of hard-fought wars and revolts.
The emperor could be in only one place at a time, but he needed to be everywhere. Ruling a great empire in an era of primitive technology and communications raised great practical difficulties. It would have been safer to keep the ruler’s heir in Rome, but Augustus couldn’t spare him; Tiberius was an experienced general and the only man Augustus trusted. Tiberius finally returned to Rome in the year 12. After celebrating a triumph, he gained the power to govern the provinces jointly with Augustus. Tiberius was now all but equal to the princeps.
In these years, Augustus put the final touch on his record. He left a will and instructions for his funeral as well as a detailed record of his achievements to be inscribed on bronze columns and set up in front of his mausoleum. The original is long gone, but copies in Latin and Greek were set up around the empire, and one complete version survives in Ankara, Turkey.
The Latin title at the head of the Ankara text fits the bill of Roman heroism: Res Gestae Divi Augusti, or “Exploits of the Deified Augustus.” There was nothing antiheroic about Augustus; like Julius Caesar before him, Augustus was declared a god after his death. “A copy of the military exploits of the deified Augustus through which he subjected the whole world to the rule of the Roman people” is how the inscription begins.
Victory is a key theme of the document. Augustus stated that he put out the flames of civil war, rid the sea of pirates, and brought peace to the provinces. Mercy is a related theme, as Augustus noted that he spared all citizens who sued him for a pardon.
The document left much out, though, such as the murders, betrayals, dishonesty, and cruelty, as well as the excesses of the imperial court. Nowhere does Augustus state that he ended the free institutions of the Roman Republic and replaced them with the benevolent despotism of the Caesars. Finally, in keeping with the masculine tone of a record of military exploits, Augustus mentioned not one woman, although he did refer to several goddesses. In short, his official version of his achievements is a work of propaganda that bends and twists the truth. One thing, however, was clear and accurate about the Res Gestae: it was a text for the empire and not just Rome.
Fittingly, Augustus ended his political career outside of Rome, as he had begun it, on a mission for the empire. In 44 BC, when he got the news of Julius Caesar’s assassination, he was just across the Adriatic Sea and opposite the last station of the Appian Way, the road that led south from Rome. When he died fifty-eight years later, Augustus was still looking eastward. Now long past his fighting prime, he still prioritized the empire. He escorted his son and heir, Tiberius, down the Appian Way on the road to the Adriatic, which Tiberius planned to cross in order to handle the latest crisis in a zone of continual conflict. As often as he could on his travels, Augustus brought Livia with him.
Augustus combined work with a holiday in his favorite place: the island of Capreae (modern Capri). He had already begun to feel ill. After crossing back to the mainland and participating in a ceremony in Naples, Augustus escorted Tiberius farther south on a journey of about four days. Then he turned back and felt so sick that he had to stop in the city of Nola, where he stayed in his family’s villa. A message was sent to Tiberius to hurry back; in one version of the story, he reached his adoptive father in time for a last conference.
Augustus died in Nola on August 19, 14, just over a month short of his seventy-seventh birthday. Imperial mythmakers surely left their mark on the public details of Augustus’s last day.
For what it is worth, his friends are supposed to have reached his bedside. Augustus asked them if they thought he had concluded the “mime” of life appropriately—that is, had he spoken like a comic actor at the end of the show. He added, “If the play has anything of merit, clap and send us out joyfully.” Then he dismissed them, and soon he was kissing Livia. His last words were supposedly “Livia, live mindful of our marriage and farewell.”
The man who had remade the world should have left it with a crash of thunder. Yet if the stories are true, Augustus concluded his life quietly with wit and modesty. The man who had ended the wars of the republic and then created the Roman Empire and the Roman peace also ended his life with recognition of how much he owed his mate. Cold blooded to the end, perhaps Augustus really did say good-bye to his omnipotence with gestures of humility.
People noticed the irony that Augustus died in the very same room where his biological father, Gaius Octavius, had died long before. But if Augustus thought of any man at the end, it was probably Julius Caesar.
Caesar and Augustus were two sides of the coin of Roman genius. Caesar was the god of battle who poured his talent and his ego into two literary classics. Augustus was the Machiavellian statesman who forged his power in blood and iron, and then went on to build a structure of peace and wealth that survived his passing for two hundred years. Caesar was a peacock; Augustus was a sphinx. Caesar fell under a hail of daggers in the Senate; Augustus died in his bed with a last kiss from his wife. Augustus started out as young murderer and ended up as father of his country. If his mother, Atia, and his great-uncle Caesar gave him his start, Augustus owed his mature achievement to two people: his friend Agrippa, and his wife Livia.
Augustus invented the concept of the princeps, the man we call emperor. His successors took him as a model. Augustus was a conqueror, a legislator, a builder, and a priest. Although he exercised supreme power, he hid it behind existing offices, misleading titles, invocations of the republic, charismatic authority, and a degree of deference to the Senate.
Caesar’s death left Rome a generation of civil war. Would Augustus’s death bequeath peace? The worries piled up. In his last years, Augustus made careful plans to transfer power, but who would obey a dead man? Was his adopted son and successor Tiberius really up to the job? Would Agrippa Postumus or Julia be freed and serve as a rallying point for opposition? Would republican sentiment burst back up to the surface in the Senate?
These questions surely troubled many minds in Rome, none more than that shrewdest of political operators, Livia. In public, the widow devoted herself to grieving. After Augustus’s cremation in Rome, for example, she stayed on the spot for five days with an honor guard of the most distinguished knights. Then she had his ashes collected and placed in his tomb.
But in private, as she began a year of mourning for her late husband, Livia surely worked tirelessly behind the scenes. What schemes, speeches, and bloodshed would smooth the path for Rome’s new ruler—her son?
Tiberius, marble seated figure.
2
TIBERIUS
THE TYRANT
On the seventeenth of
September in the year 14, Tiberius Julius Caesar, adopted son and heir of Augustus, rose and addressed the Roman Senate. His adoptive father had been dead a month. After an emotional public funeral, the Senate voted for what the Romans called “consecration”: they voted to declare Augustus a god. Dealing with Augustus’s legacy in heaven was the easy part. Things on earth were harder.
We call him emperor, but to his contemporaries Augustus was Princeps, First Citizen, a vague and unstable position. There was no guarantee that his system wouldn’t collapse at his death. After all, Rome did not have a written constitution. Some senators dreamed of restoring their old glory and power in the days before Julius Caesar, while others wanted to replace Tiberius as leader.
Yet most senators wanted to ask Tiberius to take on the full powers of Augustus. The trick for them was not to seem too subservient; Tiberius wanted to accept but without seeming too eager. That was probably not difficult. Despite Livia’s ambitions for her son, Tiberius did not aspire to supreme political power.
Tiberius was a professional soldier, and he might have yearned for an easier time and for the bluff and straightforward atmosphere of the camp. He might have thought back to an occasion on Rome’s northern front about ten years earlier, when he returned to the field on Augustus’s order after a long absence. According to one source, Tiberius’s old soldiers were thrilled to have him back again. Some men, the source says, had tears in their eyes at the sight of Tiberius, and others wanted to touch him. They remembered service with him on various campaigns and in various theaters of war. They said things such as “Is it really you that we see, Commander?” and “Have we received you safely back among us?”
Ten Caesars Page 5