The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (12 page)

Towards the end of her life, Livia was said to have offered up the following explanation to an interviewer asking how she had obtained so much influence over Augustus, saying that she had done so ‘by being scrupulously chaste herself, doing gladly whatever pleased him, not meddling with any of his affairs, and, in particular, by pretending neither to hear or to notice the favourites that were the objects of his passion’.
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Whether we can trust this or any of her lengthy sermon on the Cinna conspiracy as a direct quote from her lips must remain an unanswered question, but as a blueprint for the role of dutiful, chaste politician’s wife that she certainly affected, this matter-of-fact statement could not be bettered, winning her the plaudits of loyalists who called her a worthy successor to the women of Rome’s golden age, and inspiring an anecdote that she once intervened to spare the lives of some men who were going to be put to death for straying into her line of sight while they were naked, saying that for a chaste woman such as herself, naked men were no different from statues.
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But not everyone, it seems, admired Livia in the role of consort and confidante to the emperor. ‘I have my part in reigning …’ she is supposed to have said in her conversation with Augustus about the
Cinna conspiracy. It was a sentiment that was to prove a red rag to a bull for some.
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One source of disappointment in Livia’s and Augustus’s marriage could not be disguised by any amount of obfuscation. Although both had produced offspring with their previous partners, their own union was destined to remain childless, despite it being the emperor’s ‘dearest wish’, wrote Suetonius, that they should conceive together. A child born prematurely did not survive, prompting Pliny the Elder to claim that theirs was one of those rare unions that had ‘a certain physical incongruity between them’, allowing them to produce children with others but not with each other.
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The couple’s sterility was a piece of ill-fortune mocked by Cleopatra during the war of words in the run up to Actium, and although it may sound like a cheap shot, Livia’s and Augustus’s childlessness had serious and long-term repercussions both for the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the principle of future imperial succession.
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For dynasties need heirs. Although he was destined to live to a great old age, Augustus’s famously weak constitution drove him repeatedly to his sickbed throughout the first decade of his reign, lending particular urgency to the dilemma of which of his relatives would ultimately replace him. Female primogeniture was out of the question, ruling out Augustus’s only biological child, Julia. Two leading candidates were left – Tiberius, Livia’s eldest son from her marriage to Tiberius Nero, or Marcellus, the eldest son of the emperor’s sister Octavia.

Octavia had not been forgotten in Augustus’s plans since his succession, far from it. Now in her forties, since the dissolution of her marriage to Antony, she had been living with her brother and sister-in-law on the Palatine, where she had assumed the duty of bringing up at least nine children, not just her own son and four daughters by her marriages to Claudius Marcellus and Antony, but also Antony’s four surviving children sired with Fulvia and Cleopatra.
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As mother to such a vast brood, she evoked the example of that paragon of motherhood Cornelia, herself the mother of twelve, and it was an association that Augustus explicitly encouraged.

One of the most important legacies of Augustus’s forty-one year reign was his physical transformation of the Roman city skyline. He famously boasted that he had discovered Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and Octavia was to feature significantly within this process.
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During this period, Rome’s narrow streets and tenement
blocks were almost constantly choked with the dust and clattering din of construction work, on projects such as the new Julio-Claudian family mausoleum on the banks of the River Tiber, a vast circular tomb of white travertine whose fat concrete belly was destined to become the eternal resting place for the ashes of the emperor and his successors. Augustus’s self-aggrandising zeal for building was, however, balanced by a commitment to undertake that building work in accordance with his moral revolution. So luxury villas and buildings that went up during the competitive era of the republic for the benefit of the wealthy few were gradually replaced or rebranded as spaces for common use. One such construction project initiated not long after 27 BC was the Portico of Octavia, a public colonnade named for the emperor’s sister and remodelled on the footprint of a previous version constructed more than a century earlier by a wealthy grandee named Caecilius Metellus. Visiting the portico now, one finds only a fragile shadow of its glorious former self. The site fell into sorry neglect post-antiquity, housing a bustling fish market from the medieval period through to the end of the nineteenth century, and today its battered frontage serves as a nesting spot for pigeons and rooks. But once upon a time, this nondescript ruin was an elegant courtyard with cascading fountains and a garden that played host to a gallery of valuable paintings and sculpture.
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Pride of place was given to a seated statue of Octavia’s chosen role model Cornelia. Based on the testimony of one tourist, Pliny the Elder, who observed the statue some years later and recorded it as having resided ‘formerly in the portico of Metellus, now the buildings of Octavia’, it used to be thought that when Augustus commandeered the portico for Octavia, the statue was already
in situ
, explaining perhaps why Augustus chose this particular site as a showcase for his sister.
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Since its existence in Metellus’s day would in fact make it the only known statue of a historical Roman woman in the city before the revolutionary grant to Octavia and Livia in 35 BC, Pliny’s testimony is extremely important. But a new theory suggests that Pliny may have been labouring under a misapprehension. In 1878, excavations at the Portico of Octavia unearthed the large marble slab on which this statue of Cornelia rested, inscribed with the words
Cornelia Africani f. Gracchorum
– ‘Cornelia, daughter of Africanus, mother of the Gracchi’. Recent re-examinations of this inscription suggest that the label shows signs of being a recut of a different original, the implication being that Augustus had another female statue – of a classical
goddess, since a seated pose usually denotes divine status in ancient statuary – relabelled as Cornelia and added it to his sister’s revamped portico to underline a connection between them. A statue that Pliny assumed had been in place since Metellus’s day thus may only have been there since the 20s BC.
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The sponsorship of Roman public buildings was an act that prior to Augustus’s reign had been the sole preserve of men in Roman society. In another example of the way that traditional female values were now being broadcast from very untraditional platforms, the Julio-Claudian era saw the practice of female sponsorship take off in a big way, and Octavia’s portico was the blueprint for several of the female-sponsored buildings that followed. She also acted as a conduit between Augustus and the great Roman architect, engineer and historian Vitruvius, whose highly influential treatise
On Architecture
contained an acknowledgement of gratitude to the emperor’s sister for recommending his employment to Augustus, a note that makes it clear it was not just Livia who was a useful contact in the emperor’s circle. Livia would later overtake Octavia as the more prolific patron of public building works, but for the time being, it was Octavia, with her more visible role in the physical fabric of the city, whose star was arguably the higher in the firmament.

When Octavia’s son Marcellus and Livia’s son Tiberius emerged as the front runners to succeed Augustus, it looked at first glance as though there was little to choose between them. Both were much the same age and had been given equal billing in their youth. Indeed, they were both chosen to ride the trace-horses of Augustus’s chariot during the triumphal celebrations after Actium. Marcellus, though, said to have been ‘a young man of noble qualities, cheerful in mind and disposition’ in contrast to his pale, silent cousin, had the advantage of being related to the emperor by blood and it was he who enjoyed the faster-tracked career.
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In 25 BC, the Julio-Claudian dynasty celebrated its first ‘royal wedding’ with the marriage of seventeen-year-old Marcellus to his fourteen-year-old cousin Julia.
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The father of the bride could not himself be present, as he was still away on his foreign tour, and so – in a piece of irony that would only be realised later – Augustus’s military supremo Agrippa was commissioned to act
in loco parentis
.
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With Julia’s donning of the yellow wedding veil and slippers, the status of Octavia’s son as favourite for the purple was confirmed, elevating Octavia herself to the prestigious if unofficial position of mother to the heir-apparent. But the bubble burst all too quickly. Two
years later in the autumn of 23 BC, while the now forty-year-old Augustus struggled to recover from a near-fatal illness, Marcellus himself died suddenly of a mysterious sickness at the age of twenty, widowing Julia and unexpectedly becoming the first occupant of the brand-new family mausoleum, now looming like a 40-metre-high (130-feet-high) wedding cake over the city. Public mourning for the boy was extravagant, and Octavia’s devastation widely broadcast.
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Burying herself in seclusion, she was said to have forbidden all mention of her son’s name thereafter, giving way to her grief only during an audience with Virgil, the great poet and friend of the family, while he read her a passage from his epic poem, the
Aeneid
, in which the Roman founding father Aeneas, whom Augustus’s family claimed as an ancestor, saw a vision of Marcellus’s ghost in a parade of Roman heroes in the underworld. In his early-nineteenth-century work
Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus
, the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres captures in oils the moment recorded by Virgil’s ancient biographer, when Octavia swoons in Augustus’s lap at hearing the part of the poem that mentioned her son, her face sallow with loss.
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Yet Ingres adds another figure to the scene, one whose presence is unreported in the account of Octavia’s faint given by Virgil’s fourth-century biographer Donatus. As Augustus cradles his swooning sister and holds up a hand in signal to the poet to stop, Octavia’s other companion Livia looks on poker-faced. Her hooded eyes betray no emotion as she cups her sister-in-law’s head with one hand and drapes the other languidly over the back of her chair, contemplating with detached interest the grief-stricken face before her, the greys and blues of her clothing reflecting her icy demeanour in contrast to the warm pinks and reds sported by her companions. In a later version of the painting, two anonymous figures stare thoughtfully at Livia from the shadows, their suspicions apparently awakened by her utterly unconcerned demeanour.
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Ingres’s composition reflects a well-known report that in the wake of Marcellus’s death, ugly rumours were swirling around Rome. Surreptitious fingers of blame were being pointed at Livia, claming that she had a hand in Marcellus’s death, motivated by jealousy at seeing her own son Tiberius passed over for the succession. Even though our source for the rumours, Cassius Dio, notes that the accusation was dismissed out of hand by many who pointed out the high incidence of fatal airborne disease in the city that year, nevertheless, some of the mud
stuck and still has not come off. Robert Graves’s novel
I Claudius
alludes delicately to Livia’s ‘unremitting attention’ to her nephew, while in the television series based on the book, the camera lingers on Livia’s malevolent expression as she promises to take care of the boy on his sickbed.
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Ingres was never quite satisfied with his composition. He reworked it several times, and his indecision mirrors the inconclusiveness of the ancient accusations against Livia.
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Marcellus’s death was nevertheless just the first of a series of murders by poison that would be laid at her door during the course of her career. While it would be a futile task to try to prove or disprove her guilt in this or any other case, we would do well to remember that the stereotype of the poisoning woman was a stock character in ancient myth and history, epitomised by Cleopatra, the bogeywoman of imperial Roman imagination who not only employed poison to effect her own suicide but tested her medicine cabinet of lethal potions on prisoners of war. Indeed her example influenced the portrait of later
femmes fatales
like Lucrezia Borgia.
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The image of sorceresses like Medea and Circe, who used their drugs and potions to control and terrorise mankind, helped to establish a fine line between the ministering and murdering female stereotypes, and it was one that Livia would continue to skirt precariously as her profile on the Roman radar steadily rose. Women were the guardians of the domestic realm and keepers of the keys to the kitchen cabinets, and Roman satire caricatured them as the enemy within, knowledgeable in the poisons needed to induce abortions, drug their husbands or eliminate inconvenient rivals to their own sons’ chances of inheritance:

You fatherless orphans too, who are rather well off, I warn you – watch out for your lives and don’t trust a single dish. Those pastries are steaming darkly with maternal poison. Get someone else to taste first anything that’s offered to you by the woman who bore you.
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