The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (24 page)

Ancient historians speculated darkly about Caligula’s sexual preferences. It was whispered that he was incestuously involved with all three of his sisters, that Drusilla was his favourite and that Antonia had caught them in bed one day at her house. Given that virtually all of Rome’s most infamous emperors were accused of incest at one stage or another, reflecting as it did unease about the overlap between family and government in a dynastic power system, we would probably be wise to take rumours of bed-hopping with his sisters with a pinch of salt.
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Nevertheless, when Drusilla died in the summer of 38, she became the first Roman woman to be deified, leapfrogging Livia,
whose prior claim had been vetoed by Tiberius. Although Drusilla did not receive a temple in her name, a statue of her was placed in the temple of Venus Genetrix, the only instance of a Roman woman’s image being so venerated.
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Despite their auspicious debut, Caligula’s grandmother and surviving sisters did not bask in the sunshine of his approval very long. Within six weeks of his taking up the reins of imperial office, the venerable Antonia was dead, the precise date of her death given as 1 May 37 by a calendar found in the Roman forum in 1916.
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Some sources state it was suicide, though her grandson’s disinterested conduct while observing her funeral from the comfort of his dining room added colour to reports that he had speeded up her death with a dose of poison – a murder weapon typically associated with a woman, thus reinforcing Caligula’s reputation for effeminate perversity. The fate of Antonia’s ashes is unknown, though they were in all likelihood placed in the family mausoleum.
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Two years later, as the increasingly volatile Caligula’s reign descended into chaos, his sisters Agrippina Minor and Julia Livilla went from standard-bearers for womankind to public outcasts, accused in 39 by their brother of being accessories to a plot against him by Drusilla’s ex-husband Marcus Lepidus. Their possessions were confiscated and they were expelled to the exile islands of Pandateria and Pontia, just as their mother and maternal grandmother had been before them. In a piece of mocking revenge theatre, Agrippina was given the urn carrying the remains of the executed Lepidus, alleged to have been her lover, and ordered to re-enact her mother’s famous journey with the ashes of Germanicus. Another two years went by, during which Caligula undid much of the good work accomplished at the start of his reign, falling out badly with the Senate, many of whom were offended by his increasingly bizarre and despotic behaviour, which included his trying to have himself worshipped by his subjects as a living god. Eventually, Caligula was assassinated with the Senate’s support by his own guardsmen on 24 January 41, during a lunch break in a performance of the Palatine games. His wife Caesonia and baby daughter Julia Drusilla were also murdered, the one stabbed – apparently offering up her own neck to the assassin’s knife in a display of unnerving bravado – the latter smashed against a wall.
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The subsequent accession of Claudius as emperor, the runt of the imperial family, was a completely unexpected amendment to the
Julio-Claudian script. Caligula’s failure to nominate an heir had left a vacuum which his fifty-year-old uncle, relatively untested in either military service or public office and the butt of jokes throughout his life on account of his physical handicaps, seemed ill-qualified to fill. But with no other obvious adult male candidates left in the imperial family and with the Senate still dithering over what should be their next move, members of the emperor’s bodyguard who were said to have found Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the palace decided the matter by frogmarching him to the barracks of the praetorian guard and summarily declaring him emperor before the Senate could object.
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Despite the military’s seal of approval, which he was careful to consolidate with big increases in their pay packet, Claudius faced hurdles from the start, the first being his lack of support from the senatorial classes who objected to his cavalier coronation. He remained estranged from them throughout his thirteen-year reign, relying instead on a powerful clique of freedmen who became the key power-brokers in the imperial court during this period.

The second obstacle was that, like Tiberius before him, Claudius could not claim the ultimate badge of legitimacy – direct descent from Augustus. His closest point of contact to the Julian family tree was his mother, Antonia, niece of Rome’s first emperor. This made it all the more essential to exploit his connections to the Claudian half of the dynasty, headed up by his paternal grandmother Livia. He duly cashed in by ordering Livia’s long overdue deification on 7 January 42, elevating her to the same divine status as Augustus, with whom her cult statue now shared temple room, and granting her the honour of sacrifices conducted under the auspices of the Vestals. Thus Claudius was at least able to claim his own divine ancestress, if not ancestor.
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To publicly demonstrate his link to the Julian side of the family, Claudius also bestowed the previously rejected title of
Augusta
on his recently deceased mother Antonia, and gold, silver and bronze coins featuring her face and title were introduced into Roman currency for the first time. Ironically, the boy whom Antonia and Livia reputedly castigated as a monster and a fool was now the one responsible for granting them their greatest honours. Finally, Claudius recalled his nieces Agrippina Minor and Julia Livilla from their island exile and restored to them the inheritance confiscated by Caligula, or what was left of it after Caligula had sold their jewels, furniture and slaves. It
must have seemed to the emperor and his advisers that nothing but good could come from the reprieve of the daughters of Claudius’s talismanic and still fondly remembered brother Germanicus.

Despite Agrippina Minor’s future infamy as one of the most powerful and controversial woman in the annals of imperial history, her return to the family fold in 41 was followed almost immediately by another period of relative anonymity. Now around twenty-five years of age, she had already received a thorough grounding in the cutthroat world of Julio-Claudian politics that had resulted in the death or exile of so many of her relatives, including most of her immediate family. Widowed by the death of her husband Domitius Ahenobarbus shortly before Claudius’s accession, though reunited with her four-year-old son Nero, who had been left in the care of Domitius Ahenobarbus’s sister Domitia Lepida, she quickly formed a second union with Passienus Crispus, a wealthy socialite with a handsome estate across the Tiber, who had in fact previously been married to Domitia Lepida. Little more is heard from Agrippina over the next five years, an educated guess inviting us to presume she may have accompanied her new husband to his proconsulship in Asia in 42.
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In the meantime, it is a relative newcomer to the pantheon of imperial ladies who dominates the literary sources relating to the 40s. Prior to his elevation to the purple, Claudius had already been married and divorced twice, first to Plautia Urgulanilla, the granddaughter of Livia’s old friend Plautia Urgulania, and then to a member of Sejanus’s family, Aelia Paetina, with whom Claudius had had a daughter, Claudia Antonia.
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His third marriage, formed shortly before his accession, was to Valeria Messalina. In an illustration of the highly convoluted nature of Julio-Claudian marital politics, Messalina was the teenaged daughter of another of Domitius Ahenobarbus’s sisters, Domitia Lepida Minor, and a great-granddaughter of Octavia on both her father’s and mother’s side.
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With such a sparkling pedigree, Messalina looked on paper to be the perfect dynastic helpmate to stabilise the Julio-Claudian succession following Caligula’s brief, unhinged tenure, particularly when the timely proof of her fertility was taken into consideration – their only son was born three weeks after Claudius took the throne in February 41. The couple’s other child, Claudia Octavia, had been born the year before.

Publicly at least, Messalina’s early career followed the script written by her more august female predecessors. From his accession, Claudius devoted considerable energy to trying to win over the sceptics by
beefing up his political and military CV, and in 43 he pulled off by far the biggest coup of his reign by doing what even Julius Caesar had been unable to do, namely conquer the island of Britain, which now became the new northern boundary of the empire. At the triumphal procession through the streets of Rome which followed in 44, Messalina was permitted to follow her husband’s chariot in a mule-drawn
carpentum
, ahead of the victorious generals from the campaign, and the couple’s son, hitherto known by the name of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Germanicus, received the new sobriquet ‘Britannicus’ in recognition of his father’s great victory. Messalina meanwhile received most of the honours that by now had become a formality for Julio-Claudian women, including a grant of public statues, and she was also given the right to sit in the front seats of the theatre once occupied by Livia, the only woman who had hitherto enjoyed the status of being both wife to the reigning emperor and mother to the boy who would potentially succeed him one day.
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One honour that Livia had enjoyed eluded Messalina, however. Following the birth of her son Britannicus, the Senate offered her the title of
Augusta
. But, not for the first time, an emperor vetoed the Senate’s offer.
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Claudius’s denial may have been part of an attempt to mollify members of the Senate still chafing at the autocratic nature of the new emperor’s peremptory inauguration. But in later years his denial became a rallying point for a wave of saturnine mockery directed against Claudius’s wife. Writing a few decades after Messalina’s death and borrowing from republican-era poet Propertius’s description of Rome’s female
bête noire
Cleopatra as a
meretrix regina
– a ‘harlot-queen’ – the satirist Juvenal rechristened Messalina the
meretrix Augusta
(‘her Highness the Whore’) perverting the empire’s most honorific title for a woman.
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Juvenal’s joke encapsulates the abiding image of Messalina as a carnal prodigy whom no amount of triumphs or titles could turn into a respectable matron. As young as fifteen when she married Claudius, who was some thirty years her senior, Messalina’s persona both in antiquity and subsequent folklore was of a Roman Lolita who ran rings around her gullible elder husband and had an appetite for sex so gluttonous and insatiable that she was given a listing in Alexandre Dumas’ catalogue of the all-time great courtesans of history, became a pornographic icon to writers such as the Marquis de Sade – who wrote of one prostitute’s performance that she ‘went on for nearly two hours, flinging herself about like Messalina’ – and was made the
face of an anti-venereal disease campaign in France in the 1920s.
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Juvenal himself held up the black-haired young empress as the satirical epitome of the unfaithful wife, claiming that she used to wait for the oblivious Claudius to fall asleep, then sallied forth to trade in disguise as a prostitute under a pseudonym:

Preferring a mat to her bedroom in the Palace, she had the nerve to put on a nighttime hood, the whore-empress. Like that, with a blonde wig hiding her black hair, she went inside a brothel reeking of ancient blankets to an empty cubicle – her very own. Then she stood there, naked and for sale, with her nipples gilded, under the trade name of ‘She-Wolf’, putting on display the belly you came from, noble-born Britannicus. She welcomed her customers seductively as they came in and asked for their money. Later, when the pimp was already dismissing his girls, she left reluctantly, waiting till the last possible moment to shut her cubicle, still burning with her clitoris inflamed and stiff. She went away, exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied, and, a disgusting creature, with her cheeks filthy, dirty from the smoke of the lamp, she took back to the emperor’s couch the stench of the brothel.
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Other sources claimed that Messalina compelled other noble women to follow her into adultery, forcing them to have sex in the palace while their husbands watched – a mirror of one of Caligula’s favourite pastimes – and fobbing off the suspicions of Claudius by providing him with housemaids to sleep with.
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So consuming was her own sex drive that she was said once to have challenged a professional prostitute to see which of them could last longest in a sex marathon, a contest the empress won after servicing her twenty-fifth client in non-stop succession, earning her a place in a recently compiled volume of ‘world records’ from the ancient world.
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Despite successes such as the conquest of Britain, the years following Claudius’s peremptory and turbulent accession were characterised by an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion in his court, stage-managed, it was alleged, by the empress herself. Witch-hunts and political trials against rivals were commonplace and a sense of competition for places was keenly felt among the imperial family itself. Both Messalina and her husband shared a similar Achilles heel, namely that there were others with potentially better claims to stand in their shoes. Direct descendants of Augustus and Germanicus still survived, like the
recently recalled sisters Agrippina Minor and Julia Livilla, whose husbands might make plausible alternatives to Claudius as emperor while the women themselves could be seen as more attractive candidates for the role of empress.