The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (37 page)

Plotina’s hand in bringing Hadrian together with his wife was the overture to a close relationship between her and the new emperor, who spent his first year in power undoing some of Trajan’s military
policy decisions and facing down bitter teething problems with a Senate angered by his peremptory promotion. In 118, Hadrian returned to Rome and launched a public-relations offensive. Crowd-pleasing measures including a tax rebate, generous handouts both for plebeians and cash-strapped senators, and the establishment of charitable foundations to provide food for children did much to restore goodwill towards him. Moreover, a lavish building programme which included the renovation of the Pantheon, promised to beautify the city. In 121, he left on a four-year inspection tour of his empire, the same year in which an exchange of letters took place between himself and Plotina, letters which were later copied out in marble facsimile and displayed for public viewing in Athens. They offer a rare and remarkable window into communications between Hadrian and his adoptive mother, as well as providing us with the closest approximation we have to a record of her own voice.

Their correspondence revolved around who should be chosen as the new head of the Epicurean school of philosophy in Athens. Taking the side of Popillius Theotimus, the acting head of the school, Plotina’s opening gambit petitioned Hadrian for a change in the current law which would extend eligibility for the post to non-Roman citizens, and would allow the school’s regulations pertaining to the succession to be written in Greek, instead of Latin.

How much I am interested in the School of Epicurus, you know very well,
domine
. Your help is needed in the matter of its succession; for in view of the ineligibility of all but Roman citizens as successors, the range of choice is narrow. I ask therefore in the name of Popillius Theotimus, the present successor at Athens, to allow him to write in Greek that part of his disposition which deals with regulating the succession and grant him the power of filling his place by a successor of peregrine status, should personal considerations make it advisable; and let the future successors of the School of Epicurus henceforth enjoy the same right as you grant to Theotimus; all the more since the practice is that each time the testator has made a mistake in the choice of his successor, the disciples of the above school after a general deliberation put in his place the best man, a result that will be more easily attained if he is selected from a larger group.
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Hadrian’s affirmatory response was then reproduced in a brief subscript, and the inscription concluded with Plotina’s congratulatory
letter, written in Greek, to the Epicureans: ‘Plotina Augusta to all the Friends, greeting. We have now what we were so eager to obtain.’
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In stark contrast to her passive anonymity in the literary record, this inscription from Athens recasts Plotina as a highly educated woman, active on behalf of causes close to her heart and with the kind of access to the emperor once enjoyed by Livia. Augustus’s letter declining the Samians’ request for independence a century earlier had publicly acknowledged Livia’s efforts on the islanders’ behalf, but this dedication at Athens is the only preserved example of such a petition which gives pride of place to an empress’s own letter on behalf of the applicants.
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Plotina’s role as patroness of a philosophical role is interesting, as a great deal of satire was composed during this period lampooning a certain breed of rich women who fancied themselves as intellectuals and hired philosophical gurus. One such piece described a venerable Stoic philosopher named Thesmopolis having to look after his mistress’s Maltese dog during a journey to her country villa, and suffering the indignity of having it lick his beard and wee on his cloak.
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Such satire would have carried no sting if it did not chime with recognisable currents of complaint about female behaviour at the time. Women’s burgeoning interest in philosophy, and Plotina’s own patronage of the subject, may in part have reflected second-century Roman society’s blossoming love affair with Greek culture, of which Hadrian himself had been a keen aficionado since childhood. Plotina was not the first imperial woman to have shown interest in the subject – Livia had been consoled by a philosopher named Areus after the death of her son Drusus – but she was the first to set herself up publicly as a champion of it, a guise in which she was later emulated to powerful effect by one of her successors.
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Age and social status were the measuring sticks by which philosophy seems to have been judged an acceptable subject for women to engage in. Women who read philosophy without censure tended to be wealthy widows. Widowhood granted breathing space to a lucky few Roman women, those who had produced the three children required by law to free themselves from male guardianship and had personal fortunes of their own to fall back on. Plotina’s own twilight years, which were more peaceful and prosperous than those enjoyed by virtually all her predecessors on the Palatine, placed her firmly in this relatively emancipated category. Bricks stamped with her name have been found scattered around Rome, proving that, like Domitia
Longina, she owned factories from which she could enjoy an independent source of income in her old age, while coins demonstrate that Hadrian was meticulous about paying his adoptive mother due honours, depicting her under the new legend, ‘Plotina,
Augusta
of the Divine Trajan’.
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Plotina died six years into Hadrian’s reign, in 123 – her age and the manner of her death are unknown, but she must by now have been well past her fiftieth birthday. The emperor went into black mourning clothes for nine days and had the magnificent temple built for his predecessor Trajan rededicated to become the temple of Divine Trajan and Divine Plotina, in acknowledgement of her consecration as a goddess. Her ashes joined those of her husband in the base of the Column of Trajan nearby. Hadrian was later heard to pay the following tribute to her: ‘Though she asked much of me, she was never refused anything.’ This may not sound the most fulsome elegy, but according to Cassius Dio, Hadrian simply meant by this that ‘Her requests were of such a character that they neither burdened me or afforded me any justification for opposing them’.
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Plotina’s death was preceded by that of Salonia Matidia in 119 – again, the circumstances are unknown. Salonia’s eulogy was delivered by her son-in-law Hadrian, who also ordered her consecration and commissioned a vast Corinthian temple devoted solely to her in the prestigious locale of the Campus Martius near the Pantheon, making her the first deified woman to be honoured with her own temple inside the city limits of Rome.
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Hadrian’s motives for showering such honours on the woman who linked him through marriage to Trajan are not difficult to read. On the one hand, lavish funeral celebrations gave emperors a useful excuse to throw a public wake and court popularity with their subjects. Salonia Matidia’s consecration was observed on 23 December 119 with a handout of 2 pounds (0.9 kilogramme) of perfume and 50 pounds (22.6 kilogrammes) of incense to the local population and other reports suggest gladiatorial games were held too.
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But Hadrian was also savvy to the fact that by treating Salonia Matidia and Plotina with kid gloves, offering them the same public homage due to an emperor’s own blood relatives, he could engender an image of dynastic continuity within the new system of adoptive succession. Furthermore, by deifying them, he was ensuring that the Spaniards of the Trajanic-Hadrianic dynasty would be well represented in the corridors of heaven, an exercise in one-upmanship over the Julio-Claudian and Flavian clans.
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With Plotina and Salonia Matidia now gone, the latter’s daughters Matidia Minor and Sabina became the new senior women of Trajan’s family. Matidia Minor, who would outlive both her sister and her brother-in-law Hadrian, proved to be the dynasty’s very own maiden aunt, and, as will emerge, a valued and beloved member of the clan who succeeded her brother-in-law. No evidence survives that she ever married, which would make her an extremely curious female in pre-Christian Rome. She was also more than unusually wealthy by male or female standards, possessed of a staggering portfolio of real estate at locations in Italy, North Africa and Asia Minor, while money she and her mother gave to a foundation for imperial statues in the northern Italian city of Vicetia was still yielding funds for the city as late as 242. A prolific philanthropist, she spent millions of sesterces on community projects such as the foundation of a public library at Suessa Aurunca in Campania, the building of a road and the endowment of a charitable foundation for boys and girls.
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The legacy of her younger sister Sabina was a less happy one.

In the absence of a rich literary tradition, we have to sift through fragmentary epigraphic remains for most details of Sabina’s early life. From such piecemeal clues, we can deduce that she was the daughter of Salonia Matidia’s marriage to a senator named L. Vibius Sabinus, thus giving her the full name of Vibia Sabina, and that she probably married her cousin Hadrian at the typical age for an imperial bride of fourteen or fifteen, giving her a date of birth of around 86, and making her around thirty years old when she became empress.
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Described as ‘irritable’ and ‘ill-tempered’ in comments attributed to her husband, rumours of friction dogged the marriage between herself and Hadrian, to the point that one source claims Sabina took precautions not to become pregnant by her husband, a piece of gossip most likely invented to account for the couple’s childlessness.
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Unlike her aunt Plotina, no surviving documentation offers proof of Sabina exercising any influence over the emperor. Nor is there any substantial evidence of her lending her protection or patronage either to individuals or public buildings in the manner of many of her predecessors, although one inscription discovered in Trajan’s forum records that she oversaw the building of some kind of structure for the matrons of Rome, which one of her third-century successors, Julia Domna, later restored.
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A glance through Sabina’s financial affairs does at least provide a glimpse of a more enfranchised woman
than her nondescript literary and artistic profile would suggest. Like her sister, she had inherited a great deal of family wealth. As well as a property in Rome, she continued the recent tradition of owning brickyards around the city, and kept a large retinue of freedmen. She is surely also the same Vibia Sabina who around the time of her marriage, is on record as having donated the huge sum of 100,000 sesterces, to a local charitable foundation, or
alimentum
, in Velleia.
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Much of Sabina’s time as empress was spent on the road, establishing a pattern that was continued by women in future administrations. Hadrian passed more than half of his twenty-one-year reign as emperor on foreign tours, a practice necessitated by the demands of policing an increasingly restless empire. For the first of his long absences in 121, he headed for an inspection of his forces in the Rhineland and then made a rare appearance by a Roman emperor in the northern backwater province of Britain in 122, with Sabina in tow. There, he set to work building his famous Wall, which marked out the empire’s northern border in turf and stone.

The legacy of this visit to Britain was marred by reports of an embarrassing personal incident involving Sabina which led to the dismissal of two key aides. Few details of the episode are given, but it centred on an alleged indiscretion by the praetorian prefect Septicius Clarus and Suetonius Tranquillus – the very same Suetonius whose biographies of the Caesars give us so much of our portrait of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors, and who at this time worked as Hadrian’s private secretary. Both Septicius and Suetonius were apparently dismissed from their posts on the grounds of behaving in too informal a manner with the emperor’s wife, and only a sense of uxorial duty to his position stopped Hadrian from sending Sabina into exile.
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Although the original source of this report is the heavily fictionalised
Historia Augusta
, this incident in Britain has inspired fevered speculation among modern historians, who have entered into the spirit by imagining that Septicius and Suetonius somehow forgot themselves with the empress at the equivalent of a ‘wild office party’. By contrast, other modern verdicts on Sabina describe her in more sombre tones, claiming that she had a ‘sour expression’, ‘grim hairdo’ and a ‘tight button of a mouth’ on the evidence of her sculptural appearance, though in actual fact, Sabina’s surviving portraits mimic the bland passivity of all her other female counterparts.
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A hairstyle was gradually evolved for her that broke with the fussy curls and
rigid tiered beehives favoured by the Flavian and Trajanic ladies, and instead showed her with thick wavy hair brushed back from a centre parting and wrapped into a loose nest at the back of her head, a style inspired by the goddesses of Greek myth. The second century was a period in which, more than ever, there was a great premium placed on Greek culture within the Roman Empire, and the style of Sabina’s later portraits certainly chimed with these tastes.
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Hadrian himself was well known for being a passionate Graecophile, right down to the beard he sported in contrast to previous clean-shaven emperors.