The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (4 page)

Tiberius Claudius Nero, himself a member of a slightly less exalted branch of the Claudian clan, was cut from the same political cloth as Livia’s wealthy father Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, who would a year later find himself on the losing side at Philippi. Described in a letter by the great Roman statesman Cicero as ‘a nobly born, talented and self-controlling young man’, Tiberius Nero had enjoyed a reasonably auspicious run up the Roman ladder of advancement during the 40s, holding first the quaestorship and later the praetorship, one rung below the highest possible political rank of consul.
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Having enjoyed some favour under Julius Caesar, whose fleet he successfully commanded during the Alexandrian war, he nevertheless switched allegiances in the wake of Caesar’s murder, opting, like his future father-in-law, to support the assassins Brutus and Cassius, but later transferred his loyalties once more, this time to Mark Antony.

Rome’s political hierarchy was still in disarray following the death of Julius Caesar when Tiberius Nero, thwarted of an earlier desire in 50 BC to marry Cicero’s daughter Tullia, instead opted for a wedding with his kinswoman Livia, who at the age of fifteen was probably around twenty years his junior, a common age-gap between prospective spouses in Roman society.
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The marriage would most likely have been arranged for Livia by her father, though Roman mothers could evidently have some say in such matchmaking – the union of Tiberius Nero’s first-choice bride Tullia to her third husband Dolabella, for example, was facilitated by her mother Terentia with the resigned acquiescence of Cicero.
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Legally though, almost every Roman woman, with the exception of the six Vestal Virgin priestesses who tended the
hearth of the goddess Vesta, was subject to the total authority of her father or
paterfamilias
as long as he was alive, and from the first century BC onwards, most remained so even after marriage to their husbands. This was thanks to the increasing prevalence from that date of marriages without
manus
(
manus
here having the sense of possession or power), in other words marriages where a woman, and more importantly her dowry in the form of cash and property, remained under the legal jurisdiction of her father rather than her spouse. Such arrangements became the norm thanks to the desire of wealthy clans such as Livia’s to keep their estates intact and preserve the integrity of their families by not allowing members to come under the control of another
paterfamilias
.
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A girl in Livia’s position would technically have been free to refuse to marry, but only in the event that she could have proved that her father’s choice of fiancé was a man of bad character, an option that few girls probably felt able or inclined to take advantage of. Marriage was the only respectable occupation for a free Roman woman, but it was also the social grease and glue of Rome’s political hierarchy. An aristocratic young girl such as Livia, who had few opportunities to make acquaintances male or female outside of her restricted family circle, could very conceivably expect to be married more than once in her lifetime, in an elite culture where marriage was often not so much a romantic union as a facilitator of social and political alliances between ambitious families, alliances which might well rest on shifting sands.
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On the eve of a lavish high-society wedding such as hers, Livia would have undertaken the first of a series of ceremonial procedures symbolising her graduation from childhood to adulthood, and her transition from her father’s house to her husband’s. First, a Roman bride put away childish things – her toys and the miniature-sized toga she had worn throughout infancy and childhood – and dressed herself in a straight white woollen dress (
tunica recta
) that she had woven herself on a special loom. The next day, this simple white bridal tunic was cinched in at the waist with a woollen girdle whose complicated ‘Herculanean’ knot would eventually have to be untied by her husband. Her long hair, which had been confined overnight in a yellow hairnet, was arranged in an austere style involving the peculiar use of a sharp spear to separate the hair into six tight braids before they were secured with woollen ribbons.
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The groom and guests typically arrived at the bride’s father’s house
in the afternoon. Though Roman weddings were not a religious compact, various ceremonial gestures took place on the day, including a sacrifice of a pig to ensure good omens for the union. Words of consent were exchanged between the betrothed couple, and the marriage was sealed when a married female guest, or
pronuba
, took the right hands of the bride and groom and joined them together. A contract may have been witnessed and signed, the couple toasted with the salutation
Feliciter
(‘Good luck’) and a wedding feast then preceded the bride’s final escort to her new home, where her husband had gone ahead to await her. We can imagine the scene as the distant sounds of singing echoed across the city, just above the evening traffic and the babble of traders shutting up shop for the night. Snaking along a route thickly scented with burning pine torches, flute-players piped musical accompaniment as the raucous crowd, well-oiled by the wedding feast they had just left, tramped along in high gig, singing the traditional wedding refrains of ‘
Hymen Hymenae!
’ and ‘
Talasio!
’, and tossing handfuls of nuts to scampering children and curious local residents who had come out to watch the cavalcade go by.

In the middle of the crush, Livia’s striking egg-yolk-coloured wedding veil, or
flammeum
flared like a beacon in the darkness, draped over a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. Matching yellow slippers or
socci
, perhaps embroidered with pearls, slipped in and out of view beneath her belted tunic as she was swept along by the two young boys holding her hands, chosen from the offspring of married family friends as hopeful harbingers of the children she would one day bear. A third boy marched ahead with a pine torch, and instead of a bouquet, a spindle was carried for her along the route, a symbol of her new domestic duties. Despite the presence of these innocuous symbols of respectable wedded life, the atmosphere was thick with well-intentioned but ribald humour, and a gauntlet of risqué jokes and innuendo-laden songs had to be endured before the bride could reach her new marital home. When at last Livia’s noisy escorts delivered her up to Tiberius Nero’s front door, she found it judiciously garlanded with flowers by her waiting groom. As was required of her, she ceremoniously daubed the doorposts with animal fat and affixed skeins of uncombed wool to them, rituals designed to guarantee wealth and plenty to herself and her new husband in their married life. Finally she was carefully lifted over the threshold by her young male attendants. Caution was necessary. For any bride to trip as she was admitted through the doorway of her new husband’s home was
considered an ill omen. Once inside, after being presented with gifts of fire (a torch) and water (in a jug or vessel) from her husband, symbolising her wifely responsibility for cooking and washing and the overseeing of the household, she was led away by another married woman who escorted her to her new bedroom before admitting the groom for consummation to take place.
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Livia’s status as a teenage bride was entirely normal. Upper-class girls in the late Roman Republic typically embarked on their first marriage in their early teens, sometimes as early as twelve. This capitalised on their most fertile, child-bearing years in a climate where infant mortality rates were high. The production of children, the asset for which Roman women were most publicly valued, was an imperative for a woman in Livia’s position, and sterility, the blame for which was invariably pinned on the wife rather than the husband, could be cited as grounds for divorce. It comes as no surprise then that the date 16 November 42 BC marks the spot on the Roman time-line on which Livia leaves her first footprint, with the official documentation of the birth of her eldest son, Tiberius, the boy whose cries would later nearly spoil his parents’ cover as they fled through the Greek city-state of Sparta, and who would one day become emperor of Rome.
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Tiberius’s birth took place at home on the Palatine hill, the most exclusive residential district in Rome. Thanks to its close access to the Roman forum, the hub of the city, and its sacred associations with key moments in Rome’s mythical past, such as the birth of the city’s twin founders Romulus and Remus, the Palatine was the ideal home for an ambitious politico like Tiberius Nero. A veritable
Who’s Who
of late republican movers and shakers had also chosen to make it their base, from Cicero to Octavian and Mark Antony, and Livia had probably grown up there herself in her father’s house.
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Childbirth for a woman in the Roman world was a closely scrutinised business. From the moment of conception to the feeding and weaning stages, a barrage of advice was on offer to expectant mothers – some of it based on the theories of respected medical practitioners, some of it rooted in superstitious quackery. Prior to baby Tiberius’s arrival, Livia herself was said to have employed various old wives’ techniques to try and ensure the birth of a son, including one where she incubated a hen’s egg by cupping it in her hands and keeping it warm in the folds of her dress, where it would eventually hatch into a proud-combed cock-chick, in supposed premonition of a baby boy.
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The more pragmatic, though equally unscientific, advice of medical experts like Soranus, writing some years later in the second century, recommended that the best time for conception was towards the end of menstruation, and after a light meal and a massage.

Home births were the only kind available, and a wealthy mother-to-be such as Livia was attended by a roomful of females, including several midwives, who were kept on permanent staff by the richest households. Husbands were not present in the delivery room – though Octavian’s father Gaius Octavius had reportedly been late for a Senate vote in 62 BC when his wife Atia went into labour – while male attending physicians were almost unheard of. A remarkable terracotta tombstone from Isola Sacra, near the Roman port of Ostia, offers us an extraordinary snapshot of a Roman woman in the process of parturition. A midwife (probably the dedicatee of this roughly hewn funerary relief) crouches on a low stool before a labouring woman who is naked, and gripping tightly to the armrests of a birthing chair, her upper torso supported by another woman standing behind her. From other medical sources, we know what the relief does not show – that there was a crescent-shaped hole in the seat of such chairs, through which the baby would be delivered by the squatting midwife.
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An unpleasant-looking vaginal speculum made of bronze was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii; such contraptions may have been used to examine the birth canal in the event of complications. If the advice recorded by Soranus was followed, hot oil, water and compresses were on hand, and the air scented with herbs such as minty pennyroyal and fresh citrus, to soothe the exhausted mother.
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Giving birth was a dangerous experience in antiquity both for mother and child. It is estimated that about a quarter of infants died before their first birthday, and funerary epitaphs offer many mournful paeans to mothers who died in labour.
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But in the event of a successful outcome, such as sixteen-year-old Livia’s safe delivery of little Tiberius, the house was soon flooded with congratulatory, back-slapping friends of the proud father, and there is literary evidence that women had post-partum support from female members of their own families too.
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Nine days after the birth, a day of ceremonial cleansing rites called the
lustratio
was held for the baby, during which he or she was officially named.
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Public scrutiny of the child’s upbringing did not stop there, however. Despite the fact that most members of the elite apparently handed their children over to wet-nurses for suckling, many ancient sources criticised the practice, and insisted that women should
breast-feed their own infants themselves. A description from the second century recalls a philosophising visitor named Favorinus criticising a girl’s mother for trying to spare her daughter the exigencies of breast-feeding so soon after giving birth, insisting that the child’s moral character would be harmed by the milk of foreign, servile wet-nurses who might well be addicted to the bottle to boot. He follows the point home:

For what kind of unnatural, imperfect and half-motherhood is it to bear a child and at once send it away from her? … Or do you perhaps think … that nature gave women nipples as a kind of beauty-spot, not for the purpose of nourishing their children, but as an adornment of their breast?
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Even though such intellectual critiques failed to stop elite mothers in Livia’s day from handing over their babies for weaning, and Soranus’s gynaecological compendium actually recommended the employ of a wet-nurse for exhausted mothers, the satirising of females who did not want to endure the trials and damage to the figure caused by childbirth played well to auditors with long, rose-tinted memories. For such female narcissism was portrayed by critics of the society in which Livia grew up as a revealing contrast to the good old days of Rome’s earlier history, a period inhabited by female nonpareils such as Cornelia, a much-fêted matriarch of the second century BC who was said to have dispensed with hired help and brought up her children ‘at her breast’ and ‘on her lap’.
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