The Book of Ancient Bastards (16 page)

Stage Mother for an Empire

(58 B.C.– A.D. 29)

In domestic virtue she was of the old school, though her affability went further than was approved by women of the elder world. An imperious mother, she was an accommodating wife, and an excellent match for the subtleties of her husband and the insincerity of her son.
—Tacitus, The Annals

Livia Drusilla, the wife of Rome’s first emperor, fellow bastard Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Augustus), comes down to us through the millennia as an opaque figure at best. Every bit as capable of playing a role with all the sincerity of her nearly matchless husband, Livia made a point of playing the doting wife and caring mother in public, embracing the traditional role of the virtuous Roman matron, consumed with hearth and home, leaving business and politics to “her men.”

In reality, she was a political player and behind-the-scenes power broker, one of only two people her husband seems to have trusted during his entire long life (the other being his lifelong friend and son-in-law, Marcus Agrippa). Livia made use of that trust to influence the emperor (and others) in favor of her sons: the scholarly, moody military man Tiberius and his younger brother, the brilliant, likeable Drusus.

The accusations of several ancient historians that Livia poisoned those who stood in the way of her own sons are probably just so much axe-grinding. That said, she clearly influenced her husband, and no doubt pushed him in his choice of Tiberius as his eventual heir.

That is not to say that her hands were clean of all wrongdoing.

Once Octavian (by then called Augustus) was dead, Livia covered up the news of his death, issuing proclamations in his name and sealing up the house where he’d died so that no one got in or out without her consent. This gave Tiberius time to get to Augustus’s bedside, and by extension, to consolidate his power. It is probable that Livia ordered the murder of Augustus’s only living grandson, Agrippa Postumus, without Tiberius’s consent.

While Livia lived to see her son succeed her husband as emperor, it’s anybody’s guess how much she actually enjoyed his reign. Tiberius avoided seeing or communicating with his mother at all costs pretty much for the rest of her life. When she died in A.D. 29, a very old woman of eighty-six, he skipped her funeral and refused to honor the provisions of her will.

Cold-Blooded Mama Bastard

Roman aristocrats could be a cold-blooded lot, and frequently had completely unsentimental attitudes toward divorce. One person might marry and divorce several times over, with these marriages largely seen as property matters, rather than love matches. Livia seems to have been involved in relationships for both sentimental and unsentimental reasons. She hitched her wagon to Octavian’s star when she was still in her teens, beginning an affair with him while she was still married to her first husband (and pregnant with their second child, Drusus).She divorced said husband (a much older man who was on the wrong side of the political conflict between Octavian and the murderers of Julius Caesar) while still pregnant with Drusus. And she quickly married Octavian, again while still pregnant with the same baby!

Bastard as the Grumpy Old Man Who Lives on Your Street

(42 B.C.– A.D. 37)

[Tiberius] ordered the death of all who were lying in prison under accusation of complicity with Sejanus. There lay, singly or in heaps, the unnumbered dead, of every age and sex, the illustrious with the obscure. . . . The force of terror had utterly extinguished the sense of human fellowship, and with the growth of cruelty, pity was thrust aside.
—Tacitus, The Annals

Rome’s second emperor was a reluctant bastard if ever there was one. A proven military man and philosopher who vastly preferred books to politics, Tiberius succeeded his stepfather Augustus (Octavian) pretty much because he was the only heir left standing when Augustus died in A.D. 14, after more than fifty years of running the Roman state.

By the time the throne was thrust upon him by Augustus’s death, Tiberius seems to have resigned himself to the job, and for a while proved an able, if unspectacular, ruler. But he was in his mid-fifties by the time he became emperor, and never possessed the common touch; the Roman people didn’t much like him, and he seems to have reciprocated that lack of affection. He relied more and more on his right-hand man, the praetorian prefect Sejanus—a bastard with ideas of his own when it came to the imperial throne.

In A.D. 31, Tiberius got wind of Sejanus’s plotting to take the throne from him. He tricked his unsuspecting praetorian prefect into coming to the Senate House without his usual praetorian escort, then had him seized and executed. But Tiberius didn’t stop there: he began a bloody purge of not just Sejanus’s followers, but of every member of his family and all of his friends—basically everyone who knew him. Tiberius even had his own daughter-in-law killed when it was revealed that she had helped Sejanus poison her husband years earlier.

In the end, though, he was only forestalling the inevitable. On his deathbed, when the seventy-seven-year-old emperor rallied and asked for something to eat, Sejanus’s successor (and executioner) Macro took a pillow and smothered the old man to make way for his young heir, that nutty bastard Caligula.

Mama’s Bastard

The ultimate stage mother, Tiberius’s mother Livia spared no effort manipulating her husband (Tiberius’s stepfather Augustus) into favoring her sons by her first marriage in his succession plans, since Augustus had no sons of his own. Rumor had it that when Augustus finally kicked off himself, it was because Livia had poisoned him to get him out of the way before he changed his mind about handing off his position and his vast fortune to his gloomy stepson!

Clearing the Way for a Monster

(20 B.C.– A.D. 31)

A blend of arrogance and servility, [Sejanus] concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power. Sometimes this impelled him to lavish excesses, but more often to incessant work. And that is as damaging as excess when the throne is its aim.
—Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

Shades of
The
Godfather
! Great man conflicted about ruling a powerful family enterprise, weighed down in his old age by the assorted stresses of running said enterprise. Along comes a powerful, charismatic, innovative younger guy, ambitious, not afraid to make himself useful, all the while plotting his own eventual takeover.

That’s the story of the Roman emperor Tiberius and the helpful younger man angling to be his heir-apparent, Lucius Aelius Sejanus.

Sejanus seduced the wife of Tiberius’s son and heir, used her to help get that son and heir out of the way, got himself betrothed to his mistress once she became the dead son’s widow, and for several years was de facto ruler of the Roman Empire.

The historian Tacitus writes that Sejanus, a commoner, nursed a private ambition to become emperor once he’d been made praetorian prefect in A.D. 14, but “Sejanus’ ambitions were impeded by the well-stocked imperial house, including a son and heir—in his prime—and grown-up grandchildren.” So Sejanus set about knocking off these heirs, starting with Tiberius’s grown son-and-heir-to-the-throne, Drusus. This he accomplished by seducing Drusus’s none-too-bright wife, then getting her to help him poison her husband. When Drusus died of a sudden “illness” in A.D. 23, no one seems to have suspected a thing.

Sejanus became de facto ruler of the Roman Empire, running things in the name of Tiberius. He slowly got other heirs out of the way. In A.D. 29, Agrippina, widow of Tiberius’s nephew Germanicus, and her sons Drusus (yes, yet another Drusus) and Nero (no, not that Nero) were sent into exile on charges made by Sejanus that they were plotting against Tiberius. Agrippina wound up starving herself to death, whereas Drusus was forced to commit suicide. Nero’s end was particularly gruesome. Starved to death himself, he was apparently at one point so crazed with hunger that he attempted to eat his own mattress!

In the end, all of Sejanus’s plotting came to naught, because Tiberius’s aunt Antonia sent the emperor a letter accusing Sejanus of attempting to usurp the throne. With that single string pulled, the entire carefully constructed plot began to unravel. Sejanus was taken by surprise in the Senate House, arrested, condemned, and in short order strangled, then had his corpse thrown down the Gemonian Steps, where an angry mob tore it to pieces.

The major unintended consequence of Sejanus’s plot was that by getting rid of Drusus and Nero, he, more than any other individual, was responsible for clearing the way for their younger brother, that nutty bastard Caligula, to succeed Tiberius as emperor.

Bastard Mentor/Mentee

Tiberius, who had stayed alive and grown old in the imperial succession in part because he trusted no one, was by all accounts completely taken in by Sejanus, at one point describing him to the senate as “the partner of my labors.”