The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (13 page)

Women’s pharmacological skills could also be directed to positive ends, making medicines that healed rather than harmed. The
De Medicamentis Liber
, an extraordinary compilation of traditional Roman remedies assembled in the fifth century by a medical writer from Bordeaux, even preserves for us what it claims were the favourite medical recipes of Livia and Octavia themselves, rather like the Hippocratic equivalent of a modern celebrity cookery book. Drawing on the writings of Scribonius Largus, a physician who served the imperial court during the reign of Livia’s great-grandson Claudius, it
records that Livia herself recommended a linctus including saffron, cinnamon, coriander, opium and honey to soothe a sore throat, and also kept a salve of marjoram, rosemary, fenugreek, wine and oil in a jar by her bed to soothe chills and nervous tension, an ancient version of Vicks VapoRub. As well as telling us of Livia’s toothpaste formula, it is also our source for Octavia’s own prescription for
dentifricium
, which like her sister-in-law’s was a simple abrasive blend consisting of rock salt, vinegar, honey and barley-flour, baked into charred dumplings and scented, again like Livia’s, with spikenard.
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Octavia’s profile spiked briefly in the aftermath of Marcellus’s death. Despite her vow that she would make no public appearances, she emerged from the shadows to dedicate a library to her dead son in her eponymous portico – while Augustus established a nearby theatre in his name, the Theatre of Marcellus – and she continued to make periodic appearances in art commissioned by her brother. But the damage was done. It was said that she never recovered, either politically or personally, from Marcellus’s death, and wore mourning clothes for the last decade of her life. Amid the chorus of ancient approval that paints her as one of the best, most modest and praiseworthy of Roman women, a dissenting voice appeared some decades later in the person of Seneca, a member of the Emperor Nero’s inner circle who said that Octavia had grieved too incontinently for her son, contrasting her behaviour unfavourably with the restrained conduct of Livia when she had her own maternal sorrows to bear.

Of course, the differences between the two women ran far deeper than their respective experiences of grief. According to Seneca, they fell out badly after Marcellus’s death. Octavia was said to have nursed a hatred for her sister-in-law, suspecting that now she would get her long-standing wish of seeing one of her own sons succeed Augustus. If Livia did cherish such maternal ambitions, though, they would have to wait a little longer.
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Augustus was forced to rethink his plans quickly in the aftermath of the events of 23 BC. Marcellus’s death had not only created a vacancy in the dynastic pecking order, it left his teenaged daughter Julia without a husband. To permit his only daughter to remain single for any length of time would have been contrary to the civic ideals that Augustus actively sought to promote – under legislation passed by him within the next few years, one year was the maximum time a woman was allowed to remain an unattached widow before she was expected to
remarry.
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But Augustus did not turn to either of his stepsons by Livia, even though as a general rule he tended to keep things in the family as far as the marriages of the children of the imperial household went. Instead in 21 BC, apparently heeding the advice of his friend Maecenas, who advised Augustus that he had elevated his lieutenant Agrippa to so powerful a position that ‘he must either become your son-in-law or be slain’, he married the now eighteen-year-old Julia to the forty-two-year-old architect of the victory at Actium, who in turn divorced Octavia’s eldest daughter Claudia Marcella Maior to make way for his new bride, a marital reshuffle to which Octavia apparently gave her blessing.
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In 1902, railway workers building a track between Boscotrecase and Torre Annunziata happened to uncover the remains of a magnificent country residence where Agrippa and Julia spent at least some of their married life. Set into a hillside near the ill-fated city of Pompeii, the villa commanded a panoramic south-facing view of the Gulf of Naples, an area littered with the country retreats of the Roman glitterati. Excavations were cut short by the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius which covered the villa’s all too briefly exposed skeleton, but graffiti on amphorae and tiles found in the remains were enough to confirm the property’s original ownership. Thanks to the painting style of the interior decoration, the so-called ‘Third Style‘ which was popularised after 15 BC and was characterised by delicate decorative schemes on monochrome backgrounds, it is thought construction work on the villa probably began in the early years of Agrippa’s and Julia’s marriage.
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The Villa Boscotrecase was one of the most impressive houses of its day, testifying to the enormous wealth and prestige its owner had acquired since Actium. Words can scarcely do justice to the brilliant frescoes that were found inside, and which are today divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Muzeo Nazionale in Naples. Colour poured through the house like a liquid rainbow, flooding the walls with a richly polychromatic palette inspired by nature: red cinnabar, yellow ochre, turquoise, lime-white, violet and green. Whisper-fine pastoral vignettes chequered the walls of the so-called ‘Red Room’; painted candelabra served as pedestals for landscape ‘postcards’ on the sober walls of the ‘Black Room’; and two paintings 5 and 6 feet high (1.5–1.8 m) depicted the rescue of Andromeda from a sea-monster by Perseus and the one-eyed Cylops Polyphemus’s love for the sea-nymph Galatea in the ‘Mythological Room’. The cool marine greens and blues of their composition lent a sense of peace,
tranquillity and fantasy to the ambience of this otherwise red-painted chamber, which may have been a bedroom given that this was often the
locus
for mythological scenes.
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We cannot tell if any of these rooms were intended for Julia’s or any other female resident’s personal use. One of the key distinguishing features between Roman houses and Greek houses is that they show no signs of segregation along gender lines. Nothing in the decoration, layout or archaeological remains of Roman houses indicates which if any rooms were given over to solely male or female use. We do not even have clues such as toy remnants that might identify children’s nurseries.
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Instead, while their Athenian counterparts were almost permanently confined to secluded areas of their homes, Julia and her fellow Roman matrons were expected to make themselves visible, albeit in strictly domestic occupations in the
atrium
where their activities would be on full view, thanks to the open-door policy which Roman male grandees employed to show off their status and encourage the assumption that they had nothing to hide in their personal lives. This principle applied even at their homes outside the metropolis. Thus the Villa Boscotrecase functioned as an extension of Agrippa’s personal political empire in the city, a rural show home where, aided by Julia, he might entertain friends, receive clients and continue to flourish his plumage. However, such sociability only extended so far. Both town and country villas were divided into subtly graduated areas of public and private, the
cubiculum
(‘bedroom’) being the most private, and the atrium being the least private. The more special and privileged the visitor, the more private and richly decorated the room to which he was admitted. It was a mark of Livia’s unusually elevated status, and the rank of visitor she therefore received, that the empress herself maintained a staff of
cubicularii
, or bedroom attendants, whose task it was to supervise admittance to her inner sanctum.
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Such rich gorgeousness as we find in these rooms at Boscotrecase may seem curiously at odds with the mantra of moral austerity so rigorously espoused by Augustus. Like any society, the Romans had their own unwritten codes of conduct, an unspoken understanding of where the line between vulgarity and acceptable ostentation lay, and with its delicate pastoral and mythological decoration themes, Agrippa’s and Julia’s home was in fact quite in keeping with the elegant but restrained style of the imperial residence on the Palatine. Nevertheless, Augustus had serious reservations about the luxurious country mansions that some Romans built for themselves, taking care
to advertise the fact that he himself did not decorate his own modest country places with painted panels and statuary but let natural features such as terraces and plantations do the work, and when, many years later, one of his granddaughters, Julia Minor, built a lavish country palace that did not accord with his moral precepts, he had it demolished, an ominous warning sign, if ever it were needed, that Augustus would not tolerate moral hypocrisy in his own family.
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Julia Minor was one of a tally of five children to whom Julia gave birth during her nine-year union to Agrippa, rewarding the hopes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which seemed now to have settled on Julia and Agrippa as the guardians of its legacy. The eldest, a son named Gaius, was born in 20 BC, followed three years later by a younger brother Lucius, and in a clear signal of intent to groom them as the front runners to their grandfather’s throne, Augustus officially adopted both of them as his own sons. Adoption, whereby one
paterfamilias
legally took another man’s child, or even another
paterfamilias
, into his own family, was a long-standing Roman practice, often employed by those unable to produce heirs of their own – Augustus himself owed much of his rise to his adoption as a seventeen-year-old by his great-uncle Julius Caesar.
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In 13 BC, once Gaius and Lucius had reached the age of seven and four respectively, the Roman mint issued a coin featuring the emperor on one side, and on the other, a tiny fleshy-featured bust of Julia, her hair neatly arranged in the
nodus
, and flanked by the heads of her two infant boys. Julia thus became the only woman to appear on a coin issued by the Roman mint during her father’s reign. Above her portrait hovered the
corona civica
, the crown of oak leaves that along with the laurel was Augustus’s own particular crest; it marked Julia out as the new queen-mother-in-waiting, just as Octavia, mother of Marcellus, had been before her.
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The birth of two girls, Julia Minor and her younger sister Agrippina Maior, intersected those of Gaius and Lucius, and finally another boy came along, named Agrippa Postumus in recognition of the fact that he was born after Agrippa’s death.
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Like her stepmother Livia, Julia spent much of her time accompanying her husband on foreign tours, and her daughter Agrippina is thought to have been born on the island of Lesbos, near the Turkish coast. Inscriptions and statues along the route that Agrippa and Julia took paid homage to the fertility of the emperor’s visiting daughter, such as one in the Greek city of Priene labelling her
kalliteknos
, meaning ‘bearer of beautiful children’.
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Three years into Julia’s marriage to Agrippa, in 18 BC, Augustus’s reforming zeal led him to introduce a highly controversial new set of laws that were designed in part to promote Julia’s child-bearing example to others while purporting to deliver a sharp, self-righteous prod of moral reproof to the soft, lazy and licentious underbelly of the Roman aristocracy. The
leges Iuliae
, or ‘Julian laws’, were introduced in apparent response to a dwindling marriage rate among the Roman elite, and contained strict new measures aimed at cracking down on such laxity while offering economic incentives to marry and procreate. There was clearly also a related agenda of firming up the social hierarchy by preserving the purity and financial integrity of upper-class families, as demonstrated by restrictions the laws imposed both on marriage between unequal class groupings such as senators and freedwomen (former slave women who had won their liberty), and on testamentary bequests made outside the family.
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The centrepiece of the new legislation was the
lex Iulia de adulteriis
, which made adultery a criminal offence for the first time and prescribed the exact punishment procedure for those caught in the act. In a display of stark inequality, the brunt of these legal repercussions was to be borne by women.

Under the new laws, a woman was guilty of adultery if she had sex with anyone but her husband, but a man was guilty of the offence only if the woman he was involved with was married. Slave girls, prostitutes, concubines and single women were fair game, for the key consideration was to ensure that a man’s paternity of his own children was not in doubt. The law also stated that a married woman caught
in flagrante
could be killed by her father, along with her lover, while a cuckolded husband, although not allowed to kill his wife himself and subject to punishment if he did so, was obligated to divorce her immediately. Once divorced, the woman and her lover would be tried in a special court of law and, if found guilty, faced exile as the most likely punishment. Any man who failed to divorce a disgraced wife could be charged with ‘pimping’ for her, drawing an equivalence between an adulterous woman and a prostitute. A later revision of the law also forbade an adulteress ever to remarry a freeborn Roman male, and confiscated half her dowry and a third of her property, again underlining the fact that these laws were aimed chiefly at the wealthier classes of Roman society.
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Widows and women between the ages of twenty and fifty, who were not guilty of the sin of adultery but had divorced for other reasons, were required by law to remarry within a year and six months respectively.
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