The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (20 page)

Germanicus enjoyed a meteoric rise through the political and military ranks, earning appointment to the consulship in 12 at the precocious age of twenty-six, and subsequently the proconsular command of legions stationed in Gaul and Germany. Agrippina herself accompanied him to his posting, where they were later joined by two-year-old Gaius, who received his nickname Caligula, meaning ‘Little Boot’, from his father’s troops. A few months before Augustus’s death, the old emperor had written a letter to his beloved granddaughter, in which he advised her of the arrangements he had personally made for Caligula’s safe passage in the wake of her departure: ‘I am … sending with him one of my slaves, a doctor who, as I have told Germanicus in a letter, need not be returned to me if he proves of use to you. Goodbye, my dear Agrippina! Keep well on the way back to your Germanicus.’
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In 14, the news of Augustus’s death filtered through to troops patrolling the Rhine and Danube borders. It sparked a mutiny. Soldiers declared their loyalty to Germanicus over Tiberius while at the same time demanding better pay and conditions. Amid the chaos, Germanicus was urged to send his pregnant wife and son to a position of safety. Yet Agrippina was said to have disdainfully rejected the suggestion that she should flee, reminding her husband ‘that she was of the blood of the divine Augustus and would live up to it, whatever the danger.’ On finally being persuaded to go by a tearful Germanicus,
she left in a convoy with other soldiers’ wives, little Caligula in her arms, and her departure shamed into obeisance the wayward soldiers, stirred by the memory of her illustrious lineage and her ‘impressive record as wife and mother’, and embarrassed by the prospect of Roman women needing to seek asylum elsewhere. The immediate crisis was over, and the story served to confirm Agrippina as an heiress to the legacy of female peacemaker occupied most recently by Octavia.
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However, troubles flared up again the following year during a glory-seeking bid by Germanicus to breach German territory and extend the empire’s frontiers. Panic spread as the invading Roman troops were surrounded and the counter-attacking German army threatened to swarm across the bridge the Romans had built over the Rhine. Once more, though, Agrippina saved the day, holding the fort and acting as a nurse to the wounded, all the while pregnant with her daughter Agrippina Minor:
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Some, in panic, envisaged the disgraceful idea of demolishing the bridge. But Agrippina put a stop to it. In those days this great-hearted woman acted as commander. She herself dispensed clothes to needy soldiers, and dressed the wounded. Pliny the Elder, the historian of the German campaigns, writes that she stood at the bridge-head to thank and congratulate the returning column.
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A cinematic treatment of Agrippina’s life would inevitably cast her as the plucky heroine. But to a Roman audience, the sight of a soldier’s wife and would-be empress following the drum, directing military operations on behalf of her husband and helping forestall military embarrassment in the process, aroused more ambivalent emotions. For a start, there was the issue of Agrippina travelling abroad so freely. The question of whether women should be permitted to accompany their husbands to the front line or to political postings, had long provoked strong feelings among certain members of the ruling elite. During a debate in the Senate five years later, while discussing the choice of new governors for Africa and Asia, the senator Aulus Caecina Severus had introduced a sidebar, proposing that no appointee to a governorship should be allowed to take his wife along with him:

The rule which forbade women to be taken to provinces or foreign countries was salutary. A female entourage stimulates extravagance in peacetime and timidity in war. Women are not only frail and easily
tired. Relax control, and they become ferocious, ambitious schemers, circulating among the soldiers, ordering company-commanders about. Recently a woman conducted battalion parades and brigade exercises! … They have burst through the old legal restrictions of the Oppian and other laws, and are rulers everywhere – at home, in the courts and now in the army.
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Severus’s cantankerous tirade was swiftly rebutted, one of his interlocutors insisting that the inability of a few husbands to control their wives was no reason to deprive all of them of conjugal company, and Drusus Minor himself pointed out that Augustus had often travelled east and west with Livia. But although Severus’s concerns received little support from his listeners, the debaters did acknowledge that part of the reason for keeping women close by was to maintain a careful watch on the weaker sex: ‘Marriages scarcely survive with the keeper on the spot,’ it was pointed out, ‘whatever would happen with some years of virtual divorce to efface them?’
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Then there was the question of Agrippina actually directing troops on the battlefield. Severus’s outraged description in the Senate debate of ‘a woman’ recently conducting military exercises may not have been a reference to Agrippina herself, but there were other women of course, such as Antony’s wife Fulvia, who in recent years had been the target of such vilification. These prejudices against women on the front line of war were often intricately wound up with fears that women would start making similar incursions into the political arena.
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That the thought occurred to Tiberius too was reflected in reports of his indignant and suspicious reaction to Agrippina’s one-woman rescue mission on the German frontier:

There was something behind these attentions to the army, he felt; they were not simply because of the foreign enemy. ‘The commanding officer’s job’, he reflected, ‘is a sinecure when a woman inspects units and exhibits herself before the standards with plans for money-distributions’ … Agrippina’s position in the army already seemed to outshine generals and commanding officers; and she, a woman, had suppressed a mutiny which the emperor’s own signature had failed to check.
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Over the next four years, the flames of Tiberius’s animosity and jealousy towards his popular young ward and prospective heir continued to
smoulder. Germanicus remained on the Rhine for the next two years, inflicting a series of military defeats against the Germans until recalled by the emperor to Rome to celebrate his triumph in a processional through the city on 26 May 17, which the whole population is said to have come on to the streets to witness. An old republican tradition was observed, which decreed that the sons of the triumphant commander should accompany their father in the parade. But in a novel amendment, the daughters of the
triumphator
, in this case sixteen-month-old Agrippina Minor and her baby sister Drusilla, who were both born on Germanicus’s campaign trail, now rode in their father’s chariot as well, alongside their three brothers.
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It was a clever magnification of Augustus’s old strategy of presenting himself as both a family man and strong protector of the state.

Tiberius’s subsequent decision to dispatch Germanicus, accompanied by Agrippina and other members of his family, on a diplomatic tour of the empire’s eastern provinces with a Senate-approved mandate of
maius imperium
– supreme authority – over all provincial governors in the region, was interpreted as an attempt to sideline his rival and detach him from his faithful legions.
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The legacy of Actium should surely have warned against encouraging one’s opponents to establish rival authority in the east, and soon the memory of that battle reared its head ominously, when in 18 the imperial entourage made a stop at the site of the great sea fight, so that Germanicus could make a pilgrimage to the location of his grandfather Antony’s camp. Later they visited Cleopatra’s old domain of Egypt and took a cruise up the Nile, taking in views of the pyramids, the Colossus of Memnon – a statue that ‘sang’ when the sun’s rays passed over it – and other remnants of the ancient civilisation of Thebes. Germanicus also enacted popular measures such as lowering the price of corn while on a walkabout tour of Alexandria, and privately commissioned inscriptions dedicated to Antonia have been found along the route they took, honouring her for ‘having provided the fullest and greatest principles of the most divine family’, suggesting that perhaps she formed part of the family party too.
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It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the image of three generations of Augustus’s arch-rival Antony sightseeing at iconic locations in their infamous relative’s old hunting-ground was deliberately designed to enrage Tiberius.
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It certainly left the latter distinctly unamused, provoking him to issue a reprimand against Germanicus for infringing a command that no senator or knight should enter Egypt without
permission from the emperor.
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Leaving Actium, the party soon stopped at the island of Lesbos, where early in 18, Agrippina gave birth to her third daughter and last child, Julia Livilla. The moment recalled her own delivery in the region just over thirty years earlier, when her mother Julia had accompanied Agrippa on his travels, and in a poignant echo of her mother’s footprint around the Mediterranean, inscriptions have been found in the area of Lesbos, giving Agrippina titles in praise of her child-bearing prowess, such as
karphoros
, or ‘fruit-bearing’, just as Julia had received.
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Agrippina’s fertility was a great selling point for the regime, one expressed in portraits showing a woman with strong, regular facial features, a determined chin and full-lipped mouth, her face framed by a hairstyle that deviated significantly from the vogue established by her female forebears. The middle parting made fashionable by Livia’s late, classicising portrait was still in place, but the rest of Agrippina’s hairstyle was quite different, her thick locks swept outwards into arched waves which were then arranged in thickly clustering ringlets around her temples, like piped curls of cream. These ringlets, each carefully coiffed coil punctured in the centre by the sculptor’s drill to give it definition, were a technical tour de force, but curly hair also stood for youth, vibrancy and fecundity in the classical sculptural tradition, and was thus the perfect way to immortalise a celebrated mother of six, one of whom would in all likelihood prove the keeper of the Julio-Claudian flame.
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Livia and Agrippina, the two leading female lights of their generations of the Julio-Claudian family, were said to have disliked each other intensely, a piece of gossip reported by Tacitus, whose access to the lost memoirs of Agrippina’s daughter Agrippina Minor lends credibility to the report.
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The appearance of striking new portraits dedicated to Agrippina would not have eased such tensions. Through the smokescreen of our sources, it is difficult to ascertain which members of the Julio-Claudian household genuinely got on with each other. Livia obviously had day-to-day dealings with Antonia over the education of the children under their joint aegis, and was said to have been close to her granddaughter Livilla.
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She also accumulated a wider circle of female friends, women such as Salome of Judaea, to whom she had once given pragmatic counsel when the latter expressed a reluctance to marry a man chosen for her by her brother King Herod. Livia advised her friend to abandon thoughts of marrying the man she really desired, the Arab Syllaeus, in order to avoid a serious rift
within the Herodian royal family, evidence of a pragmatic strain in Livia that may have represented a lesson well learned in childhood from the Sabine women – those heroines of Rome’s early history who accepted their own forced marriage rather than being the cause of war between their male kin.
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Livia’s protection had proved an incredibly useful asset over the years to other women who found themselves in awkward situations. Two years after Augustus’s death, the empress had intervened in a dispute between her friend Plautia Urgulania and a former consul named Lucius Calpurnius Piso, an outspoken critic of corruption in the courts and to whom Urgulania owed money. Urgulania took refuge with Livia on the Palatine rather than obey a summons to court from Lucius, and a stand-off which threatened to embarrass Tiberius was averted only when Livia paid the fine on Urgulania’s behalf.
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Her friendship with Livia afforded Urgulania great kudos, a fact that her own grandson Plautius Silvanus later discovered to his cost when he tried ineptly to conceal his murder of his wife Apronia, whom he had thrown out of a window. After judges were appointed to hear the case, Silvanus was sent a dagger by Urgulania. Owing to his grandmother’s close friendship with the
Augusta
, Silvanus interpreted this as a message from the highest level that he should bring the matter to an end, and used the dagger on himself.
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From a modern feminist perspective, some have chosen to see in Livia a champion of her sex, shielding her friends from partisan witch-hunts, rather than an abuser of her position as mother of the emperor. But the sterner view of ancient commentators such as Tacitus was that Livia’s close bond with women such as Urgulania placed her friends above the law. It was a damaging observation, particularly in the light of the scandal about to unfold.
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Despite the enthusiasm with which Germanicus and Agrippina were greeted on their various stops along their eastern tour, a simmering row brewing back in Syria, one of the provinces under Germanicus’s supervision, was threatening to sour the whole trip.