The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (21 page)

Syria had recently been placed under new management with Tiberius’s appointment of governor Calpurnius Piso, whose wealthy wife Munatia Plancina was, like Urgulania, an old friend of Livia’s. Piso had been appointed by Tiberius ostensibly as an aide to Germanicus while he carried out his eastern duties but according to the account of Tacitus, it was whispered in some quarters that he was really there
to thrust a spoke in Germanicus’s wheel, and that Plancina had been primed by Livia, ‘whose feminine jealousy was set on persecuting Agrippina’. Consequently, the relationship between their camps was fractious. Piso showed scant respect for Germanicus’s authority while Plancina, who apparently ‘went beyond feminine respectability by attending cavalry exercises’, was reported to have got involved by verbally abusing her opposite number. When Germanicus returned to Syria after concluding his tour of Egypt, their long-running feud was reignited over Piso’s failure to follow Germanicus’s commands.
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In the autumn of 19, while still quartered in Antioch, Germanicus suddenly fell ill. Suspecting that Piso had poisoned him and convinced that curses had been placed around his sickbed, Germanicus summoned his friends to his bedside and accused the Syrian governor and his wife, singling out Plancina for special blame in lamenting, obscurely, that he had ‘fallen to a woman’s treachery’. Finally, he bade farewell to his wife Agrippina, begging her ‘by her memories of himself and by their children, to forget her pride, submit to cruel fortune, and, back in Rome, to avoid provoking those stronger than herself by competing for their power’. In a private aside, he also warned her to beware Tiberius. On 10 October, at the age of thirty-three, Germanicus died, and the news of his illness and death, which took some weeks to reach Rome, sent shock waves of confusion and grief through the city, sparking angry demonstrations from those who suspected foul play, their fury fanned by claims that Plancina had celebrated Germanicus’s demise by putting on festive clothing, in contrast to the sombre hues required of mourners. Agrippina made her way slowly back to the coast of Italy across the cold winter sea, finally disembarking before the sorrowing and sympathetic audience of Germanicus’s colleagues and admirers at the port of Brundisium, clutching the urn with the cremated remains of her husband. In Tacitus’s words, she was ‘exhausted by grief and unwell, but impatient of anything that postponed revenge’.
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When the conspicuous absence of either the emperor or his mother from the mourners provoked disquiet from the crowds, Tiberius was forced to issue a statement urging people to conduct themselves with dignity in their grief. The climate remained rife with suspicion. People remembered the death of Germanicus’s father Drusus, and stirred up old rumours by surmising that Germanicus had been killed because he was planning to restore the republic. Livia meanwhile was said to have had mysterious ‘private talks’ with Plancina. Also absent from
the funerary ceremonies was the deceased’s mother, Antonia, at least according to Tacitus, who reports that he found no record in official journals or histories of her being present. He puts the circumstance down to Tiberius’s and Livia’s making her stay inside, so as not to make their own absence seem more noticeable.
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Piso was indeed accused of murder and eventually forced to stand trial in Rome. Any hopes he had that Tiberius might intervene to save him were dashed, and he was found with his throat cut before a verdict could be reached. For Plancina, however, it was a different story. Livia’s patronage evidently counted for a great deal. Plancina was as much loathed as her husband, but ‘she had more influence’ and ‘it was doubted how far Tiberius could act against her’. After a two-day ‘sham investigation’ into her part in the affair, Plancina was spared as a result of Livia’s private appeals on her behalf.
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Thanks to remarkable separate discoveries in the 1980s, two vital new pieces of evidence have resurfaced which shed fresh insight into this whole episode. Our comparing them to the account given by Tacitus allows us to reconstruct a more forensic picture of the events of 19–20, including the role of Livia, Agrippina and Antonia in the affair. The first of these exhibits came to light in 1982 when a fractured bronze tablet was recovered with the use of metal detectors in the Roman province of Baetica (Andalusia) in southern Spain. Dubbed the
Tabula Siarensis
, it was found to be inscribed with passages from two decrees issued by the Roman Senate in December of 19, two months after the death of Germanicus, which listed the posthumous honours that should be paid to him. Six years after this retrieval, the searchers struck gold (or bronze) once more in the same region, coaxing yet more tablets out of the soil, this time preserving several copies of one of the most important Roman inscriptions ever discovered – the complete 176-line text of another decree of the Senate, dated to 10 December 20, a year after Germanicus’s death. The second find was titled the
Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone patre
, and announced to the empire’s provincial audience the outcome of the trial of Piso and Plancina for the murder of Germanicus.
⁷⁸

In their essentials, both the
Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone patre
(abbreviated henceforth to
SC
), which was posted in provincial capital cities and in the headquarters of the army’s legions, and the
Tabula Siarensis
vindicate Tacitus’s outline of events, although the latter slightly modifies Tacitus’s conclusion that Germanicus’s mother Antonia was excluded from the funeral rituals.
⁷⁹
The
SC
, though, provides an
intriguing insight into the role of Livia in the outcome of Plancina’s trial. Writing of Livia’s private intervention on behalf of Plancina, Tacitus noted that ‘All decent people were, in private, increasingly violent critics of the
Augusta
– a grandmother who was apparently entitled to see and talk to her grandson’s murderess, and rescue her from the senate’.
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It is a strong accusation. But the
SC
in fact proves that the Senate acknowledged openly and publicly that Livia’s request to Tiberius was indeed the reason for Plancina’s acquittal:

… our
Princeps
has often and pressingly requested from the House that the Senate be satisfied with the punishment of Cn. Piso Senior and spare his wife as it spared his son M[arcus], and pleaded himself for Plancina at the request of his mother and had very just reasons presented to him by her for wanting to secure her request … the Senate believes that to Iulia Aug[usta], who had served the commonwealth superlatively in giving birth to our
Princeps
but also through her many great favours towards men of every rank, and who rightly and deservedly could have supreme influence in what she asked from the senate, but who used that influence sparingly, and to the supreme piety of our
Princeps
towards his mother, support and indulgence should be accorded and has decided that the punishment of Plancina should be waived.
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These few lines inscribed on bronze are among the most important pieces of evidence in existence of Livia’s position in Roman public life. While it would be unwise to assume that the Senate’s grandiloquent blandishments referring to her ‘supreme influence’ over the Senate should be taken at face value – she still could not, as a woman, even set foot inside the chamber – they prove that the senators publicly played along with the
idea
at least that Livia could exercise such power, if she chose to.
⁸²
The words ‘great favours towards men of every rank’ also offer tangible evidence of Livia’s influence, underlining her ongoing role as a powerful networker and patron behind the scenes of imperial bureaucracy. And as a whole, the lines reinforce the ideal, of which the public had been reminded with the dedication to her of statues after her son Drusus’s death, that Livia had provided ‘service’ to the state through having given birth to the
princeps
, in a way comparable to the ‘service’ provided by great statesmen and generals. In short, they leave little room for doubt that Livia’s political influence, even if to some extent only symbolic, was taken very seriously.

The
Tabula Siarensis
states that Livia along with Antonia, Agrippina Maior and Germanicus’s younger sister Livilla – though they were not actually allowed in the Senate – were involved in the senatorial process of drawing up a short list of suitable funerary honours for Germanicus. Tiberius was given the final say and the Senate duly dispatched an announcement to all Roman colonies and municipal towns that three monumental arches were to be built in Germanicus’s honour, one on the mountain in Syria where Germanicus had held his last command, one on the banks of the Rhine near the cenotaph erected to the memory of his father Drusus, and one in Rome itself, near the Portico of Octavia and the Theatre of Marcellus. Although to this date triumphal arches had been strictly all-male affairs in terms of who was allowed to appear on them, it was decreed that the Roman arch was to be topped by a statue of Germanicus in his victor’s chariot and flanked by statues of eleven family members including both his parents, his wife Agrippina and all his sons and daughters, echoing the whole family’s inclusion in Germanicus’s joyous real-life triumph of 17. It also constitutes the first evidence of statues of women other than Livia and Octavia being included within the capital city itself.
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Despite the promise of such a revolution in the medium of public sculpture, the
SC
reminds us of the prohibitively and reassuringly bland manner in which the imperial women were generally still represented. In lauding his widow Agrippina, his mother Antonia and his sister Livilla for their restraint in bereavement, and paying tribute to Livia for schooling the deceased’s sons in the same respect, a counter-example to Seneca’s criticism of Octavia’s over-emotional mourning for Marcellus, it recycles stock laudatory epithets – Agrippina the fecund wife, Antonia the chaste widow and Livilla the obedient daughter and granddaughter:

… the Senate expresses its great admiration: of Agrippina, whom the memory of the divine Augustus, by whom she was greatly esteemed, and of her husband Germanicus, with whom she lived in unique harmony, and the many children born of their most fortunate union … and further the Senate expresses its great admiration of Antonia the mother of Germanicus Caesar, whose only marriage was to Drusus the father of Germ[anicus], and who, through the excellence of her moral character, proved herself to the divine Augustus worthy of so close a relationship; and of Livi[ll]a the sister of Germ[anicus] whom her grandmother and her father-in-law, who is also her uncle, our
Princeps
, hold in the highest esteem – whose esteem, even if she did not belong to their family, she could deservedly vaunt and can do so all the more as she is a lady attached by such family ties: the senate greatly admires these ladies in equal measure for their most loyal grief and their moderation in that grief.
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However, between the lines of the Senate’s po-faced encomium of these women’s collective virtues, and behind the sculptural commissions promising family unity, many people realised that all was not as harmonious in the Julio-Claudian family household as Tiberius’s regime would have liked them to think.

Tensions between Agrippina and her relatives over the suspicious death of her husband did not go away after the case against Piso and Plancina was settled. On the day of Germanicus’s funeral itself, Tiberius was said to have been infuriated by the reception the people gave Agrippina whom they called ‘the glory of her country … the only true descendant of Augustus’.
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Lingering antipathy between the two grew steadily worse over the next few years. Their hostility was exacerbated by the machinations of the Iago of the piece, Lucius Aelius Sejanus. A veteran soldier of Julio-Claudian military campaigns in Germany and the east, Sejanus had been appointed by Tiberius in 14 to the post of praetorian prefect, the head of the emperor’s personal guard, and from that position, began to wield increasing influence. After Germanicus’s demise, Tiberius’s biological son Drusus Minor became the de facto heir to the throne. But his death in 23, at the age of thirty-six – in circumstances which later drew a charge of poisoning on his wife Livilla, who was said to have been having an affair with Sejanus – tipped the balance of succession towards Germanicus’s family again and hope now rested chiefly on the latter’s three sons Nero Caesar, Drusus Caesar and Caligula.
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Ambitious for power, the wily Sejanus now used his opportunity to pick away at the scab of resentment between Livia and Agrippina, attempting to foment the empress’s and her son’s antagonism towards Germanicus’s widow by trading on what Tacitus described as Agrippina’s ‘insubordination’ and ‘ill-concealed maternal ambitions’. He was aided in his endeavour by the
Augusta
’s circle of female confidantes, including a woman named Mutilia Prisca, said to have ‘great influence over the old lady’, and Livilla, Germanicus’s sister.
⁸⁷

Meanwhile relations between Tiberius and his mother were no less
rocky during the 20s than they had been the previous decade. Public iconography celebrating their accord is countered by rumours in the literary record of further private flare-ups and disagreements. On 23 April 22, her dedication of a statue to the deified Augustus near the Theatre of Marcellus provoked Tiberius’s ire when she had her own name placed above his in the accompanying inscription. A surviving record of the inscription in a calendar of the period, the
Fasti Praenestini
, confirms that her name was indeed placed before Tiberius’s.
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Perhaps it was an unwelcome reminder to Tiberius of the Senate’s earlier attempts to style him by the infantilising moniker of ‘son of Livia’. The gap between official spin and public speculation was being exposed once again.