The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (22 page)

When Livia fell seriously ill shortly after this spat, any ill-feeling between mother and son was concealed from the public. In a display of filial duty, Tiberius rushed back to Rome from Campania, where he had been convalescing himself, to be at her side. In the event, the eighty-year-old empress survived the health scare, and amid the tributes to her recovery, a bronze
dupondius
coin was issued later that year from the Roman mint, featuring the slogan
Salus Augusta
beneath her portrait, a long-overdue coin debut for the longest-lived and most influential woman in the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
⁸⁹
Salus
, signifying health or well-being, alluded to Livia’s personal recovery and also toasted the health of the empire of which she was the ceremonial mother-figure. In the same year, more bronze coins (
sestertii
) were minted with an image of a
carpentum
, a wheeled carriage harnessed to mules which had previously been reserved for the exclusive use of the Vestal Virgins. They were emblazoned with the inscription SPQR
Iuliae Augustae
– ‘The Senate and the People of Rome to Julia Augusta’ – the first time an imperial woman had actually been identified by name rather than context on official coinage.
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The appearance of the
carpentum
on her coins strongly indicates that Livia was now permitted to use this special form of transport. It set her apart from other aristocratic women who usually had to travel on foot or in sedan chairs, and later that year, Livia also earned the right to sit with the Vestals in the audience of the Roman theatre, rounding off her steady appropriation of the special privileges of these hallowed priestesses, which had begun with her husband’s gift of freedom from male guardianship back in 35 BC.
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Yet the stories of quarrelling between her and Tiberius continued. By 26, the year that Tiberius chose to retire from Rome and take up more permanent
residence first in Campania and then on the island of Capri, a nadir was reached when Livia failed to persuade her son to add a provincial candidate of her choosing to the judges’ roster. This provoked her to confront the emperor with some unwelcome home truths about his stepfather’s real opinion of him.
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Tiberius agreed … on one condition – that the entry should be marked ‘forced upon the Emperor by his mother’. Livia lost her temper and produced from a strong-box some of Augustus’s own letters to her commenting on Tiberius’s sour and stubborn nature. Annoyance with her for hoarding these documents so long, and then spitefully confronting him with them, is said to have been his main reason for retirement to Capri.
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Meanwhile Agrippina was also continuing to prove a thorn in Tiberius’s side. That same year, a row broke out when one of her cousins, Claudia Pulchra, was charged with immorality, witchcraft and conspiracy against the emperor. Agrippina regarded the persecution of Claudia and other female friends of hers as a personal attack, and is said to have furiously confronted her uncle while he was in the middle of a sacrifice to his predecessor:

‘The man who offers victims to the deified Augustus’, she said, ‘ought not to persecute his descendants. It is not in mute statues that Augustus’s divine spirit is lodged – I, born of his sacred blood, am its incarnation! I see my danger; and I wear mourning. Claudia Pulchra is an idle pretext. Her downfall, poor fool, is because she chooses Agrippina as friend!’
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In response to her outburst, a tightly wound Tiberius was quoted as replying, ‘And if you are not queen, my dear, have I then done you wrong?’
⁹⁵
Following Claudia’s condemnation, Agrippina became ill, and broke down when visited by Tiberius, begging to be allowed to remarry: ‘I am lonely’, she said, according to the diaries of her eponymously named daughter Agrippina Minor, which Tacitus consulted during his research. ‘Help me and give me a husband! I am still young enough, and marriage is the only respectable consolation. Rome contains men who would welcome Germanicus’s wife and children.’ But Tiberius feared the implied political threat in this plea and chose to ignore her.
⁹⁶

For all the precariousness of Agrippina’s position, underlined by the fact that every movement she made was said to have been spied on by Sejanus’s agents and that she refused to eat food handed to her by her uncle at the table, it seems that Germanicus’s widow was not quite without protection. Despite the well-attested dislike between Livia and Agrippina, and Sejanus’s attempts to foment discord between them, the fact remains that for as long as her stepgrandmother was alive, Agrippina came to no harm.
⁹⁷

But that protection could not last much longer. Livia was now very near the end of her life. In a society in which life-expectancy was below thirty for most people, even the well-born, and in which it is estimated that only 6 per cent of the population made it past sixty years of age, the fact that she had now lived more than eight decades was either a stunning feat of genetic durability or a tribute to the skills of her private physicians – she had at least five working for her at one time or another, according to the record of the
Monumentum Liviae
.
⁹⁸
Like many age-defying record-breakers, she was said to have sworn by a daily dose of alcohol, in her case a glass of red wine from the Pucinum region of northern Italy, a prescription for the elderly later recommended by Galen, the court physician in Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s day. If the rest of his advice were followed, this would have been supplemented by a diet that included the use of plums as a laxative while excluding cheese, snails, lentils, milk and water, and a regimen of massage, gentle exercise and tepid baths. Old age was a dispiriting time for Roman women, more so than for men. The pages of Roman satire were filled with negative stereotypes of old women as toothless, wrinkled crones addicted to sex, the bottle or futile attempts to reverse the ageing process by applying face packs and thick make-up. Deprived of their fertility and their beauty, old women lost their
raison d’être
in society, though for a few wealthy women, widowhood had its attractions, bringing with it a certain degree of financial and social independence from male authority.
⁹⁹

Livia eventually died in the year 29 at the age of eighty-six, after more than half a century surveying Roman society from the top of its female pyramid.
¹⁰⁰
Sympathetic Roman historians reported that Tiberius’s reaction to his mother’s death was one of profound sorrow, though more hostile accounts claimed that the emperor made no attempt to visit his mother’s deathbed, pleading that he had business to attend to, and then ordering the funeral to go ahead without him when Livia’s body had decomposed so badly that the ceremony could
not be put off any longer.
¹⁰¹
In the event, the eulogy was delivered by the
Augusta
’s seventeen-year-old great-grandson Caligula, the wag behind Livia’s sobriquet ‘
Ulixes stolatus
’. The funeral itself was a modest affair, in keeping with the frugal principles laid down by Augustus, and Livia’s ashes were deposited in her husband’s mausoleum, probably in an alabaster cinerary urn of the type found for other female members of her family.
¹⁰²

In homage to Livia, the Senate once more proposed honours completely unprecedented for a woman, including a suggestion that she should be deified and worshipped as a goddess, and voting that an arch, a monument with a distinctly military flavour, should be built in her honour, on the grounds that ‘she had saved the lives of not a few of them, had reared the children of many, and had helped many to pay their daughters’ dowries’.
¹⁰³
They also ordered that all the women of the empire should go into mourning for a year. But Tiberius insisted that business should continue as usual, vetoing the proposal to deify his mother and at the same time refusing to honour certain financial bequests made in her will. He did allow statues to mark her passing and acquiesced to the arch on condition that he was given personal financial responsibility for its construction. It was never built. Tiberius pleaded that in rejecting deification of Livia he was not being petty but simply doing what his mother wanted, and there may have been something in that. Public refusals of honours could then, as now, serve a propagandistic function every bit as useful as their acceptance, a lesson Augustus committed to heart in handing back powers offered him by the Senate when he first came to power. Even after the death of his beloved sister Octavia, Augustus had capped the honours initially voted her by the Senate. Yet few believed at the time that Tiberius had anything other than spite in mind towards the woman who had raised him and whose awe-inspiring authority over him he was widely thought to have resented.
¹⁰⁴

The portrait of Livia the iron lady of Rome, a cold, clever proponent of petticoat politics, is one of the most enduring of Roman imperial history and has won widespread acceptance in subsequent retellings, both fictional and non-fictional. But it both undersells Livia’s role as a trailblazer for the role of imperial
materfamilias
and oversimplifies the complexity of her as a personality in Roman public life. All remaining emperors in the Julio-Claudian dynasty who followed in Augustus’s footsteps were descended directly from Livia – only two could claim the same relationship to Augustus – and all clearly
recognised Livia’s importance to the legitimacy of their succession.
¹⁰⁵
Consequently, portraits of her continued to be produced, and despite Tiberius blocking her deification, Livia did eventually go on to become the first Roman empress to be declared a goddess, although she would have to wait some years for that honour to be bestowed retrospectively by one of her descendants. In the intervening years, her acolytes in Rome’s provincial communities such as Lepcis Magna jumped the gun by honouring her with cult statues that explicitly invited her worship as a divine figure.
¹⁰⁶

She lived on in other ways too. Marriage contracts for couples in Roman Egypt invoked her name, and calendars tell us her birthday was still being publicly celebrated during the time of the Emperor Trajan almost a century later.
¹⁰⁷
Remarkably, it seems that even some of her clothes and jewels were kept either in storage or on display in the palace, which were ceremonially given as gifts to brides of the Roman imperial family as many as 400 years later. A tradition was thus inaugurated in Livia’s name whereby one first lady would dip into the wardrobe of a predecessor, and thus acquire by association some of the majesty and authority that the garments had bestowed on their first wearer.
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Most importantly, long after her death, Livia’s was still a powerful name to drop in Roman political circles, proof of which will emerge. Even Tacitus, one of her sternest critics, seems to betray a grudging admiration in his obituary for her that, despite all the crimes laid at her door, it is hard not to share:

Her private life was of traditional strictness. But her graciousness exceeded old-fashioned standards. She was a compliant wife, but an overbearing mother. Neither her husband’s diplomacy nor her son’s insincerity could outmanoeuvre her.
¹⁰⁹

The principal and most immediate victim of Livia’s death was Agrippina Maior. Soon after the
Augusta
’s demise, a letter from Tiberius on Capri was read out at Rome, denouncing his former stepdaughter for ‘insubordinate language and disobedient spirit’.
¹¹⁰
The accusations were said to have come to light only now because Livia had suppressed the letter while she was alive. Besides demonstrating her clout, this may also have been evidence of the same pragmatic streak that had led Livia to advise her friend Salome to avoid creating a feud in her own family. As a result of the incriminating letter being read, and in spite
of protests outside the Senate by loyal crowds brandishing statuettes of Germanicus’s widow in support, Agrippina was eventually sent into exile on Pandateria, the same tiny island where her mother Julia had been banished in disgrace years before. After suffering cruel treatment from her captors, including being beaten to the point of losing an eye and force-fed when she tried to end her life through starvation, Agrippina died there in her forties around the year 33. Her eldest two sons, Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar, were also imprisoned and starved to death, the latter reportedly reduced to chewing the stuffing of his bed in a desperate bid to survive.
¹¹¹
Four surviving children were left behind – daughters Drusilla, Julia Livilla and Agrippina Minor, and the youngest son, Caligula. The future of the Julio-Claudian dynasty now rested in the hands of these four.

Agrippina Maior was one of the few Roman women of the imperial period whose life story was held up in later centuries as an exemplar of how to be a ‘good’ woman. Her emotional journey to Brundisium caught the imagination of neo-classical painters in the eighteenth century, including William Turner, Gavin Hamilton and Benjamin West, whose famous painting
Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus
was commissioned by the then Archbishop of York, Dr Robert Drummond. During a dinner-party discussion, Drummond had read the relevant passage from Tacitus to an enthused West, who then took it as his template for the painting, unveiled in 1768 to royal approval from King George III.
¹¹²
The sudden popularity of the image of Agrippina grieving at Brundisium, previously an obscure one in the history of art, arose in part out of a propaganda war raging in British royal politics centred on the undue influence of court favourite the Earl of Bute over Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. In a damage-limitation exercise aimed at improving the public image of the princess, paintings were commissioned of the scene at Brundisium and analogies publicly drawn between the mother of King George III, and this famous Roman mother and grieving widow.
¹¹³
Thirty-two years later, in 1800, West was one of the guests at a Christmas party given by the notoriously wealthy peer and dilettante William Beckford at his Wiltshire estate of Fonthill Abbey, where the glamorous guest list included Britain’s greatest sea warrior Admiral Nelson, his friend Sir William Hamilton and the latter’s wife Lady Emma – heavily pregnant at the time with Nelson’s child. In coy homage to West’s painting, the company were treated one evening to a special performance by Lady Emma, who had once been an artist’s
model and now entered dressed to re-create Agrippina’s famous landing, complete with gold urn. Her display was greeted with delight by her audience, well fortified with sweet confectionery and spiced wines, and described in a contributor’s letter to the December 1800 edition of popular periodical
The Gentleman’s Magazine
as conveying ‘with truth and energy, every gesture, attitude and expression of countenance which could be conceived in Agrippina herself … the action of her head, of her hands and arms in the various positions of the urn, in her manner of presenting it before the Romans, or of holding it up to the gods in the act of supplication, was most classically graceful’.
¹¹⁴
The amusing irony of a notorious professional mistress who was at the time married to one of the onlookers and visibly pregnant with the child of another, acting the part of a Roman woman revered for her uxorious piety, was surely not lost on her audience.