The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (3 page)

Perhaps the greatest dilemma of all, though, lies in steering a course through the hazard-strewn literary terrain that we rely on for the vast majority of our impressions of Rome’s imperial women. How do we choose, for example, between the contrasting versions of Livia that coexist in the uncomplimentary descriptions of her as an unruly bully by the great Roman historian and fierce Julio-Claudian critic Tacitus, the sly flattery of her as a chaste matron with the beauty of Venus by the poet Ovid, and the appreciation of her stoic fortitude in the face of bereavement by the philosopher Seneca? Ancient sources are often a bewildering and frustrating Gordian knot of contradiction, bet-hedging, gossip, insinuation and red herring. They do not moreover share the same biographical preoccupations as we do, such as character development and psychological motivation, something that is especially true of their descriptions of female characters. Instead they tend to paint their subjects in brash, surface-deep primary colours, assigning them moral ‘types’ into which they can be pigeon-holed – as conniving stepmothers, for example (Livia, Agrippina Minor and to some extent Trajan’s wife Plotina would belong to this category), or wronged wives (Augustus’s sister Octavia or Nero’s first wife Claudia Octavia).
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Faced with such dilemmas, the temptation is to pick and choose which parts of the stories about the women of antiquity sound most plausible – usually by the measuring stick of which seem the least lurid – and then to resort to psychoanalysis and intuition to fill in the rest. But the task of deciding definitively which elements in these
crude character sketches are true and which are false is, in the majority of cases, a hopeless task. No historian has a privileged antenna to the past and it would be disingenuous to claim that we can ventriloquise for these women in the absence of their own voices and other pieces of their lives. This book does not pretend to do so, nor does it claim to be a ‘biography’ of these women in any conventional sense – it cannot get inside these women’s heads, it cannot provide us with a complete A–Z of their lives.
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Instead, what is needed is an agnostic approach to the eclectic array of narrative choices and prototypes of Roman first lady that face us. For it is precisely the sense of fighting a historical multi-personality disorder when it comes to pinning down the real Roman women behind the masks and caricatures of their ancient depictions that in fact is the key to our understanding of their place in Roman society. It is my argument that the identities of Rome’s first ladies seem so fluid, contradictory and contentious because they were dictated by the political agenda and reputation of the emperor to whom they were married or related, as well as the critical reaction to his reign. In general, emperors aimed to project an image of themselves as strong family men, and their female relatives would be deployed as goodwill ambassadors and models of familial propriety, propping up that image. But of course, in the hands of an emperor’s opponents, or a succeeding dynasty keen to sever ties and extinguish memories of their predecessors, his wife’s depiction could be wildly different.

This is why my use of the term ‘first lady’ in the book’s title and text feels apposite. It is in part a nod to the description of Livia on more than one occasion in the literature of antiquity as
femina princeps
– a feminised version of her husband Augustus’s chosen title of
princeps
, meaning ‘chief’ or ‘leading citizen’ – which loosely translates to ‘first lady’.
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But it also invites attention to the inescapable, and sometimes startling, similarities between the key parts played by these women of ancient Rome and their modern political counterparts in ‘selling’ a domestic image of their husbands – for husbands rather than wives they still usually are – to their public, while helping to further their political agenda, as I argue that Livia and her fellow Roman first ladies did.

So we shall see, for example, how individual Roman emperors’ wives were praised for stances such as adopting an approachable, open-house attitude to their subjects, sacrificing clothes and possessions to help raise funds for the Roman army, and cultivating a frugal
lifestyle, all in the aid of their ruling emperor’s image. If we consider some of the women for whom the term ‘first lady’ was originally coined, we see such model actions reverberating through the ages with exactly the same purpose. For instance, America’s first presidential spouse Martha Washington began a much-copied tradition of opening the official residence to callers on certain days, a suitable gesture from the wife of one of America’s republican founding fathers; Edith Wilson auctioned off the wool from a flock of Shropshire sheep and donated the proceeds to the First World War effort during the presidency of her husband Woodrow; and Michelle Obama has followed in the practical footsteps of Andrew Johnson’s daughter Martha Johnson Patterson, and Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife Lucy – the first of whom grazed milk cows on the White House lawn, the second of whom kept her clothing receipts for inspection – by planting a vegetable garden, a politically savvy move in the eco-conscious, economically perilous times in which her husband was sworn in.

Conversely, just as certain Roman empresses were pilloried as spend-thrifts or accused of interfering in politics by their husband’s opponents, similar criticisms have dogged many modern first ladies. Mary Lincoln and Nancy Reagan both landed in hot water for their lavish spending – the former for her unpaid clothing bills, at a time when families were mourning relatives lost in the American Civil War; the latter when an announcement was made early in her husband’s first term of the purchase of more than $200,000-worth of new china for the White House, the day before her husband’s administration was due to announce plans to lower nutrition standards for school lunches programmes. In an illustration of how positive and negative stereotypes can be attached to the same first lady, Michelle Obama is just the latest in a long line of presidents’ wives who have raised hackles by expressing strident personal political opinions, leading in her case to the cultivation of her softer, ‘Mom-in-Chief’ role, in order not to risk alienating conservative-minded voters.
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Even though ancient and modern political consorts are unquestionably worlds apart in terms of the political and social opportunities open to her, the models of femininity that have been passed down through the ages are in many ways unchanged.

This book begins on the eve of the imperial age, just as Livia’s husband Augustus stood on the verge of becoming Rome’s first emperor and she its first empress, and proceeds to ghost the footsteps
of a selection of the women who followed Livia in the role from the first century through to the fifth century, culminating in the death of one of the last empresses of Rome’s western empire, Galla Placidia. Not every imperial woman of that long period of history can be included, but I have chosen to focus on those about whom the richest tradition survives and whose stories are the most important within the unfurling narrative of Roman history. Imperial wives are the focus of most chapters, but, in many cases, the daughters, sisters, mothers and other female family members of the emperors play just as key a role – as indeed they have during the course of the history of America’s first ladies, notably in the nineteenth century, when a president’s nieces, sisters and daughters-in-law were frequently called upon to serve as surrogate consorts and hostesses at the White House, in the face of reluctance from the president’s own wife.
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Looking back into the past can often be like peering through a frosted pane of glass, beyond which indistinct shapes and colours move in blurred slow motion. That is very much the experience of trying to see into the world of the women of Rome. Yet occasionally, images and shapes come nearer the glass, closer into focus, making us squint harder in our desire to see them clearly. We all have our longings to satisfy in this regard, a sense of need to make contact with the past, to stand where someone once stood, to touch something she or he once touched. We can never know exactly who the ‘real’ Livia, Messalina, Agrippina and company were, what they thought, what they felt, whether they were every bit as black or as saintly as they were painted. But this can never repress the frisson we feel at moments of discovery which seem to bring us one tantalising step nearer to them: the cremated remains of some of the slaves who once folded Livia’s clothes and poured out her favourite glass of red wine; the richly decorated house in which Augustus’s disgraced daughter Julia once lived; a jointed ivory doll that a girl growing up in the imperial household might once have played with; or a letter written by a young Roman emperor, reminiscing about long evening talks with his mother, as she sat at the end of his bed.

It is at moments such as these, coupled with our increasing willingness to reflect on the vital role that the women of Rome played on Rome’s great stage, that that pale, blank-eyed museum portrait begins to come alive again.

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Ulysses in a Dress: The Making of a Roman First Lady

The characteristic of the Roman nation was grandeur: its virtues, its vices, its prosperity, its misfortunes, its glory, its infamy, its rise and fall, were alike great. Even the women, disdaining the limits which barbarism and ignorance had, in other nations, assigned to their sex, emulated the heroism and daring of man.

Mary Hays,
Female Biography
(1801)
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The blaze had seemed to come out of nowhere, and it caught unawares those trapped in its path, scything a lethal swathe through the olive groves and pinewoods of Sparta. As tongues of flame billowed into the night air, filling it with the acrid smell of burning tree sap, the dry sounds of crackling branches were layered with panicked shouts and laboured breathing. A man and a woman were hurrying through a burning forest. The going was perilous, so much so that at one point the woman’s hair and the trailing hem of her dress were singed. But there was little time to inspect the damage. Enemy forces were hard on their heels, and had been harrying them for some time now. Weeks earlier, the fugitive couple and their travelling companions had nearly been apprehended as they tried secretly to board a vessel out of the port of Naples – the fractious wails of their baby son almost giving the game away. The man’s name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the woman was his seventeen-year-old wife Livia Drusilla.
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The year was 41 BC. Three years earlier, the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar by dissidents acting in the name of liberty had plunged the Roman Republic into civil war, dividing its elite ruling classes into two bitterly opposed camps of supporters, those backing the assassins Brutus and Cassius, and those who had chosen to throw their weight behind Caesar’s self-appointed champions, namely his eighteen-year-old great-nephew and nominated heir, Gaius Octavius, and his lieutenant Marcus Antonius – otherwise known as Octavian and Mark Antony. Together with ex-consul Marcus Lepidus, these
self-appointed musketeers had formed a brittle three-way power-sharing agreement known as the triumvirate and proceeded to crush Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi in October of 42 BC.

But with Octavian and Antony soon at loggerheads, the Roman elite had found itself being forced to declare its loyalties once more, triggering violent clashes between rival supporters in Italy a year later, clashes which had forced the noble Tiberius Nero – who had chosen to side with Antony – and his young wife Livia into their desperate flight. A ten-year countdown was now in motion, with the courses of all parties set for the battle of Actium in 31 BC, the great sea fight at which Antony, bankrolled by his Egyptian lover Cleopatra, would square off against Octavian and the fate of the Roman Empire would be decided once and for all.

As the first act of this grand drama began, Livia Drusilla was still just an extra in the crowd, an invisible character in a society where few women were permitted to make a name for themselves as public figures. But the events of the second act, in which the man whose troops were pursuing her through Sparta replaced Tiberius Nero as her husband, propelled her to leading-lady status, and by the time the play reached its grand finale, Livia stood on the verge of becoming the ‘first lady’ of the dawning imperial age, and the founding mother of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that inaugurated it. Arguably the most powerful, certainly one of the most controversial and formidable women ever to occupy the role – her grandson Caligula later bestowed on her the sobriquet
Ulixes stolatus
(‘Ulysses in a dress’), a hybrid reference to the Greek warrior known for his cunning, and the
stola
gown worn by upstanding Roman matrons – Livia was the model against whom all subsequent wives of Roman emperors would have to measure themselves.
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No woman was to epitomise the pitfalls and paradoxes involved in being a Roman woman in public life better than she.

Unlike her Egyptian opposite number Cleopatra, to whom she was forced to play the part of understudy both over the next decade and in historical memory, Livia Drusilla was not bred into the role of imperial dynast, though nor was she an outsider to the Roman political establishment. Born on 30 January 58 BC into the distinguished patrician family of the Claudii, who boastfully claimed descent from Trojan war refugee Aeneas – one of the mythical founders of the Roman race – Livia was fourteen when Julius Caesar’s assassination on 15 March
44 BC triggered civil war among the Roman elite.
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The Claudian clan, from which she was descended on her father’s side – her mother Alfidia was from a well-heeled but less aristocratic family based in the Italian coastal town of Fundi – had been a towering presence on the political scene since the early days of the Roman Republic in the fifth century BC, boasting no fewer than twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships and six triumphs (public honours for successful generals) between them. An additional connection through her father to the illustrious Livian family – one of whose members, Marcus Livius Drusus, had become a populist hero to Italian communities clamouring for Roman citizenship in the early first century BC – also brought with it immense kudos.
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Such a glittering pedigree marked out the young Livia as a great matrimonial asset to any aspirant to political power and a successful suitor duly presented himself in 43 BC.
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