The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (30 page)

Like her tomb, no copy of Agrippina’s writings has ever been found, and, barring a papyrological miracle, it is now lost for ever. The fascination that this document nevertheless exerts over the imagination is eloquently expressed in a poem by the American William Wetmore Story – the author of a separate drama,
The Tragedy of Nero
, written in 1875:

Stern Agrippina’s diary and life

Writ by herself, recording all her thoughts

Deeds, passions, – all the doings of old Rome

swarming around her, rife with scandals,

crimes, joys, struggles, triumphs –

all the portraits sharp of men and women

as they lived, talked, loved – Not as in History’s limbo

they appear, mere names and ghostlike shadows,

but alive, fierce, restless, human – what a book to find!
¹¹³

Agrippina’s career had triggered the most anxious soul-searching yet within the Roman elite about the encroachment of women on to the political field. It may be no coincidence that over the course of the next century and a half, the women of empire seem to become almost invisible.

5

Little Cleopatra: A Jewish Princess and the First Ladies of the Flavian Dynasty
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Oh Rome! Oh Berenice! Wretched me!

Must I be emperor, and love?

The Emperor Titus, in Jean Racine’s
Bérénice
²

On 21 November 1670, at the company of the Hôtel de Bourgogne on the rue Mauconseil in Paris, French playwright Jean Racine awaited the premiere of his latest tragedy,
Bérénice
, in some trepidation. In precisely one week’s time at the rival company of the Palais-Royal on the rue Montpensier, Pierre Corneille, the doyen of French tragic theatre, would unveil his own work,
Tite et Bérénice
, on exactly the same subject matter, the doomed first-century love affair between Julia Berenice, a daughter of the Herodian royal family of Judaea, and the Roman emperor-in-waiting Titus, a scion of the Flavian dynasty that succeeded the Julio-Claudians in the year 69.

This tale of Titus and Berenice, two star-crossed lovers forced to part reluctantly in deference to a sense of patriotic duty inspired a number of revisitations during the seventeenth century both in Britain and in France, where the history of Rome was a much-mined source of characters and situations perceived as relevant case studies for the moral and political progression of the age.
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The circumstances under which Racine and Corneille both came to stage new productions based on precisely the same material within one week of each other are nonetheless murky. According to Voltaire, their competitive efforts were responses to a commission by Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, who was moved by the echoes she perceived between Titus’s and Berenice’s doomed passion and her own noble renunciation of her love affair with her brother-in-law the Sun King Louis XIV, though others have found a closer parallel with Louis’ severance of his relationship with Marie Mancini. At any rate, much pride was riding on this dramatic head-to-head, though in the end Racine need not have worried. It was his play that achieved a triumphant run while Corneille’s effort was a relative flop.
⁴

While Berenice’s story captivated seventeenth-century dramatists,
it is even more intriguing for the historian of the Roman first ladies. Though the mistress, not the wife, of an emperor-in-waiting, and a member of the Jewish rather than the Roman ruling family, she is an important link in the chain connecting Rome’s imperial consorts. She entered the scene at a time when, thanks to the choice of Titus’s father Vespasian – and later Titus himself – the emperor would rule without an empress. This was a decision that theoretically promised a cessation of the accusations that had all too frequently attached themselves to the Flavians’ Julio-Claudian predecessors, namely of being ‘petticoat governments’, infiltrated by females. Yet, as Berenice’s story and others demonstrate, women still loomed large in the orbit of the Flavian emperors, women who in different ways both abetted and threatened to derail the Flavians’ project to present themselves as revolutionaries who would sweep aside the tainted memory of Messalina, Agrippina Minor, and the rest of the
ancien régime
.

Julia Berenice was born in 28 into the family of the Herods who governed the Roman provincial outpost of Judaea, in a year when Livia’s son Tiberius still ruled at Rome, and a supposed carpenter’s son from Nazareth was causing the local governing elite some inconvenience. The great-granddaughter of King Herod the Great and his beautiful wife Mariamme, her father was Marcus Julius Agrippa – named in tribute to his ancestors’ long-standing friendship with the family of Julius Caesar. Like several others of the Herodian royal clan, Julius Agrippa had lived in the Palatine household at Rome from the age of four or five right through until his thirties, receiving the same education afforded to Claudius’s and Tiberius’s heir Drusus Minor and acquiring a reputation as a happy-go-lucky urban playboy whose spendthrift tendencies were held in check only by his mother Berenice, who doled out his allowance with a watchful eye. After her death, his ruinous spending habits left him heavily in debt, and the death of his friend Drusus in 23, allegedly at the hands of Livilla and her lover Sejanus, led him to flee his creditors and sail to his Judaean homeland. In around 27, a son, Agrippa II, was born to himself and his wife Cypros, and the following year, a daughter, named Julia Berenice after her paternal grandmother.

After spending several years moving his young family between Judaea and Syria and falling out with successive relatives and friends in his failed bids to resurrect his fortunes, in 36 Julius Agrippa decided his only option was to leave his wife and children in Judaea and return
to Rome to try and ingratiate himself with the imperial family once more. Once in Italy, his debts caught up with him again, and he was only rescued from his predicament by Antonia Minor, who out of regard for her old friend Berenice, and Julius Agrippa’s friendship with her son Claudius, lent him the 300,000 drachmas he owed to the Roman treasury. This kept Julius Agrippa’s enemies at bay for a time longer, and he used his connections with Antonia to strike up a friendship with her grandson Caligula, a friendship which would later pay dividends. Its more immediate side-effect, however, was to land him in prison later that summer when he was allegedly overheard expressing a hope that Tiberius might abdicate soon in favour of Caligula. His stay in captivity was ameliorated a little by the continued care of Antonia, who obtained a promise from the prefect of the praetorian guard, Macro, that Julius Agrippa should be allowed daily bathing rights and visits from friends who brought him clothes and some of his favourite foods.

Then in 37, Julius Agrippa suddenly experienced a remarkable reversal of fortune. The death of Tiberius duly saw the accession of Caligula, who summoned his ally from prison and appointed him tetrarch of territories including the area north-east of the Sea of Galilee, which had previously been the kingdom of Julius Agrippa’s deceased uncle Philip. Later, he also received the territory of Galilee and Peraea, confiscated by Caligula from Agrippa’s brother-in-law Herod Antipas. In the summer of 38, he returned to take possession of his new kingdom, where he was reunited with Cypros, Agrippa II and ten-year-old Berenice.
⁵

Having spent this first decade of her life being towed around Palestine, Syria and Judaea in the wake of her father’s ambitious schemes for recouping his wealth, the elevation of her father to a kingship resulted in a complete change in Berenice’s circumstances and prospects. While her brother Agrippa II was dispatched to Rome just as his father had once been to receive an education in the imperial household, a suitable marriage was arranged for Berenice with Marcus Julius Alexander, the son of an old family friend named Alexander the Alabarch, whose family was one of the wealthiest in Alexandria. The marriage took place in 41, when she was thirteen years old.
⁶

That year also witnessed the murder of Caligula and his succession by Claudius, Julius Agrippa’s old friend from his childhood on the Palatine. Caligula’s reign had been characterised by a number of tense flare-ups between Rome and its Jewish subjects, notably when Caligula
had attempted to have a statue of himself set up in the most holy of all Jewish shrines, the Temple of Jerusalem. As satellite kings appointed by the Romans, the Herods tended to side with their Roman mentors in such disputes, but Julius Agrippa used his personal connections with Caligula to persuade the emperor against such an antagonistic action. Indeed, Julius Agrippa’s influence at the Roman court was such that he is said to have assisted behind the scenes in Claudius’s hastily engineered accession to power, earning his reward when the new emperor extended the territory over which Agrippa ruled to include Judaea and Samaria.
⁷

Berenice’s brief marriage to Marcus Julius Alexander was abruptly cut short in 44 by her husband’s death, and a second marriage was quickly arranged for the fifteen-year-old princess with her uncle Herod, Julius Agrippa’s brother, to whom Claudius duly awarded the tiny kingdom of Chalcis, north of Judaea.
⁸
Not long afterwards, Berenice’s father died of a dramatic collapse while attending games in Caesarea, temporarily ending the rule of the Herods in Judaea, as their imperial masters chose to pass control of the territory to a succession of procurators appointed from Rome. The death of her elderly uncle-husband Herod four years later in 48 left Berenice a widow for the second time at the age of twenty and she now became a resident in the house of her elder brother, who in 50 was given the deceased Herod’s kingdom of Chalcis to rule.
⁹
Since their peripatetic childhood at the heels of their father, this was the first time Agrippa II and Berenice had shared a permanent abode. For the next fifteen years and more, she remained under her brother’s roof, a living arrangement that would in hindsight draw scandalised accusations of incest upon their heads from commentators in Rome. According to the historian Josephus, a Jewish insider at the courts of Vespasian and Titus, the incest rumours shamed Berenice into moving out of the palace in 65 at the age of thirty-seven, and embarking on her third marriage with Polemo, the king of Cilicia, who even agreed to be circumcised and convert to her faith. But Berenice soon requested a divorce, and returned to live under the protection of her brother.
¹⁰

These are the known facts of Berenice’s life to this point. By the mid-60s, she was evidently a woman of some public standing in the eastern Mediterranean landscape. Like the consorts of Roman emperors, she had established herself as a benefactress and public patron of good works. An inscription referring to her as ‘queen’ or
basilissa
survives from Athens, originally accompanied by an honorific
statue (now lost), and in the 1920s another inscription featuring her name was found in Beirut, recording the gift by Berenice and Agrippa II to the citizens there of marble and columns to restore a theatre first built by the pair’s ancestor King Herod.
¹¹
She herself had amassed a great deal of personal wealth, thanks to her acquisition of corn granaries and marriage settlements, and was also to demonstrate the ‘good’ Roman woman’s knack of exerting a pacifying influence on her ruling relations – credited, for example, with persuading her brother not to execute Justus, a Jewish insurgent against Roman rule. Earlier, she made a notable appearance in 60 as a silent witness at the famous audience with St Paul when the latter defended his Christian faith before Festus, the Roman procurator of Judaea, and her brother Agrippa II, an event described in the Bible.
¹²

Yet there was still little in her biography thus far to predict the flurry of interest she was to attract in the seventeenth century.

The events of 66 changed all of that. It was the year in which the First Jewish Revolt began, an uprising by Jewish factions against Roman rule in the province – whose leaders included the aforementioned Justus – lasting four years. Within that time-frame, Agrippina’s son Nero met his death, and no fewer than three emperors came and went in the space of eighteen months before a fourth – Vespasian – restored stability to the empire. Agrippa II and his sister were key players at the heart of these tumultuous political events which in turn set Berenice on a collision course with Titus and her posthumous incarnation as a doomed heroine in dozens of dramas, operas and novels from the seventeenth century onwards.

The troubles of 66 were precipitated by Gessius Florus, the brutal new Roman procurator of Judaea whom Poppaea, the woman for whom Nero had finally exiled and executed Claudia Octavia and murdered his mother, had recommended for the post in 65. In a highly provocative gesture, Gessius Florus sent soldiers into the Temple of Jerusalem to retrieve taxes he claimed were owed to the Roman purse, and a violent stand-off between Roman troops and Jewish protesters followed. Berenice happened to be in Jerusalem at the time and, according to the first-hand account of Jewish historian Josephus, she was so shocked at the brutality of the Roman soldiers, whose actions she was privy to from the vantage point of her palace overlooking the Temple, that she proceeded to dispatch several senior members of her household staff and personal bodyguard to Florus, petitioning
him to stop the slaughter. When all her envoys were rebuffed, she went to see him herself, standing barefoot before his tribunal, but was treated disrespectfully and protected from harm only by her bodyguards.
¹³