The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (31 page)

Undeterred, Berenice now wrote a letter to Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, asking him to restrain Florus. Her request was eventually answered when Gallus sent a fact-finding envoy who arrived in Jerusalem at the same time as the hastily returning Agrippa II, who had been on a diplomatic mission to Alexandria. In a bid to calm tensions, Agrippa called a mass meeting and appealed to the more militant rebels not to start a war with the Romans, placing his sister on the roof of the Hasmonean Palace, where she could be seen by all those at the meeting below. But his impassioned appeal fell on deaf ears, and despite historic precedents whereby women such as Octavia and Agrippina Maior had defused potentially violent situations by virtue of their calm diplomacy and nobility of bearing, Berenice’s appearance failed to appease the insurgents. Agrippa II and his sister had no choice but to flee the dangerous atmosphere of the city.
¹⁴

Over the next year, the Jewish rebels inflicted a series of embarrassing defeats on the Roman legions sent to crush them. Then in 67, Nero chose the semi-retired fifty-seven-year-old general Vespasian to head up the Roman response to the rebellion. Vespasian, a highly successful veteran of the British campaigns under Claudius, was grateful for the opportunity, having disgraced himself by falling asleep during one of Nero’s self-promoting poetry readings a year earlier. He was also an old friend of Berenice’s father, their connection stretching back to the days of the elder Agrippa’s sojourn in Antonia’s court, and on being appointed to his command, Vespasian set out for Antioch in Syria, to meet up with a delegation including the Herodian princess and her brother. Just before leaving for Syria, he issued orders to his twenty-six-year-old son Titus, whom he had chosen to act as his deputy in the campaign, instructing him to round up the rest of the legions from Alexandria, and meet his father in Ptolemais.
¹⁵

The precise time and setting of Titus’s and Berenice’s first meeting are nowhere recorded. They may have encountered each other at Ptolemais as Titus and his father prepared for their campaign against the Jewish rebels, or it could just as easily have been later in the summer of that year, when he and Vespasian spent several weeks as guests of Agrippa II’s at Caesarea Philippi, the city 25 miles (40 km) north of
the Sea of Galilee where Berenice’s brother had a magnificent palace.
¹⁶
The blank canvas at the beginning of their relationship has been filled by a great deal of colourful romantic speculation.
Agrippa’s Daughter
(1964), a follow-up by the novelist Howard Fast to his bestseller
Spartacus
– which went on to be famously adapted for film – conjures up an opening encounter worthy of Mills & Boon:

She remembered the first time she saw him, not tall – so few of the Italians were tall – but well formed, like a Greek athlete, short, straight nose, deep brown eyes, a wide sensuous mouth, black, curly hair, close-cropped – twenty-eight years old and so strangely without arrogance, two vertical lines between his heavy, dark brows marking him with a sort of patient despair, as if all his days were destined to be spent in hopelessness. He stood and looked at her, stared at her – until, provoked and embarrassed, she turned on her heel and left the room. Afterward, her brother Agrippa said to her, ‘He’s in love with you – hopelessly, idiotically in love with you’.
¹⁷

In another, much-loved novel of the twentieth century, Lion Feuchtwanger’s
The Jew of Rome
(1935), Titus looks back on his first meeting with Berenice, and recalls her ‘long fine face’, her ‘golden-brown eyes’, and how ‘there was always just a touch of huskiness in her voice. At first I actually disliked it.’
¹⁸

Alluring though such reconstructions are, the only concrete historical reference to this developing relationship over the next four years comes in a brief comment in Tacitus’s
Histories
, where the historian notes that Titus’s reluctance to return to Rome at the height of the campaign in 68 was thought by some to be influenced by his desire not to leave Berenice behind:

Some believed that he turned back because of his passionate longing to see again Queen Berenice; and the young man’s heart was not insensible to Berenice …
¹⁹

However, the death of Nero in June 68 and the ensuing confusion – because the emperor had left no heir – was the more plausible reason for Titus’s dilemma. The decade since the murder of Agrippina had seen Nero’s reign lunge from one crisis to another; from the revolt in Britain led by the legendary Queen Boudicca in 60 and the great fire that devastated Rome in 64 – for which some blamed Nero himself –
to a sequence of alleged conspiracies against the increasingly megalomaniacal young emperor between 65 and 68 which resulted in the vengeful executions or enforced suicides of numerous eminent members of the elite accused of having masterminded them, including the once trusted Seneca. Poppaea, too, was dead, her embalmed, spice-scented body interred in the mausoleum of Augustus with full state honours – a fusion of eastern and Roman burial traditions which were surely in part the invention of a literary tradition determined to cast her as a reincarnation of Cleopatra.
²⁰
Ostensibly, her death provoked great grief in Nero, who gave her funeral eulogy, though several sources report that it was in fact he who had caused her death in the summer of 65, by kicking her violently in the belly, while she was pregnant with their child.
²¹

In 66, Nero had made a third marriage, to a noblewoman named Statilia Messalina – no relation to Claudius’s infamous third bride – who kept a low profile, and managed to survive Nero’s brutal demise. This came after a series of breakaway declarations by provincial governors offering a challenge to the emperor’s authority led to his being declared a public enemy by the Senate on 9 June 68. In a panic, Nero fled the city to the sanctuary of a villa owned by one of his freedmen, where he stabbed himself to death at the age of thirty-one, his arm guided by one of his secretaries.
²²

Into the breach left by Nero’s exit stepped Galba, an elderly governor of the province of Spain who had secured the support of the praetorian guard and the Senate, kick-starting the chaotic period between the summer of 68 and the winter of 69 commonly known as the Year of Four Emperors. Galba’s brief six-month tenure on the Palatine finally severed the umbilical cord that had previously tied all of Augustus’s successors to Livia. The new emperor nonetheless took care to flash around his connections to Rome’s first empress, in whose household he had grown up and in whose will he had been named as a beneficiary. He included her on his brief regime’s coins in a gesture demonstrating all too clearly that Livia’s support, even from beyond the grave, was still seen to carry a powerful cachet.
²³

It was not enough, however, to secure Galba’s acceptance as emperor. The legions on the Rhine refused to swear allegiance to him, and on 2 January 69, they instead gave their public backing to Vitellius, the governor of Germania and an old ally of the Julio-Claudians. At the same time, Galba faced a challenge on another front from Marcus Salvius Otho, the governor of Lusitania (Portugal),
ex-husband of Poppaea and the man at whose seaside villa the fateful dinner party that precipitated Agrippina Minor’s assassination had taken place. Otho himself also had links to Livia through his grandfather, who like Galba had been brought up in her household, and one protégé of Rome’s first empress soon replaced another, when Galba was murdered on 15 January by the praetorian guard, and Otho was duly recognised as emperor in his place. Yet he in turn lasted barely three months, racking up debts and ordering unpopular executions before a major defeat at the hands of Vitellius’s forces in northern Italy persuaded him to commit suicide on 16 April. The Senate duly recognised Vitellius as emperor in his place.
²⁴

Then a new twist. On
I
July, the Roman legions stationed on the eastern frontiers of Rome’s empire, in Egypt, Syria and on the Danube, declared Vespasian their choice for emperor and gave him their full military backing. Suddenly the unthinkable was possible for the modestly born Vespasian, a man with no ties whatsoever to Livia or any branch of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The names of an influential circle of eastern-based supporters were attached to this attempted
putsch
, headed by Mucianus the governor of Syria, but also including Agrippa II and Berenice, who was said by Tacitus to have been a favourite of Vespasian’s for her ‘youthful beauty’.
²⁵
Some, in a typecast of Berenice as the marital opportunist, have surmised that her actions betrayed her deep-seated ambitions to be empress at Rome, but it seems also reasonable to suppose that the young Herodian royals had understandable domestic political motives for wanting to attach themselves to a winning ticket.
²⁶

Leaving command of the Judaean campaign in the hands of Titus, Vespasian headed west and after defeating Vitellius, who was caught and killed in the act of preparing to flee the city, he was acknowledged by the Senate as emperor on 21 December 69, inaugurating the era of the Flavian dynasty which would rule Rome for the next quarter of a century. The following year Titus secured victory over the Jewish rebels by sacking their stronghold in Jerusalem and destroying their holy Temple. The victory helped legitimise Vespasian’s seizure of power, and was followed by a triumphal procession through the streets of Rome in 71, a triumph still memorialised in eternal, painful relief on the Roman forum’s Arch of Titus, which shows the menorah and other sacred treasures of the Temple being carried aloft through the streets of Rome.

After almost a century, the Julio-Claudian dynasty had finally lost
its grip on power. Those fond of omens and portents noted that the laurel grove at Livia’s old villa at Prima Porta had also withered and died.
²⁷

Like Augustus a century earlier, who had also come to power at the tail end of a civil war, the immediate challenge for Vespasian and his sons was to justify their seizure of power in the absence of any links to the previous regime. Just as Augustus had used the treasure of Cleopatra’s Egypt to finance his sculpting of the city’s landscape in a way that glorified his own deeds, Vespasian set about using the profits of his plunder of Judaea to legitimise his newly won power by stamping his mark on Rome, rebranding it with the cultural insignia of his new dynasty while commissioning buildings that, in contrast to Nero’s personal pleasure domes, would benefit the whole community, buildings such as the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre, better known today as the Colosseum. Taking another leaf out of Augustus’s book, Vespasian also elected to shun Nero’s grotesquely extravagant palace – the
Domus Aurea
, or Golden House, built after the fire of 64, whose grounds sprawled over an area approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) square between the Palatine and Esquiline hills – and made it free to the public. Instead, he chose a mansion in the beautiful Gardens of Sallust as his chief residence, where he made a virtue of being accessible to his subjects, and earned a reputation for himself as an unassuming, generous, down-to-earth
princeps
, fond of a dirty joke and a game at the ball courts.
²⁸

The Flavians were nonetheless an entirely different breed from their Julio-Claudian predecessors, scions not of a great aristocratic clan but of an Italian middle-class one. Their arrival in Palatine politics was a watershed on several fronts. Vespasian spurned attempts to whitewash over his humble origins and his key legacy was the creation of a new Roman ruling class, a political elite that for the first time was not principally chosen from a narrow clique of Roman aristocratic families. It was from this new political class that not just the next generation of emperors would be chosen but, by extension, the next generation of empresses.
²⁹

Little splash had been made by the wives of the men who occupied the throne so fleetingly in the year between Nero’s death and the Flavians’ successful coup. Galba was a widower and Otho had not remarried since his divorce from Poppaea, though he apparently thought of marrying Nero’s widow Statilia Messalina before suicide
cut short his reign.
³⁰
Vitellius, on arriving in Rome from Germany, had staged an emotional reunion with his mother Sextilia on the steps of the Capitoline Hill and had her endowed with the title
Augusta
. But there is no mention of a similar honour for his wife Galeria Fundana – who in a rare exception to the historiographical rule that corrupt emperors had corrupt wives, was said to have been a woman of ‘exemplary virtue’, who had not participated in her husband’s crimes. Fundana was spared, along with her daughter Vitellia, in the aftermath of Vitellius’s death, while Sextilia died shortly before.
³¹

When Vespasian himself became emperor at the age of sixty, he like Galba was a widower, having buried a wife and daughter in the years prior to his accession, and he now became the first emperor since Tiberius to remain unmarried throughout his time in office. As the father of two adult sons, Titus and Domitian, who were already grown-up, he had no need of a wife to provide him with an heir, and seems to have preferred to rule without one. His decision may have been motivated by practical considerations, such as the desire to minimise the break-up of his estate amongst more posthumous inheritors than necessary, but also shrewd political caution, given the drama and scandal that had attended the consorts of the previous dynasty.