The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (32 page)

Nonetheless, there was a first lady of sorts during the first half of Vespasian’s ten-year reign, a woman cut from a very different cloth to her high-born predecessors – Antonia Caenis, a freedwoman who had once served in the household of Claudius’s mother Antonia, the very same Caenis to whom that venerable matron had dictated the fateful letter in 31 that warned Tiberius of Sejanus’s plot against his life. After her mistress’s death in 37, she became the lover of the rising Vespasian, in circumstances for which sadly we have no more detail. A formally recognised relationship, however, was out of the question. Although Vespasian was not a member of a high-ranking Roman family, the
leges Juliae
passed by Augustus had decreed that marriage between an equestrian and a freedwoman was forbidden. Instead Vespasian went on to marry a clerk’s daughter named Flavia Domitilla. After her death, which occurred prior to his accession, Vespasian renewed his connection with Caenis, who now moved in with him as his concubine. Marriage was still not an option. Yet even when he became emperor, this former slave-woman remained under his roof, and ancient report claimed that he made her his empress in all but name.
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Caenis is a fascinating and rare surviving example of a woman from
outside the inner imperial family circle who evidently was able to acquire a certain amount of prestige, personal wealth and access to the political process, even if such privileges made only a few faint cracks in the glass ceiling for women in Roman political life. Like her married female predecessors, her proximity to the emperor gave her opportunities to acquire influence, and she was said to have pocketed vast sums of money in return for recommending individuals for governorships and generalships to Vespasian. There were certainly precedents for freedwomen and female slaves bettering their financial prospects on the back of their association with the emperor. Records of the estate-holdings of Nero’s own freedwoman concubine, Claudia Acte, show that she acquired a large number of slaves and property holdings in Italy and Sardinia during her lifetime, which she can only have come by through the gift of her imperial lover.
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Caenis did not survive Vespasian’s full term as emperor, dying in the mid-70s, but her funerary inscription survives on a large, heavily decorated marble altar discovered close to the Porta Pia in Rome, on a site now the home of the Italian Ministry of Transport. She is thought to have owned a private estate here, and baths were later established bearing her name.
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Her epitaph was the gift of Aglaus, one of the freedmen in her employ, and was simply dedicated from himself and his children:

To the spirits of the departed,

Antonia Caenis

Freedwoman of the Augusta.

Excellent patroness.

Aglaus [her] freedman with Aglaus

and Glene and Aglais

his children
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As with the story of Berenice’s and Titus’s affair, interpreters in more recent years have been drawn to the attractive romantic template of the story of the enduring relationship between Vespasian and Caenis, two individuals unable to marry due to social convention but who, despite temporary separation, happily reunited in their late middle age. The writer Lindsey Davis, author of a 1997 novel based on the relationship, calls Caenis’s story the ‘archetypal Secretary-to-Boardroom plot’.
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Yet despite the dramatic potential of her rags-to-riches promotion, and the intrigue of her influence behind the
scenes as imperial consort-in-chief, Caenis did not occupy a position of any equivalence to that of imperial women such as her former mistress Antonia. She could never be awarded the special privileges of an empress or the title of
Augusta
and the incongruity of her position is underlined by Suetonius’s story that Vespasian’s younger son, Domitian, refused to allow her a stepmother’s privilege of kissing him but would only shake her hand.
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No portraits of her were commissioned, no titles conferred upon her, no images stamped on coins.

Nor, in fact, do any securely identified images survive of Vespasian’s former wife, Flavia Domitilla, mother of Titus and Domitian. This absence of official portraits of living female members of the ruling imperial family represents a significant break with the tradition established by the Julio-Claudians. A distinctive Flavian female portrait tradition did eventually emerge, centred around the figures of Domitian’s wife Domitia Longina, and Titus’s daughter Julia Flavia. But it was not until the advent of the Flavians’ successors, at the beginning of the second century, that images of women came to be utilised so visibly once more as mastheads for traditional Roman virtues.
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Vespasian’s ten-year reign was thus very much a judiciously sifted mixture of something old, something new, representing a departure from his predecessors, while at the same time copying their more popular and successful traits. His discreet relationship with Caenis did nothing to upset senatorial traditionalists, still jittery from the heyday of Messalina and Agrippina Minor, leaving him free to emulate the best of the Julio-Claudian traditions of power originating with Augustus. Yet there was one echo of Augustus’s rise to power that Vespasian probably would rather not have emulated – namely the disturbing presence of a foreign queen. Enter Berenice.

By the end of the Flavians’ first year in power, Vespasian’s somewhat ramshackle younger son Domitian, who was said to have had a misspent youth seducing married women, had cleaned up his act by marrying Domitia Longina, the daughter of the great general Corbulo. It was a shrewd choice of bride, though it had come at the expense of Domitia’s former husband Lucius Aelius Lamia, who was forced to give his wife up much as Tiberius Claudius Nero had been induced to relinquish Livia to Octavian for the latter’s political benefit. In Domitian’s and Domitia’s case, an alliance between an emperor’s son and the daughter of Corbulo, the greatest military leader of recent times, who had, moreover, been forced to commit suicide by Nero,
could only help the new dynasty stake out a position as champions of the heroic victims of the previous emperor’s tyranny. It also provided the provincial Flavians with a valuable tie to an old and respected Roman family of unimpeachable lineage.
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The love life of Domitian’s elder brother on the other hand was causing his father more of a problem. Prior to Vespasian’s meteoric rise to the purple, Titus had already been married twice, first to Arrecina Tertulla, daughter of a one-time commander of the praetorian guard, and then, after her death, to the well-connected Marcia Furnilla, whom he divorced after she had given birth to a daughter, Julia Flavia, born in around 65. A family nurse named Phyllis was given charge of the infant, and it is generally assumed that Julia Flavia was later taken to live in the household of her uncle Domitian on his marriage to Domitia Longina in 71, Caenis being deemed unsuitable to act the role of duenna in the way Antonia and Livia had once done for the children of the Julio-Claudians.
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When Titus eventually reappeared in Rome in 71 to play his part in the great triumph held to celebrate victory in Judaea, he returned unaccompanied. But by the year 75, Berenice had also arrived to take up residence in the city, chaperoned by her brother Agrippa II. Her sojourn in the capital, which seems to have lasted for the next four years, was to prove a public relations minefield for the Flavian dynasty.
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Only glimpses of Berenice’s and Titus’s life together in Rome survive, but they are enough to give a flavour of the mixture of tabloidesque excitement, satirical mockery and rumbling discontent that greeted her installation in the Flavian family tableau. On her arrival, she and Titus followed the example of Vespasian and Caenis by living together as if they were married. But while the emperor and his mistress cohabited in relatively discreet seclusion in the Gardens of Sallust, Berenice and Titus moved into the imperial palace on the Palatine, an ostentatious gesture that raised hackles in certain quarters. The verdict of some was that Titus’s foreign mistress ‘was already behaving in every respect as if she were his wife’, echoing Cicero’s violent condemnation of Cleopatra’s presence in Caesar’s home.
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Titus did not commit Antony’s solecism of commissioning Roman statues or coins featuring his foreign lover. In fact no portraits of Berenice survive from antiquity at all, as one might expect of a princess of the Jewish faith, which prohibited artistic representation of individuals. The only clue we have to her appearance is the mention of a jewel that she used to wear. Writing shortly after the death of the
Flavian dynasty, the satirist Juvenal mockingly referred in the course of a diatribe against women’s obsession with jewellery to a ‘legendary diamond’ once worn by Berenice, which he said was much coveted by other women. He listed the diamond as a gift from ‘the barbarian Agrippa to his incestuous sister’, dredging up the rumour of their sexual liaison.
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By drawing attention to Berenice’s diamond, Juvenal was gleefully encouraging old-fashioned members of his audience to suck in their cheeks in self-satisfied disapproval.
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Such ostentatious personal adornment formed a stark contrast to the frugal example set by jewel-free paragons of Roman womanhood such as Cornelia, and a group of Roman matrons who had sacrificed their trinkets to pay a ransom to invading Gauls in the fourth century BC. This latter story was one of Rome’s favourite feminine morality tales. The potency it held over the Roman imagination had first been demonstrated more than two centuries before Berenice’s lifetime, during a notorious debate in 195 BC over the repeal of the oppressive Oppian Law, originally passed during a crisis point in the Punic Wars with Hannibal twenty years earlier. It had aimed to restrict women’s extravagance in order to stop vital funds being siphoned away from the war effort, forbidding them from possessing more than half an ounce (14 grammes) of gold, from wearing clothing dyed with expensive coloured pigments – particularly purple – and from riding in horse-drawn carriages within the city precincts. However, when it looked as though there was a chance the law might not be repealed, some Roman matrons reportedly entered the forum to demonstrate in protest. After a furious debate, during which the redoubtable consul Cato spoke in favour of keeping the law, the motion was carried for the other side, and women were allowed to put on their purple once more.
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The furore over the Oppian Law reveals a great deal about Roman attitudes to female consumption and adornment, within whose currents Berenice and her female counterparts found themselves caught up. On the one hand there was a view, advocated by Cato’s opponents during the debate, that a woman’s clothing and jewels were to her what triumphs and badges of office were to a man, allowing her to show off her wealth and status, and complement that of her husband and father in the process. Painted, privately commissioned funerary portraits of women discovered around the empire at sites such as Fayum in Egypt, show them dripping with jewels. Fashionable gemstones included pearls, sapphires, rubies, citrines, garnets,
aquamarines, emeralds or uncut diamonds like Berenice’s, set into finger-rings, earrings, bracelets or necklaces, which could be wound in double or triple strands around the neck. Some very wealthy houses had their own jewellery-makers. As the finds from the
Monumentum Liviae
prove, Livia herself had someone to set her pearls for her.
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Yet look at portraits of Livia, and you will look in vain for these pearls. In fact, a glance at almost any marble bust of the women of the imperial family before late antiquity reveals only bare necks, wrists, fingers and earlobes. This lack of adornment, in stark contrast to the visual evidence from art and archaeological finds that women – including Livia herself – obviously wore jewellery in ‘real life’, reflects the anxieties about displays of luxury on a woman’s body.
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Juvenal was not the only writer to satirise women’s magpie-ish love of sparkly baubles and trinkets, nor was Berenice the only woman to be singled out for disapproval. Caligula’s fabulously wealthy third wife Lollia Paulina was criticised for attending a simple betrothal banquet smothered in forty million sesterces’ worth of emeralds and pearls, while Lollia’s ancestor Antony had famously cavorted with a woman so profligate that she thought nothing of dissolving a priceless pearl in a glass of wine to win a bet. The point was also made that jewellery cost Roman men a fortune to import from India, Egypt and Arabia. In short, Berenice’s diamond cast her as a reincarnation of Cleopatra, come to make trouble and spread her alien, unprincipled foreign ways.

The statement of one of her modern biographers that Berenice turned the Palatine into an eastern court is a better reflection of these suspicions about ‘un-Roman’ influences than it is of any literal transformation of the Palatine on the Flavians’ watch.
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However, that Titus’s lover did indeed find herself in controversial political territory is borne out by a cryptic comment by the contemporary Roman advocate Quintilian, who, in his famous guidebook to the training of a successful orator, remarked that he once argued a case in front of ‘Queen Berenice’, at which she was also the defendant.
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Why Berenice had been summoned, we are not told. It is possible that in fact Quintilian was not referring to a criminal trial, but to a meeting of the imperial advisory council, and that Berenice had been invited – perhaps even by Vespasian himself – to give testimony or advice on some issue in which she had expertise, such as the management of Judaea.
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Nonetheless, it was a provocative scenario, and it is clear from other sources that the Herodian princess’s residence in Rome
was doing Titus’s image no favours. Opposition to her continued presence in the city is attested by the protests of two Cynic philosophers, Diogenes and Heras, who were punished for their public protests against Titus’s immoral relationship. Diogenes was flogged for entering a theatre and delivering a lengthy and bitter tirade denouncing Berenice’s and Titus’s affair, while Heras suffered more harshly for his public condemnation of the pair and was subsequently beheaded.
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