The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (33 page)

Titus’s passion for Berenice was seen as part and parcel of a list of vices for which he acquired an unflattering reputation during his father’s reign. Allegations of debauchery with eunuchs and accepting bribes in return for swinging the outcome of court cases were bandied about. The suicide of two senators, Caecina and Marcellus, after Titus pronounced them guilty of conspiracy in 79, provoked hostility from other senators towards the emperor’s eldest son. Suggestions that the Roman people faced the prospect of another Nero on the throne, should he succeed to his father’s dignities, were publicly voiced. The stench of corruption lingered over the Flavian household and something needed to be done about it if they were not to be lumped together with the worst of the Julio-Claudians.
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On 24 June 79, Vespasian died after ten years in power, and was succeeded by his eldest son. Almost overnight, so we are told by his ancient biographer Suetonius, Titus’s reputation was transformed from dissolute merchant of vice to wise and beloved emperor, his raucous drinking parties reinvented as elegant, decorous symposia, his harem of dancing boys sent back to the stage and his undesirable troupe of friends replaced with a circle of sage political advisers. He was generous to his public, staging lavish gladiatorial entertainments of their choice and sometimes even bathing with them at the public baths, and reportedly considered a day wasted if he had not granted a boon to at least one of the many petitioners whom he always made time to see. But the most powerful proclamation of this image overhaul was the dismissal of his lover Berenice from the capital.
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Even critical Roman writers characterised the decision to separate as a difficult one for both parties. Suetonius gave a succinct digest of the parting moment between the Roman emperor and his Herodian lover as –
demisit invitus invitam
: ‘he sent her away though he was unwilling and so was she.’ This was to become the catalyst for the reinterpretation by Racine and others of this poignant tale of two divided lovers.
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Titus bowed to public opinion nonetheless, and Berenice received her
congé
. One ancient report claims she later
returned to the city but that there was no moving the newly obdurate Titus, and Berenice disappeared once more.
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No more was heard from the Jewish queen and one can only presume she returned to live out her days in Judaea.
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The fascination of her unknown fate is perfectly captured in a scene from George Eliot’s 1876 novel
Daniel Deronda
, which, in part, tells the story of a young man who in the process of uncovering his Jewish roots falls in love with a mysterious Jewess named Mirah. Arriving one day at the house of his friend and rival for Mirah’s affections, the artist Hans Meyrick, Deronda learns that Hans has conceived a plan to paint a ‘Berenice series’ of five movements from the heroine’s life, with Mirah as the model: Berenice clasping the knees of Gessius Florus in Jerusalem; Berenice alongside her brother Agrippa as he appeals to his fellow countrymen for peace; Berenice exulting in the prospect of being empress of Rome; Berenice being sent away from Rome by Titus, ‘both reluctant, both sad –
invitus invitam
, as Suetonius hath it’; and Berenice ‘seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem’ – an ending which Meyrick admits is a figment of his imagination: ‘That is what ought to have been – perhaps was … nobody knows what became of her.’
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As in the case of her Egyptian alter ego Cleopatra, it is the very qualities that render Berenice so seductive a subject for a modern audience that made her an object of suspicion and revilement among a number of Roman observers. Her reputed beauty, her exoticism, her otherness, the fascination she exerted over the emperor, were all the hallmarks of several of the straw women who had troubled the Roman imagination, from Cleopatra to Poppaea. Berenice’s entanglement with Titus provided ammunition for those who argued that allowing women to get too close to the machinery of government would always prove the downfall of Roman dynasties. Within only a few years of the Herodian queen’s departure from Rome, those concerns would be recentred on Domitia, the wife of Titus’s brother and successor.

Titus’s rule as emperor lasted only two years. He faced a number of difficult challenges during that short period, most notably the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the autumn of 79 which buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in a solid sea of volcanic ash and left thousands dead or homeless. The following year, a serious fire swept through Rome, destroying Octavia’s old portico alongside other major building works, and the city’s tragedies were compounded by an
outbreak of plague. Titus’s personal contribution to the disaster relief efforts in the aftermath of all these events nevertheless won him a great deal of popular goodwill which was boosted still further when the Colosseum was finally officially opened in 80 and one hundred days of spectacular games were held in celebration. But the honeymoon period was cut short by his death from fever at the age of forty-one on 13 September 81, paving the way for a rash of conspiracy theories over the likely meaning of his cryptic final words, ‘I have but one regret’. Some at the time took this to be a reference either to his refusal to share power with Domitian, or to an alleged – though strenuously denied – liaison with his brother’s wife Domitia, though others since have chosen to interpret the line more romantically as a lament for his loss of Berenice.
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Into Titus’s shoes stepped twenty-nine-year-old Domitian, the younger of Vespasian’s two sons. At fifteen years, his reign was the longest of the three Flavian emperors and would be remembered as, on the one hand, a period of rich cultural production, but, on the other, an age of tyranny and cruel repression that undid much of the public relations legwork put in by his father and elder brother – a trend that eventually earned this bald, fastidious and idiosyncratic individual the punishment of
damnatio memoriae
from the Senate.

Unlike his family predecessors, Domitian was already married when he took the throne on 14 September 81. Domitia Longina thus became the first – and, as it would turn out, the only – official ‘first lady’ of the Flavian dynasty, and also the first wife of a Roman emperor since Poppaea in 65 to be anointed
Augusta
.
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She was moreover granted the title within two weeks of Domitian’s accession, an unusually quick bestowal of the accolade.
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The cachet offered by the title of
Augusta
had clearly changed since the days when it was only awarded cautiously to elderly matrons like Livia and Antonia, who no longer had the biological capacity to affect the succession. Now that the principle of imperial rule was well embedded, emperors these days no longer had to be so coy about honouring their women.
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Domitia and Domitian, both in their late twenties, were in fact still childless. A son born to the couple before Domitian became emperor died in infancy and had been posthumously deified, a gesture accompanied by the issue of coins honouring Domitia as
Mater Divi Caesaris
– ‘Mother of the Divine Caesar’. No other Roman empress is thought to have received the tribute of being called the mother of a ‘god’ during her lifetime, and there must have been great hope that Domitia
could still capitalise on the accolade by providing an heir for the Flavian dynasty, in the absence of any born to Titus.
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Unlike Augustus’s and Livia’s densely branched family tree, which regularly offered several options for the provision of a Julio-Claudian heir, the hopes of the Flavians rested heavily on Domitia, although there was an alternative source of future heirs in Titus’s teenaged daughter Julia Flavia, on whom the accolade of
Augusta
had also been bestowed, despite her being so young.

Like his father before him, Domitian set about trying to portray himself in the early years of his reign as a political heir of Augustus, embarking on a stunningly ambitious architectural overhaul of the city, expanding the empire’s borders and making moral reform a centrepiece of his agenda. In this vein, he followed Augustus’s suit in publicly promoting wool-working as the ideal pastime for women by giving pride of place on the temple of Minerva in his new forum to a scene of Roman matrons weaving under the aegis of the goddess. He also announced a reintroduction of the first emperor’s legislation on sexual mores, a policy whose sting was, as before, felt most keenly by elite women. The old
Lex Iulia
against adultery – which had not been rigorously enforced in the decades since Augustus’s reign – was revived and the death penalty reinstated for Vestal Virgins who were found to have broken their vow of chastity. One of those who fell foul of this legislation, the chief Vestal Cornelia, was apparently subjected to the archaic punishment of live burial, while her alleged lovers were stoned to death.
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Meanwhile, the
Lex Voconia
of 169 BC, which had limited women’s rights of inheritance, was also resurrected in a bid to curb the growth of a small but significant group of Roman women benefiting from liberal property rights laws. These laws were allowing certain elite women to amass large personal fortunes from will bequests and divorce settlements, women such as Ummidia Quadratilla, an immensely wealthy matriarch who was reported to have lived a life of such independent leisure that she could fund her own troupe of mime actors to perform for herself and her community’s amusement.
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Women may have remained as shut out from the institutions of political power as ever, but Domitian’s attempts to reinvigorate the old Augustan laws on adultery and property inheritance make it apparent that an old debate raged on, and that there were renewed calls for women’s increasing financial and social freedom to be curbed.
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Domitian himself, however, showed no inclination to emulate his
father’s man-of-the-people stance by choosing modest living quarters. Instead, he joined the otherwise unbroken line of emperors from Augustus onwards who had set up their own establishments on the Palatine. It was a hundred years since Hortensius’s modest stone house had been requisitioned to serve as the home of Rome’s first emperor, and the swathe of hill where Augustus’s and Livia’s old home still stood like a historic museum was now completely unrecognisable. Each of their descendants had taken his turn extending and adding to the imperial residence, and Domitian’s own plans to create a palace complex in his family’s name were so ambitious that they transformed the entire hill. Masterminded by his architect Rabirius, the new ‘Domus Flavia’ took shape on the very peak of the Palatine, a brick palace covering around 40,000 square metres (47,850 square yards) and incorporating a dazzling public area adorned with polychrome marble walls and columns designed for the reception and entertainment of guests, a hippodrome, and a cordoned-off private zone reserved for the sole use of the emperor and his family, built around colonnaded garden peristyles whose fountains and flower beds provided a respite from the hubbub of the public audience rooms. Ancient authors fell over themselves to praise the overall effect, one poet calling it ‘one of the most beautiful things in the world’.
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Domitian’s love of virtuosity in his aesthetic surroundings was mirrored by a flamboyant transformation of the portrait traditions of women under the Flavians, as modelled by Domitia and Julia Flavia. From Livia’s modest
nodus
at the end of the first century BC to the more elaborate, adventurous arrangements of curls and ringlets sported by the Agrippinas in the first half of the first century AD, the Julio-Claudian era had witnessed a gradual trend for women to let their hair down, so to speak. But under the Flavians, hairdressers achieved new flights of frothy fantasy with the birth of the so-called
Toupetfrisur
, a style characterised by a high beehive of closely woven curls, whose honeycombed façades have also been compared to sea sponges and tortellini pasta.
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To achieve this new style, rows of minuscule curls as many as eight tiers high ascended to form a small pointed peak. So high was the hair piled on top of the heads of Domitia, Julia Flavia and their counterparts in these portraits that wire frames are thought to have been used as a kind of scaffolding around which to mould the locks.
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Dyes and pomades were used to give tint, sheen and hold, the effect of which is now lost to us since ancient marble portraits have long since been
stripped of any layers of paint that might have given us an idea of the colours used. Eye-watering ingredients were recommended for these hair dyes, from leeches soaked in red wine to dye one’s tresses black, to an alkaline mixture of goat’s fat and beechwood ash known as
sapo
to lighten them. These had to be used with care, as testified by one of Ovid’s poems in which he gleefully admonishes a woman who had attempted her own home-dye job:

‘I
told
you to stop using rinses – and now just look at you! No hair worth mentioning left to dye … If your hair’s fallen out, it’s not Any envious tongue that’s to blame. You applied that concoction Yourself. It was you that did it.
All your fault
.’
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Elaborate, towering styles like the
Toupetfrisur
must have taken hours to achieve, using teams of
ornatrices
and styling implements such as the
calamistrum
(curling iron) or ivory comb, examples of which have been recovered in excavation.
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The
ornatrix
who failed to satisfy her mistress or customer faced harsh punishment, if the portrait of the Roman satirists is anything to go by: ‘Why is this curl sticking up?’ a woman demands of her hapless hairdresser in one such scenario, before venting her rage with a bullwhip.
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We even know the names of one of Domitia’s own
ornatrices
, thanks to a marble plaque put up in her memory by her husband, which tells us her name was Telesphoris and she died at the age of twenty-five.
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