The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (39 page)

Another trait shared with Cornelia was Domitia Lucilla’s linguistic expertise, which emerges as one of the most powerful themes of Marcus’s and Fronto’s correspondence. Fronto offers gushing tribute to her intelligence, paying her the compliment of writing letters to
her in Greek – a language in which Roman men who wished to show off their learning wrote to each other – and strewing them with literary quotations from Homer and the like. He expresses anxiety at her finding grammatical mistakes in his letters to her, for fear that she should ‘look down on me as a goth’.
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And he also defers to the role she clearly played as superintendent of Marcus’s studies: ‘very likely you have heard [this] from your mother’, he writes, when passing on one of his gems of wisdom to his young charge.
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Some of this was doubtless flattery from a man who knew that he owed his recommendation for the post of tutor to his pupil’s mother. As firmly established in successive imperial households, such tutorial appointments were commonly the preserve of the lady of the house, and consequently Fronto’s letters to Marcus almost always sign off with a message of good wishes to Domitia Lucilla rather than to the boy’s male guardian Antoninus Pius, a doffing of the metaphorical cap of deference to his benefactress.
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Yet the compliments on intelligence within these letters provide rare, first-hand confirmation of something that was usually only referred to obliquely and hypothetically in ancient sources – the necessity of a woman’s being educated enough to oversee the education of her sons. Elsewhere, Domitia Lucilla receives an even rarer tribute. Among all the women whose lives intersected with the Caesars, she has the distinction of being publicly thanked in writing by her son for her role in his life. Beginning his famous philosophical treatise the
Meditations
with a list of the people to whom he owed his most important life-lessons, Marcus ranked Domitia Lucilla at number three, behind only his grandfather and father, leaving Fronto and the rest of his tutors trailing in her wake:

From my mother [I learned] piety and bountifulness, to keep myself not only from doing evil but even from dwelling on evil thoughts, simplicity too in diet and to be far removed from the ways of the rich.
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As the years went by, however, and the boy grew into a man, Domitia Lucilla’s name disappeared from Fronto’s and Marcus Aurelius’s correspondence, to be replaced by another leading lady. In April 145, after a seven-year engagement, the royal wedding between himself and Faustina, the teenage daughter of Antoninus Pius, finally took place. It was celebrated with the striking of coins bearing the heads of the young couple and a handout of money to the army. The birth of
Marcus’s and Faustina’s first child, a daughter, was recorded on 30 November 147, resulting in Faustina being immediately granted the name
Augusta
, and over the next twenty-three years, as many as fourteen children were born to the imperial couple. Each birth and illness was cooed and commiserated over by a doting Fronto: ‘I have seen your little chicks, and a more welcome sight I shall never in my life see, so like in features to you that nothing can be more like than the likeness’, he writes after seeing Marcus’s twin boys Antoninus and Commodus, born on 31 August 161.
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One woman who makes little appearance in the correspondence with Fronto and was not present at the wedding of her daughter to Marcus, was the girl’s mother, Annia Galeria. Antoninus Pius’s wife of twenty years survived just the first two years of his reign before dying in the winter of 140. Her husband’s celebration of her memory went beyond almost anything a Roman emperor had previously done for his wife and ensured that she remained a strongly felt presence in the city. Silver and gold statues were placed around the capital, and a charitable foundation was set up in her name to help destitute girls, advertised on coins showing her portrait on one side and the grateful orphans – now known as
puellae faustinianae
, or ‘Faustina’s girls’ – on the other.
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On top of that, a hail of coins was minted by the emperor associating her with the full range of traditional goddesses representing family values, including Juno, Ceres and Vesta, as well as personified themes such as
Aeternitas
(eternity),
Pietas
(piety) and
Concordia
(marital harmony). They showed Annia Galeria being carried to the heavens on the back of an eagle or winged female messenger just as Sabina had been on her marble relief, while a cult was established in her name, its focal point being a temple in the Roman forum itself.
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The temple’s colonnaded remains now enclose the seventeenth-century church of S. Lorenzo in Miranda but the inscription on the façade still bears the empress’s name.

Antoninus Pius and Annia Galeria were held up as an example of the perfect married couple, in life and in death. Under new marriage protocols introduced by Antoninus, young betrothed couples were obliged to approach the altar of the deified empress and her still-living husband and pray that they too should live up to such an example of
concordia
in their own marriages. Annia Galeria was thus cast as a patroness of marriage just as Livia had been, and in one of his few preserved letters to Fronto, Antoninus Pius wrote to thank his adopted son’s tutor for a recent speech in which he had praised the empress:
‘By heaven, I would sooner live with her in Gyara [a place of exile] than in the palace without her.’
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Antoninus himself never remarried, contenting himself, as Vespasian had once done with Caenis, by taking one of his wife’s former slaves as a mistress. However, his new companion seems to have exercised little of the good influence over the emperor’s diet with which Marcus credited his mother Domitia Lucilla in the
Meditations
. Indeed, Antoninus’s eventual demise on 7 March 161, at the age of seventy-four, was attributed in part to his partaking too freely of some Alpine cheese. One of the first actions of his successors, Marcus and Lucius, was to honour their adoptive parents with a joint monument of apotheosis, even though Annia Galeria had been dead for twenty years. The Column of Antoninus Pius, as it is now known, was a technically glorious riposte to Trajan’s own eponymous erection, comprising a 50-feet-high (15-metres-high) pink granite cenotaph topped with a bronze statue of the emperor, the whole structure set on top of an 8-feet-high (2.4-metres-high) illustrated marble base. Its remains were dug with some difficulty out of a hillside in the Monte Citorio area in the eighteenth century and since 1787 the white marble base has been preserved in the Vatican Museums, where it currently sits in a courtyard outside the Pinacoteca, framed by a backdrop of umbrella pines and Michelangelo’s mighty dome. Three of the pedestal’s sides are given over to the traditional decoration scheme of an apotheosis relief, while the composition of the fourth panel depicts the startling sight of Antoninus and Annia Galeria being chauffeured to heaven together, the divine cargo of a nude angel or ‘genius’ whose broad wingspan unfurls across the entire central width of the pedestal’s marble face.

Everything about this image was geared towards the reinforcement of the idea that this couple, the dynastic figureheads of the next generation of Roman emperors, were inseparable, joined at the hip and hand, even in death. Never before had two figures been shown hitching a ride on the same ‘genius’ in Roman art, and nothing in the picture hints that this husband and wife died twenty years apart. Intriguingly, the composition may have borrowed inspiration from the funerary art of the freedmen classes of Rome, which commonly affirmed the durability of the marital bond even in death.
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Following Antoninus’s death, the Roman Empire now obeyed two masters, for the first time since Octavian toppled Antony. Although Lucius Verus had always played second fiddle to him in the succession stakes, at the first meeting of the Senate following Antoninus’s demise
in 161, Marcus Aurelius insisted that his adoptive brother and fellow consul for that year should be made his co-emperor. The only asymmetry in their positions was signalled by Marcus’s ordination as Rome’s chief priest (
Pontifex Maximus
). Marcus now took Antoninus’s name and became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, while Lucius appropriated his brother’s cognomen, and was known as Lucius Aurelius Verus, the first joint Augustus in imperial history. Lucius had remained a bachelor ever since Faustina had been summarily reassigned away from him when he was eight years old, and now Marcus’s eleven-year-old daughter Lucilla was lined up to marry her adoptive uncle as soon as she came of age, uniting the two family branches.

Faustina meanwhile became the first Roman woman to succeed her mother as empress. Now in her thirties, she had already given birth to nine children. Her remarkable powers of reproduction, reminiscent of the elder Agrippina’s and a stark contrast to her childless predecessors Plotina and Sabina, provided the impetus behind an extraordinary nine distinct portrait types for her, more than for any other Roman empress, indicating that every delivery of a child was celebrated with a new portrait of her.
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At the time of Marcus’s inauguration, she was three months pregnant with the hopes of the dynasty, her twin boys Commodus and Antoninus, who were born on 31 August 161. The birth announcement was celebrated with the issue of coins, showing Faustina’s profile on one side, framed by the legend
Faustina Augusta
, and on the reverse, two baby boys facing each other in a richly draped crib, beneath the proclamation
Saeculi Felicitas
– ‘The Fruitfulness of the Age’!
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It seemed an auspicious start and made Faustina the first empress since Poppaea, a century earlier, to have given birth while her husband was in power, a remarkable statistic that highlights the shift in women’s dynastic function over that period. Despite the fact that at least half of her babies did not survive childhood, Faustina’s prodigious fertility now rendered surplus to requirements the adoptive system of succession that had chosen Rome’s emperors since Nerva’s death.

But the new regime’s honeymoon period was over almost before it had started. Although the Roman Empire under Antoninus Pius had remained superficially peaceful, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus faced several troubling crises almost immediately. Disturbances in Britain and Upper Germany had to be suppressed, while war with Rome’s old enemy Parthia had become inevitable in the face of growing aggression from King Vologaeses IV. When Vologaeses sent his armies into
the Roman province of Syria, Marcus and Lucius realised one of them must take personal charge of the war effort. Thus, Lucius, the more youthful and physically robust of the two brothers, was dispatched to oversee the Roman response while Marcus held the fort back in Rome.
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With Lucius away on the eastern frontier, Marcus grappled with various domestic problems including the fallout from the Tiber bursting its banks in the spring of 162 and the destructive trail of famine that followed. The birth of yet another child for Marcus and Faustina, a son born at the end of that year, gave the imperial house something to celebrate. But letters exchanged between Marcus and Fronto around this time hint at some of the stresses and strains that Marcus was under, increased by the periodic illnesses of his wife and children. It was fortunate the family had a very old and redoubtable kinswoman living nearby to take some of the load off their hands. Just down the road, now aged around eighty years old, lived Matidia Minor, the surviving sister of Sabina and honorary great-aunt of Marcus through Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius. Correspondence from Marcus to Fronto just after his succession reveals that the emperor’s infant daughters, Cornificia and Fadilla, sometimes went to stay with Matidia at her house in the city.
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Over in Syria, meanwhile, the Parthians were proving stubborn opponents. Thanks, however, to the efforts of talented young generals such as Avidius Cassius, by 165 the Parthian front line had been pushed back into Medea (modern Iran), the Parthian capital Ctesiphon sacked and Vologaeses forced into flight. Lucius himself could not claim much personal credit for the victory. He had lent his name and authority to the mission but spent most of his time behind the front line at a resort near Antioch, earning himself a reputation as a playboy prince. During that time, his prospective bride Lucilla reached marriageable age, and Marcus himself chaperoned his thirteen-year-old daughter, the eldest of his surviving children, as far as Brundisium and put her on a boat to Ephesus. She was met there by Lucius who had taken time out from his not very arduous military duties to marry her. After the wedding in 164, Lucilla became known as
Augusta
, just like Faustina, sisters-in-law and joint empresses now, as well as mother and daughter. By 166, Lucius’s presence in the east was no longer required and he returned to celebrate a joint triumph with Marcus in Rome on 12 October.
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Plague dragged back to the city by the eastern armies soured the victory, however, causing the deaths of millions across the empire and
delaying the start of a new military mission to reinforce the Danube frontier. In 168, the German campaign against the Marcomanni and Quadi tribes finally got under way, but in January 169, the further spread of plague forced Marcus and Lucius, whose joint presence at the front was now deemed necessary, to abandon their winter camp at Aquileia. Two days into the journey back to Rome, Lucius suffered a stroke and died just short of his fortieth birthday. Under pressure to return to the Danubian campaign, Marcus quickly betrothed the widowed Lucilla to one of his generals, the Syrian-born Claudius Pompeianus, a marriage which both Lucilla and her mother were said to have protested against on the grounds of Pompeianus’s advanced age, though their complaints fell on deaf ears.
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