The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (40 page)

All of Marcus’s attentions were now focused on the war effort. In the winter of 169–70, in preparation for the delayed offensive against the Germans, he based himself at Sirmium (in Serbia), and was accompanied there by Faustina and their youngest child, three-year-old Aurelia Sabina. A heavy financial deficit had forced Marcus to raise funds for his expedition by auctioning off some personal possessions including silk robes and jewellery belonging to Faustina. It was the prelude to the bestowal on the emperor’s wife in 174 of the unprecedented title ‘
mater castrorum
’ – ‘Mother of the Camp’. In Livia’s or Agrippina’s day, this epithet would have been an unthinkable honour for an empress, an inappropriate and unnatural trespass into the most masculine sphere, but its award bore witness to the greater military pressures now faced by the empire. It configured Faustina as a female figurehead who would keep the home fires burning, and act as a kind of forces sweetheart, albeit of a maternal mien.
⁸⁵

The Marcomanni and Quadi invaders were eventually pegged back but Marcus had his hands full with rebel groups in the Balkans and Spain as well, and spent the next few years pacifying these various elements. By 174, Marcus was once more at Sirmium, preparing for a new phase of his war, this time against the dangerous Sarmatian tribe, the Iazyges, based on the Hungarian plain. The news that former ally Avidius Cassius had been proclaimed emperor in Syria, Egypt and other parts of the east was an unwelcome distraction, but the disorganised coup soon fizzled out. In July 175, Marcus left Sirmium and taking Faustina and his son Commodus with him, embarked on a tour of the east. That same winter, Faustina died suddenly in the village of Halala in Cappadocia, aged in her mid-forties.
⁸⁶

Two traditions survive of how Faustina met her death. The first ascribed her demise to gout. This explanation would fit with the evidence of Fronto’s and Marcus Aurelius’s correspondence, which often referred to Faustina’s malaises. The other version, infinitely more damaging to Marcus Aurelius, claimed that Faustina had reluctantly joined the doomed conspiracy of Avidius Cassius out of anxiety for her children in the event of Marcus Aurelius’s death, adding for good measure that she was an adulteress whose son Commodus had been fathered by a gladiator, and a murderess who had fed Lucius Verus poisoned oysters to stop him exposing her crimes. According to this account, she had then committed suicide when Cassius’s plot failed.
⁸⁷

The latter theory of course repeated sinister narrative templates already familiar from Livia’s and the younger Agrippina’s biographies – the women’s use of poison, for example – and relies heavily on the much-fictionalised
Historia Augusta
. It was also undermined by Marcus Aurelius’s publicly grief-stricken reaction to his wife’s death. The village of Halala was renamed Faustinopolis in the empress’s memory, and the order was given that a gold statue of Faustina should sit in her old seat at the games in the amphitheatre, whenever Marcus Aurelius himself was present. An alimentary fund for underprivileged girls equivalent to the one set up after the death of Faustina’s mother was instituted. Finally, an extensive and unprecedented range of coins was issued from the Roman mint, celebrating both her consecration as a goddess, her role as a patron saint of the army, and her apotheosis into the stars, driving a chariot, like the hunter goddess Diana.
⁸⁸

Marcus Aurelius himself died five years after Faustina, on 17 March 180, at the age of fifty-eight. His nineteen-year-old son Commodus subsequently became the first emperor since Domitian almost a century earlier to succeed to the dignities of his biological father. But his reign only served to confirm the opinion alluded to in Pliny’s panegyric for Trajan, that the principle of hereditary succession risked lumbering the empire with a bad ruler. Commodus’s twelve-year reign was remembered as a nightmarish, megalomaniacal re-hash of the bad old days of Caligula and Nero, a farcical, bloody roller-coaster ride that, amongst other indignities, witnessed the bizarre sight of the emperor of Rome sporting his canvas in the arena and trying to reinvent himself through his dress and nomenclature as a modern-day Hercules.

The end of a golden age for the Roman Empire, following the glory days of his Antonine predecessors, Commodus’s arrival also went hand-in-hand
with a revival of the old idea of women as the destructive agents in the downfall of dynasties. This was witnessed by the indictment, exile and eventual execution of both Commodus’s sister Lucilla – who was allegedly involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him in 182 – and his wife Bruttia Crispina, whom he had married in 178 and who was put to death, in her case on a charge of adultery.
⁸⁹
In Crispina’s place, Commodus took a mistress named Marcia, who, in a replay of the exploits of Agrippina the younger and Domitia, was later said to have conspired in his murder. For all the pains taken during the second century to present a flattering image of the ruling dynasty through the careful public representation of its women and the selection of new privileges bestowed upon them, Commodus’s accession demonstrated just how easily such efforts could be forgotten.

7

The Philosopher Empress: Julia Domna and the ‘Syrian Matriarchy
’
¹

Mother that didst bear me, mother that didst bear me, help! I am being murdered.

Cassius Dio,
Roman History
²

Tucked into the shadow of the pretty seventh-century basilica of San Giorgio in Velabro, a popular wedding venue just off Rome’s Piazza della Bocca della Verità, nestles a small marble arch. It dates to the year 204, but despite a near miss during a bomb attack in 1993, its richly decorated grey and white surface is well preserved, and on the opposite faces of its inner bay, two relief panels survive, marble stills of the ruling Roman imperial dynasty of the early third century in action. In the right-hand frame, a serene-looking woman clad in a veil and moon-shaped diadem stands next to her toga-hooded husband, whose right arm is frozen in the act of pouring a libation over a small altar piled up with pine cones. In the left-hand panel of the arch, the couple’s young bearded son mimics his father’s action. The overall scene is of a religious sacrifice, and the identity of the three suppliants confirmed by an inscription recording that the arch was commissioned by a group of businessmen in honour of the ruling emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna and their son Caracalla. Theirs were the faces of the new Roman family dynasty which rose to power in the aftermath of Commodus’s demise and ruled the Roman Empire for almost the entire first half of the third century.

Today, the Arch of the Argentarii (‘Arch of the Money-men’) is ring-fenced for its own protection, preventing too close an inspection of the rich decoration scheme. But to a critically minded viewer, pressing the face up between the spiked metal railings for a closer look at the arch’s workmanship, it might appear that the empress Julia Domna’s awkwardly crooked left arm is rather poorly carved. Adjacent to this flaw, the right-hand margin of the panel is curiously blank, its vacancy made glaringly obvious by the fact that the disembodied head of a caduceus staff, once held by the empress, seems to be floating in
mid-air above her shoulder. Following the direction of Julia Domna’s gaze, across to the arch’s left-hand panel, one notices that there is also a yawning gap to the young Caracalla’s right, where the surface of the marble is raised and roughly textured, as if one or more figures had once stood there, and been laboriously scrubbed away.
³

These lacunae are in fact the scars of a violent exorcism that took place barely a decade after the arch’s celebratory unveiling, which saw this scene of family togetherness viciously slashed through and several original members of the tableau unceremoniously obliterated. Like a conjuring trick gone badly wrong, the cracks in this illusory façade of a family united could not be more starkly exposed. And to this family, newcomers to the imperial scene in uncertain times, the preservation of a united front mattered more than most.

The rise of the Severan dynasty spearheaded by Septimius Severus and Julia Domna is one of the more remarkable chapters in Roman imperial history. The beneficiaries of the bloody fallout from Commodus’s ill-starred reign, their tenure on the Palatine witnessed the accession of Rome’s first African emperor in Severus himself, and its first empress from the east, in the person of Julia Domna. Two people whose distant provincial birthplaces would have had them labelled as barbarian parvenus by the elite political classes of the Roman west in Livia’s and Augustus’s day now held the reins of empire. With Severus’s imperial legacy depending on the Syrian-born Domna’s side of the family, whose members ensured the dynasty’s survival for forty-two years, it also marked a return to a principle of matrilineal succession not seen since the accession of Agrippina Minor’s son Nero.

So powerful has the political influence of Julia Domna and her female relatives appeared to many modern historians, that the Severan dynasty has often been painted as a matriarchy, in which first Domna herself, then her sister Julia Maesa and great-nieces Julia Soaemis and Julia Mamaea held the apron-strings of their baby-faced progeny as they succeeded in turn to the dignities of Severus. Julia Domna in particular attracted attention from scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thanks to her association with a prominent Athenian sophist named Philostratus, who dubbed her ‘the philosopher’.
⁴
Domna’s devotion to philosophical pursuits, her sponsorship of Philostratus and her patronage of a controversial ‘circle’ of the leading literary, philosophical and scientific thinkers of the day, mean
that she is fêted as perhaps the most intellectual woman ever to wear the mantle of Roman empress.

These qualities have not always won her admirers. Born in Syria, Domna was accused in the nineteenth century of turning Rome into a bastion of ‘orientalism’ by introducing the worship of foreign goddesses into Roman state religion (and inviting comparison between these deities and herself). The great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon believed that the Severan dynasty was responsible for setting the Roman Empire’s feet on a path to decline, though Gibbon himself reserved his own criticism especially for the ‘pride and avarice’ of the Syrian women who succeeded Domna as
Augusta
; by contrast he praised her as a woman who ‘deserved all that the stars could promise her’.
⁵
More recently, Domna’s ‘political caprice’ coupled with her ‘intellectualism’ incurred her description as an unflattering hybrid of Catherine de’ Medici, Christina of Sweden and Julio-Claudian bad girl Messalina.
⁶

Yet by comparison at least to her Julio-Claudian predecessors Livia and Agrippina Minor, the only other two women previously to have served as first wife to one emperor and then mother to another, Domna received a relatively good press from contemporary observers in antiquity, earning plaudits for the quality of her advice to her son Caracalla when he eventually ascended the throne, and winning sympathy for her hostile treatment at the hands of her husband’s power-hungry aide Plautianus, whose persecution drove her to seek refuge in a world of literature and learning. This complimentary portrait survives even though Julia Domna occupied a more prominent and arguably more powerful role in the administrations of her husband and her son, than any other empress before her. Strikingly, she seems to have been received into these roles without protest from any surviving source that a woman from the east should be installed as Roman empress, a contrast to the vitriol once levelled at Berenice’s and Cleopatra’s incursions on to the imperial scene.

Such circumspection was in part a reflection of the shifting sands of the Roman political landscape. Julia Domna and Septimius Severus were role models for a new-look cosmopolitan Roman elite of the third century, for whom Latin was often no longer one’s automatic first language and obscure birth no longer a disqualification from the highest office. The cultural and political hegemony of Rome itself was weakening – Septimius Severus was to be the first emperor to celebrate his provincial origins in public building projects. The Roman
Empire itself was tilting uncertainly on its axis, still clinging to its inherited cultural and religious traditions, yet continuing to be buffeted by challenges to that orthodoxy, from artistic influences to eastern mystery cults such as Christianity. Marcus Aurelius’s tenure as emperor during the final half of the second century had also coincided with increasing difficulties in the policing of a bloated empire. The military pressures of securing thousands of miles of accumulated territory had escalated sharply. Rome, the capital of empire, was separated from its most far-flung frontier of Syria, Julia Domna’s homeland, by over 1,500 miles (2,400 km). War with Rome’s old eastern rival Parthia, unrest from Teutonic tribes in Europe, spasmodic internal rebellions against the emperor and widespread plague all combined to place the machinery of empire under increasing strain.

More than ever, the defence of empire called for strong military leadership. But the promotion of such army strong men, so critical to the empire’s security, had the potential to backfire if any of them decided to stake a claim to the biggest job of all – the emperor’s own. This conundrum was one of the problems that would beset the empire for the rest of its lifetime. It also had repercussions for the role played in each new administration by the emperor’s wife and family, whose positions became ever more precarious in the face of multiple, and often life-threatening, challenges to their legitimacy.