The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (45 page)

With the death of its ruling emperor and queen mother, and the accession of Macrinus – the first Roman emperor without a senatorial background – the brutally snapped thread of Severan succession looked beyond repair. Caracalla had never remarried after Plautilla’s banishment and death, and left no children to challenge his usurper. As she prepared to end her life, Julia Domna might well have expected to be remembered as the first and last of the Severan empresses.

But this failed to take into the reckoning the enterprising determination and opportunism of her Emesene family.

After her sister Domna’s death, the recently widowed Julia Maesa, whose family had enjoyed twenty-five years as privileged house-guests in the imperial palace, was left out in the cold. Having joined Domna on the journey east when Caracalla uprooted the Severan court to Antioch, she was now ordered by Macrinus to settle on her family estates in Emesa, the senior matriarch of a family that included her two daughters Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, and two teenage grandsons, Soaemias’s son Avitus and Mamaea’s son Bassianus. Since there was no precedent for the Roman imperial succession passing to the offspring of an empress’s sister, it might seem there was no reason for Macrinus to fear any challenge from these Syrian boys. But Macrinus struggled to keep the Roman army in the style to which it had become accustomed under the free-spending Caracalla and his disgruntled soldiers began to look for a new source of compensation.
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Who first thought of the idea is unclear – both Herodian and the
Historia Augusta
state it was Maesa herself, since she was wealthy enough to offer the legions the financial incentive to desert Macrinus. Cassius Dio, though, gives her no credit, claiming it was all the brainchild of a pair of Emesene family friends called Eutychianus and Gannys. Either way, in May of 218, a year into Macrinus’s rule, an audacious plan was hatched to have Soaemias’s son Avitus – who apparently bore a conveniently strong resemblance to his cousin Caracalla – pronounced emperor. Having been smuggled one night into the camp of the legion III Gallica stationed at Raphaneae near Emesa, along with his mother Soaemias and grandmother Maesa, fourteen-year-old Avitus was paraded before the troops at dawn the next day, who duly hailed the
boy as Caracalla’s rightful successor, no doubt tempted by the promise of a handsome reward for their switch of allegiance.
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In retaliation, Macrinus declared war not just on Avitus and his cousin Bassianus, ‘but also against their mothers and their grandmother’, reportedly marvelling at their audacity but wasting no time in sending his prefect out with orders to kill Maesa’s daughter and son-in-law before launching an attack on the rebels. A month of fighting ensued, from which one battle legend was born that Maesa and Soaemis had prevented a rout of their army by leaping from their chariots and pleading with the men to hold their ground. On 8 June, Macrinus was defeated at Antioch, and subsequently killed, his portraits condemned to destruction. The Severan dynasty, or perhaps we should say the Emesene dynasty, was back in business.
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Avitus was to become better known by the sobriquet Elagabalus, borrowed from the Emesene divinity whose cult he and his family presided over. Like his cousin Caracalla, his reign was to last five years and, amid its many controversies, was notable for the astonishingly visible role played in his administration by his mother and grandmother. Elagabalus went through three wives while emperor, among them Annia Faustina, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius, but all three played second fiddle to Soaemias and Maesa, who were both given the title of
Augusta
. So powerful were this pair perceived to be that they are the only two women on record to have ever been invited to attend meetings of the Senate, going one better than Agrippina listening from behind her curtain. A special ‘Senate of Ladies’ was even said to have been established, whose meetings on the Quirinal hill were chaired by Soaemias.
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This putative female senate, however, was no groundbreaking women’s forum. Its agenda seems to have consisted entirely of the establishment of a pedantic roster of feminine etiquette, dictating matters such as who might wear gold or jewels on her shoes, who might be carried in a litter and what material it should be made out of, and who should make the first move in kisses of social greeting. The ancient literary tradition which claimed the body’s existence in fact had no interest in flattering Elagabalus’s mother, a fact that was not lost on later inheritors of this tradition such as Erasmus. His tract of 1529,
Senatulus
(‘Little Senate’), was one of several medieval and Renaissance works which invoked Elagabalus’s and Soaemias’s ‘Senate of Ladies’ specifically to satirise the ludicrous idea of a women’s parliament, as well as what he saw as a trivial obsession in his own day with standards of dress.
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Like previous Roman first ladies, Soaemias’s and Maesa’s reputations are better understood as reflections on the emperors they were associated with, than reliable mirrors of their own achievements. When the anonymous chronicler of the
Historia Augusta
wrote that Elagabalus was ‘wholly under the control of his mother [Soaemias], so much so, in fact, that he did no public business without her consent, although she lived like a harlot and practised all manner of lewdness in the palace’ such a portrait was less of a swipe at Soaemias than it was against the reviled Elagabalus, whose reign rivalled that of Nero and Commodus as one of the most licentious in Roman history.
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On top of appointing menials such as a mule-driver, a cook and a locksmith to positions of high office, wearing make-up in public and maintaining a harem of male and female whores whose depilation, both facial and pubic, he maintained himself, the most provocative charge against Elagabalus was that he tried to introduce the worship of his eponymous Emesene god Elagabal as the chief deity in the Roman pantheon. His dress was also problematic. His grandmother Maesa tried to warn him before he entered Rome for the first time that his rich purple and gold priest’s costume would not go down well with his public, who despite the influx of easterners into the elite still had a suspicion of ‘womanish’ foreign behaviour. But Elagabalus paid no attention.
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However, on 26 June 221, forced to heed Maesa’s warnings of the precariousness of his position, sixteen-year-old Elagabalus did agree to adopt his twelve-year-old cousin Severus Alexander, son of Julia Mamaea, giving him the title of
Augustus
and naming him as his heir. Thus two camps and two rival
Augustae
were created in the imperial household, with Soaemias on one side and her sister Mamaea on the other. Mamaea played her cards shrewdly, we are told, keeping her son well away from his disreputable cousin’s sphere of influence and fulfilling the Roman mother’s traditional duty of overseeing his educational curriculum. When Elagabalus’s jealousy of his young cousin’s popularity became obvious, Mamaea ensured that only her own most trusted servants were allowed to prepare and serve Alexander’s food. Meanwhile, she began to slip money to the praetorian guard to further ensure her son’s protection, abetted by her mother, Maesa, with whom Elagabalus had never been a favourite, and whose years in Domna’s inner circle had given her a thorough education in palace politics.
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The tension in the family finally came to a head when Elagabalus’s attempt to have Alexander murdered rebounded on him, and on 12 March 222, Elagabalus and Soaemias were themselves brutally
assassinated. Cassius Dio’s account of their deaths paints a horrific scene, in which the struggling eighteen-year-old Elagabalus was dragged from his hiding-place, Soaemias clinging to her son. Their heads were cut off, their bodies stripped of their clothes and their naked corpses dragged around the streets of Rome before Soaemias’s body was discarded and Elagabalus’s thrown in the Tiber. Although other Roman first ladies had been brutally treated in death, this desecration of Soaemias’s remains was the first and only time an imperial woman’s dead body had been subject to such abuse.
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It was a reflection, not just of the hatred and bitterness that had festered between the two wings of the family, but of the increased visibility of women in public life, that it should be necessary to make their execution and humiliation so public an event.

Fourteen-year-old Severus Alexander thus became the second Syrian emperor of the fledgling dynasty hatched by Julia Maesa, and Julia Mamaea now took her sister Soaemias’s place as Roman imperial matriarch. Both she and her son attracted far less vitriol from ancient historians than their immediate predecessors, though like Elagabalus, the new emperor was said to be very much under the thumb of his mother: ‘she took over the direction of affairs and gathered wise men about her son, in order that his habits might be correctly formed by them; she also chose the best men in the Senate as advisers, informing them of all that had to be done.’
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Such filial meekness earned Alexander the appellation in literary sources of ‘Alexander Mameae’ – ‘Alexander son of Mamaea’ – a reversal of the usual convention whereby a Roman man would be recognised by the name of his father. Tiberius had of course angrily repudiated a similar title identifying him as ‘son of Livia’ when he assumed the throne. The fact that Alexander’s matronymic was used on official inscriptions, referring to him as
Iuliae Mamaeae Aug[ustae] filio Iuliae Maesae Aug[ustae] nepote
’ – ‘Son of the
Augusta
Julia Mamaea and grandson of the
Augusta
Julia Maesa’ – proves that in her case the title was not just a piece of mockery cooked up by later commentators, but proof of the highly visible and enshrined role of the emperor’s mother and grandmother in the new regime’s public image.
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Alexander won early praise for his sober conduct, judicious handling of the Senate and several well-received political appointments. Cassius Dio himself was delighted to be awarded his second consulship, the reward of which concluded his history of the period. The provocation of allowing women into the chamber of the Senate was not
repeated, and a resolution was passed condemning anyone who let one in again, confirming that the political access once afforded Soaemias and Maesa did not reflect any real shift in deeply entrenched Roman attitudes towards the prospect of women in government.
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Despite the united opinion of ancient commentators that his mother and grandmother manipulated Alexander as a puppet, choosing his advisers and selecting his friends for him, no extravagant or exceptional honours were publicly paid to either Mamaea or Maesa, certainly not in the first years of his reign. Instead, they contented themselves with the titles that had already been paid to previous
Augustae
, while Mamaea’s reported preference for a frugal lifestyle constituted a shrewd appropriation of Livia’s and Plotina’s example.
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With her mother Maesa’s death (and subsequent deification) in around 223, Mamaea assumed the senior female role in the family, a position she did not relinquish even when her son married in 225 and another woman once more shared the title of
Augusta
with her – Sallustia Orbiana, daughter of the powerful senator Sallustius. Swiftly, the machinery of government set to work stressing a message of family ‘
concordia
’ via the imperial mint. Orbiana was Mamaea’s personal choice for her son, and coins struck to celebrate the royal wedding featured Orbiana and Alexander on one side and the bride’s new mother-in-law on the other. But in 227, after just two years of marriage, when Sallustius was executed on a charge of conspiracy, Orbiana was in turn banished to Libya, the victim, it was said, of Mamaea’s jealousy of her title, even though inscriptions and coins suggest Mamaea was given top billing anyway.
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Unlike Caracalla, Alexander was reputed to have loved his wife Orbiana, but fear of his mother prevented him speaking out against her fate. This presentation of Alexander as a cowed mummy’s boy and Mamaea as a ruthless dominatrix was diluted by more favourable historical accounts of Alexander as a devoted son who built his mother a palace and pool near Baiae and Mamaea as a righteous woman who gave her son sage counsel. The portrait of devoted motherhood caught the imagination of later Christian writers who recruited Mamaea as a potential convert, claiming she once summoned the theologian Origen to give her religious instruction.
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Eight years of Alexander’s reign remained, during which the choice of slogans and patron deities on his and Mamaea’s coinage acknowledged the growing military threat from the east. In 224, the Persian ruler Ardashir had killed the last king of the Parthian Empire, Artabanus,
the prelude to his foundation of the mighty Sassanid dynasty which would rule that region for the next 400 years. After attempts at diplomacy with Rome’s new rival failed, in 231, Alexander declared war and coins were issued in which Alexander was styled as the great soldier and Mamaea was associated with
Venus Victrix
– ‘Victorious Venus’.
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Largesse was distributed to the soldiers in the name of both the emperor and his mother, aimed at stiffening their backbone for the fight and guaranteeing their loyalty. But several scrappy and unsuccessful encounters later, discontent had infected the army, and blame was targeted at Mamaea, castigated for the ‘female timidity’ which reinforced the old adage that a woman had no place on the field of battle.
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