The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (53 page)

Though Galla Placidia was compelled to live a more cloistered life, the template for rearing a girl in her position had nonetheless changed little since the salad days of Julia, Livilla and the other girls of the Julio-Claudian household. A letter written in around 400 by the Christian ascetic scholar Jerome to his high-ranking female friend Laeta, advising her on the education of her daughter Paula, advocated much of the same pedagogical prescription as written down by educational theorist Quintilian in the first century. A child should learn to read and write in Latin and Greek, by being given alphabetical ‘blocks’, and being taught an ‘ABC’ song. Hints in the compositions of Claudian, a contemporary poet and observer of fourth-century court life, suggest that Serena’s and Stilicho’s daughters Maria and Thermantia were tutored in Latin and Greek. It is thus a safe assumption that Placidia received a similar education – even more likely given that the principal language of the eastern court at least was Greek.
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She also seems to have assisted at one stage in the embroidery of a girth for her big brother Honorius’s horse, chiming with Jerome’s recommendation to Laeta that Paula should cultivate enough skill with the spindle to make her own clothes, and proving that wool-working was as desirable an accomplishment for well-brought-up Roman girls as it had been in the day when Augustus broadcast the fact that his female relatives wove his tunics.
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Any ambitions on Paula’s part to dress herself in the latest silk fashions should be squashed, warned Jerome, and make-up, jewellery and pierced ears forbidden, recalling Augustus’s reproofs of Julia for her vanity, and praise of Livia for her lack of adornment. The only thing that was fundamentally different about the education being prescribed by Jerome for Paula to that of one of her upper-class Roman forebears was that it was aimed at training her up for a life committed to virginal asceticism, rather than a position as someone’s wife.
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Jerome’s letter also advised that care should be taken over the choice of Paula’s companions and domestic attendants. One of the few surviving pieces of evidence about Placidia’s early life is that her nurse was called Elpidia, and was a trusted confidante who would remain
a member of her household into adulthood. Farming out one’s babies for breast-feeding was frowned upon just as much by Christian writers as it had been by Tacitus, but Elpidia’s companionship suggests that Placidia’s mother Galla had, like most mothers of her class, ignored such recriminations.
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Placidia’s closeness to her nurse Elpidia contrasts sharply with the picture of her relationship with her foster mother Serena. While a coterie of influential and ambitious courtiers pulled the strings of power for Placidia’s brother Arcadius in Constantinople, Serena and her Vandal-born husband Stilicho were unquestionably the new power couple of the western empire, a pose realised visually in a famous ivory diptych from the cathedral of Monza carved in around 400. Its left panel frames a standing portrait of Serena, her hair arranged in a thick roll around her head, her person adorned in the high-necked voluminous tunic layered over a tighter-fitting under-dress which had become the prevailing fashion for women of late antiquity. Although a looser and shorter ankle-exposing style of tunic called the dalmatic had begun to appear on portraits of some Christian women from the third century onwards, Serena’s robe is tightly wrapped under her bust with a jewelled belt, and pebble-sized precious stones decorate her ears and throat, an example of the increasing tendency towards lavish personal adornment, though still modest compared to the astonishingly ornate bejewelled and diademed representations of women from the later Byzantine era.
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To the right of Serena, barely reaching her waist, hovers the neatly cropped head of her small son Eucherius, enveloped in a child-size version of the military
paludamentum
worn by his father in the diptych’s right-hand panel. Stilicho, whose short narrow tunic and breeches proclaim his barbarian origins, stands leaning on a shield while curling the fingers of his other hand around a long spear.
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It is a portrait of assured combined authority, Serena the traditional Roman
matrona
holding a plucked bloom in her hand as a symbol of her guardianship of the fertility of the state, Stilicho the hard-nosed military protector at the ready. Their ambition was obvious and understandable – by 398, they had succeeded in marrying their elder daughter Maria to thirteen-year-old Honorius, making them not just guardians but grandparents to a potential heir to the western empire. The symbolism of the marriage was underlined by the fact that Honorius gave his bride a wedding gift of some of the jewels once worn by Livia and subsequently by other imperial women. When the union
failed to produce any children after six years and was ended by the bride’s death in 404, Thermantia was ushered into her sister’s shoes in a bid to see if the younger girl could do any better – though this marriage also remained childless.
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In a poem written in honour of Stilicho’s consulship in 400, Claudian coyly alluded to the future prospect of another marriage in the family one day – between Stilicho’s and Serena’s little son Eucherius and Honorius’s sister Placidia: ‘the winged Loves throng the affianced bride, daughter and sister of an emperor … Eucherius now lifts the veil from the bashful maiden’s face …’ But the veil in question – still the crocus-yellow affair worn by brides in Livia’s day, though now encrusted by jewels as befitted the fifth-century imperial aesthetic – was never worn.
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While Honorius was being put to stud with first Maria and then Thermantia in a vain bid to produce children, Placidia remained resolutely unwed throughout her teenage years, a highly unusual state of affairs among girls of the elite and almost unheard-of in the close female relative of an emperor, the exception of Hadrian’s sister-in-law Matidia Minor notwithstanding. Vows of celibacy were of course newly in vogue among girls of Rome’s noble families, but no Christian writer claims Placidia as a devotee to the monastic movement, like Jerome’s protégée Paula. Was Placidia refusing, as has been claimed, to play her foster parents’ game? It is far more likely, given that girls in her position evidently had little say in the matter, that Stilicho was still hoping that Honorius would provide them with an heir through one of their daughters. For this half-Vandal officer to have blatantly set up his own son as a rival to Honorius by marrying him to Placidia when the young emperor’s wives were still having trouble conceiving, would have been unwise. In the meantime, Stilicho would have good reason for fearing that were Placidia to marry and produce children in the interim, they would one day have a strong claim to the throne and spoil his ambitions for a Roman dynasty in his own name. So Placidia was kept on the shelf for the time being, her marginalisation reflected in the fact that she was the only imperial member of the western court not to be named on an extraordinary gold locket found in the sixteenth century in the jewel-filled sarcophagus of her sister-in-law Maria.
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Stilicho’s mettle had been severely tested from day 1 of his guardianship of the western Roman Empire. Since the reign of Valens in 376, when a mass of Goth refugees, under pressure from a surging Hun migration from the north, had attempted to seek asylum inside Roman
borders, the Romans had been struggling to deal with the territorial aspirations of these marauding newcomers. Theodosius had adopted a relatively successful containment policy, giving them land in return for their military aid, but between 405 and 408, the Danube and Rhine frontiers of the western empire took a series of hits from yet more raiding parties, comprised both of Goths and of other barbarian groups. To add to Stilicho’s problems, a usurper presumptuously calling himself Constantine III was leading a mutiny of troops in Britain and Gaul and the Balkans were being treated as a looters’ playground by a separate 20,000-strong group of migrant Goths led by Alaric, who had been trying for some years to force either the western or eastern Roman Empire to give them a settlement of land. In 406, an olive branch was extended to Alaric by Stilicho himself who promised an agreement in return for the barbarians’ military assistance in asserting western control over territory in Illyricum, an offer that Alaric duly accepted. But Stilicho’s problems on the frontiers were soon surpassed by the dangers he faced closer to home, specifically at Honorius’s court, where he had made too many enemies. After the death of Honorius’s brother Arcadius at Constantinople in 408, a rumour spread that Stilicho was scheming to set his own son Eucherius on the eastern throne, a rumour which Honorius was apparently willing to believe. On 22 August 408, Stilicho was cornered in a church in Ravenna and murdered.

Alaric’s deal was in the dust. He decided to gamble. In November 408, he arrived with an army of around 40,000 warriers outside Rome – still the symbolic jewel in the imperial crown for all its political isolation – and held the city to ransom. After a two-year siege, frustrated at Honorius’s constant prevarication, the Goths marched through the Salarian Gate and sacked the city in August 410, shaking it until its pockets rattled. In the fallout, people asked themselves who had opened the gate and let the barbarians in. Fingers were pointed by several ancient chroniclers at a woman, though they could not agree on which woman. The sixth-century account of Procopius pinned the blame on a noblewoman named Proba. But others asserted that even before the barbarians had entered the city, the Roman Senate had already weeded out the real culprit – Stilicho’s widow Serena.

Serena and her surviving daughter Thermantia had found themselves outcasts after Stilicho’s death. Thermantia had been summarily divorced and sent back to her mother, while Serena had been left with nothing, her husband’s assets all confiscated. Mother and daughter
sought refuge in Rome – conceivably even attempting to make a home for themselves in the old imperial residence on the Palatine. Also living in Rome that summer was Galla Placidia, now aged around twenty, still unmarried and evidently still left out in the cold by her brother’s court in Ravenna. But when Serena was accused of secretly parleying with Alaric, the Roman Senate – according to the account of Zosimus – decided to consult Serena’s cousin and former foster daughter Placidia, the only member of the imperial family available, on the decision of whether the former regent’s wife should be put to death for her crimes. Placidia’s answer was yes. A sentence of strangulation was passed on Stilicho’s widow.
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The notion that any Roman woman could be responsible for such a dereliction of her traditional duty as helpmate and guardian of the household as to betray it to barbarian invaders was anathema even to its early chroniclers, who condemned a Vestal Virgin named Tarpeia for treacherously opening the gates of Rome to the Sabines in exchange for gold. This negative stereotype was also grist to the mill of writers like Zosimus, who used such failures of female character as proof both that the traditional gods had abandoned their protection of Rome and that the new religion of Christianity had softened the backbone of the Roman Empire.
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Yet Zosimus himself admitted that he did not think Serena had had any such intention to conspire with Alaric. Naturally, his report of Placidia’s acquiescence in Serena’s death sentence fuels questions about their relationship over the years. Whether she thought her former foster mother was guilty or not, it is hard not to suspect that her condemnation of Serena was the bitter culmination of years of dislike.

After three days of filling their boots, Alaric and his Goths left, heading south in a renewed search for a permanent homeland. But a new member had now joined their touring party. Among the sacks of gold and silver, silks, skins and spices that the Goths had acquired from their siege and loaded on to their travelling convoy, they had procured a valuable human souvenir – the emperor’s sister, Galla Placidia herself. Placidia’s feelings on finding herself hostage to a many-thousand-strong band of barbarian migrants can only be imagined. But ahead of her lay six years in their company, the bargaining chip in repeated diplomatic haggling between her captors and the Romans over the Goths’ continued demands for a land settlement. As the Goth convoy disappeared from Roman view, her future looked dangerous and uncertain.
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While Honorius and his western advisers grappled with the problem of his sister’s abduction, which may not have been high on his list of priorities given the continuing problems presented by the usurper Constantine III and barbarian raiding parties, the court in Constantinople had been having a relatively less troublesome time. While Stilicho cracked the whip in the west, the reign of Galla Placidia’s elder half-brother Arcadius had been stage-managed for him by a coterie of eunuch courtiers, one of whom – Eutropius – had arranged the young emperor’s marriage on 27 April 395 to Eudoxia, the daughter of a Frankish general who, like Stilicho and Magnus Magnentius, had graduated from barbarian origins to become
magister militum
of the Roman army. Eudoxia’s public image on coins expressed devout allegiance to the memory of Helena, featuring as it did depictions of a cross on a wreath – a clear nod to Helena’s associations with the True Cross. A hand appeared from the ether above the empress’s head to crown her with a wreath on other coins. This image, known as the
manus Dei
or
dextera Dei
– the hand of God – denoted divine approval and was already a common sight on the coinage of Arcadius. Like her role models Helena and Aelia Flaccilla, Eudoxia was also praised for busying herself in support of the orthodox Nicene faith, her efforts initially earning her accolades from the bishop of Constantinople at the time, John Chrysostom. But a tempestuous falling-out between the empress and the bishop over her objections to one of his sermons, and his to the noise from a crowd of her supporters while he was conducting a service in the church of Hagia Sophia, drew accusations from John’s supporters that Eudoxia was an emissary of the devil. When she died of a fatal miscarriage on 6 October 404, it was said to have been brought on by her trauma over this affair.
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