The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (58 page)

For the Roman Empire was not quite dead. The east survived the breakup of its western wing, and lived on under the banner of the Byzantine Empire, the history of which is littered with the colourful stories of empresses such as Theodora – the former circus-entertainer who became the wife of sixth-century emperor Justinian; her niece
Sophia, who was said to have taken over the reins of empire when her husband Justin II went insane during the 570s; and Irene, who ruled on behalf of her son Constantine VI in the eighth century. All of them in turn became pathfinders for the medieval queens of Europe. And for the Byzantine empresses themselves, there was no uncertainty about whom they were expected to look to in history for inspiration. Statues of Constantine’s mother Helena continued to outnumber those of all other women honoured throughout Constantinople. A survey taken of the city’s antiquities in the eighth century tells us that of the twenty-eight imperial statues identified throughout Constantinople at that time, Pulcheria, Eudoxia, even Constantine’s disgraced wife Fausta were all accounted for, immortalised with two or three images apiece. But no fewer than six of the statues – almost a quarter, in other words – were of the first Christian
Augusta
.
²

Not surprisingly, the names of Livia, Messalina, Agrippina and Julia appeared nowhere in the document. To all intents and purposes, the wives and women who had established the behavioural blueprint for Rome’s first ladies almost 500 years earlier were little more than a distant memory now – the Roman buildings to which they had once lent their patronage stripped or broken up to provide construction material for the Christian empire; many of their dedicated statues recycled and remodelled to assume the facial features of new female icons; a large proportion of the literary works responsible for the preservation of their names facing the threat of extinction, thanks to the heavily biased allocation of copying resources to the great wave of biblical and liturgical literature produced during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It would be many centuries, in fact, before the attention of authors or artists returned to the women of the early Roman Empire, and then, as we have seen, almost invariably with hostile intent in mind.

The ghosts of these women nevertheless loomed large over the political landscape out of which the empresses and queens of early medieval and modern Europe were born. Though anxieties about the power of women to corrupt the political process had existed long before the arrival of Livia on the Palatine, those concerns had crystallised around her and her successors, and in turn became integral to the moral criteria by which female sovereigns and consorts would be judged for generations to come.

It is a legacy that we live with today. Never before have the wives of prime ministerial and presidential candidates been subject to so
much public scrutiny – fêted and mocked for their fashion choices, criticised for their political pronouncements, and called upon to give speeches and interviews promoting their spouses as caring family men. All the while, back-room spin doctors scrutinise their personal and professional backgrounds, looking for weaknesses to exploit. In March 2009, a frenzied media reaction greeted the arrival of the wives of world heads of state attending the G20 conference in London – resulting in more attention being paid to them than the economic agenda of the meeting. In today’s personality-driven political culture, no politician’s wife – or indeed, in certain cases, husband – can expect to escape such scrutiny altogether. Some will embrace it – a few may even prove guilty of taking advantage of their proximity to the political process. Others will hide from it, yet reluctantly allow themselves to be pushed into the spotlight if it will help their partner’s personal approval ratings. The question of what the proper role of a politician’s spouse or family members should be in his or her campaign and administration is one that elicits many different responses. And in that respect, the ‘first ladies’ of the Roman Empire still speak powerfully to us today.

1. Livia supervising the making of clothes for her family, in a drawing by the French artist André Castaigne. Wool-working was the archetypal pastime of the Roman matron.

2. The actress Siân Phillips gives a famously malevolent performance in the role of Livia, in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel
I, Claudius
.

3. The lush gardenscapes from the summer dining room of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta are among the most magnificent Roman paintings ever recovered.

4. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, detail from
Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus
(1819). Octavia swoons at hearing the name of her son Marcellus, watched by Livia, who was suspected of involvement in the young man’s death.

5. This portrait bust of Octavia was found at Velletri, just south-east of Rome, her family’s home town. It has strong facial similarities to portraits of her brother. Like Livia, Octavia wears her hair in a
nodus
style.

6. Mark Antony (
right
) courted controversy by featuring not just his own profile but that of his lover Cleopatra on coins issued by eastern Roman mints under his control.

7. The miniature image of Augustus’s daughter Julia on the reverse of this issue of 13–12
BC
is flanked by the heads of her two infant boys, Gaius and Lucius.

8. This marble bust of Antonia Minor is known as the ‘Wilton House Antonia’, named after the residence of its one-time owner, the eighth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery.