The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (8 page)

Antony’s and Cleopatra’s affair, which began while the former was still married to Fulvia, has been reimagined and re-enacted on countless occasions in literature, art and film, perhaps most notoriously and certainly most expensively in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 film production,
Cleopatra
, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
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Other incarnations range from the great eighteenth-century canvases of Renaissance painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to silver watch-casings, snuff-boxes and kitsch, gaudy enamel figurines manufactured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Amongst the literary reconstructions, Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
of course stands out, though there are also famous retellings from the likes of Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dryden. The principal source for Shakespeare’s play though was an English translation of the account written at the beginning of the second century by Antony’s biographer Plutarch.
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Although Plutarch had consulted earlier accounts including that of Quintus Dellius, an eye-witness to Antony and Cleopatra’s first meeting, he clearly also relied on his imagination in the telling of the couple’s tale, plugging gaps in his source material with his own fiction, describing scenes when no one but the protagonists were in the room or putting long speeches in the mouths of characters which could never have been recorded for posterity.
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It is essential both to the history of Antony’s and Octavian’s clash at Actium, and to understanding the stories of the first Roman empresses who rise to prominence in the aftermath of her death, to recognise that Cleopatra, the original model for a kaleidoscopic array of medieval and modern copies of the Egyptian queen, is herself a composite, woven from a miscellany of different sources and judgements crafted, edited and disseminated in the climate of Rome’s victory over Egypt at the battle of Actium and fostered by Cleopatra’s eventual conqueror Octavian. The Cleopatra we know today, summed up by one ancient author as a woman prepared to use her
artes meretricae
(‘whoreish arts’) to get her way with the Roman Antony, is in fact a wraith, the echo of a phantasm created and sustained by the publicity machine of Octavian, who was intent on casting Cleopatra as the embodiment of barbarian feminine values whom it was Octavian’s duty and destiny to crush, and in the process, win a moral victory both for the masculine Roman values of
virtus
(‘courage’) and
pietas
(‘piety’) which he claimed to represent, and for the traditional feminine traits of fidelity and chastity epitomised by his wife Livia and sister Octavia.

In the tale as told by Plutarch, Cleopatra’s spectacular arrival in
Tarsus in 41 BC was followed by an exchange of competitive hospitality between herself and Antony, as each attempted to outdo the other by hosting lavish banquets, an encounter in which Antony came off looking the worst. Cleopatra’s company at the dinner table was nonetheless sufficient to captivate him so thoroughly that she was able to whisk him off to Alexandria for the winter, all thought of his military duties abandoned. A recital of Antony’s Egyptian sojourn follows, an eccentric catalogue of whimsical anecdotes and exploits portraying the couple as inveterate pleasure-seekers and pranksters. Cleopatra encouraged Antony in all manner of pastimes, including gambling and hunting, and they were even said to have formed a drinking club called the ‘Society of Inimitable Livers’, and to have dressed up as slaves to go gallivanting through the streets of Alexandria, much to the delight of the population. They spent money like water, ordering feasts for a party of twelve that would better have fed a hundred. The pair also played practical jokes. Annoyed at his lack of success fishing in the harbour of Alexandria one day while Cleopatra was watching, Antony told one of his slaves to swim underwater and attach some previously caught fish to the end of his line which he duly hauled up in triumph. Cleopatra turned the tables the next day, in front of a large audience of her friends whom she had forewarned, by ordering one of her own slaves to attach a fish clearly not native to the Mediterranean to Antony’s hook, much to his embarrassment when he reeled it in.
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Whether rumour or fact, tales like this were priceless ammunition for Octavian over in Italy. In 40 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, but news of Lucius’s and Fulvia’s rout by Octavian’s forces in Perusia had already drawn Antony away from his Egyptian second family, back to Italy and his confrontation with Octavian. The result was the pact at Brundisium, ratified by Antony’s marriage to Octavia. Cleopatra was suddenly out of the picture and remained so for the next three years, as Antony, tempted back into line alongside his rival, directed military operations against the Parthians from Athens, where he had set up home with Octavia.

But then in the autumn of 37 BC, while Octavia was still receiving praise for her role in brokering peace between her husband and her brother at Tarentum, Antony headed back to the east for a reunion with Cleopatra. He proceeded to attempt an invasion of Parthia in 36 BC, with Cleopatra as his financial backer, but was driven into a calamitous retreat, tarnishing his military reputation. Meanwhile
Octavian had killed two birds with one stone by defeating the triumvirs’ old enemy Sextus Pompeius at the battle of Naulochus on 3 September and simultaneously ousting the hapless Lepidus from the third spot at the triumvirate’s table on a charge of trying to usurp Octavian’s authority in the battle for Sicily. Three had become two and the deck was steadily stacking in Octavian’s favour.

The ace up Octavian’s sleeve was Octavia. Just as she had been an instrument for peace, she was now to become an instrument for war. In the summer of 35 BC, not long after Antony had suffered his humiliating reversal in the Parthian campaign, Octavia travelled from Rome to her old marital home in Athens, taking with her money, army supplies and troop reinforcements for her husband. Plutarch is again our reporter, describing first Octavia’s reception in Athens, where she found letters from Antony forbidding her from proceeding further, and her self-restraint despite her anger at his dissembling. He then sketches Cleopatra’s mental turmoil at the thought that ‘Octavia was coming to take her on in hand-to-hand combat’ and her strategy of shamming illness as though grief-stricken at the thought of losing Antony. Reproached by Cleopatra’s aides who plaintively censured him for neglecting the woman who loved him so much, Antony was said to have become ‘so soft and effeminate’ that he was persuaded to abandon his latest military project and return to her side in Alexandria. Octavia was forced to return to Rome but refused to leave the home she shared there with her husband, against the wishes of her brother. She elected to remain there caring both for her own children and for Antony’s offspring with Fulvia, continuing to welcome his friends, and in the process ‘hurting Antony without meaning to, because he became hated for wronging a woman of her fine quality’.
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The portrait of Cleopatra as a deceitful manipulator, of Antony as soft and effeminate and of Octavia as a faithful, wronged wife were all hallmarks of Octavian’s increasingly vociferous campaign to persuade the Roman public that he was the only man to lead them. With typical tactical savvy, he seized with relish the opportunity to make serious political capital out of the trouble in his sister’s marriage, and threw all of his weight behind a strategy aimed at boosting his credentials as a champion of old-fashioned conservative morality while painting Antony as the emasculated puppet of a foreign queen. In the process, a glass ceiling of sorts was broken for women in Roman public life, as Livia and Octavia became increasingly important in
helping define Octavian’s image as devoted husband, brother and family man.

The year 35 BC was the watershed. In a bid to ratchet up his campaign to sell the Roman public an image of his wife and sister as the new Cornelias for their age, Octavian approved the special grant of a series of remarkable honours and privileges to Octavia and Livia. Their new entitlements were threefold: first, they were awarded a protection known as
sacrosanctitas
, making it an offence to utter verbal insults against them. Secondly, they were given immunity from
tutela
– male guardianship – which effectively meant they had the freedom to manage their own financial affairs. Thirdly, statuary portraits of Octavia and Livia were to be commissioned for public display.
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These three marks of distinction put the two women in an extraordinary and unprecedented position. The right of
sacrosanctitas
was a concession reserved exclusively for the publicly elected male political class of tribunes. The granting of it to Octavia and Livia acknowledged their emergence into a position of public political significance hitherto closed off to women. It also suggests that there had been an escalation of the war of words between Antony’s and Octavian’s camps of supporters, which had led to retaliatory insults being directed at Livia and Octavia – or at least, that that was the impression Octavian
wanted
to create. The award of
tutela
was not completely innovatory, as it was a right that had long been shared by the Vestal Virgins. But all other Roman women, even those whose fathers and husbands were dead, were required to accept the supervision of a
tutor
or guardian, and the honour by association with the Vestals was clear. Octavia and Livia were to be treated on a par with the most revered group of women in Roman society.
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The grant of statues was potentially even more significant, however. Politicians of the Roman Republic had long proved themselves staunch opponents of the idea of allowing a woman to be venerated in public sculpture. In 184 BC, a speech by the great orator and moral stickler Cato the Elder had caustically disparaged the idea, and prior to Octavian’s announcement in 35 BC, we hear of only a single other example where a real-life Roman woman was publicly honoured in the city with a statue in her likeness – who else but Cornelia, commemorated for her role as mother of the Gracchi with the dedication of a bronze statue which is unfortunately lost.
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But that exception notwithstanding, the idea of women taking their place in the male
public gallery of portraits honouring Rome’s mythological and historical leaders was still deeply alien to a senatorial class notoriously wary of permitting women to cross the threshold of politics.

Octavia of course already had a public portrait profile of sorts in the east, thanks to the coins issued by Greek and Asian mints under her husband Antony’s jurisdiction during the more peaceful years of their marriage. Moreover, while statues of women were taboo in the city of Rome itself, it was not uncommon to erect statues of the wives, daughters and mothers of high-ranking men in the Greek eastern areas of empire. The royal houses of the east also displayed few qualms about granting space to their female dynasts on coins and statuary. In keeping with the portrait practices of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra herself projected her own image across her kingdom, in statuary, on temple reliefs and coins. Perhaps this was the key to Octavian’s motivation in sanctioning such statues of his sister and wife in Rome. In giving the nod to a sculpture programme featuring Octavia and Livia, Octavian was pointedly setting up the women of his own family in direct competition with their eastern counterpart.
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But there were risks attached to such a ploy, given that public statuary of female family members in the east commonly went hand in hand with kingship, and might lay their sponsor open to the accusation of dynastic aspirations, a touchy subject in republican Rome. Octavian had to tread carefully. His gesture meant that in a single stroke, Octavia and Livia were emancipated from many of the usual supervisory restrictions on their gender, and simultaneously became the most scrutinised women in the entire city. Therefore, Octavian had to get these portraits just right, so as not to offend the traditionalists whose support he needed.

We cannot identify for certain which, if any, of the catalogue of surviving portraits we have of Livia and Octavia may be prototypes of these earliest statues, but one of the best contenders can be found on the ground floor of the Museo Nazionale in Rome.
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A slightly pockmarked marble bust, just under 40 cm (15¾ inches) high, the face is of a serenely beautiful woman with regular symmetrical features and large heavy-lidded eyes, her neatly combed locks meticulously arranged into the quiff-like
nodus
hairstyle, with just a few tendrils allowed to escape from the hairline above her ears. Found at Velletri, south-east of Rome, it has been widely accepted as a portrait of Octavia, whose family originated from that region, and the identification is bolstered by the facial similarity to portraits of her brother
Octavian and comparisons to her own profile on coins. Moreover, the more old-fashioned style of her
nodus
, the hair whipped up into a higher peak than was the fashion in subsequent decades, supports the suggestion that this portrait may indeed be a close relative of those original sculptures commissioned of Octavia in 35 BC.
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The Velletri bust is the most commonly reproduced image of Octavia today. A far larger number and variety of ancient portraits survive for her sister-in-law Livia, thanks to the latter’s greater longevity in the spotlight, but during this teething period for female sculpture, the portraits of both women were so similar that distinguishing them with any confidence is sometimes impossible. Coin and statuary portraits do not, regrettably, give us anything like a photographic facsimile of how Livia, Julia and other imperial women actually looked in real life, any more than portraits of Roman men do. Individual facial quirks do sometimes creep in, which can help with identification – for example, some of Livia’s round-cheeked, thin-lipped early portraits betray a slight overbite shared by other members of the Claudian family, while Octavia has the serious expression and aristocratic bone structure which characterise portraits of her brother. But by and large, these were idealised images whose sponsors were less concerned with getting a good likeness than with projecting a blandly appropriate image that could be uniformly produced by artists and sculptors across the empire. This stern regularity in itself articulated the key message being silently preached.
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By portraying Livia and Octavia in inscrutable, perfectly nodus-coiffed uniformity in their early portraits, a vindication of the virtues of traditional, decorous Roman womanhood was proclaimed, and a dignified reproof offered to Antony’s desertion of his Roman wife for Egyptian Cleopatra.