Caesars' Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire

Praise for Caesars’ Wives

What a great idea for a book this is—what a record of filial loathing, sexual scheming, parental neglect, suicide, fratricide, matricide, patricide, infanticide, incest, and abuse . . . . The result is a book both scholarly and racy . . . . a book to be commended: one that restores to life some of the toughest, most colorful, and most bizarre women who ever existed.

—Robert Harris, author of The Ghost, for The Sunday Times (London)

At last. A book that does not sell us the powerful, intriguing women of Rome simply as poisoners, schemers, and femmes fatales, but that brings a wonderfully rich, varied, and original range of evidence to bear on the reality of their extraordinary lives. After reading this book you will feel as though you have travelled the city with Livia, Agrippina, et al.—glimpsing the heady power play and high-octane culture of the day and understanding both more subtly and more deeply how these women rode—and sometimes outmaneuvered—the political storm that was the Roman world.

—Bettany Hughes, author of Helen of Troy

"A vivid account of the women who cracked the marble ceiling of ancient Rome’s corridors of power. Caesars’ Wives emerge from the long dark shadows of their better known imperial consorts as brilliantly colored personalities of flesh, blood, intellect, and passion. Annelise Freisenbruch has stripped away the layers of myth and painted the portraits of these remarkable wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters with clarity, sympathy, and a charming humor."

—David Tripp, author of Illegal Tender and Special Consultant to Sotheby’s

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Copyright © 2010 by Annelise Freisenbruch, Ph.D.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freisenbruch, Annelise, 1977–

Caesars’ wives : sex, power, and politics in the Roman empire / Annelise Freisenbruch.—

1st Free Press hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Emperors’ spouses—Rome—Biography. 2. Empresses—Rome—Biography.

3. Wives—Rome—Biography. 4. Rome—Biography. 5. Rome—Kings and rulers—Biography.

6. Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C.–476 A.D.

7. Rome—Politics and government—30 B.C.–476 A.D. I. Title.

DG274.3.F74 2010

937’.060922—dc22

2010019368

ISBN 978-1-4165-8303-5

ISBN 978-1-4165-8357-8 (ebook)

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (1957). London: Penguin.

Reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus, translated with an introduction by Michael Grant (Penguin Classics 1956, Sixth revised edition 1989). Copyright © Michael Grant Publications Ltd., 1956, 1959, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1989. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Contents

Family Trees

Introduction: I, Claudia

A Note on Naming and Dating Conventions

1. Ulysses in a Dress: The Making of a Roman First Lady

2. First Family: Augustus’s Women

3. Family Feud: The People’s Princess and the Women of Tiberius’s Reign

4. Witches of the Tiber: The Last Julio-Claudian Empresses

5. Little Cleopatra: A Jewish Princess and the First Ladies of the Flavian Dynasty

6. Good Empresses: The First Ladies of the Second Century

7. The Philosopher Empress: Julia Domna and the Syrian Matriarchy

8. The First Christian Empress: Women in the Age of Constantine

9. Brides of Christ, Daughters of Eve: The First Ladies of the Last Roman Dynasty

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

I, Claudia

Caesar’s wife must be above reproach.

Plutarch, Life of Julius Caesar;

Mrs. Landingham, The West Wing

Visitors to Cambridge University’s Museum of Classical Archaeology might be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into a reclusive art collector’s private playground. In this long, echoing gallery under a high, beam-latticed glass roof, a rustling soundtrack provided by the brush of sketching artists’ pencils, one is treated to a parade of more than four hundred reproductions of the most iconic and instantly recognized images from the classical world: the friezes and pediments removed by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon; the Apollo Belvedere, once worshipped by eighteenth-century neoclassicists as the most beautiful surviving statue from antiquity; the Vatican’s harrowing sculpture of tragic Laocoön and his sons being dragged to their watery grave by two strangling serpents before the doomed walls of Troy.

Arriving in the final bay of the museum’s circuit, we are greeted by a Roman hall of fame, a disembodied lineup of the men who ruled Rome, immortalized in portrait busts. Most of the big names are here, their physiognomies conjuring their well-known historical personalities: a pudgy, youthful Nero; a wizened, bullish Vespasian; a cultured, bearded Hadrian; and a pinched, discontented Commodus. Huddled in the back row of this illustrious gallery of gray patrician heads, the smooth, pale face of a woman sits slightly incongruously. Her name is printed simply on a card underneath—Faustina Minor—no more, no less. It is an airbrushed, bloodless mask of a face, expressionless and unreadable, the ripples of her combed hair carefully regulated, the shells of her almond eyes gazing blankly at something behind us.¹

What is left of who this woman once was in this chalk-white echo? For an echo is all it is, not simply because it is inanimate, but because, like most other things in this museum, it is a copy, a plaster reconstruction created from the original more than a century ago, when such cast collections, and indeed the study of Classical art, were particularly fashionable. It is not even a certainty that it really is Faustina Minor, a woman whose name is not known to many, though she was in fact the wife of the much admired sixteenth emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius. How should we go about imagining the life of the woman behind this enigmatic plaster shell, who looked out at an empire over her husband’s shoulder yet about whose life little evidence survives?

The temptation to play Pygmalion, to bring Faustina and the other great women of imperial Rome to life according to one’s fantasy, is incredibly tempting, and has indeed proved so for many artists and writers. Perhaps the most influential of all modern portraits is that created by the British author Robert Graves, who in August 1933, while living in exile in the sleepy Majorcan village of Deya, dispatched his latest manuscript to his London publishers, hoping disconsolately that it would enable him to pay off a £4,000 debt on his house. The book was I, Claudius, an account of the first imperial dynasty of the Roman Empire told from the perspective of its stammering, eponymous narrator, Claudius, Rome’s fourth emperor. Graves professed scorn for the work, calling it a literary conjuring trick, yet both it and its sequel, Claudius the God, proved huge commercial and critical successes, and in 1976 the novels were adapted for television in Britain and the United States. The thirteen-episode saga, sold under the tagline The family whose business was ruling the world, quickly became the Sopranos of its day, winning acclaim for its all-star British cast and charting record figures for the networks.

But in a shift in emphasis from the narrative focus of Graves’s books, the real stars of the show—the ones who dominated most of the scenes and attracted much of the reviewers’ attention and whose faces became the defining promotional image for the program—were the women in Claudius’s life, in particular his grandmother Livia, the wife of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, and Claudius’s third and fourth wives, Messalina and Agrippina. These women formed a dangerous trio: Livia, a Machiavellian who eliminated all rivals to her son Tiberius with cold-blooded insouciance; Messalina, a murderous tease who cuckolded and humiliated her elderly husband; and Agrippina, a black widow whose hand was ultimately behind Claudius’s demise.²

The long shadow cast by I, Claudius was well-illustrated in the recent popular HBO series Rome, which chose Julius Caesar’s niece Atia for its most malevolent and memorable character. Even though there is barely any historical evidence for Atia’s life beyond the suggestion that she was a devoted and morally upstanding mother to her son Octavian, she was played here with scene-stealing brio as a cunning, amoral temptress, a clear cultural hangover from the series’ 1970s televisual predecessor. However, Graves’s own unflattering portrait of Rome’s leading women was not entirely his own creation. He simply chose to cooperate, for the most part, with the descriptions of them written by ancient Rome’s best known and most revered commentators, and indeed made a virtue of doing so. "I have nowhere gone against history," he wrote in his defense of the books’ themes, citing the ancient Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius as corroborators of his depiction of the women of Rome’s first imperial dynasty.³

Indeed the ancient literary sources that inspired Graves seem, on the face of things, to conform with his characterizations. Besides Livia, Messalina, and Agrippina, a sample of the women of the Roman imperial age includes Julia, a wisecracking daughter who disgraced her father by getting drunk in the Roman Forum and then having sex with strangers on the speaker’s platform; Poppaea, a vain and beautiful mistress who persuaded the emperor to kill his mother so that he might marry her; Domitia, a wife who committed adultery with an actor before conspiring in her husband’s assassination; and Fausta, a stepmother who tried to seduce her own stepson and then engineered his execution before herself being boiled to death as punishment. These are just a few of the women whose reputations are responsible for the largely hostile reaction to the women of Rome throughout history. So vilified are they that their names have been invoked by many as justifications for denying women a share in political power through the ages, their faces held up—literally, in some cases—as malignant and universal specters of murderous delinquency, promiscuity, and criminality.⁴

For Graves was by no means the first to exhume the women of antiquity from the pages of Tacitus and his Roman contemporaries. Far from it. Rome’s imperial women had already made countless appearances through the centuries in post-Classical Western cultural productions: plays, histories, novels, operas, films, poems, pornographic compendia, paintings, prints, sculptures, manuscript illustrations, and even playing card illustrations and other novelty curios. In the fourteenth century the first biographical catalogues of notorious women from history began to appear, beginning with Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus—On Famous Women—in 1374. Roman women made regular appearances in such lists, held up in a few isolated cases as role models of female stoicism and patriotism but more often touted as sternly worded cautionary tales to rebellious-minded young ladies in widely read volumes, such as the Scottish clergyman James Fordyce’s 1766 tome, Sermons to Young Women. In history and literature their names have been recycled as pseudonyms for other famous, and controversial, women: Catherine the Great, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine de’ Medici, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, and Josephine Bonaparte, to name a handful, have all been likened to female counterparts from the Roman Empire, the comparison alluded to in nicknames and portraits. There was even a Messalina of Ilford, twenty-nine-year-old Edith Thompson, who in January 1923 became the first woman in fifteen years to be hanged in Britain for her alleged part in the murder of her husband. Many have since called the verdict into question, but press reports at the time did not hesitate to cite the erotic content of Thompson’s letters to her lover and co-accused, Frederick Bywaters, as justification for naming her after Claudius’s nymphomaniacal and murderous third bride.⁵

The historical image of Roman womanhood was not always so tainted. During the eighteenth century, for example, the label Roman matron often stood for something praiseworthy and admirable. Nowhere is this seen to better effect than in the correspondence between Abigail Adams, wife of prospective U.S. president John Adams, and her friend Mercy Otis Warren. In 1777, while at her Braintree home in Boston, Abigail received a letter from Mercy in response to one she had sent expressing melancholy at her husband John’s all too frequent absences from home at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Mercy’s letter counselled her friend to be robust and remember the example set by the matrons of Rome:

I do not wonder at the Regrets you Express at the distance and absence of your Excellent Husband. But should not the same Heroic Virtue, the same Fortitude, patience and Resolution, that Crowns the memory of the ancient Matron, Adorn the Character of Each modern Fair who Adopts the signature of Portia.⁶

Mercy Warren’s postscript alluded to Abigail Adams’s habit, first acquired in May 1775, of signing herself Portia in her letters, a name she had appropriated from the wife of one of late Republican Rome’s most famous revolutionary heroes—Brutus, the assassin of the dictator Julius Caesar. It was an appropriate penname for the wife of a man who in common with his fellow American founding fathers, identified himself strongly with Roman republican statesmen and martyrs such as Cicero, and Abigail Adams was not alone in having adopted this epistolary practice. Mercy Warren herself frequently signed herself Marcia in her letters during the 1770s, either in tribute to the admired wife of Republican statesman Cato the Younger or to Marcia’s daughter of the same name who was also the half-sister of Portia. She also occasionally used Cornelia as a pseudonym. But the point of such role-playing for Mercy and Abigail was about much more than mirroring the practices of their husbands. They were looking to the Roman matron as inspiration and sanction for their own self-professed role as female patriots in the dawning age of American independence, at a time when the question of how much female involvement was ever desirable in politics was a subject of much scrutiny and skepticism.⁷

Abigail Adams’s identification with Portia was encouraged by her husband, and weekly newspapers, ladies’ magazines, and other genteel literary channels regularly advised their female readers to draw inspiration from their education in the Classics and to emulate Roman female forebears. Yet such sisterly feelings of identification with the Roman matrons of the Republican era did not extend to the women of the age that succeeded them—the calamitous reputations of the wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers of the Caesars ensured that outside the republican discourse of eighteenth-century America, France, and Britain, comparisons to the Roman women of the past were rarely intended to flatter. In the words of one of Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren’s British correspondents, the outspoken female republican historian Catherine Macaulay, nothing could have stood in greater contrast between the conduct of the Republican Roman matrons she admired and that of the loose vicious women whose presence so often poisoned monarchical governments.⁸

Not all reviews of Rome’s imperial women have proved so negative. A few enjoy relatively favorable reputations both in the literary sources of antiquity and posthumous legend. They include Agrippina Maior (Agrippina the Elder), mother of the emperor Nero’s infamous parent Agrippina Minor (Agrippina the Younger). After being widowed in the year 19 by the suspicious death of her popular husband Germanicus, the elder Agrippina became a figure of sympathy for those who suspected the ruling emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia in Germanicus’s murder. Caenis and Berenice, mistresses respectively of the father-and-son team Vespasian and Titus, have both featured as the heroines of popular plays and novels, and Helena, mother of the Roman Empire’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, was even granted sainthood. Yet it is undoubtedly the more unchaste and dictatorial women who, assisted by popular fictionalizations of their lives, have come to dominate the popular conception of what Rome’s imperial women were really like. Even the saintly examples seem like cardboard-cutout gynoids, the ancient equivalent of Stepford wives.

This book reopens the case file on Livia and her fellow Roman first ladies, aiming to reveal something about them beyond their static, cartoonish stereotypes. But how do we speak for and about them? Rome was a man’s world, no two ways about it. Roman identity was defined exclusively in terms of achievement in the male spheres of militarism and politics, from which its female citizens were shut out. Even the Roman word virtus, meaning courage, was rooted in the word for man, vir. At no point in Roman history could women hold political office. They could not command armies, they could not vote in elections, they had relatively few rights under the law, and overall played a limited and heavily prescribed role in Roman public life, certainly in comparison to their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. Despite occasional evidence of female rebellion against unpopular laws and of debate among jurists and philosophers about the privileges that should be afforded Roman women in the realm of education and property inheritance, there was certainly no such thing as a women’s rights movement in antiquity. Most (though not all) of the Roman first ladies discussed here would never have come to historical notice if it weren’t for the men they married or the sons they gave birth to, and their biographies were invariably constructed in the shadow and reflection of those of their male relatives.

One of the principal conundrums for the modern historian of the women of ancient Rome is that virtually no writing by a woman, let alone a woman of the imperial family, survives in the historical record, with the exception of a few fragmentary scraps of letter-writing, poetry, and graffiti. Whereas today’s political wives tell their own stories in interviews and memoirs, the only known female autobiography of antiquity, written by Nero’s mother, Agrippina Minor, has fallen prey somewhere along the line to history’s censoring hand—whether deliberately destroyed or simply lost to time, we don’t know—along with any other female-authored works that may have once existed. Men of antiquity have been victim to the same erasure; the writings of Claudius, for example, have not survived, works that may have revised the popular verdict that Rome’s fourth emperor was an ineffectual and comical figure.⁹ But the systematic silencing of the voices of women from ancient history reflects more general prejudices about women and the value or desirability of hearing about them in the first place. As a result we can never see the women of antiquity except through the eyes of those who were writing about them decades or even centuries after their deaths and who portrayed them only as extras and supporting players in the narratives of their male relatives’ lives.

Perhaps the greatest dilemma of all, though, lies in steering a course through the conflicting views presented by the existing literature. How do we choose, for example, between the contrasting versions of Livia: the uncomplimentary descriptions of her as an unruly bully by the great Roman historian and fierce Julio-Claudian critic Tacitus; the sly flattery of her as a chaste matron with the beauty of Venus by the poet Ovid; and the appreciation of her stoic fortitude in the face of bereavement by the philosopher Seneca? Ancient sources are often a bewildering and frustrating Gordian knot of contradiction, bet hedging, gossip, insinuation, and red herring. They do not share our biographical preoccupations, such as character development and psychological motivation, something that is particularly evident in their descriptions of female characters. Instead they tend to paint their subjects in brash, surface-deep primary colors, assigning them to moral types: conniving stepmothers, for example (Livia, Agrippina Minor, and to some extent Trajan’s wife Plotina), or wronged wives (Augustus’s sister Octavia or Nero’s first wife, Claudia Octavia).¹⁰

Faced with such dilemmas, the historian is tempted to pick and choose which parts of the stories sound most plausible—which usually means least lurid—and then to resort to psychoanalysis and intuition to fill in the rest. But deciding definitively which elements in these crude character sketches are true and which are false is largely a hopeless task. No historian has a privileged antenna to the past, and it would be disingenuous to claim that we can ventriloquize for these women in the absence of their own voices and other pieces of their lives. I do not pretend to do so, nor do I claim to have written a biography of these women in any conventional sense. I cannot get inside these women’s heads or reconstruct their lives in exact detail.¹¹

Instead I take an agnostic approach to the eclectic array of narrative choices and prototypes that face us. These women all seem to suffer from a historical multipersonality disorder, to wear many masks, and to suffer numerous caricatures in their ancient depictions. In fact these are key to our understanding of their place in Roman society. The identities of Rome’s first ladies seem so fluid, contradictory, and contentious because they were dictated by the political agenda and reputation of the emperor to whom they were married or related, as well as the critical reaction to his reign. In general emperors aimed to project an image of being strong family men, and their female relatives would be deployed as goodwill ambassadors and models of familial propriety, propping up that image. But of course in the hands of an emperor’s opponents or a succeeding dynasty keen to sever ties and extinguish memories of their predecessors, depictions of the women could be wildly different.

This is why the term first lady seems apposite. It is in part a nod to the description of Livia on more than one occasion in the literature of antiquity as femina princeps—a feminized version of her husband Augustus’s chosen title of princeps, meaning chief or leading citizen—which loosely translates to first lady.¹² But it also invites attention to the inescapable and sometimes startling similarities between the parts played by these women of ancient Rome and those played by modern political spouses in selling to their public a domestic image of their husbands—for husbands rather than wives they still usually are—while helping to further their political agenda, as did Livia and her fellow Roman first ladies.

So we shall see, for example, how individual Roman emperors’ wives were praised for stances such as adopting an approachable, open-house attitude to their subjects, sacrificing clothes and possessions to help raise funds for the Roman army, and cultivating a frugal lifestyle, all in the aid of their husband’s political image. If we consider some of the women for whom the term first lady was originally coined, we see such model actions reverberating through the ages with exactly the same purpose. America’s first presidential spouse, Martha Washington, began a much-copied tradition of opening the official residence to callers on certain days, a suitable gesture from the wife of one of America’s republican founding fathers; Edith Wilson auctioned off the wool from a flock of Shropshire sheep and donated the proceeds to the First World War effort during the presidency of her husband, Woodrow; and Michelle Obama has followed in the practical footsteps of Andrew Johnson’s daughter Martha Johnson Patterson and Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy—the first of whom grazed dairy cows on the White House lawn, the second of whom kept her clothing receipts for inspection—by planting a vegetable garden, a politically savvy move in the eco-conscious, economically perilous times in which her husband was sworn in.

Conversely, just as certain Roman empresses were pilloried as spendthrifts or accused by their husband’s opponents of interfering in politics, similar criticisms have dogged many modern first ladies. Mary Lincoln and Nancy Reagan both spent lavishly; the former racked up unpaid clothing bills at a time when families were mourning relatives lost in the American Civil War, and the latter spent more than $200,000 on new china for the White House the day before her husband’s administration was due to announce plans to lower nutrition standards for school lunch programs. In an illustration of how positive and negative stereotypes can be attached to the same first lady, Michelle Obama is just the latest in a long line of presidents’ wives who have raised hackles by expressing personal political opinions. She has countered this by cultivating a softer, mom-in-chief role in order not to risk alienating conservative-minded voters.¹³ We have inherited such models from Imperial Rome even though ancient and modern female consorts are unquestionably worlds apart in terms of the political and social opportunities open to them.

This book begins on the eve of the imperial age, just as Livia’s husband Augustus stood on the verge of becoming Rome’s first emperor and she its first empress, and proceeds to ghost the footsteps of a selection of the women who followed Livia in that role from the first century through to the fifth, culminating in the death of one of the last empresses of Rome’s western empire, Galla Placidia. Not every imperial woman of that long period of history can be included, but I have chosen to focus on those about whom the richest tradition survives and whose stories are the most important within the narrative of Roman history. Imperial wives are the focus of most chapters, but in many cases the daughters, sisters, mothers, and other female family members of the emperors play just as key a role, as indeed they have during the course of the history of America’s first ladies, notably in the nineteenth century, when presidents’ nieces, sisters, and daughters-in-law were frequently called upon to serve as surrogate consorts and hostesses at the White House in the face of reluctance from the president’s own wife.¹⁴

Looking back into the past can be like peering through a frosted pane of glass, beyond which indistinct shapes and colors move in blurred slow motion. But images and shapes do come nearer the glass, closer into focus, making us squint harder in our desire to see them clearly. We all have our longings to satisfy in this regard, a need to make contact with the past, to stand where someone once stood, to touch something he or she once touched. We can never know exactly who the real Livia, Messalina, Agrippina, and company were, what they thought, what they felt, whether they were every bit as wicked or as saintly as they were painted. But there are moments of discovery that seem to bring us one tantalizing step nearer to them: the cremated remains of some of the slaves who once folded Livia’s clothes and poured out her favorite glass of red wine; the richly decorated house in which Augustus’s disgraced daughter Julia once lived; a jointed ivory doll that a girl growing up in the imperial household might once have played with; or a letter written by a young Roman emperor, reminiscing about long evening talks with his mother as she sat at the end of his bed.

It is at moments such as these, coupled with our increasing willingness to reflect on the vital role that the women of Rome played on Rome’s great stage, that that pale, blank-eyed museum portrait begins to come alive again.

A Note on Naming and Dating Conventions

NAMES

Imperial Roman genealogies are labyrinthine affairs. I have done everything I can to avoid confusion for the reader in trying to give everyone in the book distinct names, though inevitably there are still several female characters with variants on the name Julia, for example. The family trees I have provided will hopefully prove useful here.

Under the Republic, most Roman woman used only one name. During the Imperial age, however, it became more common for a free-born woman to have two names. The first was usually a feminine form of her father’s nomen, or clan name; the second was a version of his cognomen, which identified what branch of the clan he was from. So, for example, Livia Drusilla was the daughter of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, and Valeria Messalina was the daughter of Marcus Valerius Messala Barbatus. However, in a break from convention, certain imperial women were also named after dynastic female predecessors. For example, Livia Julia (known by her nickname of Livilla) was named after her paternal grandmother Livia, rather than in tribute to her father Drusus’s cognomen of Claudius, emphasizing Livia’s unusual importance in the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Women did not change their names at marriage. Former slave women who had been freed kept their old slave name and added on the clan name of the family they had served. Thus Antonia Minor’s scribe-woman Caenis later became known as Antonia Caenis.

Families with more than one daughter of the same name distinguished them by using comparative or ordinal adjectives, so Antonia Minor (Antonia the Younger) was the younger sister of Antonia Maior (Antonia the Elder). In the case of the two Agrippinas, however, Maior distinguishes the elder Agrippina from her more notorious daughter Agrippina Minor. It is perhaps more conventional to use the anglicized form Major, rather than Maior, but I made the amendment after one of my readers pointed out that Agrippina Major and Agrippina Minor sounded like two pupils at an English public school.

DATES

If a BC date is not indicated, all dates may be considered AD.

CAESARS’

WIVES

CHAPTER ONE

Ulysses in a Dress

The Making of a Roman First Lady

The characteristic of the Roman nation was grandeur: its virtues, its vices, its prosperity, its misfortunes, its glory, its infamy, its rise and fall, were alike great. Even the women, disdaining the limits which barbarism and ignorance had, in other nations, assigned to their sex, emulated the heroism and daring of man.

Mary Hays, Female Biography, vol. 2 (1801)

The blaze had seemed to come out of nowhere, surprising those caught in its path and scything a lethal swath through the olive groves and pinewoods of Sparta. As tongues of flame billowed into the night air, filling it with the acrid smell of burning tree sap, the dry sounds of crackling branches were layered with panicked shouts and labored breathing. A man and a woman were hurrying through a burning forest. The going was perilous; at one point the woman’s hair and the trailing hem of her dress were singed, but there was little time to inspect the damage. Enemy forces were hard on their heels and had been harrying them for some time now. Weeks earlier the fugitive couple and their traveling companions had nearly been apprehended as they tried secretly to board a vessel out of the port of Naples, the fractious wails of their baby son almost giving the game away. The man’s name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the woman was his seventeen-year-old wife, Livia Drusilla.¹

The year was 41 BC. Three years earlier the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar by dissidents acting in the name of liberty had plunged the Roman Republic into civil war, dividing its elite ruling classes into two bitterly opposed camps: those backing the assassins Brutus and Cassius, and those supporting Caesar’s self-appointed champions, namely his eighteen-year-old great-nephew and nominated heir, Gaius Octavius, and his lieutenant Marcus Antonius, otherwise known as Octavian and Mark Antony. Together with the ex-consul Marcus Lepidus these self-appointed musketeers had formed a brittle three-way power-sharing agreement known as the Triumvirate and had proceeded to crush Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi in October 42 BC.

But Octavian and Antony were soon at loggerheads, and the Roman elite found itself forced to declare its loyalties once more. A year later the opposing factions clashed violently in Italy, forcing the noble Tiberius Nero, who had chosen to side with Antony, and his young wife, Livia, into their desperate flight. A ten-year countdown was now in motion, with the courses of all parties set for the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, the great sea fight at which Antony, bankrolled by his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra, would square off against Octavian to decide the fate of the Roman Empire once and for all.

As the first act of this grand drama began, Livia Drusilla was still just an extra in the crowd, an invisible character in a society where few women were permitted to make a name for themselves as public figures. But in the second act the man whose troops were pursuing her through Sparta replaced Tiberius Nero as her husband, propelling her to leading-lady status, and by the time the play reached its grand finale Livia was about to become the first lady of the dawning imperial age and the founding mother of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that inaugurated it. Arguably the most powerful, certainly one of the most controversial and formidable women ever to occupy the role—her grandson Caligula later bestowed on her the sobriquet Ulixes stolatus (Ulysses in a dress), a hybrid reference to the Greek warrior known for his cunning and the stola gown worn by upstanding Roman matrons—Livia was the model against whom all subsequent wives of Roman emperors would have to measure themselves.² No woman was to epitomize the pitfalls and paradoxes involved in being a Roman woman in public life better than she.

Unlike her Egyptian opposite number, Cleopatra, to whom she was forced to play second fiddle both over the next decade and in historical memory, Livia Drusilla was not bred into the role of imperial dynast, but nor was she an outsider to the Roman political establishment. Born on 30 January 58 BC into the distinguished patrician family of the Claudii, who boastfully claimed descent from the Trojan war refugee Aeneas, one of the mythical founders of the Roman race, Livia was fourteen when Julius Caesar was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC, triggering civil war among the Roman elite.³ The Claudian clan, from which she was descended on her father’s side—her mother, Alfidia, was from a well-heeled but less aristocratic family based in the Italian coastal town of Fundi—had been a towering presence on the political scene since the early days of the Roman Republic in the fifth century BC, boasting no fewer than twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, and six triumphs (public honors for successful generals). An additional connection through her father was to the illustrious Livian family, one of whose members, Marcus Livius Drusus, had been a populist hero to Italian communities clamoring for Roman citizenship in the early first century BC.⁴ Such a glittering pedigree marked out the young Livia as a great matrimonial asset to any aspirant to political power and a successful suitor duly presented himself in the year 43 BC.⁵

Tiberius Claudius Nero, himself a member of a slightly less exalted branch of the Claudian clan, was described in a letter by the great Roman statesman Cicero as a nobly born, talented and self-controlling young man, and had enjoyed a reasonably auspicious run up the Roman ladder of advancement during the 40s, holding first the quaestorship and later the praetorship, one rung below the highest possible political rank of consul.⁶ Having enjoyed some favor under Julius Caesar, whose fleet he successfully commanded during the Alexandrian War, he nevertheless switched allegiances in the wake of Caesar’s murder, opting to support the assassins Brutus and Cassius, as did Livia’s wealthy father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus—who a year later would find himself on the losing side at Philippi and commit suicide in his tent. Tiberius Claudius Nero would later transfer his loyalties to Mark Antony.

Rome’s political hierarchy was still in disarray following the death of Julius Caesar when Tiberius Nero, thwarted of an earlier desire in 50 BC to marry Cicero’s daughter Tullia, instead opted for a wedding with his kinswoman Livia, who at the age of fifteen was probably around twenty years his junior, a common age gap between prospective spouses in Roman society.⁷ The marriage would most likely have been arranged for Livia by her father, though Roman mothers could evidently have some say in such matchmaking.⁸ Legally, though, almost every Roman woman, with the exception of the six Vestal Virgin priestesses who tended the hearth of the goddess Vesta, was subject to the total authority of her father or paterfamilias as long as he was alive. The father’s control usually persisted even after marriage, because at that time, from the first century BC onward, marriages without manus became increasingly common (manus here having the sense of possession or power). In other words, these were marriages in which a woman and, more important, her dowry in the form of cash and property remained under the legal jurisdiction of her father rather than her spouse. Such arrangements became the norm thanks to the desire of wealthy clans such as Livia’s to keep their estates intact and preserve the integrity of their families by not allowing its members to come under the control of another paterfamilias.⁹

A girl in Livia’s position would have been technically free to refuse to marry, but only in the event that she could have proved that her father’s choice was a man of bad character, an option that few girls probably felt able or inclined to take advantage of. Marriage was the only respectable occupation for a free Roman woman, but it was also the social grease and glue of Rome’s political hierarchy. An aristocratic young girl such as Livia, who had few opportunities to make male or female acquaintances outside of her restricted family circle, could expect to be married more than once in her lifetime, in an elite culture where marriage was often not so much a romantic union as a facilitator of social and political alliances between ambitious families, alliances that might well rest on shifting sands.¹⁰

On the eve of her lavish high-society wedding Livia would have undertaken the first of a series of ceremonial procedures symbolizing her graduation from childhood to adulthood and her transition from her father’s house to her husband’s. A Roman bride put away childish things—her toys and the miniature toga she had worn throughout infancy—and dressed in a straight white woolen dress (tunica recta) that she had woven herself on a special loom. The next day, this simple white bridal tunic was cinched in at the waist with a woolen girdle whose complicated Herculanean knot would eventually be untied by her husband. Her long hair, which had been confined overnight in a yellow hairnet, was arranged in an austere style involving the peculiar use of a sharp spear to separate the hair into six tight braids before they were secured with woolen ribbons.¹¹

The groom and guests typically arrived at the bride’s father’s house in the afternoon. Though Roman weddings were not a religious compact, various ceremonial gestures took place on the day, including the sacrifice of a pig to ensure good omens for the union. Words of consent were exchanged between the betrothed couple, and the marriage was sealed when a married female guest, or pronuba, took the right hands of the bride and groom and joined them together. A contract may have been witnessed and signed and the couple toasted with the salutation Feliciter (Good luck); a wedding feast then preceded the bride’s final escort to her new home, where her husband had gone ahead to await her. We can imagine the scene as the distant sounds of singing echoed across the city, just above the evening foot traffic and the babble of traders shutting up shop for the night. Snaking along a route thickly scented with burning pine torches, flute players played as the raucous crowd, well oiled by the wedding feast they had just left, tramped along in high gig, singing the traditional wedding refrains of Hymen Hymenae! and Talasio! and tossing handfuls of nuts to scampering children and curious local residents who had come out to watch the procession go by.

In the middle of the crush Livia’s striking egg-yolk-colored wedding veil, or flammeum, flared like a beacon in the darkness, draped over a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. Matching yellow slippers (socci), perhaps embroidered with pearls, slipped in and out of view beneath her belted tunic as she was swept along by the two young boys holding her hands, chosen from the offspring of married family friends as hopeful harbingers of the children she would one day bear. A third boy marched ahead with a pine torch, and instead of a bouquet a spindle was carried for her along the route, a symbol of her new domestic duties. Despite the presence of these innocuous symbols of respectable wedded life the atmosphere was thick with well-intentioned but ribald humor, and a gauntlet of risqué jokes and innuendo-laden songs had to be endured before the bride could reach her marital home. When at last Livia’s noisy escorts delivered her up to Tiberius Nero’s front door she found it garlanded with flowers by her waiting groom. As was required of her, she ceremoniously daubed the doorposts with animal fat and affixed skeins of uncombed wool to them, rituals designed to guarantee wealth and plenty to herself and her new husband. Finally she was carefully lifted over the threshold by her young male attendants. Caution was necessary; for any bride to trip as she was admitted through the doorway of her new husband’s home was considered an ill omen. Once inside, after being presented with gifts of fire (a torch) and water (in a jug or vessel) from her husband, symbolizing her wifely responsibility for cooking and washing and the overseeing of the household, she was led away by another married woman to her new bedroom before admitting the groom for consummation to take place.¹²

Livia’s status as a teenage bride was entirely normal. Upper-class girls in the late Roman Republic typically embarked on their first marriage in their early teens, sometimes as early as twelve. This capitalized on their most fertile childbearing years in a climate where infant mortality rates were high. Having children, the asset for which Roman women were most publicly valued, was imperative for a woman in Livia’s position; sterility, the blame for which was invariably pinned on the wife rather than the husband, could be cited as grounds for divorce. In the eyes of Roman commentators a Roman matron’s standing was umbilically linked to her children’s achievements. Not surprisingly, 16 November 42 BC is the date on the Roman timeline of Livia’s first appearance, with the official documentation of the birth of her eldest son, Tiberius, the boy whose cries would later nearly spoil his parents’ cover as they fled through the Greek city-state of Sparta, and who would one day become emperor of Rome.¹³

Tiberius’s birth took place at home on the Palatine hill, the most exclusive residential district in Rome. Thanks to its close access to the Roman Forum, the hub of the city, and its sacred associations with key moments in Rome’s mythical past, such as the birth of the city’s twin founders, Romulus and Remus, the Palatine was the ideal home for an ambitious politico like Tiberius Nero. A veritable Who’s Who of late republican movers and shakers had also chosen to make it their base, from Cicero to Octavian and Mark Antony, and Livia had probably grown up there herself in her father’s house.¹⁴

Childbirth for a woman in the Roman world was closely scrutinized. From the moment of conception to the feeding and weaning stages, a barrage of advice was offered to expectant mothers, some of it based on the theories of respected medical practitioners, some of it rooted in superstitious quackery. Prior to baby Tiberius’s arrival, Livia herself was said to have employed various old wives’ techniques to try to ensure the birth of a son, including incubating a hen’s egg by cupping it in her hands and keeping it warm in the folds of her dress, where it would eventually hatch into a proud-combed cock chick