The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (15 page)

Octavia, maintaining her low profile since the demise of Marcellus, lived long enough to see her former daughter-in-law Julia married to Tiberius. If Seneca’s report that Octavia feared this to be Livia’s ambition all along is to be believed, the sight would have been mortifying to her. Her death came soon enough, in 11 BC, reputedly of a broken heart, the ideal mother to the end.
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A grieving Augustus delivered his sister’s funeral oration himself, and in a simple ceremony she was interred alongside Marcellus in the mausoleum by the Tiber. The tombstone that she shared with her son was discovered during excavations in 1927.
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Two years after Octavia’s funeral, on 30 January 9 BC, the new-look Julio-Claudian family gathered together for a magnificent ceremony to mark the dedication, not far from the mausoleum, of the Ara Pacis (‘Altar of Peace’), one of the showpieces of Augustus’s self-glorifying programme of public art, built to celebrate the emperor’s recent triumphant return from Gaul and Spain and to proclaim the age of Augustus and his family as an age of peace.

It was, significantly, also Livia’s fiftieth birthday. Though her role as a conduit between her husband and his subjects had been well established over the past twenty years, Livia was the only one of the three leading women of the imperial household thus far not to have been recognised on a coin of the Roman mint or with a major public building or monument in the city. That year marked her debut at last with her depiction alongside her husband on the Ara Pacis, in the most elevated and flattering guise in which she had yet appeared. Gone was the prim
nodus
, and instead her long hair was parted in the centre and allowed to fall loose under a veil, in a deliberate echo of the statuary poses of classical goddesses. Her husband also stood veiled and garlanded beside her, casting the pair as the benevolent patriarch and matriarch of the empire, a veritable Jupiter and Juno on earth.

The Ara Pacis was the first Roman state monument on which
women and children had featured. This was both a sign of the Augustan regime’s growing confidence with giving the women of the imperial household a public role, and a further indication of Augustus’s desire to make his family-man image a integral part of his public persona. Later that year, a banquet was held for the Senate on the Capitoline hill in honour of the military successes of Tiberius over the Dalmatians and Pannonians, and both Livia and Julia were given the distinct honour of presiding as joint hostesses over a separate feast attended by the leading women of the city – the first time that women are known to have been given a leading role in celebrating a triumph for a male relative.
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As mother of Gaius and Lucius, and wife of the guest of honour Tiberius, Julia enjoyed exalted public status, although her complicated private life was conceivably already prompting curious whispers among the guests. Marriage to Tiberius, which had initially been conducted with a semblance of amity, had hit choppy waters, with the couple rumoured to be sleeping in separate beds. This was said to be Tiberius’s decision, following the death of their infant firstborn in the Italian city of Aquileia.
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It is difficult to gauge the depth of the attachments between Roman parents and their children without naturally bringing our own emotional expectations to bear. Mothers like Julia, who had already produced five healthy children, could expect to suffer the loss of at least one child in infancy. It is estimated that perhaps 5 per cent of all live-born Roman babies died in their first month, and that almost a quarter of infants died before their first birthdays. The inevitability of such losses perhaps explains why children of this age rarely received funerary monuments, though the evidence of letters such as that between the second-century rhetorician Fronto and the then-emperor Antoninus Pius, on the loss of the former’s three-year-old grandson, indicates that the death of very young children was still an occasion for great grief:

Be the immortality of the soul ever so established, that will be a theme for the disputations of philosophers, it will never assuage the yearning of a parent … I seem to see a copy of his face and fancy that I hear the very echo of his voice. This is the picture that my grief conjures up of itself.
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The connection made by Tiberius’s biographer between the death of their child and the breakdown of marital relations with Julia does
indicate that this loss was heartbreaking enough to put the final nail in the coffin of their marriage. The death of her grandchild notwithstanding, Livia on the other hand had good reason to be pleased with life in 9 BC as she looked out over the scene of the Capitoline banquet with all Rome’s aristocracy gathered to celebrate the triumph of her offspring, and the city below resounding to the hubbub of ordinary people enjoying their own celebratory feasts. Her sons were bringing home victory after victory from Pannonia, Germany and the Balkans, to great adulation. Drusus in particular was a popular favourite with the Roman public, and his marriage to Octavia’s younger daughter Antonia Minor, which had produced two young sons and a daughter – Germanicus, Claudius and Livilla – had tightened the knot between the Julian and Claudian branches still more securely, cementing Livia’s place as the linchpin between them. With the vaunting of her image as Rome’s
materfamilias
-in-chief on the nearby Ara Pacis, life must have seemed very sweet just now, particularly if her mind chanced to wander back to her precarious days on the run with Tiberius Nero.

Tragedy rudely interrupted in September that year, though, with the news of the premature death of Drusus in a riding accident, just as a celebratory banquet was being prepared by his mother Livia and wife Antonia to celebrate his military successes.
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Accompanied by her husband, Livia went as far as the city of Ticinum (Pavia) to meet the procession bringing Drusus’s body home from the campaign trail in Germany, their route illuminated by pyres lit throughout the country to signal Rome’s great mourning for so popular a son. There they met a grief-stricken Tiberius, who had ridden almost 300 kilometres (185 miles) to reach his younger brother’s deathbed, and had led the cortège home. A poem of condolence, the
Consolatio ad Liviam
, which was written and addressed to Livia by an anonymous figure, re-creates the scene of Drusus’s sad homecoming and funeral, portraying Livia as the epitome of devastated motherhood as she grieves for her youngest boy: ‘Is this the reward for piety? … Can I bear to look at you lying there, cursed wretch that I am? … Now, in my misery, I hold you and look upon you for the last time …’
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Unlike Octavia, however, for Livia the loss of her beloved son did not result in a maudlin retreat from public life. In step with the
Consolatio
’s advice that she should master her feelings, she adopted a stiff-upper-lip attitude that won her applause. While Octavia had recoiled from the prospect of seeing images of her son, unable to bear the sight of her dead child’s features set in marble, Livia went the other way,
commissioning her own statues of Drusus.
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Livia’s fortitude placed her in excellent company. In an essay written in the 40s, while he was in temporary exile under the reign of the Emperor Nero, the Stoic philosopher Seneca commanded his mother Helvia not to be one of those women who grieves for the rest of her life, recommending she take the great Cornelia for her example, who had refused to give in to tears and recriminations after the death of her sons.
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More public statues of Livia herself were also ordered by the Senate as a sign of respect. As well as acting as a public reminder of the legal incentives offered by the Julian laws to women who produced three children or more, these statues of Livia carried a new significance, because they were awarded in specific recognition of her contribution as a mother. They were accompanied by the symbolic conferral on the empress of the privileges of the ‘three child rule’ (despite the fact that even before Drusus’s death, Livia had only two children still living). Whereas honorary statues such as these, intended for public display and granted by senatorial decree, had once been the sole preserve of men who had performed great services to the state, now a mother’s contribution of children to society was portrayed as bearing comparison to male achievements in public service, a recognition of the new importance of women and the family in the Roman artistic gallery of power.
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Livia was also beginning to lend both her name and support to numerous public-building projects that were to become iconic landmarks throughout the city.
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Although Octavia and a few other women had already broken ground here, including Agrippa’s sister Vipsania Polla, who had also had a portico named after her and apparently took a hand in designing a local racecourse, Livia soon left her female contemporaries far behind.
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As part of Augustus’s religious regeneration of the city and its sacred precincts, she was put in charge – at least nominally – of overseeing the rebuilding of certain temples and shrines that had slumped into disuse. Easing her emergence into public life with an emphasis on her role as traditional wife and mother, the temples to receive her patronage honoured goddesses associated with women and the family. Thus under Livia’s aegis, the temples of the goddess Bona Dea Subsaxana and of Fortuna Muliebris were restored, both religious complexes associated with female virtues of fertility and wifely support – Bona Dea was a fertility and healing goddess worshipped in exclusively female religious festivals, while the temple of Fortuna Muliebris (‘The Fortune of Women’) had in fact been built
in tribute to Rome’s fifth-century female saviours, Veturia and Volumnia.
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Shrines to Pudicitia Plebeia and Pudicitia Patricia, cults of chastity, are also thought to have been dedicated by Livia, and she gave her name to non-religious edifices such as the public market, the Macellum Liviae, another appropriate commission given its association with domestic management, the Roman housewife’s arena of responsibility.
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The showpiece of Livia’s building programme though was the Porticus Liviae (‘Portico of Livia’). This was one of the places to see and be seen in the city, described by an ancient tourist as amongst the great spectacles of Rome.
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Like Octavia’s portico, the plot of land on which it was erected had once belonged to a republican fat cat, in this instance a wealthy aristocrat of freedman stock named Vedius Pollio, a financial adviser of Augustus’s who had earned himself a reputation for questionable business practices and feeding unfortunate slaves who incurred his wrath to his pet fish. On his death, Pollio had bequeathed a portion of his estate to the emperor, grandly expressing the wish that it should be used as the site for a magnificent building to benefit the people of Rome. Instead, Augustus ordered Pollio’s sprawling private temple to excess, located within the warren-like residential district of the Subura on the Esquiline hill, to be flattened and replaced with a portico named after Livia, an oasis of sunlit gardens, artworks and colonnaded walkways shaded by thick fragrant grape-vines clambering over trellises, which soon became a popular meeting point for the inhabitants of the otherwise crowdy, smelly Subura. Ovid even cheekily recommended it in his pre-exile days as a good spot to meet girls, not quite the message Augustus had in mind.
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The extent to which Livia – or indeed Octavia and Vipsania Polla – was actively involved in the planning of such building projects cannot be known, but the portico was yet another instance of the way in which Livia had become a key figure in the emperor’s propaganda. A handful of women outside the imperial family was inspired by her example. Eumachia, a public priestess and wealthy member of an old Pompeian family who, after her father’s death, had taken on the management of his wine, amphora and tile export business, used the Porticus Liviae as a blueprint for the construction of a huge portico paid for out of her own funds and bordering the forum of Pompeii, the entrance to which still stands.
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Livia was now clearly a role model for the women of the elite.

The Porticus Liviae was completed in 7 BC, and its dedication presided over by Livia herself. Also housed in the portico was a shrine devoted to
Concordia
, a cult in honour of marital harmony, which Livia is thought to have added as a special tribute to her husband on 11 June, a date which was celebrated as a kind of Mother’s Day in the Roman calendar.
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Highly ironic then, given the theme, that also at her side for the dedication was her son Tiberius, still basking in the glory of his first triumph and his appointment to the consulship, but whose unhappy marriage was about to drive him to commit career suicide, to the great consternation of his mother. When in 6 BC, his stepfather offered him a prestigious five-year posting to the eastern province of Armenia, Tiberius rejected it and instead requested leave to withdraw from public life and retire to the island of Rhodes. He excused his decision on the grounds that he was tired of public office, and wished to step aside in favour of Gaius and Lucius. His announcement, however, caused a rift with Augustus, who condemned his stepson’s decision in the Senate, calling it an act of desertion. Livia is said to have strained every sinew to induce her son to change his mind. But he would not be persuaded, and left Rome by the port of Ostia without a word to most of his friends, spending the next seven years in quiet sanctum, attending the lectures of various professors of philosophy.
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