The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (16 page)

Some ancient biographers insisted that Tiberius was indeed motivated by a genuine desire to advance the interests of Julia’s boys.
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Other reports claimed that he was in fact piqued at their precocious rise through the political ranks and had flounced off to Rhodes in a fit of the sullens. The most popular theory of all though was that in isolating himself on Rhodes, Tiberius was determined to put as many miles as possible between himself and Julia, whose company he could no longer endure.

How do you solve a problem like Julia? The question was beginning to cause a real headache for Augustus. He was increasingly exasperated at his daughter’s recalcitrance, his sentiments on the matter summarised in a comment made to friends one day that ‘he had two spoiled daughters to put up with – Rome and Julia’. In his determination to steer her on to a more respectable path, he wrote urging Julia to learn from the example set by her stepmother Livia, after differences between the two women’s companions at a recent gladiatorial contest were commented on by bystanders – Livia’s circle of distinguished middle-aged statesmen forming a stark contrast to Julia’s entourage
of dissipated young men. But in retort to her father’s aspersions on her friends, Julia wrote impudently – according, once again, to Macrobius’s
Saturnalia
: ‘These friends of mine will be old men too when I am old.’ In the face of all of Augustus’s critiques, of her immodest dress sense, her rowdy circle of friends, even her vanity-driven habit of plucking grey hairs from her head, Julia refused to conform to the austere living example set by her father, apparently retorting to an entreaty by a friend: ‘He forgets that he is Caesar, but I remember that I am Caesar’s daughter.’
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Several, or even all, of these pithy sayings attributed to Julia could of course be the invention of Macrobius or his first-century source Domitius Marsus. But they are nonetheless indicative of the terms in which the rift between Julia and her father was perceived, and when the end finally came, Julia’s fall from grace was truly spectacular and left no room for doubt as to the seriousness of her offences. The year 2 BC, in which the blow fell, began auspiciously enough. It marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Augustus’s formal assumption of the mantle of
princeps
, and pseudo-restoration of ‘the republic’. On 5 February, the emperor was named
pater patriae
(‘Father of the Country’) by the Senate, and in August, lavish celebrations were held to mark the dedication of the Forum of Augustus. Alongside bronze statues of the great and the good was a magnificent temple to Mars the Avenger, in which was housed a trinity of deities claimed as patron gods by the Julian family – Mars, Venus Genetrix, and Divus Julius. The latter represented the deified Julius Caesar, who had been consecrated as a god in 42 BC, thus conveniently allowing his great-nephew to call himself ‘son of a god’.
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But a dark cloud loomed over the pageant. Barely was the dedication over, than Augustus issued a statement to be read out to the Senate. The enraged emperor, it was announced, had publicly disowned his daughter Julia, word having reached him that she was suspected of drinking and committing adultery with a series of men. The charge-sheet included the torrid accusation that she had even had sex on the Rostra, the platform from which orators spoke to the crowds in the forum and from which her father had proclaimed his laws on marriage and adultery in 18 BC. There were even fruitier allegations, quoted later from Augustus’s anguished personal correspondence, that a garland had been hung on the statue of the satyr Marsyas in the forum, next to which Julia had turned prostitute and offered to take on all comers, including strangers. Such was Augustus’s shame, that when a freedwoman
of Julia’s named Phoebe hanged herself in the wake of the scandal, he is said to have observed that he would rather have been Phoebe’s father.
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The scandal dealt a devastating blow to Augustus’s attempts to present his family as above suspicion in the moral purity stakes. The penalty for adultery laid down by Augustus’s own legislation was exile. Such was his fury that he was said to have considered killing his daughter, though in the end he contented himself with having her banished to the tiny windswept island of Pandateria, off Italy’s western coast. The fact that he treated her case at the level of treason, referring it to the Senate, reflects the level of betrayal that Augustus felt at her failure to live up to the standards he had set his family.

Today, the island of Pandateria goes by the name of Ventotene. At a mere 3 kilometres (1.8 miles) long, its pink and white houses and sparkling navy-blue harbours make it popular with holidaymakers. Once, though, it was a place of bleak exile, home to a prison fortress as recently as 1965. Julia was confined to a lonely existence here for the next five years. Forbidden all sumptuary pleasures including wine and male visitors, she was now forced to live in accordance with her father’s political and moral precepts – though she was not quite without company. At her own insistence, we are told, Scribonia, the wife Augustus discarded in favour of Livia, loyally accompanied her daughter into exile. As already alluded to in the case of Livia’s own faithful shadowing of Tiberius Nero, such acts by women in support of banished husbands or children were much admired in Roman literature of the imperial period. Scribonia’s act thus cast her not as the nagging harridan of Augustus’s correspondence, but as a woman who conceived of her duty and most important role in life as that of being a mother to her child.
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Over the last two centuries, the case against Julia has been reopened, and many classical scholars are now convinced that the charges of sexual immorality laid against her were in fact a cover-up for something more sinister.
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Based on hints dropped by ancient writers such as Pliny and Seneca, it has been deduced that Julia’s real crime was not adultery, but involvement in a political plot against her father. Five men were named as Julia’s partners in adultery – Iullus Antonius, Quintus Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus and Scipio – all of them from noted aristocratic families. One possibility is that their real offence was conspiring in an attempt at regime change, of
which there were several during the first emperor’s reign. If this theory is correct, the name of Iullus Antonius – Antony’s and Fulvia’s son, who had been charitably brought up by his stepmother Octavia in the aftermath of his father’s death – must have sent the greatest shiver down the emperor’s spine. The pairing of Augustus’s daughter and the son of his greatest enemy was an irony not lost years later on Seneca, who referred to Julia as ‘once again a woman to be feared with an Antony’.
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The evidence that Julia was plotting the overthrow of her father is thin at best. But it was nevertheless impossible to separate the political from the sexual implications of her crimes. Whether true or false, an accusation of adultery against Julia, the offspring of the man who had espoused puritanical new laws against such immorality, carried with it consequences far more serious than mere personal embarrassment, and could never have been stomached by the emperor.
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All the same, angry protests are said to have greeted the well-liked Julia’s banishment. They stirred Augustus to angry retort in the popular assembly, but he did relent after a few years, permitting his daughter’s return to the mainland, though confining her to the city of Regium, on the toe of Italy. In Regium, Julia was at least allowed to venture out into the town and provided with a house and an annual allowance by her father. However, Augustus was never reunited with his daughter, and she remained in his black books to the end. Her father’s will later stipulated that neither she nor her daughter Julia Minor – who was to be exiled for adultery ten years later – should be permitted burial in the family mausoleum, a punishment which, as one writer has put it, ‘constituted a posthumous and highly symbolic revocation of membership in the Julian
gens
’.
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He also disinherited her, and on his death, the share of his estate that she as a daughter would have been legally entitled to passed instead solely to Livia and Tiberius.
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Although she did not suffer the punishment known as
damnatio memoriae
, which would have immediately condemned all existing sculptures and artistic images of her throughout the empire to the scrapheap, no images of her survive that can be dated after 2 BC, the year of her banishment.
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Rome’s attempts to airbrush certain citizens from its memory in this way usually leave telltale traces, obvious scars where someone’s name or image has been erased from a monument. In Julia’s case there is little sign of that happening. Her existing public portraits were probably allowed to remain, given that she was the mother of the
still-in-favour Gaius and Lucius. Their removal would have spoilt the balance and aesthetic appeal of group family portraits in which she already featured prominently. But a quiet word from on high seems to have been dropped in the ear of artists and town-planners around the empire, and an unofficial moratorium issued on further production of portraits of the emperor’s disgraced daughter, while her existing portraits may later have been recycled, remodelled and relabelled to fit the image of other, later imperial women.
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This would explain why the coin issued for her and her two sons in 13–12 BC is the only securely identifiable portrait that survives of her, a woman who was once the centrefold of her family dynasty. Lead theatre tickets from Rome, and bone gaming tokens from Oxyrhyncus in Egypt, featuring images of a woman resembling the coin portrait, have been found, but we cannot tell for sure if they are Julia.
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Julia was the first woman in the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s young history to suffer such a downfall and condemnation. She was not the last. Her fate had exposed irreparable cracks in the seemingly impenetrable façade of this new, morally rejuvenated golden age of Rome, cracks that would prove difficult to repair.
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When Tiberius, taking a break from his daily diet of study in self-imposed exile in Rhodes, heard of his wife’s fate, the news apparently delighted him – although he had been writing to Augustus, half-heartedly urging a reconciliation between father and estranged daughter, perhaps in the hope of wheedling his way back into the emperor’s good graces. Nevertheless, the irreconcilable breakdown of Tiberius’s marriage had weakened any claim he might have had to succeed his stepfather as emperor. When his subsequent requests to return to Rome were eventually granted in the year 2 by an unwilling Augustus, egged on by pleading from Livia, Tiberius settled down to what should have been a life of political seclusion, decamping to an out-of-the-way house in the Gardens of Maecenas.
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Despite their mother’s scandalous exit from Rome, Julia’s sons Gaius and Lucius were still riding the crest of a great wave of popularity as the de facto heirs to Augustus. Both had long since shed the childish tunics of their boyhood and graduated to the
toga virilis
, the dress adopted by young men on reaching sexual maturity.
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In 1 BC, shortly before the twenty-two-year old Gaius departed for a career-building posting in the eastern provinces, the Julio-Claudian house had celebrated its first imperial wedding in a decade, with Gaius’s
marriage to his cousin Livilla, daughter of Antonia Minor and the deceased Drusus, and thus granddaughter to both Livia and Octavia. All seemed set for the inevitable coronation of Gaius or his younger brother Lucius as successors to their grandfather’s dignities.
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Yet within two years of Tiberius’s return to Rome, Augustus’s dynastic blueprint was in tatters. On 20 August 2, Lucius died of a sudden illness at Marseilles while en route to an army posting in Spain. The same year, Gaius received a wound during a siege at Artagira in Armenia, which ultimately resulted in his death eighteen months later on 21 February 4, while attempting to make the journey back to Italy.
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The premature demise of these two popular young men left Julia’s and Agrippa’s last surviving son, the sixteen-year-old Agrippa Postumus, as the emperor’s one surviving male grandchild. Augustus could not rest all his hopes on the shoulders of an inexperienced teenage heir, and bowed to the inevitable. On 26 June, four months after the death of Gaius, he officially adopted forty-four-year-old Tiberius, moving his wife’s son to the head of the Julio-Claudian line of succession. As a pre-condition of his promotion, Tiberius was compelled to adopt in turn his seventeen-year-old nephew Germanicus, the eldest son of Drusus and Antonia. Leaving nothing to chance, Augustus also adopted Agrippa Postumus, providing another option in the succession stakes, should it be needed. The pieces on the Julio-Claudian chessboard had shifted dramatically. The next emperor of Rome would now in all likelihood come from the family of Livia and not Augustus.

In August 14, at the age of seventy-five, Augustus set out from Rome on his last journey, attended by Livia. His purpose was to accompany Tiberius, who was being dispatched to Illyricum on official imperial business, as far as the town of Beneventum, south of Rome. The last decade of Augustus’s rule had been dogged by setbacks, culminating in a disastrous defeat for the Roman legions in Germany at the battle of Teutoburg Forest five years previously, which effectively curtailed further Roman territorial expansion for the time being. The empire’s borders were now delineated by the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, the Euphrates in the east and the Sahara in Africa, and few new territorial gains would be made during the remaining course of empire.
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