The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (2 page)

For my parents

ANNELISE FREISENBRUCH

The First Ladies

of Rome

The Women Behind the Caesars

INTRODUCTION

I, Claudia …

Caesar’s wife must be above reproach.

Plutarch,
Life of Julius Caesar

Mrs Landingham,
The West Wing
¹

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. Stroll through this long, echoing gallery with its high, beam-latticed glass roof, a rustling soundtrack provided by the brush and claw of sketching artists’ pencils, and one is treated to a parade of over 400 of the most iconic and instantly recognised images from the classical world. There are the friezes and pediments removed by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon; there is the Apollo Belvedere, once worshipped as the most beautiful surviving statue from antiquity; there is 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.

As we arrive in the final bay of the museum’s circuit, a Roman hall of fame greets us, a disembodied line-up of the portrait heads of the men who ruled Rome. Most of the big names are here, their marble physiognomies conjuring up 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 grey 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.
²

What is left to us of who this woman once was, in this chalk-white echo? For an echo is all it is, not simply because it’s 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. In the uncertain business of identifying faces from the ancient world, it is not even a certainty that it really is Faustina Minor, a name that is unlikely to evoke many flickers of recognition 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 comparatively 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 the novels were eventually adapted for television screens in Britain and the US in 1976. 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 topping viewing 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, attracted much of the reviewers’ attention and whose faces became the defining promotional image for the programme – 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; Agrippina a black
widow whose hand was ultimately behind Claudius’s demise.
³

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 did not spring unaided from the creative mists of the author’s imagination. He simply chose to co-operate, 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 defence of the books’ themes, citing the likes of the ancient Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius as corroborators of his depiction of the women of Rome’s first imperial dynasty.
⁴

Reading through the ancient literary accounts that inspired Graves, his characterisations seem on the face of things to be entirely appropriate. Besides Livia, Messalina and Agrippina, a sample of the potted biographies of the women of the Roman imperial age includes 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; a vain and beautiful mistress who persuaded the emperor to kill his mother in order that he might marry her; a wife who committed adultery with an actor before conspiring in her husband’s assassination; and a stepmother who tried to seduce her own stepson and then engineered his execution before herself being boiled to death as punishment. Julia, Poppaea, Domitia and Fausta – these are just a few of the women whose reputations are responsible for the largely hostile historical 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 – quite literally in some cases – as malignant and universal spectres of murderous delinquency, promiscuity and criminality.
⁵

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. The image of Rome’s imperial women had already run the gauntlet of centuries of post-classical western cultural production via a kaleidoscopic spectrum of plays, histories, novels, operas, films, poems, pornographic compendiums, paintings, prints, sculptures, manuscript illustrations and even playing-card illustrations and other novelty curios. Since the fourteenth century, when 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 ladies made regular appearances in such lists, held up in a few isolated cases as role models of female stoicism and patriotism, but more often than not touted as sternly worded cautionary tales to rebellious-minded young ladies in volumes that enjoyed a wide readership in their day such as 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 compared at one time or other to female counterparts from the Roman Empire. At a more home-grown level, there was even a ‘Messalina of Ilford’, twenty-nine-year-old Edith Thompson, who in January 1923 became the first woman to be hanged in Britain for fifteen years 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.
⁶

Not all reviews of the women connected to the Roman imperial houses have proved negative, however. Several enjoy relatively favourable reputations both in the literary sources of antiquity and posthumous legend, including 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 rallying figure of sympathy for those who suspected the fell hand of the ruling emperor Tiberius and his mother Livia in Germanicus’s murder. Caenis and Berenice, mistresses respectively of father-and-son team Vespasian and Titus,
have both featured as the heroines of popular plays and novels, while Helena, mother of the Roman Empire’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, was even granted entry to the sainthood. Yet it is undoubtedly their more notorious, unchaste and dictatorial female counterparts who, assisted by popular fictionalisations of their lives, have come to dominate the popular conception of what Rome’s imperial women were really like, and even the saintly examples seem like cardboard-cut-out 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 more about them than their static, cartoonish stereotypes allow. But the question of how we speak for and about them has its own complications. 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
. Women could not hold political office at any point in Roman history. 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 or 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 were not 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 poetry, letter writing and graffiti. Whereas today’s political wives can give interviews or write memoirs to set the record straight on their lives, 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, along with any other female-authored works that may or may not have once existed. Men of antiquity as well as women have also been victim to such literary accidents and sabotages – the writings of Claudius, for example, have not survived, works which may well have exerted a restraining influence on the popular verdict that Rome’s fourth emperor was an ineffectual and comical figure.
⁷
But the systematic blackout imposed on 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 often writing about them decades, or even centuries, after their deaths and who were often less interested in them as individuals than as extras and supporting players in the narratives of their male relatives’ lives.