The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (35 page)

Unlike Messalina’s and Domitian’s defaced portraits, however, Domitia’s remained pointedly intact. Two bronze coins from Asia Minor featuring the facing heads of the emperor and his empress, show signs of deliberate damage to his profile, while hers remains untouched. Portraits of Domitia survive which can be dated to this twilight period of her life, indicating that Domitian’s successors saw some value in promoting her image. It may well be that they perceived the political capital of venerating the wife who was suspected of having a hand in his downfall, thus ridding the Roman public of an unpopular ruler.
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In this respect, Domitia was able to carve a reputation for herself independently of her husband, defying the historical convention whereby a wife’s fate and reputation was irredeemably tied to that of her spouse.

Like Livia, the only previous
Augusta
to have survived her husband, Domitia retained a respectable foothold in society in widowhood. Though, in contrast to Rome’s first empress, she receives no mention in literary sources after her husband’s assassination, there are indications that she maintained an independent source of cash flow in widowhood deriving from brick factories. The year of her death is unknown, though the date stamped on surviving bricks from her factories indicates that not only did she outlive her husband by at least thirty years, she saw two more emperors come and go after him. This would have made her around eighty years old at her death. An inscription on a marble tablet found at the ancient city of Gabii, just outside Rome, records the dedication in 140 of a temple to the memory of ‘Domitia Augusta’, on a plot of land donated by the local town council and financed by one of the empress’s freedmen and his wife, Polycarpus and Europe. They also set up a fund to allow the town to celebrate Domitia’s birthday (11 February) every year with distributions of food, a benefaction that was advertised on a bronze tablet and posted in public for locals to read.
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The Flavian dynasty marks a caesura in the history of Roman first ladies. In contrast to the first decades of imperial rule, when politics had been the preserve of one family, the circumstances of the Flavians’ rise had resulted in the outsourcing of the throne to a wider circle for the first time, signifying a sea-change in Roman political circles. A new
arriviste
elite now lined the corridors of Roman power, men who had been given a leg-up by Vespasian and his sons, and it was from this pool of talent that Rome’s next generation of emperors and empresses would be chosen. Berenice, Caenis, Julia Flavia and Domitia, though
very different women who stood in very different relationships to the emperor, seemed in some ways to represent a final echo of the old guard: Berenice with her resemblance to Augustus’s old enemy Cleopatra; Caenis with her close links to the Julio-Claudian household; Julia Flavia, another imperial woman tarred by allegations of incestuous influence over her uncle; and Domitia, accused of having conspired in the murder of her husband, like so many of her predecessors.

Yet this diverse group of women also pointed the way to new models of Rome’s first lady. As the second half of its imperial history unfurled, the city’s consorts began to be drawn from a far more disparate circle of candidates – from families without a long political pedigree; from origins as humble as the peasantry; from provinces as far afield as Syria. No longer would the right to be a member of this elite female club be the exclusive preserve of one family, one class, or one native region.

6

Good Empresses: The First Ladies of the Second Century

The body was burned on the shore, not long after my arrival, as preliminary to the triumphant rites which would be solemnised in Rome. Almost no one was present at the very simple ceremony, which took place at dawn and was only a last episode in the prolonged dramatic service rendered by the women to the person of Trajan. Matidia wept unrestrainedly; Plotina’s features seemed blurred in the wavering air round the heat of the funeral pyre. Calm, detached, slightly hollow from fever, she remained, as always, coolly impenetrable.

Memoirs of Hadrian
, by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951)
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One dawn morning in November 130, some three decades after the Flavian dynasty had ended, a group of high-profile Roman sightseers assembled together at the feet of one of Egypt’s most popular visitor attractions. The party included the ruling emperor Hadrian, his wife Sabina, and an amateur poet and member of the provincial royal house of Commagene named Julia Balbilla. The object of the tourists’ awe was the ‘singing’ Colossus of Memnon, a 60-feet-high (18-metres-high) seated statue erected as one of a pair at Thebes
c
.1400 BC to honour the pharaoh Amenophis. It had acquired its tuneful sobriquet thanks to a high-pitched squeal akin to a snapping lyre-string which seemed to originate in the statue’s larynx, though this was probably just the sound caused by overnight moisture evaporating from its sandstone joints as they buckled under the rising desert heat. Nonetheless, several among the hundreds of tourists who made the pilgrimage to the seated mammoth every year had scratched verses on its legs to commemorate the miraculous experience of hearing the statue speak.
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The atmosphere among the visiting VIPs that November morning was perhaps a little subdued. Just a few weeks previously, Hadrian’s beloved boy companion Antinous, who should have formed one of the party, had freakishly drowned in the Nile. The emperor’s party had already made one pilgrimage to the Colossus the previous day but the statue had remained silent, and the local officials who managed
the site could be forgiven for being nervous lest their charge should once again fail to perform its famous party trick for this illustrious audience. But this time, thankfully, as the sun came up and warmed the monument’s craggy stone contours, the trademark wail was finally heard. In tribute, four poems recording the visit of the imperial party were composed by Julia Balbilla and etched on the Colossus’s left leg and foot, alongside the other honorary literary offerings already left there, each a rather more elegant and formal version of an ‘I woz ’ere’ graffito:

I, Balbilla, when the rock spoke, heard the voice of the divine Memnon or Phamenoth. I came here with the lovely Empress Sabina. The course of the sun was in its first hour, in the fifteenth year of Hadrian’s reign, on the twenty-fourth day of the month Hathor. [I wrote this] on the twenty-fifth day of the month Hathor.
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Seventy years after Hadrian’s and Sabina’s visit, another emperor, Septimius Severus, made his own family trip to the statue, and in a well-intentioned gesture, ordered that the damage caused to it by an earthquake in 27 BC should be repaired. The unforeseen consequence was that the ‘singing’ stopped, and the stream of tourists dried up. Today, the Colossus of Memnon remains silent, and the poems etched by Julia Balbilla are barely visible, scrubbed away by the swirling sand of the desert.
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Just as these poems have faded, so too has much of our picture of Sabina and her fellow imperial Roman women of the second century.

Although the Flavian dynasty was succeeded in 96 by an imperial hall of fame, a period famously christened by Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli as an age of five ‘good’ emperors, the women of that era remain relative unknowns. Nerva (96–8), Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–38), Antoninus Pius (138–61) and Marcus Aurelius (161–80) presided over a period of relative political stability, free of assassinations and civil war, which saw Rome unfurl its wings to their utmost territorial limit.
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Yet the women these new emperors chose as their consorts receive little attention both in contemporary accounts of the period and in the works of later artists and dramatists who pounced on the trials and tribulations of their more disreputable and glamorous first-century sisters with such glee.

The anonymity of Plotina and Sabina, when viewed in a line-up of suspects that includes Messalina and Agrippina Minor, could be read
as an indication that the emperors had now managed to get their relatives to conform to their ideals of quiet domesticity and strict morality. Perhaps, in keeping their wives and daughters out of the limelight, Trajan, Hadrian and the other ‘good’ emperors of the second century succeeded where their Julio-Claudian, and to some extent their Flavian, predecessors failed. In part, though, this impression comes courtesy of the new literary terrain in which we now find ourselves. Tacitus and Suetonius, the chief executors of the historiographical fate of Livia and her Julio-Claudian descendants, wrote their histories as insiders in the courts of Trajan and Hadrian, and served these emperors’ interests in commentating on the depravity of previous regimes in felicitous, antidotal contrast to the rulers of their own day. Neither of their accounts extends beyond the reign of Domitian, leaving us to rely on other, less satisfactory written sources for most of our information about second-century imperial history and the place of women within it, such as the late, anonymously authored and notoriously unreliable
Historia Augusta
, which is riddled with obvious fabrications and invented citations.
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However, there is another important reason for this apparent anonymity. With the advent of the dynasties that ruled Rome in the second century, a woman’s reproductive capacities were removed as the link in the chain that determined the transfer of power from one emperor to another. Between the accession of Nerva in 96 and Marcus Aurelius’s bequest of the throne to his son Commodus in 180, each successful candidate for emperor would be head-hunted and officially adopted as a son by his predecessor, to whom he bore little or no blood relation. In part, this was a policy forced on the imperial family by the fact that the marriages of Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius all failed to produce sons. But it was spun by loyalists of their regimes as a positive outcome that ensured emperors would be chosen on merit and that Rome would not be saddled with another dynastic disaster like Nero.
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Yet while ancient literary sources preserve a mostly tight-lipped silence on the activities of Plotina and her second-century cohort, archaeological investigation reveals that official portraits of second-century imperial women on coins and statuary were just as ubiquitous across the Roman Empire as those of their more notorious predecessors.
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Moreover, the suffocating veil drawn over the lives of the second-century empresses in the biographical mainstream is belied by the evidence of more quixotic sources, including private letters and
fortuitously preserved inscriptions, which afford us brief but colourful glimpses of the wives of Trajan, Hadrian and company, making their own vital mark on the legacies of their husbands.

The power vacuum in the wake of Domitian’s murder in 96 was temporarily filled by Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a distinguished ex-consul who was the reluctant choice of Domitian’s assassins in the absence of other candidates. It proved more of a caretaker role for the elderly and childless Nerva, who was compelled to placate disgruntled elements in the army by adopting the popular, hard-drinking governor of Upper Germany, Marcus Ulpius Traianus (‘Trajan’) and anointing him as his successor, thus guarding against another period of instability. Upon Nerva’s death on 28 January 98, Trajan stepped smoothly into his adoptive father’s shoes. His nineteen-year rule established him as one of Rome’s most successful military supremos, whose achievements included increasing the empire’s holdings to encompass Arabia, Armenia and Mesopotamia, defeating Rome’s old enemy Parthia, and winning a great victory across the Danube in the Dacian Wars, commemorated in painstaking detail on his eponymous column erected in the heart of Rome.

Born in around 53 in the province of Baetica in southern Spain, Trajan was the first Roman emperor to come from outside Italy. His accession represented a breakthrough for the new political class of provincial elites who had been promoted under the Flavians, including men such as Trajan’s own father who had successfully commanded the tenth legion under Vespasian during the defeat of the Jewish revolt and been rewarded with a consulship for his efforts. If Trajan’s accession represented a quantum leap for this
arriviste
set, the same can be said for the new breed of women who took up the mantle of empress.

Pompeia Plotina was the first of this new wave. Little is known of her background, but she is thought to have come from Nemausus (the French city of Nîmes) in Gaul and to have been born in around 70, just as Vespasian became emperor.
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That she was chosen as a bride for Trajan, the up-and-coming scion of the Ulpian clan, indicates at least that her family, of whom no information survives, came from similarly well-connected senatorial stock. The marriage between this son and daughter of new elite families, heralding from areas hundreds of miles from the empire’s capital, reflected the diverse social make-up of the dominant new political class at Rome.

Plotina was almost thirty years old and had been married to Trajan
for at least ten years before he became emperor. But prior to that day when she set foot in Domitian’s old palace as Rome’s newest first lady, not a trace of her life-story survives. This was in part a reflection of the usual indifference to a woman’s upbringing in contrast to that of her husband. But it is also related to the fact that, as a childless woman, Plotina was not even a supporting player in the formative years of a future emperor as Livia was, denying us the kind of anecdotal gems that enrich Livia’s biography, such as the latter’s escape from a Spartan forest fire with her baby son Tiberius in her arms.
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