The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (6 page)

Octavia was in some ways the quiet woman of this era in Roman politics, remembered now chiefly as a passive bystander forced to play second fiddle to her more exotic rival for Antony’s affections, Cleopatra. In her incarnation in Shakespeare’s tragedy
Antony and Cleopatra
, she is described as being of ‘a holy, cold, and still conversation’ whose frigidity would drive Antony into the arms of his ‘Egyptian dish’, while a recent television drama about the Roman Empire portrayed her as a plaintive wet-blanket, a prostituted pawn in the plans of her scheming mother, Atia.
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Octavia’s reputation in antiquity was rather more impressive. As well as inspiring declarations of devotion from her brother Octavian, she was presented as someone whose beauty, honour and prudence might successfully tame the roving eye of roué Antony. Above all, she won plaudits as a mother. In the three years after Brundisium, she gave birth to two daughters, Antonia Maior and Antonia Minor, whom she raised alongside her son and two daughters from her first marriage, as well as her two stepsons from Antony’s relationship with Fulvia, a brood of seven in total.
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In short, Octavia figured in the Roman mindset as the perfect, passive, dutiful antidote to ‘bad women’ like Cleopatra and Fulvia – a maternal paragon in the mould of Cornelia, and someone whose example other women of her generation would be encouraged to follow.

But there was one important way in which the role created for Octavia on her marriage to Antony represented a break with the past. Shortly after their wedding, Antony commissioned a series of gold, silver and bronze coins from mints operating in various eastern cities under his control, depicting himself and his new bride. Tiny, fingernail-sized examples of these coin issues survive, showing Octavia’s and Antony’s heads in tandem, the couple’s portraits stamped either individually on the reverse and obverse sides, or in ‘jugate’ form – that is to say, with their profiles overlapping side by side. The issue of these coins was a powerful gesture. For as well as advertising the new dynastic alliance binding two halves of the empire in ostensibly blissful harmony, they made Octavia the first clearly identifiable living woman to appear on official Roman coinage in her own right, and this was
the first time that a Roman woman’s image is known to have been used alongside that of her husband to bolster his political credentials.
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The choice of a coin as the medium for a Roman woman’s visual debut as a public icon was particularly forceful. Coins allowed replicas of the image to be duplicated and distributed on a huge scale, finding their way into the palms and pouches of a ruler’s subjects quickly. At one level, Octavia’s first public portrait was a resolutely traditional affair, personifying her as the good and faithful wife of Roman legend, a serene support to her husband. Even her hairstyle was on message – a meticulously combed arrangement known as the
nodus
(literally meaning ‘knot’), in reference to the distinctive roll of hair swept up harshly above the forehead. This rigid pompadour was highly fashionable among both well-to-do and less well-heeled women of the first century BC, its demure austerity projecting the appropriate image for the respectable Roman wife and mother, and it was a style from which Octavia never deviated during her lifetime, at least in her official portraits.
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But despite the comfortable familiarity of the
nodus
, the post-Brundisium coins confounded the status quo that had previously refused to contemplate the sight of a living woman on state-sponsored iconography. Portraits of women had appeared on coins in the empire’s eastern provinces, but never on ones directly issued by Rome itself.
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For the Senate to sanction the image of a woman on a coin issued to represent the government of Rome to its subjects was a striking innovation. It was also one that Octavian would use before long to turn the tables on his opponent.
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For now though, the intended effect was still to remind the subject ruminatively or unconsciously fingering that small coin of the unity of the couple depicted and the unity at the heart of the triumvirate with Octavia as the linchpin holding the whole edifice together. For a time at least, the illusion of these two bitter former rivals playing happy families seems to have stuck, and the truce agreed at Brundisium poured oil on the troubled waters of Mediterranean politics. As part of the terms of a separate deal struck by Antony and Octavian with the Sicily-based Sextus Pompeius, those who had supported this outlaw against the triumvirs were permitted to return from exile without reprisals, an amnesty which finally permitted Livia, her husband and son to abandon their uncomfortable life on the run. They returned to Rome in 39 BC. As a punishment for disloyalty, however, some of the triumvirs’ opponents would be returned only a quarter of their confiscated assets. Tiberius Nero was among those to whom this
punishment was meted out. It surely spelled the end of any prospects of a glittering political career for Livia’s husband, as obscure retirement beckoned for the former praetor. As far as Livia herself was concerned, though, fate was about to take a surprising hand.
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While Antony departed for the east that October with new wife in tow, his young brother-in-law was reassessing his own marital options. The son of a respectable but unremarkable equestrian clan whose ties to Julius Caesar through his mother Atia were his only claim to fame, an advantageous marriage was more important to the highly ambitious Octavian than most. His decision a year earlier in 40 BC to marry Scribonia, a twice-divorced woman some ten years his senior, had been motivated by her family’s close connections to the Sicilian renegade Sextus Pompeius, with whom the triumvirate were at the time trying to come to terms. It was Octavian’s second marriage, and was the follow-up to his termination of a brief – and, so he claimed, unconsummated – union with Fulvia’s daughter Claudia, which had been dissolved when he initially fell out with Claudia’s stepfather Antony. Prior to this, Octavian also had at least one broken engagement to his name, underlining the speed and ease of betrothal, divorce and remarriage among the Roman elite in a climate where husbands, fathers and brothers needing to forge alliances with influential families used their female relatives as a vital currency.
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But before the year 39 BC was out, in a ruthless demonstration of how easily these alliances could be made and broken, Octavian had divorced Scribonia – just hours after she had given birth to their only daughter, Julia – and invited the pregnant ex-wife of one of his political opponents to move in with him, as a prelude to marrying her. The pregnant woman in question was Livia. A year which she began as a political exile ended with her as consort to one of the two most powerful men in the world.
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How this pair met and came to abandon their respective spouses has been the subject of considerable confusion and controversy. Octavian later wrote of his abrupt decision to divorce Scribonia after just a year of marriage: ‘I could not bear the way she nagged at me’.
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His critics, such as Tacitus – looking back on events from the vantage point of the following century – claimed that on the contrary, Octavian was fascinated and tempted by Livia’s beauty and had stolen her from Tiberius Nero by force. Barbed letters from Antony to his rival, as preserved by imperial biographer Suetonius, insinuated that Scribonia had been shown the door for having objected too loudly to
having a rival, and that Octavian was so lecherous that he had once seduced a fellow guest’s wife – possibly Livia, though it is left unclear – at a dinner party, dishevelling her hair and returning her pink-faced to the table.
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Other sources, however, portray Tiberius Nero less as a cuckold than as a willing accomplice, saying that he even gave away his ex-wife in lieu of her father at the marriage ceremony, and then joined in with the wedding feast afterwards.
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Further intrigue surrounds the fact that at the time of her second betrothal, in the autumn of 39 BC, Livia was already six months pregnant with her second son Drusus, to whom she gave birth while living under Octavian’s roof on 14 January 38 BC. She had only three days to recover from the delivery before the marriage ceremony took place on 17 January.
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Predictably, Livia’s pregnancy set tongues wagging. Octavian’s reported anxiety for the proprieties, even pausing to consult priests about the permissibility of marrying a pregnant woman, did not stop the inevitable speculation over Drusus’s paternity, summed up in a sarcastically witty epigram which enjoyed much popularity:

How fortunate those parents are for whom

Their child is only three months in the womb!
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It is a perplexing set of anecdotes to sift through, and several theories have been put forward in a bid to untangle the story’s narrative knot. There is the suggestion, for example, that mischievous satellites of Antony were the ones stoking the rumours of Drusus’s illegitimacy. Others argue that Tiberius Nero’s own sons had in adulthood tried to smother suggestions that their father was in any way a hapless cuckold by claiming his acquiescence in all the arrangements.
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Both ideas are plausible, given the Roman establishment’s propensity for casting smokescreens over uncomfortable historical episodes. However, there is clearly another agenda at stake behind the preservation of these stories. Those who read or listened to accounts of Octavian’s seizure of Livia from Tiberius Nero were being invited to scrutinise the masculine credentials of the rivals, the axis on which all Roman political battles were fought. Some wanted to portray Tiberius Nero as the occupant of the moral high ground, others were being prodded to draw the conclusion that Octavian was the more manly of the two.
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At least one secure conclusion about the motives for Octavian’s and
Livia’s marriage can be drawn. Livia’s proven fertility and family tree would have been absolutely priceless assets to her new husband. Octavian’s relationship to the assassinated dictator Julius Caesar had opened a lot of doors in his rise up the ladder of public life, but the origins of his own immediate family were resolutely middle-class, laying him open to scorn from Rome’s political aristocracy, quick to detect the scent of the bourgeois. Marriage to Livia, with her impeccable family lineage linking her to two of Rome’s greatest and most revered political dynasties, the Claudians and the Livians, could silence those critics very effectively. To the ruthlessly ambitious Octavian, such considerations cannot have been far from his mind in turning his attentions to the wife of one of his opponents.

Whether or not Tiberius Nero objected to being supplanted at his wife’s side by his younger rival, it would have done him little good to protest. His star was on the wane, his political credit was more or less used up in Rome and he had lost most of his property to the proscriptions – a stark contrast to the stratospheric rise of Octavian, now just one step away from holding all the aces in the imperial deck. Giving in with good grace was probably the best option open to him. He lived in quiet retirement for another five years after the divorce, before dying around the year 32 BC, after naming Octavian as guardian to both his sons. They had lived with Tiberius Nero since their parents’ split, as prescribed by Roman law which usually granted custody of children to fathers after a divorce.
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It was nine-year-old Tiberius who ultimately clambered on to the speaker’s platform in the Roman forum to deliver his father’s funeral eulogy.

Scribonia retreated into the shadows and seems never to have remarried though she lived well into her eighties, a grand old age in antiquity. It is unclear whether her little girl Julia was allowed to remain with her or went with her father – though the law automatically granted guardianship of her to Octavian, children were allowed to remain with their mothers when convenient. Given Julia’s infancy and Octavian’s political schedule, it is most likely that the girl stayed in her mother’s care for the time being.
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Scribonia’s story, however, would intersect dramatically with Julia’s further down the line. Octavian’s hostile portrait of his ex-wife as a nagging shrew remains the most influential description of her, but others in antiquity were more admiring, the philosopher Seneca calling her a
gravis femina
(a ‘serious’ or ‘dignified’ woman) for her robust advice given many years later to a disgraced great-nephew on how to face his punishment like a
man. Elsewhere the elegist of one of her daughters by an earlier marriage referred to her flatteringly as ‘sweet mother Scribonia’.
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It was a stock epithet of the obituarist’s vocabulary. Yet Scribonia’s unstinting loyalty as a mother was indeed in the end to be her most remarkable legacy.

Home for Livia’s sons Tiberius and five-year-old Drusus after their father’s death in 32 BC reverted to an elegant if relatively modest grey stone property on the Palatine hill, occupied by their now twenty-six-year-old mother and new stepfather since the occasion of their marriage. The house had been confiscated by Octavian during the wave of proscriptions in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi from the family of Quintus Hortensius, the famous orator and great rival of Cicero’s who had amassed a fortune from his legal career and subsequently bequeathed the villa to his daughter Hortensia and son Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. Both these children were bitter opponents of Octavian – Hortensia, who as we have seen had inherited her father’s gift for oratory, became a heroine to republican-minded women of the eighteenth century such as the British historian Catherine Macaulay for her stand against Octavian and his plans to tax wealthy Roman women in 42 BC. Hortensia’s brother died at Philippi, fighting for Brutus and Cassius. By adopting their family home as his own, Octavian not only rubbed salt into their wound, but advertised the spoils of his victory at Philippi in the most blatant manner possible.
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