The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (23 page)

Agrippina was not the last victim of Livia’s death. Plancina did not last long either once her old friend was gone. She died at her own hand, we are told, after the deaths of both Agrippina and her patroness revived the old accusations against her.
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In a telling reflection of the sobering influence Livia was thought to have commanded over him, even Tacitus writes that until Livia’s death, there was some good in Tiberius as well as evil.
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But in the eight remaining years of Tiberius’s reign after his mother’s demise, Sejanus’s influence continued to fester, and the period following the exile of Agrippina and the death of Livia was characterised by a series of witch-hunts and death trials against powerful members of the Senate. But Sejanus’s own downfall was to prove as brutal and owed its conclusion to an unlikely agent. In 31, Antonia Minor received word that a conspiracy against Tiberius was being masterminded by Sejanus, ambitious to interrupt the Julio-Claudian succession and seize power for himself. Summoning her secretary and trusted freedwoman Caenis, she dictated a letter, warning her cousin of the plot, and entrusted it to another servant, Pallas, to be delivered to Tiberius on Capri, under cover of darkness. Subsequently, in October that year, Sejanus was executed, his body thrown to the mercy of a vicious mob and his children put to death as well.
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In a piece of tragic irony, one of the victims of the fallout from this affair was Antonia’s own daughter Livilla, accused in the suicide note of Sejanus’s wife, Apicata, of having conspired not just in this coup against the emperor but in a cover-up of the murder of her own husband Drusus eight years previously by her secret lover, Apicata’s
husband. The penalty for Livilla was death – a sentence, according to one account, carried out by her own mother.
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That Antonia’s rigid code of duty would induce her to starve her own daughter, as was claimed, seems brutal to us, but it cemented her reputation as a faithful guardian of the astringent moral legacy laid down by her grandfather Augustus, and immortalised her as the latest woman to save Rome from its enemies.

Livilla subsequently became the first woman in imperial history to suffer the indignity of what has become known as a
damnatio memoriae
– an order to destroy all statues of her across the empire, obliterating her name and face from public memory.
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She was not to be the last. Her fate was an ominous prelude to the next chapter in the history of the women of the imperial house. If Agrippina Maior was the Roman matron to whom the great ladies of Emma Hamilton’s generation wanted most to be compared, then the women who took over the imperial mantle next were the ones to whom comparison proved most embarrassing.

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Witches of the Tiber: The Last Julio-Claudian Empresses
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I tried dissipation – never debauchery: that I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina’s attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure.

Edward Rochester on Bertha Mason, in Charlotte Brontë’s

Jane Eyre
(1847)
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Let him kill me – provided he becomes emperor!

Agrippina Minor, in Tacitus’s
Annals
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Two days’ journey south of Rome, a reassuring distance from the increasingly sour and strained atmosphere of the imperial court during Tiberius’s last years, lay the popular seaside spa resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples, holiday home of the Roman jet set. The Bay of Naples was the Hamptons of the ancient Mediterranean, its salubrious climate, epicurean seafood delights and cosmopolitan clientele making it the getaway of choice for wealthy Romans who headed there in their droves once the city began to heat up in March and April. For hedonists, it offered evening boating picnics on pleasure-craft bobbing about the sparkling bay, beach parties, concerts and luxury shopping, while the health-conscious could try the various thermal spa cures on offer, including outdoor saunas heady with sulphurous vapours emanating from the volcanic soil.
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Anyone who was anyone in the imperial age had a summer place in or around Baiae, from Augustus himself, who had disapproved of the drunken antics of the rowdy local set his daughter Julia ran with and once even wrote a curt letter reproving a male admirer for visiting her there, to Antonia, senior matriarch of the imperial family now that Livia and Agrippina were dead.
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Home for Antonia was a luxury villa in the small, exclusive enclave of Bauli (modern Bacoli), just south of Baiae. Formerly the possession of Republican grandee Hortensius – the same Hortensius from whose descendants Augustus had summarily appropriated the imperial house on the Palatine – Antonia’s
villa was a must-see on the local tourist trail thanks to its tenant’s eccentric habit of keeping a lamprey, somehow adorned with gold earrings, in the ornate fishpond. With its beautiful gardens and stunning views from the colonnade across the bay towards Pompeii, this maritime mansion provided Antonia with a welcome retreat, not just from the searing summer heat of the city but from the internecine feuding on the Palatine during the dark days of Tiberius’s reign, which had resulted in the deaths of two of her three children, Germanicus and Livilla.
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Two decades down the line and under new ownership, this same tranquil villa near Baiae was to be the scene of perhaps the most notorious and colourfully described assassination in Roman history after that of Julius Caesar. That the assassins’ victim this time was a woman signifies how much bigger a political target women had become since the days of the republic. The years leading up to this bloody event were marked by the passing of three emperors and the accession of a fourth who would be the last of the dynasty founded by Augustus and Livia to wear the purple. If the names of these men came to stand, in the accounts of the moralising commentators of the next generation, for the worst that imperial rule could offer in the way of corruption, scandal and abuses of power, then their consorts proved highly satisfactory advertisements for the maxim that the health of the Roman Empire could always be gauged by the conduct of its first ladies.

Like the rest of her Julio-Claudian female relatives, few details survive of the early life of perhaps the most famous of this new generation of imperial women, Agrippina Minor, one of the six offspring of Germanicus and his admired wife Agrippina Maior. Born on 6 November 15 on her father’s campaign trail in the German provincial city of Ara Ubiorum (Cologne) and taken to Rome as a baby to be raised on the Palatine with her siblings, little Agrippina had just turned four when news came through of Germanicus’s death in Syria and she was taken by her uncle Claudius to meet her grieving mother’s convoy from Brundisium on the Appian Way. From that time, all we know is that she, her two younger sisters and elder brother Caligula were apparently allowed to remain with their mother in her Palatine apartments. The next we hear of her is in 28, when at the age of thirteen, she was wedded at the instigation of her great-uncle Tiberius to an impeccably blue-blooded but rather shady grandson of Octavia, Gnaeus
Domitius Ahenobarbus, a man accused once of deliberately driving his carriage over a child playing with a doll on a village road.
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The marriage eventually produced one son born at Antium on 15 December 37, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, better known to history simply as ‘Nero’.

Nero’s birth came nine months after the death of Tiberius, who had breathed his last on 16 March at the age of seventy-eight, having spent his final years as a recluse at his hilltop villa on Capri, the remains of which still overlook the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean. He was not missed, his self-imposed seclusion having created an atmosphere of political stagnancy and suspicion at Rome, and his morose temperament and natural frugality having failed to endear him to a public afflicted by grain shortages, who are said to have gleefully shouted ‘To the Tiber with Tiberius’ on hearing of his death. Tales of cruelty and sexual orgies with little boys on Capri, his once burly physique reduced to gaunt, blotchy disfigurement, provided an ignominious finale to a biography that had once promised so much.
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After years of foot-dragging, the question of Tiberius’s succession had finally been decided. Only three credible candidates were available. They were Germanicus’s younger brother, Claudius, Caligula or Tiberius Gemellus – the son of the disgraced Livilla. Claudius was considered a non-starter on account of his handicaps, and his nephews Caligula and Gemellus were named joint heirs, but the former quickly had the emperor’s will annulled, and Gemellus was forced to commit suicide later that year.
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Twenty-four-year-old Caligula thus became Rome’s third emperor, trusting, in the absence of any real political or military experience, the popular memory of his father Germanicus to win him public support.

Despite his reign lasting only four years, Caligula’s name was to become synonymous with some of the grossest excesses of the Roman imperial age. An infamous story that he once tried to have a favourite racehorse named consul is just one of many preserved anecdotes illustrating his egotism, cruelty and profligacy. They include the charge that he had citizens thrown to wild beasts or sawn in half for minor offences such as criticising his shows; that he made parents attend their own sons’ executions and had torture trials conducted in his presence during mealtimes; that he served golden meat and bread at his feasts, and drank pearls dissolved in vinegar – a narrative echo of the trick once played by Cleopatra, that other
traducer of Roman values. An additional rumour that Caligula had in fact hastened the death of Tiberius, with whom he had been staying on Capri at the time, by smothering his adoptive grandfather with a pillow, became the blueprint for subsequent violent usurpations of imperial power.
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Nonetheless, Caligula’s reign began auspiciously enough with a series of crowd-pleasing measures which included his making a personal pilgrimage across stormy seas to the island of Pandateria to recover the ashes of his mother Agrippina, which he carried back to Rome in his own hands and interred with great ceremony in the mausoleum of Augustus.
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It was a poignant reverse of the journey he had made when just seven years old, when he accompanied his mother on her own voyage home from Brundisium, carrying the ashes of Caligula’s father. Games were now inaugurated in honour of the new emperor’s mother, at which an image of her was carried around the arena in a mule-drawn
carpentum
, and her rehabilitation was completed with the issue of a new bronze coin series featuring the notice ‘The Senate and the People of Rome – To the Memory of Agrippina’, backed on the other side by her portrait and titles.
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Caligula thus drew a line in the sand between himself and the unpopular Tiberius, who had treated Agrippina so badly.

Caligula’s living female relatives also came in for star treatment in the early days of his reign. He insisted that his three sisters, Drusilla, Julia Livilla and Agrippina Minor, should be given the same privileges as the Vestals, the best seats in the house at public games, and that their names be included alongside his own in the wording of public oaths. They also became the first living women to be pictured and explicitly identified on a coin of the imperial mint – a bronze
sestertius
produced in 37–8 which showed three tiny full-length images of the sisters, each captioned by name but depicted with the accoutrements of three female deities personifying abstract qualities crucial to Roman success:
Securitas
(‘Security’),
Concordia
(‘Harmony’), and
Fortuna
(‘Fortune’).
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Antonia, the emperor’s grandmother and former guardian, was not forgotten. The Senate was persuaded to bestow on her at a single stroke all the honours ever won by Livia during her lifetime, which included the vacant position of priestess to the divine Augustus’s cult, the travel privileges afforded the Vestal Virgins and the right to style herself
Augusta
, a title Antonia declined, just as her mother Octavia had once done. Caligula wed three women in quick succession during
his time as emperor (he had married his first wife, Junia Claudilla, before coming to the throne) but not one of them was ever awarded that title, indicating that it was still seen very much as a dowager’s privilege, and too sensitive a form of address for the wife of the emperor.
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With all of these honours, Caligula was acknowledging first the importance of his matrilineal connection to Augustus through his mother Agrippina and his grandmother Antonia. However the elevation of his sisters is crucial. Precious little of note is known about Caligula’s four wives. His first, Junia Claudilla, died giving birth to a stillborn; his second was Livia Orestilla, whom – in a replay of Livia and Augustus’s union – Caligula was said to have abducted from her husband Piso just hours after their wedding and then divorced only days later; in a similar scenario, his third wife, the wealthy Lollia Paulina, was summarily wrested from her husband, a provincial governor, apparently after Caligula heard his grandmother Antonia commenting on her beauty, though she too was soon discarded; finally, in around 39, he married his mistress Milonia Caesonia, described by the third-century historian Cassius Dio as ‘neither young nor beautiful’, but a woman who shared Caligula’s extravagant and promiscuous characteristics, and whom he was said to have paraded naked in front of his friends. The four women had only one characteristic in common – none of them ever provided the emperor with a male heir. Only Caesonia successfully carried a pregnancy by Caligula to term, reportedly giving birth just after their wedding to a daughter named Julia Drusilla, of whose paternity Caligula was convinced when she tried to scratch out her playmates’ eyes, thus proving she shared his own violent temper. The emperor lacking a son, his sisters would be vitally important in continuing the Julio-Claudian line.
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