The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (38 page)

On his return to the west, and after taking a three-year sabbatical at Rome in the mid-120s, Hadrian and his entourage resumed their hectic travelling schedule, and the years between 128 to 132 were spent zig-zagging between Africa, Greece, Syria and Judaea. There, the emperor’s provocative order to build a Temple to the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus on the sacred site of the Jewish temple destroyed by Titus and Vespasian, together with an attempt to refound Jerusalem as a new colony named after Hadrian’s family, elicited a bitter backlash from the Jewish population. In 130, the emperor headed for Egypt with a travelling entourage estimated to have included as many as 5,000 aides and hangers-on. Among the convoy was Sabina, the poet Julia Balbilla, and a beautiful young man named Antinous, who originally came from Bithynia, in north-western Turkey, and whom literary sources tell us was Hadrian’s lover.
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For a Roman emperor to have male as well as female sexual partners was not unheard of, nor did it automatically lead to his vilification. Roman sexual mores dictated that as long as the penetrated party in a sexual relationship was the man’s inferior in terms of age, gender or social rank, a man’s masculinity need not be compromised – although in the case of Caligula and Nero, their own lovers’ corrupting foreign origins and their shameless public vaunting of their passion, figured as proof of their own depravity.
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Hadrian’s and Antinous’s relationship divided opinion among writers of antiquity, some of whom portray Hadrian’s passion for the boy as too overt. But thanks to the startlingly large number of sculptures that survive of this beautiful Greek boy, images that inspired fevered adoration among art collectors of the eighteenth century, Antinous is fêted today as a gay icon. It is unquestionably his idolisation that has fuelled much of the modern backlash against Sabina as a sour termagant from whose reproaches Hadrian gratefully escaped into the arms of his
golden-limbed boy-god.
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In counterpoint, Sabina’s travelling companion Julia Balbilla is nowadays sometimes cast as the empress’s Sapphic consolation prize, a piece of role play lent authenticity by the fact that Balbilla wrote in the same Greek dialect used by the famous poetess of Lesbos.
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Much of the year 130 was spent by the emperor’s travelling party based in Alexandria, venturing out for hunting excursions in the scorching desert, visits to the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and to pay homage before the tombs of the emperor’s heroes Pompey and Alexander the Great. Then a pleasure-seeking cruise up the River Nile one day ended in a tragedy worthy of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel when Antinous was mysteriously drowned – in circumstances said variously to be an accident, a suicide or a case of human sacrifice designed to assist in a spell to make Hadrian live longer.
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Hadrian’s devotion to Antinous’s memory became legendary. After his death, supposedly on the order of the emperor, the entire Roman world from coast to coast was flooded with images of this obscure boy from Bithynia while the foundation stone for a city called Antinoopolis was laid on 30 October at the edge of the Nile, next to where he met his fate. Temples heralded the creation of a new cult in his honour, a gesture that drew mockery from a few who pointed out that the emperor had not gone to so much trouble for his own sister when she died.
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Not long afterwards, the imperial party arrived at the Colossus of Memnon where the four poems composed by Balbilla preserve a record of their visit between 19 and 21 November.
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The presence of an otherwise unknown female poet laureate from Commagene (near the modern Turkish border with Syria) in the entourage of the empress of Rome is intriguing. Female poets had certainly been a fixture in Roman society since the days of the republic, though the only Latin poetry written by a woman that still survives came from the
stilus
of Sulpicia, an aristocratic contemporary of Augustus’s daughter Julia. Sulpicia’s elegiac compositions on her love affair with a man named Cerinthus were preserved among the writings of her uncle Messala’s protégé Tibullus.
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Love poetry was seen as a suspect occupation for a woman, however. It was presented as a mark against vilified republican matron Sempronia that she was a skilled versifier, and society ladies of the early empire who dabbled in the fashion for composing witty epigrams risked mockery from the satirists, who dubbed them ‘magpie poetesses’ and sneered at them
for trying to compete with the great Sappho.
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Balbilla, the royally connected sister of a friend of Hadrian’s, was herself a disciple of Sappho, as shown by her choice of poetic metre. She would surely have come in for similar criticism. The forty-five poorly preserved lines that make up her poetic tribute to Sabina and Hadrian, all that remain of her
oeuvre
, have certainly garnered poor reviews, one modern critic dismissing them as ‘atrocious’.
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But they are nonetheless precious fragments of an all too rare category of evidence from antiquity – writing by a woman – of which the Colossus of Memnon is a surprisingly rich repository. Three more women, Damo, Dionysia and Caecilia Trebulla, also signed themselves the authors of lines engraved on the statue’s legs.
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Just beneath the last of Balbilla’s four offerings, a short postscript acknowledging the Colossus’s performance was even added by Sabina herself.
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In the silence left by the women of antiquity, such crackles from the past, when just for a moment a female voice can be faintly heard, cannot help but strike a chord of longing, particularly in the light of Sabina’s own murky and contradictory historical persona.

By May 134, Hadrian’s and Sabina’s travels ended with their arrival back in Italy, where an exhausted Hadrian now remained for the last three years of his life, dealing
in absentia
with a serious insurrection that had earlier broken out in Judaea under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba, during the suppression of which over half a million Jewish insurgents would be brutally slaughtered. From the tranquil vantage point of his magnificent imperial playground at Tivoli, Hadrian began to ponder the choice of who should succeed him as emperor. His health was poor, and ongoing construction work on the mausoleum in which he would be buried overlooking the Tiber, could only remind him of his own mortality. Like the marriage of Plotina and Trajan, his union with Sabina had remained childless, so he could not deviate from the recent precedent of selecting an artificial ‘son and heir’ from outside his own family. In 136, he decided to plump for one of that year’s consuls, Aelius Caesar. But the death of Aelius two years later forced Hadrian to think again. Close to death himself, the emperor now offered to hand the baton to the well-regarded fifty-one-year-old ex-consul Aurelius Antoninus, on the condition that Antoninus agreed to adopt both his wife Annia Galeria Faustina’s nephew Marcus Annius Verus – a young favourite of Hadrian’s –
and
Aelius Caesar’s young son Lucius Ceionius Commodus as his reserve successors, a suggestion to which Antoninus in due course acquiesced.

Before Aelius Caesar’s death had upset Hadrian’s plans, Sabina herself died, close to her fiftieth birthday. Hadrian’s stone elegy for his wife, which visitors to Rome’s Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori will find embedded high in the wall of the main staircase, acted like a cool, silent reproof to the kind of lurid claims later made in the
Historia Augusta
that the emperor had poisoned his wife or even driven her to suicide.
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An exquisite, though now heavily restored, marble relief, its composition shows a recumbent Sabina suspended above the flames of her funeral pyre, her eyes tilted contemplatively into the distance as she is serenely transported on a diagonal flight path into the heavens, borne side-saddle on the back of a female messenger with eagle-wings, who brandishes a flaming torch like a broomstick. In the foreground, feet planted on
terra firma
, sits Hadrian who crooks his finger up towards the stars, as though pointing the way for his wife.
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The scene depicts the apotheosis, or divine ascent, of Sabina in accordance with her posthumous deification on the order of Hadrian. Coins struck at the same time and featuring Sabina being carried up to heaven on the back of an eagle, with the legend
consecratio
stamped beneath, formed companion pieces to the relief.
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Although emperors such as Titus had appeared in such a guise before, never before had an imperial woman’s apotheosis been portrayed in art. Like other such ‘firsts’ for imperial women, though, it was less an encomium of Sabina in her own right than a gesture intended to reflect glory on to Hadrian’s own family legacy.

Hadrian survived his wife by barely a year. He died at Baiae on 10 July 138, at the age of sixty-two, possibly of coronary heart disease.
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In 139, his remains were dug up from their temporary resting-place in the gardens of Domitia and reinterred in his just-completed 50-metres-high mausoleum overlooking the River Tiber, alongside those of Sabina. Two bronze peacocks preserved from the tomb’s remains probably stood guard over Sabina, since peacocks were the traditional vehicle for female apotheosis, while eagles performed the same service for new male deities.
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Reinvented by subsequent generations as a medieval fortress, a prison and a safe house for the pope during times of political unrest, today Hadrian’s and Sabina’s tomb has been swallowed up into the cylindrical drum of the Castel Sant’Angelo which looms like a fat sentinel over the approach to the Vatican. Hadrian and Sabina did not live a peaceful coexistence in death. When a horde of angry Goths sacked the city of Rome in August 410, they are said
to have despoiled the mausoleum of the urns that contained the couple’s ashes.
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Probably the least high-profile in the modern consciousness of the ‘good emperors’ of the second century, Hadrian’s successor Antoninus governed the empire for twenty-three relatively peaceful years, the longest reign of any emperor since Tiberius. The fact that he had barely set foot outside Italy and possessed no military credentials to speak of before taking office did not prove a bar. Wealthy and popular, but down-to-earth enough to get his feet dirty with regular folk in the annual grape harvest, he was welcomed with open arms by the majority of the Senate and in tribute to his piety in successfully pressing that reluctant body to deify Hadrian, he was given the official title Antoninus Pius – ‘Antoninus the Righteous’.
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Part of Antoninus’s appeal as a plausible successor to Hadrian had been his connections to the powerful Annii family, acquired through his marriage to Annia Galeria Faustina, daughter of olive-oil baron Annius Verus and his wife Rupilia Faustina.
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Annia Galeria Faustina’s elder brother Verus had married a woman named Domitia Lucilla, the wealthy heiress to a huge family brick-factory fortune, and it was from this union that Annia Galeria Faustina’s nephew Marcus Annius Verus, who would grow up to become the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was born in April 121.

Although the Annii originally hailed, like Trajan’s and Hadrian’s families, from the province of Baetica in southern Spain, the young Marcus Aurelius was brought up in his family’s mansion in the wealthy and fashionable district of the Caelian hill in Rome. The early death of his father had seen Marcus being taken under the wing of a series of male mentors and tutors, including Hadrian himself, who apparently took a shine to this scholarly young lad. On Antoninus Pius’s succession in 138, the new emperor honoured the promise he had made to Hadrian to adopt the now seventeen-year-old Marcus, and Aelius Caesar’s eight-year-old son Lucius Ceionius Commodus, as his joint-heirs. Amalgamating their new sire’s names into their own, Marcus now became known as Marcus Aurelius Verus Caesar, while Lucius’s name changed to Lucius Aurelius Commodus – though he is better known now as Lucius Verus. In a further tacit acknowledgement of Marcus’s seniority, a prior betrothal between Antoninus Pius’s daughter Faustina and Lucius was nullified, and Faustina rebetrothed to Marcus.
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Much to Marcus’s frequently expressed reluctance, he was now obliged to take up residence in the imperial house on the Palatine. Over the next two decades, the task of grooming him for the top job of emperor was entrusted to a number of advisers and educationalists, chief amongst whom in his late teens and early twenties was a doughty, gout-riddled rhetoric instructor named Cornelius Fronto. A long correspondence between the two was maintained over the next twenty years and preserved in an edited collection of Fronto’s papers but no traces of it survived the literary clear-out of late antiquity when most classical literature was lost at the hands of Christian censors. Then, more than a thousand years later, between 1815 and 1819, a cardinal called Angelo Mai, who was head librarian at first the Ambrosian library in Milan, and then the Vatican library in Rome, miraculously turned up extracts from the correspondence hidden for centuries beneath the overwritten copy of a Christian text.
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Though still little-studied, these letters not only constitute a priceless record of the friendship between a young prince and his educational mentor, they also provide us with precious first-hand glimpses of life on the Palatine, and of a young emperor-in-the-making’s affectionate relationships with the women around him – chief among whom was his mother Domitia Lucilla. In his reports to his tutor, Marcus often writes of his closeness to his mother, who he says used to sit on his bed chatting to him before the gong went for dinner – a meal characterised as an informal affair, eaten on one occasion in the villa’s olive-oil-press room, where the chatter of the ‘yokels’ gave the imperial family much amusement.
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Day-to-day domestic crises are also described, such as the traumatic week in which Marcus’s sister Annia Cornificia was seized with agonising ‘pain in the privy parts’ (probably a reference to menstrual cramps) and Domitia Lucilla ‘in the flurry of the moment, inadvertently ran her side against a corner of the wall, causing us as well as herself great pain by the accident’.
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We are also given a hint that unlike Livia and other upper-class Roman mothers, Domitia Lucilla followed the great Cornelia’s example by breast-feeding her son when he was an infant – although this may have been a piece of throwaway rhetoric on Marcus’s part designed to cast his mother in the most flattering light.
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