The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (42 page)

As well as setting up Domna as the reassuring guardian of Roman stability, both domestic and military, there was another agenda behind the bestowal on Domna of a title first awarded to Faustina. When and wherever possible, Severus strove to link himself to Rome’s last ‘good’ emperor, Marcus Aurelius, even to the extent of wearing the same Greek-style beard as his and getting Marcus’s physician Galen to prescribe him the same cassia-based medicine he had administered
to his former patient. The military, economic and political uncertainties of the third century had made it even more important for Septimius Severus than it had been for his predecessors to establish strong roots for his dynasty in the solid traditions of a stable past. From the portraiture commissioned and churned out in vast quantities by the empire’s master sculptors, cameo-makers and painters, to the insignia and slogans chosen for his family’s appearances on Roman coinage, Severus not only modelled himself on his most successful Antonine predecessor but claimed to be that dynasty’s natural heir. The same year that Domna was linked to Faustina with the title
mater castrorum
, Severus adopted himself into the Antonine clan, declaring himself the son of Marcus Aurelius. Riskily, this also meant accepting kinship with Commodus, so the bluntly pragmatic decision was taken to deify the former emperor, thus sweetening the pill and legitimising Severus’s seizure of power.
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The elder of Severus’s and Domna’s sons, Bassianus, was meanwhile renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus after his newly acquired ancestor, though like Caligula, an emperor to whom he was unfortunately later compared, it is by his nickname – ‘Caracalla’, a reference to the hooded cloak that he habitually wore – that he is far better known.

Unsurprisingly, this charade did not pass without a wry comment or two from Severus’s public. One wag commented on the emperor’s newly arranged family tree by quipping that it was nice that he had finally found himself a father.
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Severus’s artificial ‘self-adoption’ was certainly a piece of remarkable chutzpah. Yet in doing it, he was showing himself a keen student of previous emperors, such as Augustus and Vespasian, who had shored up their own legitimacy quotient by emphasising – and sometimes embellishing – their ties to admired former leaders. Another profitable stratagem, as we have already seen, was to stress one’s connections to former emperors’ wives – a tactic adopted, for example, by Galba and Otho in relation to Livia, and by Hadrian in tribute to Plotina. Severus himself could boast of no such personal friendships or family ties to famous empresses. So, instead, he improvised. By mapping the deified Faustina’s image on to Domna’s, even though she, like him, had no ties, blood or otherwise, to the Antonines, Severus fostered an illusion that his dynasty came with divine approval. The story that he had dreamed of Faustina preparing the wedding couch for himself and Domna shortly before his marriage, was just one component of such propaganda, whose urgent purpose was to provide a reassuring sense of continuity and stability, glossing
over the war-ridden interlude of the early 190s, while also distracting attention from the interloper status of the new first family.
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As a consequence, all corners of the Roman Empire were bombarded with images of the Severans as a family unit during their first few years in power. Every imperial house since the Julio-Claudians had seen itself celebrated in group portraits, but none had included the emperor’s wife and children with such regularity. On almost every public monument featuring Severus, Domna and their boys were beside him, heavily underlining her symbolic importance as the maternal guarantor of the Severan dynasty’s future. Coinage issues reinforced the message – gold
aurei
issued from 202 featured a portrait bust of Domna framed on either side by the profiles of her sons. The accompanying slogan
felicitas saeculi
(‘The Fruitfulness of the Age’) deliberately echoed the message of a similar coin featuring Faustina and her boys.
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But these compositions, with their statement of togetherness, were to have their message tainted. Soon the image of one family member would be obliterated.

The army of slaves, freedmen and civil servants who had run the imperial household on the Palatine since the days of Augustus and Livia saw little of its new occupants for the first decade of Septimius Severus’s reign.
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Refurbishments to the palace were commissioned, such as the addition of a new imperial audience box from which Severus and his family could enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the races in the Circus Maximus down below, but there was little initial opportunity to enjoy this luxurious facility. Having criss-crossed the empire eliminating internal rivals for the throne, the new emperor returned by sea to the east in 197 to take on the external threat posed by the Parthian Empire and did not set foot in Rome again for the next five years. Domna and his sons continued to accompany Severus on this odyssey, as well as his closest adviser and fellow African, the newly appointed praetorian prefect Fulvius Plautianus.

For Domna, the trip meant a welcome return to her native land, Syria, and perhaps a reunion with members of her Emesene family. To have a locally born wife could only have done Severus’s approval ratings in the region good, and during these changing and uncertain times in which the empire’s centre of gravity was gradually shifting outwards from Rome to its peripheries, it was politically useful to have eyes and ears so close to Rome’s easternmost borders in the form
of Domna’s relatives. Several of her Emesene kinsmen in fact rose to prominent positions within the emperor’s circle, perhaps with the help of lobbying from Domna herself if the example of Livia and Plotina was anything to go by. Most notable among those promoted included Domna’s brother-in-law Julius Avitus Alexianus, a former equestrian officer who was brought into the Senate at the beginning of Severus’s reign and later awarded the consulship. Alexianus was the husband of Domna’s sister Maesa, who had come to live with Domna when she became empress, giving her an insider’s view of palace politics that would come in useful later in her own career.
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By January 198, Severus was celebrating the emulation of Trajan’s achievement in the capturing of the Parthian capital Ctesiphon. He now chose to bestow on Caracalla the imperial title of ‘
Augustus
’ – which had never been shared by a father with his son in order to delineate the latter as heir – and gave Geta the more junior title of ‘Caesar’. Domna could now claim to be the first imperial woman to be simultaneously wife and mother to two
Augusti
. After an aborted attempt to lay siege to the Arab fortress of Hatra, Severus and his entourage went on an extended tour of Egypt in 199, echoing the trip up the Nile taken by Hadrian and Sabina. The new first family visited the same cultural monuments as their Antonine predecessors, including the Colossus of Memnon, where Domna was able to walk up and read the verses composed by Balbilla to commemorate the visit of Sabina. It was on this same trip that Severus issued his unfortunate order to ‘fix’ the singing statue, silencing it for ever more.

In contrast to Hadrian’s and Sabina’s reputedly stilted relationship, there are no reports of disharmony in the union between Severus and his Syrian-born wife. In truth, little is said about their relationship at all, although the amusing piece of information that Severus spoke Latin with an accent thick enough to make him pronounce his own name as ‘Sheptimius Sheverus’ leads one to assume they most likely conversed in Greek, a language that Domna herself would have spoken growing up in Emesa.
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The only discordant note about their marriage appears in the
Historia Augusta
, which claims that the emperor refused to divorce Domna even though ‘she was notorious for her adulteries, and also guilty of plotting against him’.
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This story more probably had its roots either in the kind of pre-ordained narrative traditions established for the careers of previous imperial wives, or alternatively in a smear campaign against her by another member of her husband’s circle – Fulvius Plautianus, the head of the praetorian guard.
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A fellow
native of Lepcis Magna, Plautianus had enjoyed a flourishing career under Domna’s husband, but was said to dislike the empress intensely, for reasons that will soon emerge.

In 202, the imperial family finally arrived back in Rome to great fanfare, and Plautianus’s position as the emperor’s most powerful and trusted aide was strengthened still further. In an echo of the attempts of Tiberius’s ruthless praetorian prefect Sejanus to ingratiate himself into the imperial family, Plautianus saw his daughter Plautilla married to Caracalla, making him father-in-law to the future Augustus. The wedding took place in April as part of the celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of Severus’s rule and was described by Cassius Dio, one of the wedding guests, as a lavish affair at which the gifts were paraded through the forum and up to the palace, and the guests were served both refined dishes of cooked meat yet also ‘live, raw meat’ such as barbarians would eat.
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Both this detail and the observation that the dowry Plautianus provided for his daughter would have covered the dowry costs of fifty women of royal rank, reflected Cassius Dio’s distaste for the father of the bride, whom he described as a sensual glutton who would eat and drink so much at banquets that he vomited at the table, and whose lust for boys and girls stood at odds with his puritanical treatment of Plautilla, whom he kept in purdah and refused all visitors.
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The fourteen-year-old groom Caracalla in turn detested Plautianus and treated his new bride Plautilla with vicious contempt.
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Domna’s own sentiments towards her new daughter-in-law, who became her equal in rank with the award of the title
Augusta
and whose coiffure, at least in her early portraits, was styled to resemble her own, are not recorded.
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But if the testimony of Cassius Dio is correct, she had reason to fear the intrusion into her family of Plautianus; ever since his arrival on the scene, he had made it his mission to discredit the Syrian empress, even torturing her friends to get information on her that he could pour into Severus’s ear:

So greatly did Plautianus have mastery in every way over the emperor, that he often treated even Julia Augusta in an outrageous manner; for he cordially detested her and was always abusing her violently to Severus. He used to conduct investigations into her conduct as well as gather evidence against her by torturing women of the nobility. For this reason she began to study philosophy and passed her days in the company with sophists.
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Cassius Dio’s affidavit that Julia Domna retreated into a private world of study and philosophic conversation in the face of Plautianus’s persecution has been the driving force behind the archetypal image of her, distinguishing her term as first lady of Rome from all of her predecessors as one of real intellectual engagement. It complements famous remarks made by one of the leading literary figures of the day, a Greek sophist and crony of the imperial court named Philostratus, who noted in the prologue to his most important work
Apollonius of Tyana
(a biography of a neo-Pythagorean philosopher of the first century) that he had been aided in his research for the work by its commissioner, Julia Domna herself, of whose ‘circle’ he was a member: ‘for she admired and encouraged all rhetorical discourse – she set me to transcribe these works … and to take care over their style’.
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Julia Domna’s ‘circle’ has long been the subject of passionate disagreement and debate. On one side it has been much compared to the ‘salons’ presided over by educated female hostesses of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe, and described as being populated by the cream of Severan academic society, not just sophists like Philostratus, but well-known mathematicians, lawyers, historians, poets and doctors.
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The evidence against the existence either of a formal ‘salon’ or one with so long and illustrious a list of attendants is that Philostratus, the only ancient source to mention any such circle in the first place, in fact names only one other member – a sophist and rhetorician named Philiscus of Thessaly who ‘attached himself closely to Julia’s circle of mathematicians and philosophers, and obtained from her with the emperor’s consent the chair of rhetoric at Athens’.
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As important research has proven, the identity of many other supposed members of Domna’s circle, including Cassius Dio and medical writer Galen, has in fact been presumed on the sole testimony of a historian of the nineteenth century, who came up with the list off the top of his head but whose speculations were subsequently quoted by other scholars as if fact.
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Although we draw a blank on membership of Domna’s circle, and indeed the question whether she hosted soirées in the manner of society hostesses such as the eighteenth century’s Madame du Deffand or the seventeenth century’s Madeleine de Scudéry, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the Syrian empress was clearly an intellectual sponsor of considerable influence. Moreover, she had personal interests in a wide range of studies that no other imperial
woman is known to have shared. Of course, her services to Philostratus and Philiscus were entirely in keeping with the role of patron that we have already seen performed by other imperial women such as Octavia, to whom Vitruvius paid tribute for inspiring
On Architecture
, and Plotina, who herself helped parachute a candidate of her choosing into the chair of the Epicurean school at Athens. But more than that, Domna herself appears to have engaged in conversations not just about philosophy, but also about rhetoric, two subjects that were otherwise presented by most Roman literary sources as the educational preserve of men. An opaquely expressed letter survives, addressed by Philostratus to Julia Domna and seemingly a continuation of an ongoing dialogue between them, in which the former tries to persuade his patroness of the merits of the florid rhetorical style of the sophists, and urges her to refute attacks on them, ‘in your wisdom and knowledge’.
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