The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (5 page)

An ancient biography of Tiberius preserves the information that Livia herself employed a wet-nurse or
nutrix
to look after her son, one of the very few glimpses we have of this period of her life.
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Yet it is important. For it plugs directly into Roman thinking about the ideal woman, a yardstick against which Livia and her successors as Roman first lady would be judged. Women rarely won praise in the writings of antiquity for acting in their own interests, rather, they were praised for facilitating the interests of their husbands and their sons, and, through them, furthering the glory of Rome. Cornelia, as the mother of populist politician brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, was celebrated for her stewardship of their childhood, bringing them up to be eloquent orators and morally upstanding young men fed on a diet of mother’s milk. In the same way, details of Livia’s upbringing of Tiberius survive because the ancient biographers in question were
interested not in Livia per se, but in how her upbringing of young Tiberius might have impacted on the grown man – and emperor – that he would eventually become.

Those reviews were still unwritten. At this stage, despite her impressive family tree, Livia was still very much one of the giant cast of extras in the grand historical narrative of this tumultuous period in Roman history. But unravelling political events and the aspirations of her husband soon propelled her closer to the centre of the action.

In the wake of their joint victory over Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC – the victory which resulted in the suicide of Livia’s father – the honeymoon period for arch rivals Mark Antony and Octavian did not last long. The relationship between this charismatic veteran warhorse and ambitious political wunderkind had always been a marriage of convenience. On their return from the scene of their victory, Antony had departed to oversee his allocated share of territory in the eastern Roman Empire. This left the third triumvir Lepidus with responsibility for the province of Africa and Octavian with jurisdiction over Italy, and the unpopular task of repossessing land and redistributing it among the military troops who had been promised a reward for supporting the triumvirs against Brutus and Cassius. Very soon, a cold war set in between Octavian’s and Antony’s camps which showed few signs of thawing over the next decade.

With Lepidus increasingly sidelined, the battle-weary Roman ruling classes found themselves under pressure to declare their allegiance between two rival candidates for overall power, and soon Tiberius Nero made his choice, deciding to nail his colours to the mast of Antony. Smuggling Livia and their newborn son out of Rome in 41 BC, they made for Perusia (modern Perugia) in central Italy, where they found Antony’s wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius spearheading attempts to foment popular discontent against Octavian among those Italians whose land had been repossessed.
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Antony’s third wife Fulvia was a highly controversial figure in his campaign, and one whose character assassination in ancient sources gives us a taster of what was in store for the
femmes dangereuses
of the imperial era. Rome was an aggressively militarist society, one that configured war as a critically – and exclusively – masculine sphere of achievement. The presence of a woman on the front line was anathema, making Fulvia a prime target for Antony’s opponents, who made political capital out of the spectre of a woman managing her
husband’s operations in the field. Recent archaeological discoveries at Perugia of missiles thrown during stand-offs between the opposing sides give us a flavour of the kind of rhetoric employed. The finds included slingshots on which derogatory insults aimed at Fulvia had been scratched – slogans such as ‘I’m aiming for Fulvia’s cunt’, and ‘Baldy Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, open your arses’.
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Her press in the annals of Roman history is scarcely more flattering than these crude graffiti.
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For one ancient historian, Fulvia’s macabre pleasure in the death of Antony’s harshest critic Cicero, whose head she demanded to be brought before her in order that she might stab the great orator’s quicksilver but now lifeless tongue with a gold hairpin – a feminine variant on a dagger or sword – crystallised her reputation as a terrible hybrid of male and female characteristics; while Octavian himself was the alleged author of an obscene poem about her, in which he claimed that Fulvia, frustrated by Antony’s affairs with other women, had adjured Octavian to ‘fight me or fuck me’, an invitation which he mockingly declined.
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For a Roman woman to stray into traditionally male territory, as Fulvia was seen to be doing, did not automatically have to lead to her condemnation. The city’s richly idealised history of its own mythical past was punctuated by stories of females like Cloelia, a young girl lauded for rescuing a group of female hostages from the Etruscan king Porsenna by swimming with them across the Tiber through a hail of enemy spears, and publicly thanked with the erection of a statue on the Appian Way, an honour otherwise afforded almost exclusively to men during the republic. Other women, both fictional and real, were praised for their ‘masculine’ bravery in suicide. Most notable among this group was Lucretia, whose rape by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus, was the catalyst for the overthrow of monarchical rule in 509 BC, and the founding of the republic, on ostensibly democratic principles. Lucretia won everlasting praise as a role model for Roman women for stabbing herself in the heart after her rape, rather than allow her compromised chastity to bring dishonour on her father and her husband. Then there were the ladies who directly intervened to broker peace between warring male factions, like Veturia and Volumnia, who in response to a plea from other Roman matrons inside the city, negotiated the about-turn from the city gates of their respective son and husband, Coriolanus, when he threatened to invade Rome in the fifth century BC; and the Sabine women, whose abduction by the earliest Roman settlers threatened
to spark war between the newcomers and their Sabine neighbours, but whose pleas for reconciliation led to peace. All of these stories were set at times of severe flux in Roman history, as tyrants were overthrown or thwarted, and ages of peace restored. The message was, if only all women were as chaste as Lucretia, as brave as Cloelia, and as wise as Veturia and Volumnia, then Rome would never fall into the traps of vice, corruption and despotism that had afflicted it at various points in its historical trajectory.
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As a rule though, women like Fulvia, and later Antony’s lover Cleopatra, who meddled in the exclusive political and military territory of men, were more usually categorised as harbingers of a world turned upside down. The dividing line between the female sphere of domestic life and the public world of men was a fixed one, and woe betide any woman perceived to have overstepped it. One such straw woman of the republican era was Clodia Metelli, cited during a lawcourt speech delivered in 56 BC by Cicero, when he was defending her former lover Caelius Rufus on a charge of attempting to murder her. Cicero, who claimed that the allegation had been cooked up by Clodia’s brother Clodius, with whom Cicero had a long-standing feud, undermined Clodia as a witness by claiming that she was a member of a rowdy, drunken and sexually promiscuous social set who hung out at the popular seaside resort of Baiae, south of Rome. The damning word he used was that she was ‘notorious’, implying that Clodia had broken the unwritten rule of Roman society which dictated that a woman’s place was to be seen and not heard.
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The real targets of such vilification, however, were usually the men who tolerated a woman’s incursion into the public sphere in the first place, and who, according to Roman definitions of masculinity, were thus to be regarded as weak and feminine themselves, unable to keep their own house in order. These at least were the sentiments behind Plutarch’s description of Fulvia as ‘a woman who cared nothing for spinning or housework, and was not interested in having power over a husband who was just a private citizen, but wanted to rule a ruler and command a commander – and consequently Cleopatra owed Fulvia the fee for teaching Antony to submit to a woman’.
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In stark contrast, funerary epitaphs on the tombs of women of the period painted sepia-toned portraits of the occupants as domestic role models who without exception bore children, loved their husbands, kept house, spun wool and could hold a conversation but knew their place.
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To the Roman way of thinking, this wool-working housewife was the
ideal woman, moulded in the image of the heroic martyr Lucretia, who had been engaged in spinning at her loom when her rapist Sextus Tarquinius first saw her. The contrast between her and the brazen Fulvia could not have been more acute.

In the end, Fulvia’s and Lucius’s campaign to drum up opposition to Octavian in favour of Antony was scuppered in early 40 BC when Octavian’s forces laid siege to their camp, forcing the rebels into a chaotic exodus in which Tiberius Nero and Livia were caught up. The next year of their lives was spent in peripatetic exile, and the timing of their various movements from this point becomes uncertain. Forced to make first for the resort of Praeneste, east of Rome, they went from there to Naples where they had a close shave with Octavian’s forces because of the crying of Tiberius, who had to be passed from hand to hand between Livia, his nurse and their other travelling companions in a bid to quiet him, as they surreptitiously threaded their way down to the port. On arrival in Sicily, the hopes of Livia’s husband that they would receive the protection of another renegade, Sextus Pompeius, who had used the island as his base since fleeing the scene of his father Pompey’s defeat at the hands of Julius Caesar, were dashed when Octavian began to make peace overtures to Sextus Pompeius. Livia and Tiberius Nero made next for Greece, where Sparta seems to have afforded the émigré couple a warm welcome at least, thanks probably to the doors opened by the Claudian family name, which had vested interests in the region. But their hiding place was discovered, forcing them into their swift and hazardous night-time exit through the Spartan forest fire.
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Such was the tumultuous nature of Livia’s first trip into the internecine landscape of the late republic. In its more colourful details, such as the singeing of her dress and hair as she ran through that burning Spartan forest and her frantic attempts to silence her crying son, it reads almost as the autobiographical back story of an aspiring political candidate, a
Biography
channel voiceover narrative of an underdog’s struggle against the odds. It is impossible not to wonder what the young Livia made of her situation. In the absence of first-or even second-hand testimony, we can never know whether she was a willing abettor in Tiberius Nero’s political objectives or simply a passive accomplice whose only option was to follow dutifully in her husband’s footsteps. Graffiti from Pompeii dating to the first century, in which Roman women, though deprived of voting rights themselves, urged support for certain electoral candidates, along with the active
example set by republican matrons such as Fulvia, illustrate that women could and did promote the political causes of their menfolk.
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Despite the Roman conception of public speaking as another of the key building blocks of masculine identity, to the exclusion of women, female protest and rebellion on their own behalf was also not unheard of – the most famous incidence coming a year before the siege of Perusia in 42 BC when Hortensia, the daughter of one of the great orators of the day, Hortensius, delivered a speech against the triumvirs’ imposition of a tax on Rome’s wealthiest women to help pay for the war with Brutus and Cassius, a tax that was later partially repealed. Livia herself, now that her father was dead and she was
sui iuris
– independent, save for the supervision of a guardian who oversaw certain of her affairs – was legally free to leave Tiberius Nero if she wanted to. Instead, by staying with her husband, she was actually acting in a way that even those who reviled Livia in later life recognised was an honourable part for a woman to play, as the historian Tacitus acknowledged when he wrote approvingly of the virtue displayed by women in other turbulent times who ‘accompanied their children in flight’ and ‘followed their husbands into exile’.
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Nevertheless, it is clear that if circumstances had not intervened, a prolonged marriage to Tiberius Nero, for all his impressive credentials, would never have brought Livia more than fleeting recognition at best in the annals of Rome’s history. Instead, while she and her husband licked their wounds, it was another woman who found herself in the temporary glow of the public spotlight.

In a bid to patch over the cracks in their fragile alliance, Octavian and Antony now agreed to put the Perusine wars behind them and call a truce. At the harbour of Brundisium (Brindisi) on the Adriatic coast of Italy, the terms of a treaty were agreed in October 40 BC, which confirmed the awards of the eastern provinces of the empire to Antony and the western provinces to Octavian, while third-wheel Lepidus was dispatched to the province of Africa, well away from the centre of the action. To seal the deal, Octavian took a page out of the negotiation handbook of his great-uncle Julius Caesar. He offered up his recently widowed elder sister Octavia – who thirteen years earlier had been the bait in a similar bargain offered by Caesar to his rival Pompey (though she was rejected by the latter) – in marriage to his opponent. The death from illness earlier that year of Fulvia, as she tried to join up with Antony in Greece, had removed any obstacle on his side, and
though Roman protocol recommended that ten months’ mourning should have followed the death in May of Octavia’s previous husband, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, before she married again, her brother’s political needs could not wait. The treaty and attendant wedding duly cemented peace between Antony and Octavian, with twenty-nine-year-old Octavia as the glue holding it together.
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