The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (60 page)

20. A portrait bust of Livia, with her hair fashioned in the austere
nodus
style commonly worn by Roman matrons of the first century
BC
.

21. The luxurious arrangement of precisely drilled waves and curls sported by Agrippina Maior formed a stark contrast to the rigidly plain
nodus
worn by her predecessors.

22. This portrait, commonly thought to be of Domitia, shows off to excellent effect the flamboyant style of hairdressing that became popular under the Flavians, during the second half of the first century.

23. The stiff, rigid coiffure of Trajan’s wife Plotina does not seem to have set a fashion among women of the second century.

24. The plaited bun hairstyle of this woman, thought to be Julia Mamaea, was a precursor of similar styles worn by women in the later third and fourth centuries.

25. Howard Fast’s novel
Agrippa’s Daughter
(1964) casts Berenice as a plucky – and beautiful – flame-haired champion of her people.

26. This image from the Vatican Museums of second-century emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife Annia Galeria Faustina, being borne upwards to the heavens in conjugal unity, represented the first joint imperial apotheosis portrayed in Roman art.

27. The Berlin tondo of Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna and their two sons, Caracalla and Geta, is the only painted portrait of an imperial family to survive from antiquity. The obliteration of Geta’s face was executed on the orders of his brother.

28. In Paolo Veronese’s
The Dream of St Helena
(
c
. 1570), two angels carrying the True Cross appear to Constantine’s mother as she sleeps, inspiring her to seek out its hiding place.

29. The moment of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, on which Jesus was crucified. She is accompanied by a female attendant to her left, and Judas Cyriacus to her right. The Judas Cyriacus version of the Cross’s discovery was immensely popular in the Middle Ages.

30. The vast porphyry sarcophagus of Helena, mother of Constantine. It was originally placed in a mausoleum near her estate in Rome, but was removed in the twelfth century to serve as a tomb for Pope Anastasius IV. Its militaristic decoration scheme suggests it may originally have been intended for a male member of Constantine’s family.

31. The Vandal-born general Stilicho, with his wife Serena and their son Eucherius.