The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (61 page)

32. Pulcheria was a prominent figure at her brother Theodosius II’s court in Constantinople. Coins depict her with the elaborately jewelled coiffure typical of imperial female portraits of the fifth century; on the reverse, an image of the goddess Victory painting the Christian chi-rho symbol onto a shield.

33. The empress Galla Placidia, caught with her children, Honoria and Valentinian III, in a storm that threatened to capsize their boat, utters her prayer to St John the Evangelist.

34. Though Galla Placidia’s remains are almost certainly entombed in the imperial mausoleum beneath St Peter’s in Rome, her body was once thought to lie in a sarcophagus in the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. The building is famous for its exquisite blue mosaic interior, rich in Christian symbolism.

Notes

Introduction: I, Claudia
…

1
Plutarch,
Caesar
10.8. Mrs Landingham, secretary and doorkeeper to the president, utters this line in the episode ‘18th and Potomac’, series 2 of
The West Wing
.

2
On the way in which we read portraits of emperors, see Vout (2009), 262. This bust of Faustina Minor is a copy of an original in the Vatican, Braccio Nuovo, 2195. Museum of Classical Archaeology, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge: no. 601.

3
On the writing of
I, Claudius
, see Spivey (1999), vii, and Seymour-Smith (1995), 227–33. On the reception of the television drama, see Joshel (2001),
passim
, and 159, n. 35 on the portrayal of Livia in particular. In both the book and television version, Nero’s mother is actually called Agrippinilla, to distinguish her from her mother Agrippina Maior.

4
Jonathan Stamp, the creative director of
Rome
, is on record as stating that the Republican Roman matron Clodia Metelli was actually the inspiration for Atia, but the legacy of
I, Claudius
seems to be clearly apparent in her portrayal: see also Ragalie (2007), 5–7. On Graves’s acknowledged debt to ancient historians, see Spivey (1999), ix.

5
An 1893 publication on the physiognomy and pathology of female criminals by Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso and historian Guglielmo Ferrero – the latter of whom was responsible eighteen years later for a history of the Roman empresses titled
The Women of the Caesars
– was fronted by a title-page illustration of a Roman portrait bust of Claudius’s wife Messalina, whose facial proportions were claimed to match those of nineteenth-century prostitutes: see Wyke (2002), 328–30.

6
On the literary tradition of ‘female worthies’ and their roots in Roman history, see Winterer (2007), 41f; Hicks (2005a) and (2005b); McLeod (1991). On Messalina’s modern reception history, see chapters 9 and 10 of Wyke (2002), for a full and fascinating account.

7
See recent revisionist readings of Nero too; for example, Elsner and Masters (1994).

8
See Elsner and Masters (1994), 2, on the problem with regard to Nero’s story; also Edwards (2000), xvi and D’Ambra (2007), 160.

9
On the preoccupations of biography as a genre, see Lee (2009) and (2005).

10
Literary references to individual imperial women as
princeps femina
include Ovid,
Epistulae ex Ponto
3.1.125, Ovid,
Tristia
1.6.25 and the anonymous
Consolatio ad Liviam
303 (all referring to Livia) and Macrobius,
Saturnalia
2.5.6 (referring to both Livia and Julia). See also Purcell (1986), 78–9 on the term; and Barrett (2002), on the analogy of ‘first lady’ as applied to Livia.

11
On the habits of America’s first ladies, see Caroli (1995), 5–7 (on Martha Washington); 148 (on Edith Wilson); 56 (on Martha Johnson Patterson); 90 (on Lucy Hayes); 71–2 (on Mary Lincoln); 275–6 (on Nancy Reagan).

12
See Caroli (1995), 35.

1
Ulysses in a Dress: The Making of a Roman First Lady

1
The opening to Hays’s entry on Livia, in Vol. 2 of
Female Biography
.

2
This dramatised portrait of Livia’s flight is based on Suetonius,
Tiberius
6; also Cassius Dio,
Roman History
54.15.4 and Velleius Paterculus 2.75.

3
An admittedly loose translation of Caligula’s reported nickname for his great-grandmother: Suetonius,
Caligula
23.2. See Purcell (1986), 79 on translating this epithet.

4
Livia’s birth is commonly dated to either 59 or 58 BC: see appendix 5 in Barrett (2002) for a full summary of the arguments. I have abided by the more orthodox date of 58.

5
Suetonius,
Tiberius
1. On Livia’s genealogy, see Barrett (2002), 4–8.

6
The year of Livia’s and Tiberius Nero’s marriage is uncertain, but see Barrett (2002), 11 on 43 BC being the most likely date.

7
Cicero,
Letters to his Friends
13.64.2: trans. Treggiari (1991), 129.

8
Barrett (2002), 11 on Tiberius Nero’s likely age.

9
Treggiari (2007), 95; see also D’Ambra (2007), 73. On Cicero’s letter, and on women’s consent to marriage in general, see Gardner (1986), 41f.

10
On women, marriage and the law, see Gardner (1986), 5 and 13.

11
Gardner (1986), 42–3 on limited opportunities for acquaintanceship.

12
The use of a spear in this context has long proved difficult to interpret. It may, as Plutarch suggests, have been intended to recall the warlike claiming of the Sabine brides by the Romans: see Olson (2008), 21f for more on this.

13
I have reconstructed this scene based on modern scholarship on Roman weddings, chiefly that of Treggiari (1991), 161ff. For specific details, see also Hemelrijk (1999), 9 on the putting-away of toys; Lefkowitz and Fant (1992), no. 271 for a third-century wedding invitation specifying the time of day; Croom (2000), 95–6, citing Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
9.56–114, for pearl-embroidery on
socci
; Shelton (1998), no. 56 for Catullus’s take on the wedding song with its ‘dirty Fescennine jokes’.

14
Suetonius,
Tiberius
5 on Tiberius’s date and place of birth.

15
Barrett (2002), 177.

16
Suetonius,
Tiberius
14.1; Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
10.154.

17
Rawson (2003), 101–2.

18
Kleiner and Matheson (1996), 92, cat. no. 56, for illustration of the speculum from Pompeii; Lefkowitz and Fant (1992), no. 355 on instructions for the midwife: Soranus,
Gynaecology
1.67–9.

19
Rawson (2003), 106.

20
See the Favorinus episode described in Aulus Gellius,
Attic Nights
12, as below.

21
On the
lustratio
, or cleansing ritual, see Rawson (2003), 110–11.

22
Aulus Gellius,
Attic Nights
12.

23
Hemelrijk (1999), 66, citing Tacitus,
Dialogue
28 which also states that Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar, and Atia, the mother of Augustus, nursed their own children. See also Gardner (1986), 241f on breast-feeding, which briefly discusses a fragmentary third-century letter from a parent apparently requesting their son-in-law to provide their daughter with a wet-nurse: ‘I do not permit my daughter to suckle.’

24
Suetonius,
Tiberius
6.

25
Suetonius,
Tiberius
4; Cassius Dio,
Roman History
48.15.3.

26
Inscriptions Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae
1106 and 1112: translated P. J. Jones (2006), 98; see also Hallett (1977), 151–7.

27
On Fulvia’s reputation, see Delia (1991).

28
Martial, 11.20.3–8 preserves the poem. On Fulvia’s pleasure in Cicero’s death, see Cassius Dio,
Roman History
47.8.3–4. See Wyke (2002), 170 and Pelling (1988), 141 on the abuse and function of Fulvia.

29
See Milnor (2009), 277–8 on women acting virtuously in the public sphere. On Rome’s republican female heroines and villainesses, see Hillard (1992) and Joshel (1992). On their adoption by British and American women in the eighteenth century, see Hicks (2005a) and (2005b).

30
Cicero also implied an incestuous relationship between Clodia Metelli and her brother, a standard theme of Roman political invective that would also be levelled at Caligula and Drusilla; Nero and Agrippina Minor; Berenice and Agrippa II; Domitian and Julia Flavia; Julia Domna and Caracalla; and Galla Placidia and Honorius.

31
Plutarch,
Life of Antony
10.5.

32
See Fischler (1994), 117:
Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae
8403.

33
Cartledge and Spawforth (1989), 94 on Claudian connections in region: see also Barrett (2002), 17.

34
Lefkowitz and Fant (1992), no. 179.

35
Tacitus,
Histories
1.3.1. There are also references to mothers supporting their sons’ political candidacies; for example, in the cases of Helvia and Seneca, or Servilia and Brutus: see Dixon (1988), 5. On the concept of
sui iuris
, see Gardner (1986), 6.

36
Plutarch,
Life of Antony
31: see also Wallace-Hadrill (1993), 32, and Wood (1999), 30-1. Octavia was born around 69 BC and was Octavian’s full sister – he had another elder half-sister named Octavia too. In his account, Plutarch confuses the two sisters. For reasons of clarity, I have omitted any mention of the half-sister Octavia from the main narrative.

37
Antony and Cleopatra
, II. vi.119–23. The television drama in question is HBO’s
Rome
.

38
Plutarch,
Life of Antony
87 on Antony’s and Octavia’s children.

39
There is an argument that Fulvia was the first woman to be depicted on a coin, but the identification is too insecure for comfort: see Wood (1999), 41–3, and Wallace-Hadrill (1993), 32 in support of theory that Octavia is the first woman.

40
Kleiner (2005), 262, suggests that Octavia and her hairdressers invented the
nodus
.

41
Wood (1999), 44 on acceptability of royal couples appearing on Hellenistic coinage.