The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (9 page)

We should not imagine that the empire’s streets were suddenly flooded with images of women – that would have been to risk offending traditional ideas of a woman’s place in the public sphere. But with a few strategically placed commissions, Octavian issued the Roman world with a clarion call, inviting them to see his wife and sister as muses for his project to resurrect a long-lost golden age of Roman history. A golden age when legendary women like Lucretia sacrificed themselves on the altar of duty. A golden age for which Octavian was tacitly offering himself up as the architect of restoration.

While Octavian set about projecting images of Octavia and Livia in marble as paradigms of feminine modesty to citizens of Rome,
Cleopatra replaced Octavia as the face of Antony’s Roman coinage, issued by mints under his control. Surviving records of one issue of around 33 or 32 BC show that huge numbers of silver
denarii
, the currency of Rome, were commissioned on Antony’s orders after he finally achieved some military success in the east by defeating Armenia with Cleopatra’s financial help. These coins feature Antony on one side, and Cleopatra on the other, a ship’s prow in the forefront to signal her contribution of naval power towards the victory.
⁸⁹

Despite the concession of statues to Livia and Octavia, the inclusion of a foreign queen on the official coinage of a Roman general was completely unprecedented and deeply provocative in a political culture so ideologically opposed both to the idea of a woman near the heart of power – a foreign one at that – and to the principle of monarchical government. In 34 BC, Antony took his victory celebrations further by staging a lavish Roman-style triumph in Cleopatra’s home city of Alexandria, during which he was said to have formally given Cleopatra and her children vast gifts of territory, now known as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. Octavian knew exactly which button to press to make the Roman political classes nervous about what was happening in Alexandria. By playing on long-held Roman prejudices against the feminine, weak, immoral, servile and barbarous orient, he continued to aggressively portray Antony as a turncoat against traditional, male, Roman values, a poodle in Cleopatra’s lap.

Antony directly rebutted at least one of the many charges Octavian levelled at him, that of being a drunkard, a common stereotype of the east, writing an essay titled ‘On his Drunkenness’, which has since been lost. In letters to his former brother-in-law, he also accused Octavian of hypocrisy for trying to score points off him on the grounds of sexual morality by recalling Octavian’s own affairs:

What has come over you? Do you object to my sleeping with Cleopatra? … what about you? Are you faithful to Livia Drusilla? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you have not been in bed with Tertullia, or Terentilla, or Rufilla, or Salvia Titsenia – or all of them. Does it really matter so much where, or with whom, you perform the sexual act?
⁹⁰

Harking back to his opponent’s nuptials, Antony also claimed that his rival’s marriage to Livia had been conducted ‘in indecent haste’, and reminded Octavian of times when his friends used to arrange for him
line-ups of women and girls, stripped naked for his inspection, as though at a slave market.
⁹¹

Just as in modern electioneering, making political capital out of the peccadilloes of one’s opponents was a common tactic employed by rivals for office in republican Rome. The most famous grandees of this period – Cicero, Pompey, Julius Caesar – were all accused of seducing other men’s wives at one time or another, so Antony’s charge that Octavian had been unfaithful to Livia was nothing out of the ordinary. But it did need refuting if Octavian was explicitly setting himself up against Antony as the moral guardian of Roman values, and his first-century biographer Suetonius cites the excuses given by Octavian’s friends, who, while admitting his infidelities, claimed none were motivated by unthinking lust. Instead, by tapping up the wives and daughters of his enemies, he was getting inside information that would help his political campaign, and thus defending Roman interests.
⁹²

Many of the most notorious Roman accounts of Cleopatra’s infamy are preserved from poems and stories recorded after the final confrontation between the two sides at Actium. But they give us a flavour of the sort of invective that was aimed against her in the years before, including charges of sexual and culinary gluttony. Pliny the Elder, in the first century, wrote that Antony and Cleopatra had once challenged each other to see who could stage the most lavishly expensive banquet, and that Cleopatra had won the wager by tossing one of her pearl earrings into a goblet of vinegar, letting it dissolve and then nonchalantly swallowing it.
⁹³
The story certainly captured the imagination and was one of the most popularly re-created episodes of art from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Such tales reflect a long-standing preoccupation on the part of Roman moralists who bemoaned the gluttonous materialism of pleasure-seeking plutocrats both among their own contemporaries and in previous eras. Pliny the Elder himself lamented that in his day, Romans spent over 100 million sesterces a year on pearls and perfumes imported from the east. Over-expenditure on food was a particular source of outrage.
⁹⁴
Salacious stories of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s gluttonous banquets and wastefulness with money appealed to this moralising streak in Rome’s conscience. Probably one of the most well-known habits of Cleopatra is that she liked to bathe in asses’ milk, to keep her skin soft. The fact that the same bathing habit was said to have been shared by later Roman women who were regarded as profligate and corrupting, such as Nero’s second
wife Poppaea, may suggest that the practice was commonly attributed to any woman who was seen to offend morality.
⁹⁵

In the summer of 32 BC, after a year or two more of this cat-and-mouse baiting, Antony finally divorced the hapless Octavia, ordering some of his men to go to Rome and evict her tearfully from his house, and Octavian’s propaganda machine swiftly whirred into overdrive.
⁹⁶
He dispatched a delegation to the Vestal Virgins, who commonly acted as keepers of citizens’ important papers, with orders to fetch Antony’s will. When the Vestals refused to give it up, Octavian came to fetch the document himself, already primed as to its contents by two of Antony’s supporters who had witnessed it and then subsequently defected. Once he had his hands on the will, Octavian called meetings of the Senate and the popular assembly, and proceeded to read it out. Among the passages he highlighted was the revelation that Antony was leaving vast sums of money to his children with Cleopatra, and, most devastatingly, that Antony had requested that he should be buried alongside the Egyptian queen in Alexandria.
⁹⁷

Octavian’s action in publicising another man’s will was illegal and there are different accounts of the Roman reaction to it. Some say Octavian’s claims were treated with unease and some scepticism while others recount that it convinced everyone, even Antony’s closest friends, of their worst fears that Antony was completely under a woman’s thumb and even planning to move the headquarters of Roman government to the Nile.
⁹⁸
But the outcome was the same. Tales of Antony, a Roman general, dressing in oriental clothing and walking behind the litter of a woman in company with her eunuchs could not be stomached. In October, a resolution was passed declaring war. Because Octavian did not want to incur the charge of starting a civil war, however, the official target of his declaration was not Antony, who was after all a fellow Roman citizen, but Cleopatra herself, forcing Antony to show his hand in opting to fight on the side of Egypt.
⁹⁹

The next few months were spent in preparation for battle. Armies were raised, war chests filled and allegiances traded with promises of land and rewards. On both sides the ongoing battle for the right to claim just cause continued over the autumn and winter of 32 BC. Stories of portents and omens predicting defeat for Antony were circulated, probably by Octavian’s agents. Octavian himself publicly claimed that Antony was on drugs and that when it came to the fight their opponents would be Cleopatra’s hairdresser, her eunuch and her ladies-in-waiting.
¹⁰⁰
In fact Antony, with the wealthy Cleopatra as his
financial backer, started out with a greater number of troops and funds at his disposal.
¹⁰¹
But, thanks to the superior stewardship of Octavian’s lieutenant Agrippa, Antony’s advantage was eaten into during initial engagements over the spring and summer of 31 BC. Finally, the bulk of Antony’s naval fleet were pegged back to an anchorage just off Actium, at the narrow mouth of the Ambracian Gulf. On the afternoon of 2 September, after several days of skirmishing and stand-offs, the two opposing fleets steadily advanced towards each other across the glimmering blue surface of the Ionian Sea to decide the destiny of the Roman Empire.
¹⁰²

… on one side was Augustus Caesar, leading the men of Italy into battle alongside the Senate and the People of Rome, its gods of home and its great gods … on the other side, with the wealth of the barbarian world … came Antony in triumph … with him sailed Egypt and the power of the East from as far as distant Bactria, and there bringing up the rear was the greatest outrage of all, his Egyptian wife! On they came at speed, all together, and the whole surface of the sea was churned to foam by the pull of their oars and the bow-waves from their triple beaks … fresh blood began to redden the furrows of Neptune’s fields … But high on the headland of Actium, Apollo saw it all and was drawing his bow. In terror at the sight the whole of Egypt and of India, all the Arabians and all the Shebans were turning tail and the queen herself could be seen calling for winds and setting her sails by them. She had untied the sail-ropes and was even now paying them out.
¹⁰³

Years after the battle of Actium, the image of Cleopatra hoisting her purple sails and lamely fleeing the scene of the fight with Antony in hot pursuit was an abiding theme of literature written in honour of Octavian’s victory. Actium did not bring down the final curtain, and in fact relatively few casualties were suffered, but it was the pivot on which the fate of Octavian’s and Antony’s contest was decided. After escaping with some of their ships still intact, Antony and Cleopatra resumed life in Alexandria, where they remained for another year until Octavian arrived in the summer of 30 BC and dealt a final knockout blow to their land and sea forces. The final act of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s story became the stuff of legend. After a despondent Antony took his own life and bled to death in Cleopatra’s arms, the Egyptian queen managed to convince Octavian of her pliability, even offering gifts to Octavia and Livia to earn their goodwill. She thus
earned permission to visit Antony’s tomb, where she was later found dead on a golden couch, through self-inflicted poisoning either by asp bite, as the most popular report had it, or by a vial of venom secreted in one of her hairpins. One of her dying ladies-in-waiting, Charmion, who had also ingested poison, had the breath to hiss, in response to an angry reproach from one Roman soldier, ‘It is no more than this lady, the descendant of so many kings, deserves’, a line borrowed sixteen centuries later by Shakespeare, in his own staging of the scene.
¹⁰⁴
Thwarted of his hopes to carry his illustrious prisoner of war back to Rome, Octavian later had an image of Cleopatra carried through the city streets in his triumphal procession, an image which was said to have featured a snake clinging by its jaw to the dead queen.

The last political rivalry of the republic was over. Unlike her father and ex-husband, Livia had backed the right horse.

Livia did not find herself empress of Rome overnight. The transformation from republic to monarchy in the aftermath of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s deaths was not instantaneous: Rome was still raw and bloodied from decades of civil war, and Octavian understood the need to tread carefully, all too aware of the fate of his great-uncle Julius Caesar, whose attempts to strong-arm the state into accepting autocratic rule had resulted in his assassination. In 27 BC, three years after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian made a great show of renouncing the extraordinary dictatorial powers granted him as a triumvir, pledging to restore the republic and declining the trappings of despotic kingship. In return for this self-effacing gesture, the Senate, its palm greased by the promised restoration of its former constitutional powers, urged Octavian to become consul-for-life and pressed on him the appellations of
Augustus
, meaning ‘divinely favoured one’, and
princeps
or ‘first citizen’, an epithet familiarly used in the republic for a leading statesman. Effectively, they handed him the keys to the empire, a mandate for absolute power carefully cloaked in traditional republican language in order to oil the wheels of transition.

Livia herself received no official title for the time being. Augustus shied away from giving his wife an honorific name equivalent to his and it was not until after his death almost forty years later that her role in the dynastic set-up was recognised with a variant of his own
cognomen
,
Augusta
. The word ‘empress’ is now accepted shorthand for the woman married to the Roman emperor, but there is no equivalent for it in Latin. The Roman public had apparently voiced
no opposition to having portraits of Livia on display in public spaces since the grant of 35 BC. But to accord her official status akin to that enjoyed by queens of the eastern royal families, in a society still getting acclimatised to the idea of one-man-rule, where the memory of Cleopatra was still very raw, was one step too far.
¹⁰⁵