Livia, Empress of Rome Read online

  Where, then, was Marcus and Alfidia’s house, in which Livia was born and where she would spend the greater part of her childhood? The answer, of course, is probably lost. The Clivus Victoriae ascended the Palatine from the Velabrum, the low valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills bookended by the Forum and the cattle market. Popular and prestigious, it was home to much of senatorial Rome, not only Cicero but also Clodius and, at least until the year before Livia’s birth, the faithless Clodia – a motley agglomeration of neighbours for a young girl. If, as seems probable, Marcus’s house was close by, Livia would spend almost the whole of her long life in this select enclave on Rome’s most sacred hill. Within walking distance lay the Temple of Victory – and that statue of Claudia Quinta which stood as a perpetual memorial to the heights attainable by Claudian womanhood.

  It was an environment calculated to foster family pride. Souvenirs of five hundred years of Claudian distinction lined the walls of Marcus’s atrium. They spilled over into the adjoining alae or wings – a wax mask for each of the holders of those twenty-eight Claudian consulships, the generations of censors and dictators, winners of triumphs and ovations. Supplementary were the accretions of Livii Drusi office-holders. ‘There could not be a more beautiful or ennobling sight for a young man eager for fame and respect,’ Polybius had written of such a display. ‘For who would not be inspired to see the images of those men renowned for their excellence…The greatest result is that young men are thus inspired to undertake anything for the public good in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men.’4

  Polybius’s focus, characteristic of the ancient world, was masculine endeavour. In the century after the historian’s death, is it not possible that such a display, glimpsed daily, exerted a similar enchantment over a daughter of the Claudii and Livii Drusi? Hostile ancient sources notwithstanding, there is little to suggest that at any point in her life Livia’s ambitions significantly transgressed accepted boundaries of the female sphere – and much to the contrary. Her self-perception confined itself within the perimeters Rome prescribed for its women: she was daughter, wife and mother. But at a relatively early age, in marrying Octavian, Livia embraced eminence apparently without fear. When that association brought her fame, she took pains to ensure that fame was accompanied by respect. We cannot know what in her own mind constituted the grounds of that respect: her position as wife of Rome’s first citizen…or an awareness of her unique inheritance of two families’ greatness, renown for excellence spanning half a millennium…

  ‘I read over your letters again and again, and am continually taking them up, as if I had just received them; but, alas! this only stirs in me a keener longing for you,’ Pliny the Younger wrote to his wife Calpurnia.5 ‘You cannot believe how much I miss you. I love you so much and we are not used to separations. So I stay awake most of the night thinking of you…’6 Thanks to publication of his letters within his own lifetime, Pliny’s marriage to Calpurnia is among history’s most famously happy. If that happiness was exceptional, such an outcome was not, insofar as Pliny allows us to discern, a source of surprise to him. ‘What less could be expected?’ he once asked Calpurnia’s aunt Hispulla.7 His reaction is evidence that, by the beginning of the second century AD, at least some upper-class Romans regarded marriage not simply as a response to social, political and economic pressures, but a personal union promising ideally emotional fulfilment to both partners.

  It is impossible to offer more than the most conjectural picture of the emotional climate in which Livia spent her childhood. Were Marcus and Alfidia happy? We do not know. Did they expect to find happiness in marriage a century and a half before Pliny married Calpurnia? Perhaps. Marcus, by one account, had his peccadilloes. Again Marcus Caelius Rufus and Cicero intrude into Livia’s sphere. In 50 BC, Caelius Rufus wrote to his mentor. Livia’s father, probably at that point a praetor, was presiding over a court. The cases under review all violated the Scantinian law. That vintage piece of Republican legislation penalized homosexual acts,8 if a reference in Quintilian is correct, ‘criminal fornication’ between men and ‘free-born boys’ – young men who were not slaves.9 Quintilian records a fine in one instance of ten thousand sesterces. Caelius Rufus makes no comment beyond asserting the irony of Marcus, in implementing the Lex Scantinia, being in a position to censure others.10

  We are not compelled to conclude from this that Livia’s father was unfaithful to her mother with a succession of Roman youths, but the possibility exists. Taunts of homosexuality were common among Rome’s magistrate classes. Roman society did not regard such transgressions in the same light as may modern readers, although it drew the line at passive homosexuality and incest. No recorded response of Alfidia’s survives. She may sensibly have concluded that ‘free-born boys’ represented a lesser challenge than Marcus taking a mistress. Such a reaction would be in keeping with the policy advocated for husbands by the eminent contemporary writer Varro: ‘A husband must either put a stop to his wife’s faults or else he must put up with them. In the first case he makes his wife a more attractive woman, in the second he makes himself a better man.’11 The first course, it goes without saying, was not open to Alfidia. It is unlikely that Livia was aware of this aspect of her parents’ lives, if indeed it existed. There is no evidence of a divorce between Marcus and Alfidia nor, save in Caelius Rufus’s correspondence, of scandal attaching to either of them.

  Latin does not contain a word specifically for baby. While this should not be interpreted as proof that individual Romans were uninterested in their infant offspring, it is indicative of a broader detachment. The Romans recognized the extent to which babies required and merited adult attention. Lucretius, in his history of the natural world, acknowledges that human children are more helpless in their early stages than the young of any other species.12 What Romans did not perpetuate in relation to babies and small children was a culture of doting.

  Tacitus was one of several ancient writers to decry the ubiquity of wet-nursing. He applauded those mothers who fostered a closer bond with their babies, but he did not idealize the menial aspects of childcare. In the Dialogues, he attributes to the orator Vipstanus Messalla sentiments expressive of traditional Roman philosophy. ‘In the early days, every child born of a good mother was reared not in the dismal room of a mercenary nurse, but in the lap of its own mother, enfolded in her care. Such a woman took particular pride in being described as looking after her home and devoting herself to her children.’13 A mother’s pride, however, stuck at physical drudgery. That side of childrearing was entrusted to slaves. Slaves, like later nurserymaids, exercised the day-to-day care of children. Their responsibility lasted throughout the period of infantia, which Quintilian indicates continued until around the child’s seventh birthday, the point at which, typically, formal learning began.14 In wealthy households like that of Livia’s parents, this task would have been shared by several slaves, even if the family numbered only one child. The child enjoyed both its mother’s care and affection and that of its attendant slaves.

  All the pointers indicate that Livia was an only child. The sources do not record any siblings and none is known to have come forward during the long period of Livia’s public prominence, when close relationship to the wife of Rome’s emperor would have been obviously advantageous. Added to this is the fact that Marcus, adopted as a child by Drusus, in turn himself adopted a son.

  His choice fell on a scion of the Scribonius Libo family. The boy in question was the eldest son of Lucius Scribonius Libo, consul in 34 BC. In keeping with standard practice, he took the name Marcus Livius Drusus Libo and as such would himself attain the consulship under the empire of Livia’s second husband.

  Through his biological father, Marcus’s adopted son was a nephew of Scribonia, who later preceded Livia as the wife of Octavian. Indirectly, therefore, by adopting Libo and uniting the two families more closely, Marcus may have been instrumental in bringing together Livia and the husband who catapulted her name into the h
istory books. None of this, of course, can have been in Marcus’s mind at the time and it seems probable, since we hear of no relationship existing between Livia and her adopted brother, that Libo’s adoption was accomplished at the very end of Marcus’s life, perhaps even in his will. Since Livia was already married by this time and no longer living with Marcus and Alfidia, she and Libo, though near contemporaries in age,15 may have been virtual strangers to one another.

  Despite the example of Cornelia of the Gracchi with her twelve children, Livia’s only-child status was not particularly unusual. Upper-class families of the late Republic invariably extended to no more than two or three children. In part this was attributable to high rates of infant mortality and the hazards of childbirth to mothers, but only in part. In the absence of primogeniture, Romans avoided excessive division of patrimony and estates.16 Society women, we are told by commentators from Seneca to Juvenal, were adept at avoiding pregnancy, as much for the preservation of their good looks as their health.17 It was part of an argument which had raged almost from the Republic’s origins. Although the Romans possessed no formal definition of marriage before Modestinus in the early third century ad,18 there had long been an acceptance that the purpose of marriage was children – in the case of the upper classes, those children the Republic required for its continued smooth running. Eunomia, in Plautus’s comedy of the early second century BC, The Pot of Gold, counsels her brother to action which will do him everlasting good: marriage ‘to produce children’.19 Augustus later castigated unmarried and childless men for failing to carry out ‘any of the duties of men’ and expressed the wish that they ‘did not exist at all’.20 Actress and emperor issued advice which senatorial Romans before and after Marcus found all too easy to disregard.

  There were advantages for Livia, of course. The Romans’ espousal of a recognizable small nuclear family created bonds of intimacy between parents and their offspring, even in the absence of any widespread fondness for small children. The management by slaves of the more arduous aspects of childcare, together with the limited number of children in most households, in some cases enabled significant parental involvement in the nursery.

  The Emperor Augustus, in sentiments attributed to him by the Greek historian Cassius Dio, commended parenthood as a means of self-perpetuation. ‘Is it not a joy to acknowledge a child who possesses the qualities of both parents, to tend and educate a being who is both the physical image of yourself, so that, as it grows up, another self is created? Is it not blessed, on quitting this life, to leave behind as successor…one that is your own, born of your own essence, so that only the mortal element of you passes away, while you live on in the child that succeeds you?’21 But there are notable suggestions that this essentially egocentric view did not predominate. Plutarch records that even Cato the Censor, a strict traditionalist in matters relating to the family, made a habit unless prevented by public duty of being present at his son’s bathtime, while Aulus Gellius devoted to his literary life only time left over from the more pressing duties of administering his estate and attending to his children’s education.22 According to Lucretius, young men’s funeral services of the late Republic, the period of Livia’s childhood, included a stock lament that a deceased father would never again have his children run to him to be kissed and lifted to his breast.23 Cato himself may have been a forbidding figure, but such instances indicate that, at least within the confines of the home, Roman fathers were able to enjoy openly affectionate relations with their children.

  It is a picture that is sometimes difficult to reconcile with that of the archetypal Roman mother. Tradition – beloved of upper-class Romans – made clear demands on the Republic’s mothers. Their purpose was not primarily, as it is understood today, the creation of a secure and loving environment. Senatorial mothers carried within them the blueprint of an ideal Roman. Their task was to realize that blueprint.

  Emphasis rested on discipline, moral vigilance and ethical rigour.24 It was a stern code which made greater provision for the good of the State than that of mother or child. ‘Had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike,’ says Shakespeare’s Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, ‘I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.’25 The ancient sources reveal how near the mark was Shakespeare’s estimate. The poet Horace refers to time dragging for the children of widows, bound by maternal authority, while Cicero mentions the severe punishments meted out by mothers or teachers for breaches of mourning.26 Although it was the senior male of a Roman household, the paterfamilias, who exercised power by right of law – the so-called patria potestas, by which the paterfamilias possessed the right of life and death, as well as ongoing control of his children’s financial affairs – in practice the male and female roles of father and mother were not sharply differentiated. Both held authority. Neither served as sole provider of a child’s quantum of love and kindness. Both felt in equal measure the responsibility imposed by past exempla.

  Even the most deeply cherished theories cannot consistently reap results. The history of Republic and Empire alike abounds with men and women who failed to meet – or chose to bypass – the exacting standards Rome sought to impose by ancient precept. Parents and especially children resisted the pale inspiration of wax ancestor masks, the stirring didacticism of those documents of family greatness hidden in the arca. They were the targets of Velleius Paterculus, writing Rome’s history at the beginning of the first century ad: ‘The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new. The state passed from vigilance to slumber, from the pursuit of arms to the pursuit of pleasure, from activity to idleness.’27 They ignored Horace’s poetic warning:

  Roman, you may be innocent of guilt,

  Yet you shall pay for each ancestral crime,

  Until our mouldering temples are rebuilt

  And the gods’ statues cleansed of smoke and grime.28

  Livia was not among their number, as her future career will show, although, as time passed, few around her matched her determined self-control. As an adult married to Rome’s first emperor, she embraced and embodied age-old concepts of ideal Roman womanhood, her public persona a deliberate sop to nostalgia for a mythical, more virtuous past. Her outlook was shaped by the demands made on her by her husband, at a moment of constitutional innovation, to exemplify cultural norms, and by her consciousness of her own place in the long continuum of Roman history. She accepted that that place was hers in the first instance by dint of birth. Her education began early – in the atrium of her father’s house, where the smoke of daily sacrifice scorched the cheeks of veteran imagines, and at her mother’s knee.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Virility to her reasoning power’

  In 50 BC Cicero was buying and Marcus was selling. The commodity being traded was a garden. The business of its purchase occupied a succession of letters between Cicero and a Roman knight called Atticus.

  Undoubtedly, Marcus jeopardized the deal’s smooth progress by digging in his heels over price. Cicero drove a hard bargain. In his case, reluctance to compromise on price arose from dissatisfaction with the goods in dispute. Marcus’s garden had not been the orator’s first choice. Of the names on Atticus’s shortlist, only Marcus was prepared to sell.

  Cicero’s instructions to Atticus entrusted the equestrian with a degree of responsibility. ‘If you ask, what is it I wish for? First, Scapula’s gardens, then Clodia’s; afterwards, if Silius refuses and Marcus is unreasonable, those of Cusinius and Trebonius…But if you prefer Tusculanum, as you have signified in some of your letters, I shall not object to it.’1 Of these seven options two – the gardens of Clodia and Marcus – would recur throughout the letters. Atticus, clearly, cared little for the latter. ‘Though you say you quite revolt from Marcus’s gardens,’ Cicero replied to him, ‘yet I must be content with those, unless you can find something else. The building I do not regard.’2 It was a half-hearted endorsement. Later Cicero wavered. In a subsequent letter, he told Atticus, ‘Th
ose of Silius and of Marcus do not appear to me sufficiently respectable for a family residence. How would it become one to remain for any length of time in such a villa as that? I should therefore prefer, first, Otho’s; and next to that, Clodia’s. If nothing can be done, either some stratagem must be practised upon Marcus, or I must be content with Tusculanum.’3

  In the event, evidently, nothing could be done, and Atticus’s stratagem prevailed with Marcus. Cicero himself provides us with a clue to the motives of Livia’s father in selling his gardens. In discussing Clodia’s resistance to Atticus’s approaches, he writes, ‘I do not suppose…that she will sell; for she takes pleasure in it and is in no want of money.’ 4 It is unlikely, in a city as crowded as Rome, that Marcus, like Clodia, did not also take pleasure in his property. Perhaps, then, Marcus was indeed in want of money.

  How had this come about? We can be reasonably certain that Marcus had received a significant inheritance from Drusus. In addition, Alfidius probably provided his daughter with a handsome dowry, her entrée to such glittering marriage stakes. Under Roman law of this period, Marcus was entitled to mortgage any property included in Alfidia’s dowry for his own use without Alfidia’s consent. That there is no evidence to suggest he did this may in itself tell us something positive about the nature of Livia’s parents’ marriage.