Livia, Empress of Rome Read online

  This was not unusual. Teenage pregnancies were widespread in contemporary senatorial Rome. Girls were often married by the age of fourteen and frequently earlier, although officially the law frowned on marriage before a girl’s twelfth birthday. Plutarch is one of several writers whose reservations about ‘childish’ brides survive on record. Still, the custom persisted. Pliny’s friend Fundanius was a philosopher with progressive views on women’s education. But when his daughter Minicia died at the age of thirteen, invitations to her wedding had already been despatched.2

  The rationale was twofold. Romans had taken on board a correspondence earlier propounded by Aristotle of the virtue of women (a euphemism for sexual continence) and the vigour of the state. It thus became imperative that means be found of safeguarding female virtue, ideally by channelling the sex urge. Marriage was the safest sanctioned outlet. As the onset of sexual desire in women was fixed by ancient doctors at the beginning of puberty, specifically menstruation, this was the obvious time to harness those feelings within the respectable confines of a suitable alliance. The need was felt to be especially pressing in the case of girls who ate a lot but did little work3 – a curious intimation that female libido in ancient Rome peaked among greedy teenage girls of the leisured classes. Surviving funerary inscriptions emphasize that women of the senatorial class did indeed marry younger than their lowlier counterparts.

  It was partly a case of carpe diem. The Augustan poet Horace caught the mood:

  Life’s short. Even while

  We talk Time, hateful, runs a mile.

  Don’t trust tomorrow’s bough

  For fruit. Pluck this, here, now.4

  Even among adults life expectancy was short. One modern study set the median age of death for women of the Roman Empire at twenty-seven.5 The task that upper-class girls were required to accomplish was therefore restricted to a narrow window. In their hands rested the future of the state. They must produce the next generation of Rome’s rulers.

  Given their importance, aristocratic marriages were mostly arranged. The contracting parties were the husband or husband’s father and the wife’s father or brother. Like so much in Rome, the choice of a spouse was men’s business, managed in order to create alliances that were firstly political and afterwards economic or social. By the time of Livia’s marriage, Roman women’s position was such that fathers might consult their daughters’ inclinations. But the truth remained that so long as a daughter was under her father’s legal guardianship – within his potestas – her only grounds for refusing his choice were if the husband-to-be could be shown to be morally unfit.6 Since sons too were bound by paternal authority, they faced similar restrictions. In their case, only a bride of notoriously bad character could be rejected.7 Where first marriages were concerned, it would be a remarkable girl indeed who succeeded in acquiring a notoriously bad character by the age of fourteen. In the light of her subsequent behaviour such a reputation is unlikely in Livia’s case.

  For the father of the bride, a daughter’s marriage was an event of some significance. Cicero described his daughter Tullia’s marriage as his ‘top domestic priority’8 – despite the fact that, on this occasion, the marriage in question was Tullia’s third and that Cicero, absent from Rome as governor of the eastern province of Cilicia, would ultimately acquiesce in Tullia and her mother Terentia making the choice of husband themselves. It is likely that Marcus regarded Livia’s marriage in similar fashion, as Livia herself would certainly have understood.

  We do not know whether Roman girls thought of their marriage in any romantic light. That they should would appear to indicate a society in which hope perpetually triumphed over experience. Like much in Livia’s upbringing, her attitude towards her eventual marriage – which she accepted as fore-ordained and unavoidable – was shaped by precept and example. She was familiar with Marcus and Alfidia’s marriage and those, presumably, of their friends. Family history furnished further instances. Many offered distinctly troubling pause for thought, like the recent extreme case of Clodia and Quintus Metellus Celer, a union coloured by infidelity, accusations of incest and rumours of murder by poisoning. Livia’s grounds for hope lay in her relationship with her father. In these matters, even the most devoted father could rate highly the exigencies of self-interest. The one factor of which the teenage Livia can have been sure was that her husband would not be her immediate contemporary. Upper-class Roman men invariably married on the cusp of their first magistracy, the quaestorship.9 At the end of the Republic, the minimum-age qualification for quaestors was thirty, ensuring that Livia’s husband would be at least double her age. That rule, and many like it, was about to be broken. But neither Livia nor Marcus could have known that.

  Rome, unlike ancient Greece, did not segregate men and women. In the city itself, the Forum, the Senate House and almost all public monuments formed a men-only world from which women were excluded.10 But the business of state was not confined to these precincts of the city centre. The houses of Rome’s ruling elite encompassed public as well as private life; their internal planning did not enforce male and female zones. Spaces like the atrium and the tablinum existed to accommodate at home the same public role the Roman father espoused in the Forum or Senate House. At recognized periods of each day – notably the morning salutatio, when clients and colleagues petitioned the resident magistrate – the private realm of the Roman house functioned as workplace. The salutatio was no place for children. But for the inquisitive, perspicacious child, this window on to Roman politics in the raw must have operated like a barometer, offering at least scratch readings of the shifting pulse rate of the great city outside. Was it possible that, approaching marriageable age, Livia Drusilla of the Claudii was unaware of the tenor of Roman politics to which Marcus devoted his days? Did she sense the seismic upheaval that, throughout her childhood, threatened Rome in the person of a single ambitious patrician? Did Marcus betray to her his fears for the future of the system with which their family was inextricably caught up? Probably not. Marcus may not have defined those fears, even to himself. But Rome’s governing elite formed a hermetic coterie. Their gossip, which must intermittently have reached Livia’s ears, inevitably touched on politics. She surely knew the name of Julius Caesar.

  Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus belonged, as we have seen, to two of Rome’s most distinguished senatorial families. Their joint record of service matched the lifespan of the Republic. For almost five centuries, Claudii and Livii Drusi had striven for the good of the state, that res publica the Romans regarded so highly. In doing so they had inevitably also served themselves well. Marcus can be forgiven for making an equation between the good of the state and his own welfare. Their fortunes were bound closely together.

  Politically, Rome was a conservative body. Witness the reluctance of the populace to vote for novi homines, those men like Gaius Marius whose family names were unknown in the senatorial records. Ditto the belief, genuinely held, that the son of a dutiful, upright father would himself be dutiful and upright. ‘Brave noble men father brave noble children,’ wrote Horace. ‘In bulls and horses likewise the male’s stamp shows clearly; we never find fear bred from fierceness, eagles hatching doves.’11 Marcus’s political philosophy was rooted in the preservation of the Republic. In the building blocks of the Republic’s government lay the foundations of his life of privilege, wealth and power. When forces moved to challenge that structure and the future of the Republic appeared imperilled, it was not to be expected that Marcus would act otherwise than in the Republic’s defence. And so, through a mixture of self-interest and good intentions, at a moment of unprecedented upheaval, Marcus, seeking a son-in-law who was also a political ally, backed the losing side. He dragged with him into the maelstrom his daughter Livia.

  In 44 BC, the year of Livia’s fourteenth birthday, a victorious general exchanged his laurel wreath for a leafy circlet made of gold. He wore with it the red-purple tunic and toga associated by Romans with military conquest, and red calf-length
leather boots which, he claimed, had once formed part of the ceremonial dress of the kings of Alba Longa. He was Julius Caesar. At the beginning of the year, his position as dictator of Rome, traditionally granted for six months at times of national emergency, was declared permanent; he held the censorship lifelong. In all but name he had achieved the unthinkable and become king of the world’s proudest republic. Rome was turned on its head. The ramifications of Julius Caesar’s eminence were complex and radical, and would alter the course of many Roman lives, Livia’s among them.

  ‘I love and I hate,’ Catullus had confessed of his Claudian mistress ‘Lesbia’ in the preceding decade. Henceforth Rome would love and hate Caesar. For while ordinary Romans loved the man whose statue they inscribed even in his own lifetime ‘To the Unconquered God’,12 too late the city’s nobles succumbed to justifiable anxiety. Caesar’s formal powers, bestowed on him in principle by those same nobles acting as the Senate, exceeded all previous awards. Such a monopoly operating long-term was irreconcilable with Rome’s traditional government by elected magistrates culled from the city’s first families.

  Something had to give and famously did so on the Ides of March. A conspiracy of senators, sixty in total, murdered Julius Caesar on the March morning a soothsayer had warned him would prove fearful. We do not know if Marcus was among their number. Caesar’s life was extinguished by twenty-three stab wounds. The deed was witnessed by the assembled Senate, conspirators and non-conspirators alike. In its aftermath, once civil war had become inevitable, all faced the same choice. On which side did they stand? For or against the dead man’s cause? Were they tyrannicides or Caesarians? Despite his dalliance with Caesar’s Triumvirate in 59, Marcus chose to oppose those loyal to Rome’s erstwhile master. So, too, did the man he had chosen as Livia’s husband. In both cases it proved the wrong decision.

  Since politics among the Roman elite was a family affair, it should not surprise us that the marriages contracted by noble families served as litmus tests of political allegiance. Marcus’s choice of a husband for his only daughter was motivated by political gain. His candidate, lauded by Cicero as ‘a young man of noble family, of native talent, and moderation’,13 ought to have proved a useful ally. He was even a kinsman, though we cannot be sure of the proximity of the two families’ connection.

  His name was Tiberius Claudius Nero and, in marrying Livia, he achieved a form of immortality. Thanks to the circumambulatory nature of fate, it was Nero’s names – and, in some instances, his genes – which were ultimately bequeathed, via Livia, to Rome’s first imperial dynasty. Like Marcus and his daughter, Nero was a Claudian – as his name suggests one of the Nerones. The lesser of the family’s two branches, the Nerones had not held the consulship for more than a century and a half. Whatever Marcus’s hopes for his son-in-law – and Cicero’s encomium notwithstanding – Tiberius Claudius Nero was not the man to revive their laggardly fortunes. His marriage to Livia would prove a questionable alliance for Marcus’s family and an ambiguous testament to Marcus’s good judgement. It would also test Livia on a personal level.

  Four years before Marcus served as praetor, Nero proposed himself as prosecutor in a highly publicized extortion trial. It was his first recorded appearance in the Roman public arena. His attempt, though unsuccessful, was not disgraceful and again earned Cicero’s plaudits. Indeed, Cicero remained impressed by Nero, later choosing him as Tullia’s third husband – an unsuccessful conclusion to that ‘top domestic priority’, since Tullia, in her father’s absence, had availed herself of an alternative suitor, leaving Nero still up for grabs. Possibly Cicero’s interest was instrumental in raising Nero’s profile. Although a further seven years would pass before his marriage to Livia, their engagement may have been of long standing, brokered by Marcus in the wake of Tullia’s rejection. Clearly Nero inclined towards an alliance of some prominence, as it was he who had proposed himself to Cicero rather than vice versa. The proposal occurred in the year of Marcus’s praetorship. Marcus’s high office, publicized on account of his application of the Scantinian Law, combined with Livia’s exemplary pedigree, which Tullia could not rival, may well have rendered marriage to his ‘cousin’ just as attractive to Nero as marriage to Cicero’s daughter. Happily, by the time that marriage took place, following Caesar’s assassination, both men inhabited similar political territory. It had not always been so.

  At moments in the previous two decades Marcus and Nero had each adopted a course in relation to Julius Caesar that was frankly opportunistic. Marcus, as we have seen, curried favour with the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. We do not know if he succeeded in his attempt to secure for himself a commission fundraising in Alexandria the year before Livia’s birth. Following the collapse of the Triumvirate in 53, he played his hand with greater circumspection. Crassus’s death pitted Pompey against Caesar. There is no record of Marcus declaring himself for either, although it is reasonable to surmise that, confronted by Caesar’s decidedly un-Republican vaunting ambition, his sympathies lay with Pompey. Pompey, however, was killed in 48. Thereafter Marcus’s course mostly fades from view.

  At the very point when we assume Marcus had turned away from Caesar, Nero embraced him. In 48 Nero became one of Caesar’s quaestors. The appointment took him from Rome to Alexandria, once Marcus’s proposed destination. There he commanded Caesar’s fleet. In Alexandria, for the one and only time in a notably chequered career, he acquitted himself with distinction: Suetonius asserts that it was Nero who was ‘largely responsible’ for the Caesarian victory in the Alexandrian War.14 Whatever the truth of this assessment, Caesar himself was apparently pleased with his acolyte. He rewarded Nero with a priesthood and, two years later, a commission of some prestige: the foundation of two veterans’ colonies in southern Gaul on the sites of modern Arles and Narbonne.

  Did absence in Gaul make the heart grow fickle or was Nero simply a man always ready to back the frontrunner? On his return to Rome following Caesar’s death, he discarded his Caesarian colours. He made a singular proposal in a debate in the Senate – special rewards for the tyrannicides Brutus and Cassius for their role in the misdeed which had robbed Nero of an indulgent master. Cicero, more circumspect, suggested an amnesty for past evils.15

  The result was that by the summer of 44 BC Nero and Marcus found themselves politically united. Both opposed the forces loyal to Caesar’s memory, led for the moment by Mark Antony but shortly to be ranged behind the dictator’s great-nephew Octavian. Both, as would eventually become apparent, had miscalculated – though modern sympathies may incline more towards Marcus, the less overtly self-motivated of the two. Sure of the path he had chosen, Marcus, went one step further. He consigned all his eggs to a single basket. He engaged his only daughter Livia Drusilla to the turncoat Nero. It is not an action any Roman father would have undertaken lightly. We do not know how long the union had been in Marcus’s contemplation. The engagement of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla would not, as events unfolded, form the precursor to a marriage of great duration.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Night would last for ever’

  Across the city a dark pall descended. It hid the sun and an acrid fog cloaked the streets. On distant Sicily, Etna had erupted – not puffs of smoke but balls of flame, according to reports. Such was the heat of the blast, Livy tells us, that it was felt across the Strait of Messina.1 Fallout has been traced as far as Greenland. ‘The sun, when Caesar fell, had sympathy for Rome –’ Virgil wrote later. ‘That day he hid the brightness of his head in a rusty fog/And an evil age was afraid his night would last for ever.’2 Volcanic gloom clouded much of the year 44 BC. Crops failed, Plutarch records, from lack of sunlight and warmth. It was surely symbolic.

  Was any aspect of Livia’s engagement conventional, bar the safely patrician status of her Claudian husband? These were remarkable times in Rome’s history, unsettled and unsettling, the political sands quicksands, the centre of power in flux. Two years before Caesar’s death, Cicero �
�� never at a loss for words – had taken it upon himself to advise the dictator, ‘It is for you alone, Caesar, to bring back to life all that you see in ruins…you must restore honesty and trust…’3 Caesar’s murder and its aftermath left Rome more deeply fragmented than before. A broken world, it offered opportunities to the resourceful, as Livia’s second husband, Octavian, would prove in spectacular fashion, and pitfalls for the unwary, as her first husband amply demonstrated.

  But revolution in Rome was not an act of volcanoes or the weather any more than it was the result of mass uprising. In Rome revolution was an upper-class affair. Regimes toppled, as Caesar fell, to the pressure of disaffected insiders. While the Senate debated its course, ordinary Romans pursued their daily business, muttering about the portent of the iron-red fog. So long as the streets remained free from fighting and fear, Roman life continued its familiar round. Throughout 44 and for much of 43, Caesar-less Rome struggled to recover a semblance of normality. A race had begun to decide the city’s new master. All too soon that race would erupt into blood and iron. For the moment, in Rome itself at least, swords were mostly sheathed. If Marcus had already reached an agreement with Nero, it would still have been possible at this point to celebrate the engagement publicly.

  Livia and Nero’s engagement party shared its name in Latin with the word for betrothal itself: ‘sponsalia’. Such parties were attended by a wide circle of guests, including politicians as well as relatives. The husband-to-be presented his betrothed with a ring, the anulus pronubus. According to Pliny the Elder, the ancient custom of an iron ring persisted; Tertullian suggests more plausibly anuli of gold.4 Presents were exchanged which, by legal dispensation, could exceed the value otherwise imposed on gifts.5 Whether Livia and Nero yet knew each other we will never discover. The likelihood of their acquaintance increases or dwindles depending on the point at which Marcus and Nero reached their agreement. Nor do we know the length of Livia’s engagement or the date of her wedding, though many dates can probably be discounted as inauspicious, including the period of the Feast of the Dead, the Parentalia, in mid-February, and May, the month in which Romans sacrificed to their dead. We reach firmer ground when we consider the form their wedding took: several contemporary sources outline typical marriage procedure. Given the value placed by Romans on tradition, it is unlikely that Livia’s wedding to Nero diverged significantly from accepted practice.