Livia, Empress of Rome Page 7
Livia was beautiful. On that even hostile sources agree. Ovid, not wholly reliably, commends her Venus-like form and Junoesque features from the misery of his Black Sea exile, when Livia was in her late sixties. She must have presented a striking appearance on her wedding day five decades earlier, in the first flush of youthful radiance.
On her head she wore a scarf-like veil of vibrant orange. The flammeum did not, like modern bridal veils, cover her face: it was wrapped around her hair. Part of the ceremonial dress of the wife of the priest of Jupiter,6 it was an antiquated detail, typical of Rome’s romanticizing of its own past. A marjoram wreath held the flammeum in place.7 Beneath the folds of flame-coloured tissue, Livia’s hair – for the only time in a girl’s life – was tortured into a cone-shaped arrangement at odds with current Roman fashion. With a ceremonial spear, her hair had been parted into six broad locks. Reasons for the spear are not clear – one author suggests the use specifically of a bent iron spearhead in order to dispel evil spirits resident in the hair.8 The hair was plaited and the six plaits fastened into the required cone with woollen fillets. How much of this eccentric construction was visible beneath the orange veil remains uncertain. The Roman wedding dress was a tunica recta, a white woollen tunic woven on an upright loom like those of the aristocratic atrium. It was fastened around the waist by a woollen girdle, tied in an elaborate ceremonial knot. Unravelling the knot of Hercules was a bridegroom’s first challenge. It may have been intended as a symbolic deterrent to yet more evil spirits. On her feet Livia wore slippers, known as lutei socci, of the same flame orange as her veil.
Even before the wedding began, there were ceremonies and acts of piety. A bride dedicated her childhood toys, including her dolls, and the toga worn by all Roman children, with its single scarlet stripe, to her father’s household gods. Given the age at which aristocratic Roman girls married, this represents more than a token surrender of the past and is not without poignancy. If the family’s shrine was in the atrium, the ceremony of dedication would have taken place within sight of the symbolic marriage couch which, today of all days, achieved a special significance. Beyond the atrium, the vestibule leading to the house’s main entrance, and the entrance itself, were decorated with branches and flowers, the ‘green gifts of Thessalian buds from fields and alps, from river banks where the light west wind has unsealed them’ described by Catullus.9
The formal act of marriage scarcely existed as such – a characteristic instance of a very Roman discrepancy that religion, which coloured so many aspects of the city’s life, notably politics, was virtually absent from areas which seem to modern readers quintessentially ‘religious’, such as the marriage service.10 By way of formality it was traditional to divine omens. Cicero records that this was not priest’s work, but that of a friend of the family.11 In the unlikely event that he was able to discern any omens at all, the auspex present at Livia and Nero’s wedding faced a difficult conundrum. What should he reveal to that happy assembly of Claudians? Livia’s first marriage would be blighted by Nero’s inability to keep pace with the switching tides of contemporary politics and his unerring instinct for backing a loser. Despite its short duration, it must frequently have felt to Livia like a test of stamina and endurance. Livia and Nero were probably married for a maximum of five years. It was a hair-raising, peripatetic interlude. Banishment, flight and terror were the gifts of Nero’s household gods. Added to this, all too soon, came bereavement. The auspex, it is safe to assume, mentioned none of this.
As the light faded, Livia left Marcus’s house for the final time. She set off on foot for the short journey to her new marital home, also on the Palatine. Possibly she was accompanied by flutes, as the dramatist Plautus suggests in his farce Casina.12 Boys bearing torches almost certainly formed part of her procession. If she did not herself carry a spindle and distaff, tools of ‘virtuous’ weaving, an attendant did so on her behalf. The torches had been lit in Marcus’s house – according to Varro, at the ceremonial hearth of the bride’s atrium.13 Possibly, obscene songs and jokes accompanied Livia’s progress, an incursion of indecorousness wholly at odds with the austere, even forbidding rectitude she would later present to Romans’ gaze. At her destination, she anointed the doorposts with oil and fat and decorated them with woollen fillets. She was carried over the threshold by her attendants. Inside the house, Nero offered his bride water and fire, symbols of the domestic concerns of the Roman matron. In her wake, Livia brought with her her entitlement of ancestor masks, a substantial portfolio – for the politician of acuity an inheritance equal in value to the largest dowry. Nero was not that politician.
On the following day, in a potentially nerve-racking ceremony, Livia made an offering to Nero’s household gods for the first time. The blood, smoke and ash of sacrifice sealed her compact with her new husband. Henceforth her role was that later expounded by Plutarch in his Advice to Bride and Groom, standard lessons Alfidia had surely taught her daughter. ‘The wife ought to have no feeling of her own, but she should join with her husband in seriousness and sportiveness and in soberness and laughter.’14 Far from jibbing at such constraints, Livia made them – or at least the semblance of them – her life’s study. It was not by accident that she would later be associated with concordia, the Roman concept of marital harmony, and serve as a model for wives across the Empire. In the short term, concordia made demands on a sixteen-year-old girl. Surviving records fail to provide grounds for hope that her marriage to Nero abounded in ‘sportiveness’ or ‘laughter’. As she wrestled with adjustment to her new state, Livia was also – with good reason – becoming increasingly afraid for her father.
In November 43 three men met on an island. Appian, in his history of Rome’s Civil War, places the island in the river Lavinius. It was situated between Bononia and Mutina in northern Italy, an undistinguished site for talks which would decide the mastery of the Roman world.
The men were not friends in any real sense. Nor were their long-term aims compatible. Two had fought as enemies within the last six months. One was, effectively, a makeweight. His name was Lepidus. We met him a decade earlier when, as interrex, he witnessed the storming of the atrium of his house by supporters of the murdered Clodius. Senior-most in years, he would become the junior partner of the three men gathered in uneasy truce on that nameless island.
His colleagues were Caesarians. Mark Antony had shared Caesar’s last consulship and afterwards seized control of the dictator’s financial affairs. Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew, had been adopted posthumously by Caesar at the age of eighteen. He sought from Mark Antony not only control of Caesar’s finances, of which he was the principal heir, but leadership of the Caesarian cause, his real inheritance. At the battle of Mutina earlier the same year, Octavian had defeated Mark Antony. That victory went some way to redressing the balance of power between the two men, which was otherwise weighted heavily in Mark Antony’s favour. Separately, Lepidus, Antony and Octavian had decided on amity. Collectively, they would attain the power they craved. Individually, they were later to re-evaluate their union.
They met for two days and reached decisions on the three major challenges that faced them. If they were to hold sway in Rome, in place of Brutus and Cassius and the tyrannicides bent on restoring the Republic to its former status quo, they must legitimize their power. To make that power a reality, they needed funds. To preserve their power from onslaughts, they required both money and the removal of their enemies.
The first point was easily settled. They overrode the abolition of the post of dictator which Mark Antony had enacted after Caesar’s death, and decreed themselves joint dictators for a five-year period – a Commission of Three for the Ordering of the State, known to historians as the Second Triumvirate.15 This agreed, the Triumvirs formulated a plan which reflected credit on none of them. They decided, for the second and last time in Roman history, to institute a Proscription, drawing up long lists of their intended victims. The ‘proscribed’ forfeited all their worldly
goods, which were liquidated in order to fill the coffers of the ruling party. They also forfeited their lives. ‘Proscripti’ were marked men. Once their names had been displayed on notices posted in Rome, anyone might kill them with impunity. There were even incentives for those who delivered the head of a victim to the Triumvirs: a reward of 100,000 sesterces to a free man, 40,000 sesterces and a promise of freedom to a slave.16 Inevitably most of the killings were undertaken by soldiers. The Proscriptions’ first victim was the tribune Salvius. Soldiers decapitated him in front of his guests at a banquet which, with exemplary sangfroid, he had arranged knowing that it would be his last.17 His bloody end soon became a statistic.
In total the Proscriptions of 43 accounted for the murder of three hundred senators and two thousand equestrians. The lists embraced such prominent figures as Cicero and Caesar’s scholar-librarian Marcus Terentius Varro. Mark Antony sacrificed his uncle, Lucius Caesar, Lepidus his brother Paullus. Octavian, Suetonius records, ‘proscribed even Gaius Toranius, his own guardian, who had been his father Octavius’s colleague as aedile.’18 It was a merciless interlude. Slaves sold their masters and even wives abandoned husbands, the senators Septimius and Salassus perishing with the connivance of their spouses.19 Terror gripped the streets of Rome. Appian’s account does not exaggerate. ‘Many people were murdered in all kinds of ways, and decapitated to furnish evidence for the reward. They fled in undignified fashion, and abandoned their former conspicuous dress for strange disguises. Some went down wells, some descended into the filth of the sewers, and others climbed up into smoky rafters or sat in total silence under close-packed roofs. To some, just as terrifying as the executioners were wives or children with whom they were not on good terms, or ex-slaves and slaves, or creditors, or neighbouring landowners who coveted their estates.’20 It was not to be expected that Marcus would escape.
We cannot be certain why the name of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus was added to the lists of the Proscripti. The sources do not reveal any particular relationship, good or bad, between Livia’s father and the Triumvirs. The explanation surely lies, as one recent biographer has suggested, in Marcus’s support in the Senate for a decree to place one of Caesar’s most prominent assassins, Decimus Brutus, at the head of two legions.21 The motion passed, Decimus Brutus exploited his military command against Mark Antony at the battle of Mutina. The Triumvirs demanded a high penalty for what Marcus may have justified to himself as an act of loyalty to the Republic.
Although Marcus did not in fact die as a result of the Proscriptions, time was running out for Livia’s father. He did not survive to witness the birth of his first grandchild, a boy called Tiberius, on 16 November 42 – or the outcome of Nero’s refusal in the same year to relinquish his praetorship at the appointed time.
Chapter 7
Fugitive
The man asking the questions was an historian, Livia’s near-contemporary Velleius Paterculus.
‘Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs? Who can refrain from hoping for a lot different from that which he now has, or from dreading one that is the opposite of what he expects?’1
The subject who had inspired these reflections was not ‘he’ at all, but Livia. It was the year 40 BC and Livia, ‘most eminent of Roman women in birth, in sincerity and in beauty…was then a fugitive…’
It was not, of course, the outcome Marcus had intended in betrothing Livia to Nero. But Marcus was dead, killed in autumn 42 by his own hand in his tent in a military camp in Thrace. The battle of Philippi, ‘sepulchre of citizens’ as Propertius described it, represented Republican Rome’s last stand. Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius were vanquished by Mark Antony and Octavian and a force of 100,000 men. With the battle lost, Velleius Paterculus tells us, Marcus and his fellow proscriptus Quintilius Varus, ‘without making any appeal for mercy, ended their lives’.2 Livia’s father behaved as Rome’s cult of virtus demanded, resolute in the determination never to give in, even in the face of defeat.3 Among those who drove him to suicide was the future husband of his only daughter.
Married life should have been so different for Livia. Surviving epitaphs suggest a widespread model of marriage that is small-scale in its focus, mundane, safe in its predictability. Republican Rome denied even the richest, grandest women control over their lives. Instead, it outlined a template of hazardous childbirth and uneventful domesticity. ‘Stranger, I have little to say,’ announces one tomb inscription of the period. ‘This is the unbeautiful tomb of a beautiful woman…She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two children…Her speech was delightful, her gait graceful. She kept house, she made wool. I have finished. Go.’4 Livia, too, was a beautiful woman. She also bore Nero two children. As events will show, she may or may not have loved her husband with her heart. Later, in the course of her second marriage, she is recorded as making wool and weaving woollen cloth. But her first marriage afforded her all too little time for keeping house. In vain would she seek to emulate the subject of one glowing epitaph, who ‘desired nothing more than that her house should rejoice’.5 Among the short-term outcomes of Philippi was an all-pervasive uncertainty among the households of senatorial Rome. Domestic tranquillity was not the Triumvirs’ first priority. The consul Pedius, who worked to mitigate the violence of the Proscriptions and shorten the victim lists, died, we are told, of exhaustion and despair.6 It was that sort of time.
Marcus had died, as he had mostly lived, a man of principle. His final stand was in defence of the Republic. It was not a sacrifice Nero was prepared to match. Speedily the younger Claudian transferred his allegiance from the assassins to the Triumvirs. He placed his trust not in Caesar’s adopted son Octavian – a political tyro and unknown quantity, his family newcomers to the senatorial ranks – but in Mark Antony, the Republicans’ dictator. We cannot know the extent to which Nero shared with Livia the rationale behind his political oscillation, only that no record of open dispute between them survives.
‘The ideal for a man,’ Nicostratus would later write in his treatise On Marriage, ‘is a kind wife who knows how to look after him. He can relax with her and confide all his secrets, even public business, to her since it is like confiding in himself.’7 Nicostratus’s ‘ideal’ depended on a husband for whom sharing secrets and public business represented a positive benefit. There is no evidence that Nero fell into this category. Nor would the discrepancy in age between Nero and Livia, and the latter’s presumed political naivety, have encouraged him to confide in her. Nicostratus wrote at a time when the imperial system – notably the example set by Livia in her marriage to Augustus – had accustomed Roman men to women’s closer knowledge of power. In 42 BC, so fundamental a shift in outlook remained remote. Nero’s attitude probably corresponded more nearly to that of Sallust, whose Conspiracy of Catiline, published only two years earlier, contained a pithy demonization of Sempronia. Sempronia paid for her involvement in Catiline’s plot by posthumous denunciation as a woman ‘who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring’, a weightier criticism in Rome than modern readers may suspect.8 Sallust’s Sempronia was dangerous. Interference in politics branded her a transgressive, even sexually predatory, figure. Neither Nero nor Livia herself would have wished Livia to follow her example.
In the short term at least, Nero deserves our leniency. With hindsight, we can see that by the end of 42 Rome’s Republic was defeated both ideologically and as a means of government. Julius Caesar had recognized the signs of its decline, but his foresight, coloured by self-interest, was not widespread. Other men of senatorial rank shared Nero’s uncertainty and his apparent belief that Mark Antony remained the Republic’s torchbearer. Pledging his support for him in 42, Nero may have acted in good conscience, in defence of the system Claudians had upheld since the sixth century. Only Nero’s subsequent vacillations undermine his claims to integrity.
For the moment, Livia’s anxieties were smaller in compass, distinct from
the hurly-burly of Rome’s power-broking. By the end of 42 she found herself both bereft and elated, confronting the death of her father and the birth of her first child. Tipping the scales in the right direction, her husband’s star also showed signs of ascendancy. Like Marcus before him, Nero – newly married and a father to boot – had been elevated to the praetorship.
‘I did not take my father’s line; His trade was silver coin, but mine Corinthian bronzes…’ ran the doggerel scrawled during the Proscriptions on to the base of a statue of Octavian.9 The double allusion is to the rumour that the fortunes of the Octavii derived from money-lending and to Octavian’s reputed fondness for costly objets d’art looted from the houses of the proscripti. Corinthian bronze was an alloy of copper, silver and gold not necessarily manufactured in Corinth. It was used for a range of bibelots and trinkets, including portrait busts. Pliny, in his Natural History, valued it ‘before silver and almost before gold’.10 Its value to us is as an indicator of the splendour of the aristocratic Roman townhouse.