Livia, Empress of Rome Page 8

  This was the environment Livia had inhabited as a child, one in which the mistress of one household, ‘and not a particularly rich one’, spent 150,000 sesterces on a wine ladle, while Cicero bought a table for the staggering sum of half a million sesterces, a seventh of his purchase price of Drusus’s house on the Palatine.11 At first, following her marriage to Nero, this remained Livia’s environment. Although it is probably impossible to trace Nero’s Palatine house, it is important to recognize this aspect of Livia’s life and the extent to which her experience prior to the Civil War was circumscribed by luxury and the blithe assumptions of hereditary wealth. Those assumptions were swiftly challenged, hostage to Nero’s declining fortunes.

  Nero’s praetorship was conducted against a backdrop of growing divisions between the Triumvirs. At the close of his term of office, when the judicious magistrate might have kept his head below the parapet, Nero refused to relinquish the fasces. Instead he allied himself with Lucius Antonius, Mark Antony’s brother and consul for the year, and Antony’s formidable wife Fulvia, daughter of Sallust’s Sempronia. Lucius and Fulvia opposed Octavian’s awards to the Caesarian veterans of Philippi of land which had been confiscated from Italian farmers. ‘By making charges against Caesar before the veterans at the one moment, and at the next inciting to arms those who had lost their farms when the division of lands was ordered and colonists assigned, [Lucius] had collected a large army,’ Velleius Paterculus reported.12 Large it may have been, but effective it evidently was not – at least, not effective enough. Lucius and Fulvia established an insurrectionists’ stronghold in Perusia, the modern-day Umbrian hill town of Perugia built high above the Tiber valley. There Nero, Livia and Tiberius followed Lucius. Octavian and his armies followed too. When Perusia fell, starved into submission, Nero alone of the city’s Roman office-holders refused to capitulate.13 In fear for his life he fled – and the family of Tiberius Claudius Nero found themselves on the run. Out of sight was the gilded world of the Roman townhouse, with its Corinthian bronzes and generous complement of slaves; untended the hearth of Nero’s household gods where Nero spilt animal blood and Livia made obeisance; remote the relative freedom of the aristocratic wife’s life in Rome, with its public baths and shops, galleries, gardens and colonnades. Nero and Livia travelled with a reduced party of attendants, possibly only Tiberius’s wet nurse and a single general servant. This novel experience of the fugitive’s life must have frightened both of them and was particularly arduous for Livia as the mother of a young baby. The years of danger had begun. His own poor judgement, added to Octavian’s dexterity at manipulating a constantly shifting pattern of alliances, served to brand Nero a rebel with a losing cause.

  For three years Nero, Livia and Tiberius travelled. They fled from Perusia to Praeneste, Praeneste to Naples, Naples to Sicily, Sicily to Athens. At last they reached Sparta, the Greek city which had once enjoyed Claudian protection and now, under altered circumstances, returned the favour. At first Nero continued his policy of active opposition to Octavian. In Naples, he had attempted to incite an uprising among the city’s slave population. Again Octavian emerged victorious. Historians like Velleius Paterculus recount such incidents specifically from Livia’s viewpoint, while both Velleius and Cassius Dio make much of Livia’s flight from the man she would shortly marry. The former describes Livia as ‘a fugitive before the arms and forces of the very Caesar who was soon to be her husband’,14 exploiting for dramatic effect an irony of hindsight. In his handling, there is something heroic about Livia’s terrifying chase across Italy. His narrative seems to echo the pursuit of men and women by gods familiar from epic poetry. ‘Pursuing bypaths that she might avoid the swords of the soldiers, and accompanied by but one attendant, so as the more readily to escape detection in her flight, she finally reached the sea and with her husband Nero made her escape by ship to Sicily.’15 The truth cannot have been either romantic or picturesque. If Livia’s spirits gave way, we are not aware of it. At a certain point, Nero, while remaining inimical to Octavian – Pliny described the men as enemies – eventually tired of direct engagement with his adversary; his subsequent course suggests instead a search for safe refuge. Perhaps he was moved to pragmatism by the plight of his wife and baby.

  What was never in question was Livia’s loyalty to her husband. Whether through affection, consciousness of her duty as a wife, or necessity – at some point, unsurprisingly, Nero’s name was added to the list of the proscripti and Livia may have doubted whether she any longer had a house in Rome to return to – she remained at Nero’s side. Although such behaviour was not unique at this time, it was considered exemplary, contrasting as it did with the bloodier paths chosen by the wives of Septimius and Salassus. It suggests forcibly that later efforts to present Livia as the archetypal virtuous Roman wife rested on solid foundations. The period of Nero’s Proscription frightened, frustrated and humiliated Livia but did not find her wanting in steadfastness or courage. Like a man grasping at straws, Nero exhausted one by one those leaders who shared his opposition to Octavian. All in vain.

  Sixty years later, the senator Aulus Caecina Severus argued the case for Roman governors travelling abroad without their wives: ‘A female entourage stimulates extravagance in peacetime and timidity in war…Women are not only frail and easily tired. Relax control, and they become ferocious ambitious schemers…Wives attract every rascal in a province.’16 In the midst of civil war, Livia gave the lie to Severus’s words. Nero’s flight across the ancient world presented her with every sort of challenge. Hurrying from Sparta for reasons now lost, ‘she ran into a sudden forest fire which scorched her hair and part of her robe.’17 It was night and both Livia and Tiberius might have been killed in the unexpected conflagration, but the sources record neither complaint nor recrimination from Livia. Not until her return to Rome did her support for the hapless Nero falter.

  Nero’s destinations had included Sicily. There Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Great, continued with some success to champion the cause of the Republic. Although Sextus’s sister Pompeia indulged baby Tiberius with presents of a cloak, a brooch (presumably to fasten the cloak) and some gold buttons, for Nero the detour proved less rewarding. There was no warm welcome from the man whose father Marcus had served almost twenty years earlier. Haughty in defeat, Nero claimed that Sextus had failed to treat him with proper respect. The small family of Claudii were soon on their travels again.

  But Sextus did not forget his unwelcome visitors. In the summer of 39 BC he made a fragile pact with the Triumvirs. The Treaty of Misenum, though of short duration, included what amounted to a pardon for Sextus’s allies. Among those exiles whose names would be removed from the lists of the proscribed was Tiberius Claudius Nero. Inevitably, absolution did not come cheap. Nero could expect the restoration of no more than a quarter of his property: the remainder was annexed by the State. At last he and his family could return to Rome in safety.

  It was to be a summer of surprises. As autumn approached, Livia could no longer disguise the fact that, for the second time, she was pregnant. How she greeted this news we do not know. She was nineteen years old. Her father was dead, perhaps her mother too (Alfidia’s death is not mentioned in the sources). Her husband, though undoubtedly courageous, had shown himself inadequate to the challenges posed by Rome’s political turmoil. Nero had lost his fortune as well as his credibility as a statesman; by serendipity he had escaped with his life. As future events would reveal, he may also by this point have forfeited Livia’s affections. As summer turned to autumn, questions of loyalty and affection increasingly occupied Livia’s thoughts. The biggest surprise of 39 was still to come.

  Chapter 8

  ‘The whimsicality of fate’

  In 56 BC ‘a highly respected man of noble character’, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, asked his friend Cato the Younger for the hand of his daughter Porcia in marriage. Cato demurred. Porcia was already married. Cato was married, too – to his second wife Marcia, by whom he had three further chi
ldren. Undeterred, Hortensius evolved another plan. Plutarch tells us that ‘[he] wanted not only to be Cato’s intimate friend but also to unite their families and their future descendants’. So he switched his attentions from Porcia, ‘and boldly asked Cato to give him his own wife [Marcia], who was still young and fertile’. At the time Hortensius was nearing sixty, Cato almost forty and Marcia little more than twenty-five. Cato and Marcia showed every sign of affection. More than this, Marcia was pregnant. ‘Cato, however, seeing how eager and determined Hortensius was, did not oppose him, but told him that they had to ask Marcia’s father, Philippus, for consent. After Philippus had been consulted and had given his approval, he engaged Marcia to Hortensius in the presence of Cato, who had also given his consent.’1 What Marcia thought we do not know. In the previous generation, Sulla’s stepdaughter Aemilia had entered a similar compact with extreme reluctance. Heavily pregnant, she found herself divorced at speed from her husband Marcus Acilius Glabrio. In his place Sulla married her to Pompey the Great. His motives were political. Shortly after, Aemilia died in childbirth.

  As peace returned to Rome with the cessation of civil war, it was Cato’s acquiescence, not Marcia’s or Aemilia’s sacrifice, which Romans would have reason to remember.

  It was not friendship which had drawn the Triumvirs to Sextus Pompey in the summer of 39 BC but fear. The people of Rome were hungry. Famine gripped the city. From his island base, Pompey wielded significant naval power. His control of the seas was more than tactical: it enabled him to disrupt shipments of grain from Sicily to Rome. Although Roman politics, unlike those of Revolutionary France, did not pivot on the price of a loaf of bread, restricted food supplies in the capital provided a recipe for disaffection. Riots and demonstrations rent the streets. Romans had grown unused to iron rations. ‘We want the parrotfish, transplanted from distant shores; we want fish from the Syrtes that cost a shipwreck to bring to Rome: we’re tired of grey mullet. We fancy a mistress not a wife. Roses are out: we want cinnamon,’ Petronius would write, only partly in jest. Sallust traced the Roman taste for luxury and soft living as far back as the middle of the second century BC; perhaps the habit had become ingrained.2 Octavian dared not risk any meddlesome rabble-rouser who attributed shortage of food to his own continuing hostile relations with Pompey. He learnt his lesson the hard way, after being stoned in the Forum by an angry mob, and made with reluctance a makeshift peace.

  For Nero and Livia, exiles no longer, this sense of Rome’s diminished munificence came very close to home. Nero’s proscription may have cost them their house on the Palatine; undoubtedly their return to the city found them poorer. Livia herself was still a woman of some substance – she probably inherited property not only from Marcus but also Alfidia, had the latter died by this stage. We do not know if her inheritance was adequate for the couple’s needs. Roman law limited bequests to daughters. In addition, since, like Nero, Marcus had been proscribed, Livia shared his estate unequally with the Triumvirs. Also taking a slice out of the pie, we assume, was Livia’s late-begotten ‘brother’, Marcus’s adopted son, Marcus Livius Drusus Libo.

  If a sense of relief was mixed with weariness on Livia’s part in that summer of 39, it is hardly surprising. Financial constraints may have compromised the only way of life she knew; and her husband’s distinctly uncertain political future apparently lay at the behest of a man to whom she attributed multiple wrongs – the death of her father, the loss of her fortune and three harrowing years of fear and danger. Seneca’s Stoic assessment that the happy life lay in ‘peace of mind and lasting tranquillity’3 provides grounds enough for Livia’s certain unhappiness.

  Help came to hand from a previously untried source, the same Marcus Livius Drusus Libo with whom Livia now shared not only Marcus’s patrimony but a name. What form that help took we do not know, but it is possible that Libo agreed to intervene on Nero and Livia’s behalf with Rome’s new powers-that-be. The proposal may have come from Nero or from Livia – or was perhaps Libo’s own. The idea of Nero or Livia requesting help from Octavian, their enemy and their victor, sits oddly with that ‘excessive haughtiness’ or ‘exceeding arrogance’ which Livy insisted on as a defining characteristic of the Claudii. Libo’s intention – motivated by ‘family’ feeling? – may have been to initiate a dialogue which would result in the restitution of Nero’s forfeited property. In fact, in a dramatic outcome none could have anticipated, Libo’s intervention (if such it was) resulted in further losses to Nero, on this occasion no less a prize than his wife.

  Libo’s loyalty, like Nero’s, lay partly with Sextus Pompey, who at some point became his brother-in-law. His connection with the Triumvirate, however, was through his aunt Scribonia.4 Scribonia had become a political tool at about the time Nero and Livia failed to find refuge with Sextus on Sicily. Sextus’s coolness towards the exiles was influenced by a positive change in his relationship with Octavian. That change was cemented when, in 40, Octavian married Scribonia and the two men found themselves related. It must have seemed an easy matter to Libo to ask his aunt to intervene with her powerful new husband on behalf of his ‘sister’ and Nero. Scribonia was well placed to ask favours of her new husband: shortly after her marriage to Octavian, she fell pregnant. Given Nero’s tarnished reputation, she could not, however, have anticipated much warmth in Octavian’s likely response. She was magnificently mistaken.

  Octavian was twenty-four years old. Of uncertain health, he was nevertheless at the peak of his physical powers. For reasons not of love but politics, he had married a woman ten years his senior whom Seneca described uncosily as ‘of the stern old type’.5 The death of his great-uncle Julius Caesar five years earlier had propelled Octavian unexpectedly to the forefront of Roman politics. Heedless of the cautions of his mother and stepfather, he had chosen to interpret that propulsion as the call of destiny. Perhaps the arrogance of youth made him reckless. It was a daunting inheritance for an eighteen-year-old boy with no experience of politics or warfare and the scantest family connections with Rome’s governing hierarchy. Cicero’s joke that Octavian ‘must be praised, honoured – and must be removed’ encapsulated senatorial Rome’s misjudgement of the boy-heir as lightweight. It was not an assessment anyone thought to repeat in 39. At worst Octavian had achieved parity with his fellow Triumvir Mark Antony. Lepidus was scarcely thought of. The future of Rome, it was clear, now rested in one of two pairs of hands. For Octavian it was a heady prospect and one which may have raised to bursting point the pent-up feelings of five years of extreme physical and nervous exertion. His loveless marriage provided a leaky conduit for such emotions. He had reached the very state in which a man is apt to let slip his defences.

  Cassius Dio’s Roman History includes an account of the flight of the Claudii from Campania, following the fall of Naples and Lucius Antonius’s surrender in January or February 40. It has a glib, pat quality to it. ‘When Caesar’s party got the upper hand, [Nero] set out with his wife Livia Drusilla and with his son Tiberius Claudius Nero. This episode illustrated remarkably the whimsicality of fate. This Livia who then fled from Caesar later on was married to him, and this Tiberius who then escaped with his parents succeeded him in the office of emperor.’6 Events themselves were less clinical or neatly fore-ordained than Dio’s account suggests. But within less than two years, the unexpected coda to Nero and Livia’s flight was indeed a remarkable illustration of the whimsicality of fate.

  It is a moot point what modern opinion would have made of Livia’s appearance. Surviving portraits, of which Livia boasts a larger number than any other Roman woman,7 depict a woman of rounded face with plump cheeks, a long straight nose and gently arching eyebrows. The most striking features of Livia’s portrait busts are her tiny rosebud mouth and slightly prominent chin. Both nod towards a certain determination – a steeliness and strength of character denied by the smooth brow, open gaze and soft cheeks. The effect today is pleasantly arresting rather than beautiful, but such a reaction is at odds with contemporary respon
ses. To her contemporaries, as we have seen, Livia’s beauty was a watchword. It would prove an important facet of her history. Like the Cinderella princesses of fairytales, Livia was beautiful, intelligent and, after a period of travail, swept off her feet by Prince Charming. Ancient historians mistrusted that combination of good looks, shrewdness and influence over her husband. Some preferred, as time passed, to cast her in the role of wicked stepmother. Neither portrait can be trusted. In the heat of Rome’s high summer, Livia’s effect on Octavian was little short of electric.

  The ancient sources are perfunctory in their treatment of Octavian falling in love with Livia. After an exposition of the history of 39, Dio offers simply, ‘Besides these occurrences at the time Caesar married Livia.’8 Octavian’s emotional condition did not concern his first chroniclers: Livia became a figure of significance only insofar as she swayed Octavian’s political judgement. Throughout the fifty-two years of their marriage, Octavian took pains to conceal that eventuality from any third party, especially the eye of history; his careful propaganda veiled the dynamics of his private life. Nevertheless, the sequence of events baldly recounted in the sources facilitates a number of inferences. Chief among them is the lightning speed of Octavian’s love for Livia. Implicit within it is the likelihood of powerful feelings of sexual attraction. If Octavian’s contemporary biographer Nicolaus of Damascus is to be believed, that attraction may have been on Livia’s side as well as Octavian’s. Nicolaus claimed that Octavian’s good looks ‘attracted many women’.9

  Livia gave birth to her second child, a boy named Claudius Drusus Nero, known afterwards as Drusus, on 14 January 38 BC. Three days later she married Octavian. The birth was evidently easy since Livia was so quickly back on her feet. Its circumstances differed markedly from those of Drusus’s conception, when Livia and Nero remained in exile, their lives clouded by uncertainty; its speed was characteristic of these early stages of Octavian and Livia’s relationship. For Livia, uncertainty had passed by the time of Drusus’s birth. She had agreed to divorce Nero and marry Octavian as long ago as late September or early October, when the couple’s whirlwind engagement won the sophistical sanction of Rome’s college of pontiffs. She had probably been Octavian’s mistress since shortly after they met. At the time of that meeting, at the end of the previous summer, Livia was already pregnant with Drusus, her husband’s child. But Octavian, himself the husband of a pregnant wife, was not deterred from asking Nero to divorce her in his favour. For the gossip-mongers of Rome who remembered Hortensius’s pursuit of Marcia, it was a case of history repeating itself.