Julia Augusti

Elaine Fantham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134323432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This scholarly biography details the life of an extraordinary woman in an extraordinary society.

Julia Augusti studies the life of the only daughter of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and the father who sacrificed his daughter and her children in order to establish a dynasty.

Studying the abundant historical evidence available, this biography studies each stage of Julia's life in remarkable detail:

• 
  
  

• her childhood - taken from her divorced mother to become part of a complex and unstable family structure
• her youth - set against the brilliant social and cultural life of the new Augustan Rome
• her marriages - as tools for Augustus' plans for succession
• Julia's violation of her father's moral regime, and the betrayal of her absent husband.

Reflecting new attitudes, and casting fresh light on their social reality, this outstanding biography will delight, entertain and inform anyone interested in this engaging Classical figure.

1
Introduction

Daughters and wives in Roman society in the late republic

The lives of elite Roman women were essentially determined by their marriages, and so the story of Julia, daughter of Augustus, was inevitably shaped by her marriages and their outcome. Despite the lapse of two millennia there are quite a number of ways in which Roman elite families behaved like the privileged families of modern North America or Europe, and had similar aspirations for their children. But they had far more control over the marital choice of their children of either sex than we have known in the past 100 years. We are best informed about families with both wealth and political standing, whose largely inherited money would follow both their sons and their daughters. But when a daughter became a wife, family wealth would pass through her dowry and other rights of inheritance into the family of her husband.

The pattern of age at marriage among the propertied classes tended to be different from those in Western urban societies either now or fifty years ago. Elite young men would usually marry in their mid-twenties, after a year or more of military service and some initial experience attending cases and even pleading in the criminal or civil courts, but their brides would be markedly younger women between fifteen and twenty.¹ This was in part because the family felt no need to retain the daughter at home in order to give her a full education, and partly from fear that once into the flush of adolescence the girl might throw away her virginity or lose the reputation for chastity which was a prerequisite for marriage. So betrothal tended to follow as soon as possible after puberty, even when the girl’s physique suggested postponement of consummation in marriage, because she seemed insufficiently developed to carry a healthy pregnancy or survive the high risks of childbirth.

As the young man learned how to serve as an advocate in the forum by observing an elder, so the young wife would have learnt some of the complexities of running a large household by observing her mother, and her training would be supplemented by the slave staff of her new household. However, her immediate duty was not as chatelaine, but to ensure the continuation of the clan by producing the next generation.

We can imagine our young Roman couple anxiously awaiting their first-born, say in the year of Cicero’s consulship, when Octavian was born as younger child of the senator M. Octavius and his wife Atia.² Naturally they would hope for a boy, and a handsome child, physically and mentally active. He could follow either of two respected career paths to lead him to distinction, one as an army officer, the other, now becoming more common, as an advocate and then politician. Success whether in the army or the courts, would normally lead the young man to election, first to one of the twenty junior offices held around age twenty-five, then to more competitive office. Young men from good families or with good personal reputations could stand for election as Aedile, an expensive office which earned popularity by spending private fortunes on public games and festivals,³ or as tribune of the people, an office favoured by men with a talent for popular speaking, often but not always, radical in their political colour.⁴ There were traditional ages at which it was legitimate to stand for the higher offices, but a man with a good record and influential friends could hope to be elected Praetor around the age of forty, to spend the year administering one of the standing tribunals at Rome, and if lucky a further year or two governing a Roman province. On his return, he would be eligible to stand for the highest regular office, as one of the two consuls. The consuls of each year were regularly awarded the position of governor in one of the more challenging provinces: within their province, particularly an overseas region like Spain or Africa or Asia Minor, they were effectively in total control as military commanders, as administrators and as civil and criminal judges. They received no salary, but could expect to return to Rome wealthy even without practising the usual level of corruption. Men reached this climax of the Roman career structure at or soon after forty-five, but the Roman pattern of life expectation even for privileged people meant that most Roman fathers would not live to see their sons approach high office: indeed a father would be quite likely to die around the age of fifty, when his son would be entering junior office. As for the son himself, he might not have long to live after his consulship: many ex-consuls would have only a few years as elder statesmen in the Senate.

Of course there was an even chance that our young parents would not produce a son from the first pregnancy, and would have to keep trying. There were also many miscarriages and stillbirths, so many that they went unreported by historians unless the mother died in childbirth, or as a consequence of a recent birth, like the daughters of Caesar and Cicero. Usually we can only guess at miscarriages from gaps between the birth-dates of siblings. It took Cicero and his wife another ten years after their first-born daughter to produce their son Marcus, and Julius Caesar, for all his sexual activity, seems to have had only the one child – a girl. But supposing the first-born child was in fact a girl. What would our elite parents hope for their daughter, and what could they hope from a daughter? Daughters were expensive, because their only role was marriage, and a good match required a proportionate dowry, one that would satisfy the groom’s family and honour the bride’s social standing. (This might be less than the portion parents expected to leave each son in their wills, but it had to keep her ‘in the style to which she was accustomed’, and the money or property must be handed over within little more than a year of marriage.) For fathers whose wealth consisted chiefly in land, it would be hard to provide cash or securities. After education in the home, perhaps sharing the elementary tuition of a brother in grammatike (reading and writing Greek and Latin) and accounting, the girl would not be likely to benefit from the next stage of education in rhetoric, which only began at or after puberty. As soon as she reached puberty and was eligible for betrothal and marriage, her parents would seek out a good match for her – the most promising son of the best family among their acquaintance – but this is exactly where the clash arose between parental ambition and personal concern for their daughter’s happy adult life, which often played second fiddle. The more prominent her family, the less it was likely that the girl would have much choice in the age, appearance or character of her new husband. The original pattern of marriage gave the bride into her husband’s control or manus, so that she owed him the obedience of a daughter to her father, and her actions were legally subject to his authority. Even when the self-interest of families led to fathers retaining power over their daughters and their property, and offering them in marriage sine manu, many brides were immature teenagers ten or more years younger than their husbands so that the initial relationship would tend to be paternal. But the new wife would learn to know her husband and, given goodwill on both sides, such marriages often led to a balanced relationship in which the bride would find private satisfaction in rearing their children and take vicarious pride in her husband’s public successes.

If both partners came from the same background and the husband was outgoing as well as ambitious, one might hope for a real working partnership between the couple, eased by their possession of a slave household and enjoyment of more than one home. Among the elite it was normal to own both a townhouse in Rome and one or more villas in the Alban hills or in the inviting climate of Campania. For the typical political careerist and his wife, the chief hardship was separation for a year or more when the husband had to go on campaign or govern a province away from Rome.⁵

This is how the poet Propertius saw the life of Cornelia, the stepsister of the Julia who is our subject. Cornelia died in her thirties, before her children reached puberty, and Propertius’ elegy presents her funeral eulogy in her own voice:

‘I saw my brother twice occupy curule office, and I died when he was appointed consul. I lived long enough to win the matron’s robe and was not taken from a childless family; you my sons Lepidus and Paullus were my consolations after death, and my eyes were closed by your hand in death. Daughter, you were born to be the model of your father’s censorship; Copy me and live as wife of a single husband. This is the highest reward of a woman’s triumph, when frank opinion praises how well she served her marriage’.

(Prop. 4.11.65–72)

Here we see through male eyes the aspirations of the dead noblewoman for both herself and her daughter.

But Cornelia was fortunate in that her father was unimportant – so unimportant that scholars still debate his identity. Julia, Cornelia’s stepsister, had the misfortune to be born child of C. Iulius Caesar Octavianus, the future Augustus, and the fact that she was his child, and his only child, dogged her through a troubled life. So far we have played down the other half of the equation, that is, what (apart from grandsons) parents wanted from (not for) their daughters. Essentially, the ambitious father would hope to use his daughter’s marriage to gain for himself powerful allies – the right son-in-law might bring him a consulship – or, if he had sons, to bring the same influence to help her brothers’ career. And this can be best illustrated by fully documented examples.

We should start with the marital record of the republic’s two greatest generals, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey), born in 106 BCE and Gaius Julius Caesar, born six years later. Plutarch’s life of Pompey records five marriages, of which two ended with the deaths of his wives. Although Pompey’s father had been both consul and general when he died in 87, his unpopularity left his son an outsider, who had to make his own way. Thus the young man’s first marriage came about as a result of his prosecution for possession of state property (booty appropriated by his father) in his twentieth year: he was acquitted by the presiding judge P. Antistius, whose daughter he then married. But three years later, when Cornelius Sulla returned wealthy and victorious from his Asian command against Mithridates and his Greek allies, Pompey won such great successes as commander, first of his own local militia, then of forces fighting for Sulla, that Sulla began to see the young man’s military glory as a dangerous threat to his own power. He realized he needed to bind Pompey to him and did so by a marriage alliance. Sulla had no daughter, but persuaded Pompey to divorce Antistia, so that he could marry Aemilia, Sulla’s stepdaughter by his noble wife Metella. Plutarch reports that Antistius had died in poverty and Antistia’s mother had killed herself, leaving her an orphan. No matter, let Pompey become Sulla’s son-in-law by marrying Aemilia. But Aemilia herself was already married (her husband is unknown) and in advanced pregnancy. Plutarch reports that her stepfather now engineered the pregnant woman’s divorce and remarriage, but she had scarcely entered Pompey’s home, when she died of complications in childbirth.⁶ It was typical that Romans resolved on a political marriage would not wait for the woman to give birth in the house of her child’s father: it was enough that his paternity was established. Plutarch, the honest bourgeois from a small Greek town, is rightly shocked, and calls this behaviour tyrannical (Pompey 9) but it is a pattern that will be repeated.

We do not know when Pompey made his third marriage to Mucia, a kinswoman of the same family, the Metelli. The marriage has to be dated by inference from the ages of the three children she bore him, Gnaeus Pompeius (old enough to fight at Pharsalus in 48 BCE, so born at the latest in the early 60s) his younger brother Sextus (so young he was kept out of mainland Greece during the campaigns) and Pompeia, old enough for marriage in the mid 50s. We do know that Pompey himself was away campaigning in Spain from 78–72 BCE, and in the eastern Aegean and the hinterland of Asia Minor for four or five years from 67 BCE. Indeed Plutarch reports that when Pompey was offered the eastern Aegean command, he complained that he was not being allowed to stay in Italy and enjoy the company of his wife, but then Pompey was known for pretending reluctance to accept commands or high office. But it is perhaps not surprising that on his return to Italy in December 62 BCE, Pompey divorced Mucia, alleging adultery (Plut. Pompey 42). Writing to Atticus in January 61, Cicero claims that Pompey’s action met with general approval.⁷

We have reached the point where both the political biography of Pompey and his personal life converge with the career of Julius Caesar, the great-uncle who restored the prominence of his family and gave his name to Julia’s father, Octavius. In 61, Caesar had held the praetorship but was still to be elected as Consul, but Pompey, as the newly returned victor over Mithridates, was the most important and powerful individual in Rome. Even so, Pompey needed political allies to ensure the official ratification of his eastern settlement and the allocation of land in Italy for the demobilization of his soldiers. Pompey was open to aligning himself with the main body of senatorial conservatives, if they would only authorize his recommendations and meet his needs, but he was also open to offers of alliance from more radical quarters. Let us leave him between his third and fourth marriages while we retrace the early marital history of Caesar.

Caesar, like Pompey, was an outsider, but from a decayed patrician family: although a member of his clan had held the consulship as recently as 91 BCE, his own father had not held high office. The biggest asset to his political future had been the marriage of a kinswoman – his aunt Julia, to the ‘new man’ Gaius Marius, the great commander and reiterated Consul of 107, 104–100 and, finally, 86 BCE. Both ancient biographies of Caesar, by Plutarch and by Suetonius, have lost their opening chapters, but Suetonius reports that Caesar had divorced Cossutia, daughter of a wealthy but non-senatorial family, to marry Cornelia, the daughter of Cornelius Cinna (who had seized power in Rome and was re-elected Consul from 87–84 BCE). This marriage may have been connected with his proposed appointment as Flamen Dialis, a position which he ultimately rejected. This peculiar patrician religious office was no secular priesthood like the pontificate he would hold from 73 BCE. Uniquely, it required a patrician wife like Cornelia, but the nomination may have been contrived in the first place to save his life and satisfy his enemies by excluding him from a political career.⁸ What matters to our understanding of Caesar’s marital history is that when Sulla returned with his army from Asia and demanded that Caesar divorce Cornelia, he refused, and remained married to her until her death in 68 BCE. Cornelia was the mother of Caesar’s only known child, Julia, born some time before 74 BCE, and he honoured his wife on her death by claiming the right to give her a public funeral oration (Suet. D.J. 6.1). Shortly after this, he married Pompeia, the daughter of the late Consul Pompeius Rufus and granddaughter of Sulla (Suet. D.J. 6.2: this woman was not related to Gnaeus Pompey).

Caesar himself held office at Rome as Aedile (65) and Praetor (62), and his mother Aurelia lived in his city house along with his wife and, presumably, his young daughter. It was there that a public scandal arose when, in December 62, young Publius Clodius disguised himself as a flute girl in order to spy on the women’s festival of the Good Goddess (which no man might attend) and allegedly to have intimacy with Pompeia. There is no doubt that he had smuggled himself into the house, but the charge of adultery (or even attempted adultery) lacks plausibility on this crowded occasion, and Caesar himself, presiding as Pontifex Maximus⁹ over the religious investigation, refused to believe the story. This was, however, the notorious situation in which he declared that Caesar’s wife had to be above suspicion, and Cicero reports his divorce of Pompeia in a letter of February 61, only a month after the news of Pompey’s divorce. Caesar left Rome almost immediately to serve as proconsular governor of Further Spain for 61 and most of 60 BCE.

Now, indeed, the scene was set for marital and political realignments. Pompey and his political intentions still dominated Roman political gossip, which was intensified when he began negotiations for a remarriage. Plutarch’s Pompey (47) reports two contrasting overtures by Pompey. In the first, he approached Rome’s leading conservative statesman M. Porcius Cato, asking for a double marriage alliance in which he himself would marry one of Cato’s nieces, while his son Gnaeus would marry the other. Despite some enthusiasm on the part of Cato’s womenfolk, he strongly rejected the offer, and would point in 59 to the disgrace they would have felt if they had been associated with Pompey’s hostile treatment of the Senate. Plutarch quotes Cato as claiming that ‘it was intolerable to have supreme power prostituted by marriage alliances and to see men helping one another to power and armies by means of women’ (Pompey 4...

Table of contents

• Women of the Ancient World
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Women of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty
• Julia’s family and descendants
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Julia’s parents and childhood
• 3 Tensions of Julia’s youth
• 4 The rise of Marcus Agrippa
• 5 Old enough to be her father
• 6 Julia’s homes
• 7 The fatal marriage
• 8 Julia’s boys
• 9 Julia’s girls
• 10 Julia in the judgement of posterity
• Appendix I Material sources
• Appendix II Testimonia (in chronological order) for Julia’s disgrace, exile and death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of persons and places
• Subject index