Caesars' Wives

Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire

Annelise Freisenbruch

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781416583578
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

In scandals and power struggles obscured by time and legend, the wives, mistresses, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the Caesars have been popularly characterized as heartless murderers, shameless adulteresses, and conniving politicians in the high dramas of the Roman court. Yet little has been known about who they really were and their true roles in the history-making schemes of imperial Rome's ruling Caesars—indeed, how they figured in the rise, decline, and fall of the empire. Now, in Caesars' Wives: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Roman Empire, Annelise Freisenbruch pulls back the veil on these fascinating women in Rome's power circles, giving them the chance to speak for themselves for the first time. With impeccable scholarship and arresting storytelling, Freisenbruch brings their personalities vividly to life, from notorious Livia and scandalous Julia to Christian Helena. Starting at the year 30 BC, when Cleopatra, Octavia, and Livia stand at the cusp of Rome's change from a republic to an autocracy, Freisenbruch relates the story of Octavian and Marc Antony's clash over the fate of the empire—an archetypal story that has inspired a thousand retellings—in a whole new light, uncovering the crucial political roles these first "first ladies" played. From there, she takes us into the lives of the women who rose to power over the next five centuries—often amid violence, speculation, and schemes—ending in the fifth century ad, with Galla Placidia, who was captured by Goth invaders (and married to one of their kings). The politics of Rome are revealed through the stories of Julia, a wisecracking daughter who disgraced her father by getting drunk in the Roman forum and having sex with strangers on the speaker's platform; Poppea, a vain and beautiful mistress who persuaded the emperor to kill his mother so that they could marry; Domitia, a wife who had a flagrant affair with an actor before conspiring in her husband's assassination; and Fausta, a stepmother who tried to seduce her own stepson and then engineered his execution—afterward she was boiled to death as punishment. Freisenbruch also tells a fascinating story of how the faces of these influential women have been refashioned over the millennia to tell often politically motivated stories about their reigns, in the process becoming models of femininity and female power. Illuminating the anxieties that persist even today about women in or near power and revealing the female archetypes that are a continuing legacy of the Roman Empire, Freisenbruch shows the surprising parallels of these iconic women and their public and private lives with those of our own first ladies who become part of the political agenda, as models of comportment or as targets for their husbands' opponents. Sure to transform our understanding of these first ladies, the influential women who witnessed one of the most gripping, significant eras of human history, Caesars' Wives is a significant new chronicle of an era that set the foundational story of Western Civilization and hung the mirror into which every era looks to find its own reflection.

CHAPTER ONE
Ulysses in a Dress
The Making of a Roman First Lady

The characteristic of the Roman nation was grandeur: its virtues, its vices, its prosperity, its misfortunes, its glory, its infamy, its rise and fall, were alike great. Even the women, disdaining the limits which barbarism and ignorance had, in other nations, assigned to their sex, emulated the heroism and daring of man.

Mary Hays, Female Biography, vol. 2 (1801)

The blaze had seemed to come out of nowhere, surprising those caught in its path and scything a lethal swath through the olive groves and pinewoods of Sparta. As tongues of flame billowed into the night air, filling it with the acrid smell of burning tree sap, the dry sounds of crackling branches were layered with panicked shouts and labored breathing. A man and a woman were hurrying through a burning forest. The going was perilous; at one point the woman’s hair and the trailing hem of her dress were singed, but there was little time to inspect the damage. Enemy forces were hard on their heels and had been harrying them for some time now. Weeks earlier the fugitive couple and their traveling companions had nearly been apprehended as they tried secretly to board a vessel out of the port of Naples, the fractious wails of their baby son almost giving the game away. The man’s name was Tiberius Claudius Nero, and the woman was his seventeen-year-old wife, Livia Drusilla.¹

The year was 41 BC. Three years earlier the assassination of the dictator Julius Caesar by dissidents acting in the name of liberty had plunged the Roman Republic into civil war, dividing its elite ruling classes into two bitterly opposed camps: those backing the assassins Brutus and Cassius, and those supporting Caesar’s self-appointed champions, namely his eighteen-year-old great-nephew and nominated heir, Gaius Octavius, and his lieutenant Marcus Antonius, otherwise known as Octavian and Mark Antony. Together with the ex-consul Marcus Lepidus these self-appointed musketeers had formed a brittle three-way power-sharing agreement known as the Triumvirate and had proceeded to crush Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi in October 42 BC.

But Octavian and Antony were soon at loggerheads, and the Roman elite found itself forced to declare its loyalties once more. A year later the opposing factions clashed violently in Italy, forcing the noble Tiberius Nero, who had chosen to side with Antony, and his young wife, Livia, into their desperate flight. A ten-year countdown was now in motion, with the courses of all parties set for the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, the great sea fight at which Antony, bankrolled by his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra, would square off against Octavian to decide the fate of the Roman Empire once and for all.

As the first act of this grand drama began, Livia Drusilla was still just an extra in the crowd, an invisible character in a society where few women were permitted to make a name for themselves as public figures. But in the second act the man whose troops were pursuing her through Sparta replaced Tiberius Nero as her husband, propelling her to leading-lady status, and by the time the play reached its grand finale Livia was about to become the first lady of the dawning imperial age and the founding mother of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that inaugurated it. Arguably the most powerful, certainly one of the most controversial and formidable women ever to occupy the role—her grandson Caligula later bestowed on her the sobriquet Ulixes stolatus (Ulysses in a dress), a hybrid reference to the Greek warrior known for his cunning and the stola gown worn by upstanding Roman matrons—Livia was the model against whom all subsequent wives of Roman emperors would have to measure themselves.² No woman was to epitomize the pitfalls and paradoxes involved in being a Roman woman in public life better than she.

Unlike her Egyptian opposite number, Cleopatra, to whom she was forced to play second fiddle both over the next decade and in historical memory, Livia Drusilla was not bred into the role of imperial dynast, but nor was she an outsider to the Roman political establishment. Born on 30 January 58 BC into the distinguished patrician family of the Claudii, who boastfully claimed descent from the Trojan war refugee Aeneas, one of the mythical founders of the Roman race, Livia was fourteen when Julius Caesar was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC, triggering civil war among the Roman elite.³ The Claudian clan, from which she was descended on her father’s side—her mother, Alfidia, was from a well-heeled but less aristocratic family based in the Italian coastal town of Fundi—had been a towering presence on the political scene since the early days of the Roman Republic in the fifth century BC, boasting no fewer than twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, and six triumphs (public honors for successful generals). An additional connection through her father was to the illustrious Livian family, one of whose members, Marcus Livius Drusus, had been a populist hero to Italian communities clamoring for Roman citizenship in the early first century BC.⁴ Such a glittering pedigree marked out the young Livia as a great matrimonial asset to any aspirant to political power and a successful suitor duly presented himself in the year 43 BC.⁵

Tiberius Claudius Nero, himself a member of a slightly less exalted branch of the Claudian clan, was described in a letter by the great Roman statesman Cicero as “a nobly born, talented and self-controlling young man,” and had enjoyed a reasonably auspicious run up the Roman ladder of advancement during the 40s, holding first the quaestorship and later the praetorship, one rung below the highest possible political rank of consul.⁶ Having enjoyed some favor under Julius Caesar, whose fleet he successfully commanded during the Alexandrian War, he nevertheless switched allegiances in the wake of Caesar’s murder, opting to support the assassins Brutus and Cassius, as did Livia’s wealthy father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus—who a year later would find himself on the losing side at Philippi and commit suicide in his tent. Tiberius Claudius Nero would later transfer his loyalties to Mark Antony.

Rome’s political hierarchy was still in disarray following the death of Julius Caesar when Tiberius Nero, thwarted of an earlier desire in 50 BC to marry Cicero’s daughter Tullia, instead opted for a wedding with his kinswoman Livia, who at the age of fifteen was probably around twenty years his junior, a common age gap between prospective spouses in Roman society.⁷ The marriage would most likely have been arranged for Livia by her father, though Roman mothers could evidently have some say in such matchmaking.⁸ Legally, though, almost every Roman woman, with the exception of the six Vestal Virgin priestesses who tended the hearth of the goddess Vesta, was subject to the total authority of her father or paterfamilias as long as he was alive. The father’s control usually persisted even after marriage, because at that time, from the first century BC onward, marriages without manus became increasingly common (manus here having the sense of possession or power). In other words, these were marriages in which a woman and, more important, her dowry in the form of cash and property remained under the legal jurisdiction of her father rather than her spouse. Such arrangements became the norm thanks to the desire of wealthy clans such as Livia’s to keep their estates intact and preserve the integrity of their families by not allowing its members to come under the control of another paterfamilias.⁹

A girl in Livia’s position would have been technically free to refuse to marry, but only in the event that she could have proved that her father’s choice was a man of bad character, an option that few girls probably felt able or inclined to take advantage of. Marriage was the only respectable occupation for a free Roman woman, but it was also the social grease and glue of Rome’s political hierarchy. An aristocratic young girl such as Livia, who had few opportunities to make male or female acquaintances outside of her restricted family circle, could expect to be married more than once in her lifetime, in an elite culture where marriage was often not so much a romantic union as a facilitator of social and political alliances between ambitious families, alliances that might well rest on shifting sands.¹⁰

On the eve of her lavish high-society wedding Livia would have undertaken the first of a series of ceremonial procedures symbolizing her graduation from childhood to adulthood and her transition from her father’s house to her husband’s. A Roman bride put away childish things—her toys and the miniature toga she had worn throughout infancy—and dressed in a straight white woolen dress (tunica recta) that she had woven herself on a special loom. The next day, this simple white bridal tunic was cinched in at the waist with a woolen girdle whose complicated Herculanean knot would eventually be untied by her husband. Her long hair, which had been confined overnight in a yellow hairnet, was arranged in an austere style involving the peculiar use of a sharp spear to separate the hair into six tight braids before they were secured with woolen ribbons.¹¹

The groom and guests typically arrived at the bride’s father’s house in the afternoon. Though Roman weddings were not a religious compact, various ceremonial gestures took place on the day, including the sacrifice of a pig to ensure good omens for the union. Words of consent were exchanged between the betrothed couple, and the marriage was sealed when a married female guest, or pronuba, took the right hands of the bride and groom and joined them together. A contract may have been witnessed and signed and the couple toasted with the salutation Feliciter (“Good luck”); a wedding feast then preceded the bride’s final escort to her new home, where her husband had gone ahead to await her. We can imagine the scene as the distant sounds of singing echoed across the city, just above the evening foot traffic and the babble of traders shutting up shop for the night. Snaking along a route thickly scented with burning pine torches, flute players played as the raucous crowd, well oiled by the wedding feast they had just left, tramped along in high gig, singing the traditional wedding refrains of “Hymen Hymenae!” and “Talasio!” and tossing handfuls of nuts to scampering children and curious local residents who had come out to watch the procession go by.

In the middle of the crush Livia’s striking egg-yolk-colored wedding veil, or flammeum, flared like a beacon in the darkness, draped over a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram. Matching yellow slippers (socci), perhaps embroidered with pearls, slipped in and out of view beneath her belted tunic as she was swept along by the two young boys holding her hands, chosen from the offspring of married family friends as hopeful harbingers of the children she would one day bear. A third boy marched ahead with a pine torch, and instead of a bouquet a spindle was carried for her along the route, a symbol of her new domestic duties. Despite the presence of these innocuous symbols of respectable wedded life the atmosphere was thick with well-intentioned but ribald humor, and a gauntlet of risqué jokes and innuendo-laden songs had to be endured before the bride could reach her marital home. When at last Livia’s noisy escorts delivered her up to Tiberius Nero’s front door she found it garlanded with flowers by her waiting groom. As was required of her, she ceremoniously daubed the doorposts with animal fat and affixed skeins of uncombed wool to them, rituals designed to guarantee wealth and plenty to herself and her new husband. Finally she was carefully lifted over the threshold by her young male attendants. Caution was necessary; for any bride to trip as she was admitted through the doorway of her new husband’s home was considered an ill omen. Once inside, after being presented with gifts of fire (a torch) and water (in a jug or vessel) from her husband, symbolizing her wifely responsibility for cooking and washing and the overseeing of the household, she was led away by another married woman to her new bedroom before admitting the groom for consummation to take place.¹²

Livia’s status as a teenage bride was entirely normal. Upper-class girls in the late Roman Republic typically embarked on their first marriage in their early teens, sometimes as early as twelve. This capitalized on their most fertile childbearing years in a climate where infant mortality rates were high. Having children, the asset for which Roman women were most publicly valued, was imperative for a woman in Livia’s position; sterility, the blame for which was invariably pinned on the wife rather than the husband, could be cited as grounds for divorce. In the eyes of Roman commentators a Roman matron’s standing was umbilically linked to her children’s achievements. Not surprisingly, 16 November 42 BC is the date on the Roman timeline of Livia’s first appearance, with the official documentation of the birth of her eldest son, Tiberius, the boy whose cries would later nearly spoil his parents’ cover as they fled through the Greek city-state of Sparta, and who would one day become emperor of Rome.¹³

Tiberius’s birth took place at home on the Palatine hill, the most exclusive residential district in Rome. Thanks to its close access to the Roman Forum, the hub of the city, and its sacred associations with key moments in Rome’s mythical past, such as the birth of the city’s twin founders, Romulus and Remus, the Palatine was the ideal home for an ambitious politico like Tiberius Nero. A veritable Who’s Who of late republican movers and shakers had also chosen to make it their base, from Cicero to Octavian and Mark Antony, and Livia had probably grown up there herself in her father’s house.¹⁴

Childbirth for a woman in the Roman world was closely scrutinized. From the moment of conception to the feeding and weaning stages, a barrage of advice was offered to expectant mothers, some of it based on the theories of respected medical practitioners, some of it rooted in superstitious quackery. Prior to baby Tiberius’s arrival, Livia herself was said to have employed various old wives’ techniques to try to ensure the birth of a son, including incubating a hen’s egg by cupping it in her hands and keeping it warm in the folds of her dress, where it would eventually hatch into a proud-combed cock chick in supposed premonition of a baby boy.¹⁵ The more pragmatic, though equally unscientific advice of medical experts like Soranus, writing some years later in the second century, recommended that the best time for conception was toward the end of menstruation and after a light meal and a massage.

Home births were the only kind available, and a wealthy mother-to-be such as Livia was attended by a roomful of females, including several midwives, who were kept on permanent staff by the richest households. Husbands were not present in the delivery room, though Octavian’s father, Gaius Octavius, was reportedly late for a Senate vote in 62 BC when his wife Atia went into labor. Male attending physicians were almost unheard of. A remarkable terra-cotta tombstone from Isola Sacra, near the Roman port of Ostia, offers us an extraordinary view of a Roman woman in the process of parturition. A midwife (probably the dedicatee of this roughly hewn funerary relief) crouches on a low stool before a laboring woman, who is naked and gripping tightly to the armrests of a birthing chair, her upper torso supported by another woman standing behind her. From other medical sources we know what the relief does not show: that there was a crescent-shaped hole in the seat of such chairs, through which the baby would be delivered by the squatting midwife.¹⁶ An unpleasant-looking vaginal speculum made of bronze has been discovered in the ruins of Pompeii; such contraptions may have been used to examine the birth canal in the event of complications, and, if the advice recorded by Soranus was followed, hot oil, water, and compresses were on hand and the air scented with herbs such as minty pennyroyal and fresh citrus, to soothe the exhausted mother.¹⁷

Giving birth was a dangerous experience in antiquity for both mother and child. It is estimated that about a quarter of infants died before their first birthday, and funerary epitaphs offer many mournful paeans to mothers who died in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front flap
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: I, Claudia
• A Note on Naming and Dating Conventions
• 1: Ulysses in a Dress: The Making of a Roman First Lady
• 2: First Family: Augustus’s Women
• 3: Family Feud: The People’s Princess and the Women of Tiberius’s Reign
• 4: Witches of the Tiber: The Last Julio-Claudian Empresses
• 5: Little Cleopatra: A Jewish Princess and the First Ladies of the Flavian Dynasty
• 6: Good Empresses: The First Ladies of the Second Century
• 7: The Philosopher Empress: Julia Domna and the Syrian Matriarchy
• 8: The First Christian Empress: Women in the Age of Constantine
• 9: Brides of Christ, Daughters of Eve: The First Ladies of the Last Roman Dynasty
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Photo Credits
• Back flap
• Back cover