Augustus

IX

GOLDEN AGE

40–38 B.C.

The rising poets of the age celebrated the arrival of peace with works that still speak vividly of their relief and joy. One of these, Publius Vergilius Maro (Englished as Virgil), came from the middle or lower middle ranks of Italian society, but his father ensured he received a good education. Virgil migrated to Rome, where, like any ambitious young man, he studied rhetoric. Painfully shy, though, he apparently lost the first law case at which he spoke.

Suetonius gives a portrait sketch of the man: “He was tall and bulky, with a dark complexion and the appearance of a countryman. He had changeable health [and] ate and drank little. He was always falling in love with boys.”

Virgil was thirty, approaching the height of his powers. Having abandoned Rome and a public career, he lived in Neapolis. His first major publication was the Eclogues (from the Greek for “selection”), a series of ten poems that describe an ideal countryside. But in Virgil’s neverland of lovely young shepherds and shepherdesses, real emotions and real events (such as the loss of the author’s farm because of Octavian’s veteran settlements, and its return thanks to the triumvir’s intervention) lie close to the surface.

The young poet could recognize reality when he saw it. Whatever emotional scars his brush with triumviral power left him with, he made his peace with the regime. In these days before print, a professional writer without a personal fortune had no large middle-class market to provide him with an income from book sales. He needed rich patrons to supply his means—in the form of money or gifts of property and slaves—and to pay for the laborious copying out of his books. In the first instance, then, Virgil probably attached himself to Octavian’s cause for the sake of financial security. However, he also acted from political conviction, for the triumviral regime promised stability and prosperity. The two men became fast friends.

Virgil wrote that the Golden Age had returned to Italy, and with a curious infantine addition. This was the messianic theme of his fourth eclogue:

The Firstborn of the New Ages is already on his way from high heaven down to earth.

With him, the Iron Age shall end and Golden Man inherit all the world. Smile on the Baby’s birth, immaculate Lucina [goddess of childbirth]; your own Apollo is enthroned at last.

What exactly is Virgil getting at? Who is this baby? Is he a metaphor for something, or is a real person being denoted? Some detective work is needed to unravel the mystery.

The poem is addressed to Gaius Asinius Pollio; he was a friend of Antony and had assisted him in the recent negotiations with Octavian. A man of principle in an age of turncoats, he was about to leave politics and write his History of the Civil Wars describing the period from the First Triumvirate to Philippi (sadly lost).

Pollio had a dry sense of humor and a reputation for straight talking. When Octavian once wrote some lampoons about him, Pollio only observed: “For my part I am saying nothing in reply; for it is asking for trouble to write against a man who can write you off.”

Some commentators have wondered whether the child could be Pollio’s son, but it is hard to see why Virgil should have imagined such a boy as savior of the world. A more likely candidate would be the predicted offspring of Antony and Octavia, whose union presaged peace after long years of war. Indeed, she was soon pregnant. Some scholars even believe that the poem was written as a wedding hymn.

However, we should not forget that Octavian, too, was a newlywed, albeit somewhat unsuitably. It was known that Scribonia was carrying a child. A detail from the eclogue suggests that the answer to the conundrum may lie here. This is the reference to Apollo “enthroned at last”; just as orientalizing Antony favored the dionysiac Dionysus, so throughout his life Octavian appropriated the logical, severe god of light, Apollo. It is rather more likely that Virgil had Octavian’s unborn child in mind than Antony’s.

In the event, the issue turned out to be academic. In 39 B.C. both women bore daughters, Julia and Antonia.

For all the poet’s fine words, optimism was fading. Before the Treaty of Brundisium, Sextus Pompeius had attempted to help Antony against Octavian, only to be called off at the last moment. He was angry and threatening.

Sextus employed two admirals, ex-slaves and former pirates called Menodorus (or Menas) and Menecrates. Perhaps they had been taken prisoner and enslaved by Pompey the Great during his highly successful campaign in 67 B.C. against the pirate fleets that used to dominate the Mediterranean. Having secured control of Sardinia and Corsica, they maintained the blockade of Italy.

At Rome, the price of goods soared. For once Octavian lost touch with public opinion, which wanted him to restore peace by coming to an understanding with Sextus. He obstinately refused to do this, and to pay his soldiers he levied a new tax on property owners (fifty sesterces per slave, plus a death duty).

For many, this was the final straw. Forced settlements, war, proscription, and famine—these things had all been endured, but now the people lost patience. There were demonstrations and riots. As he had done with the mutinous soldiers, Octavian decided to brave the mob in person and explain why it was wrong to blame him for the situation. He came to the Forum, attended only by some associates and a handful of bodyguards.

As soon as the crowd caught sight of him, they started bombarding him with missiles. They did not stop even when they saw they had injured him. Octavian stood his ground, although this meant that he was, in effect, placing himself in their hands. When Antony was told what was happening, he rushed to the rescue. As he came down the Via Sacra into the Forum, the crowd did not at first throw anything at him, for he was known to favor peace with Sextus, but they warned him to go back. When he refused they began to stone him.

Antony summoned reinforcements. His soldiers quickly surrounded the Forum, broke into small groups, and marched down alleyways into the square. The crowd could not escape and a number of people were killed. Pushing his way through the press, Antony reached Octavian only with the greatest difficulty and escorted him home. There was no doubt that he had saved his colleague’s life, and in spectacular fashion.

This was a most instructive episode. It illustrates the continuing growth of a bloody-minded courage in Octavian. Through the exercise of will, Octavian, now twenty-four years old, was tempering himself in fire.

What kept Antony and Octavian in power was the active support of the people and the legions: this was a lesson they had already learned many bitter times. Octavian eventually realized that he would have to give way on the matter of Sextus. Discreet feelers were put out and soon an entente was in prospect. Menodorus in Sardinia wrote to Sextus, counseling against peace; either he should make war wholeheartedly, he recommended, or he should wait and see if the famine at Rome would enable him to drive a harder bargain.

Sextus rejected this advice and met the opposing leaders at a peace conference in the summer of 39 B.C. Accompanied by many of his Roman supporters, he sailed from Sicily in a huge flagship, with six banks of oars, leading a fine fleet. He anchored off Misenum, a headland at the northern end of the Bay of Naples dotted with the holiday villas of the rich, where the meeting was to be held. Wooden planks had been laid on piles in the sea, to create two platforms. Antony and Octavian went to the one nearer the coast and Sextus to the seaward platform. Enough water lay between them to allow the members of each party to talk among themselves without being overheard; exchanges between them had to be shouted, in a primitive and literal form of megaphone diplomacy.

These cautious arrangements were presumably made at the initiative of Sextus. Perhaps recalling the nightmare scene when he had watched his father go to his death on the Egyptian coast, he was determined not to risk his life by abandoning his ship for the terra firma of his enemies.

Sextus opened the discussions by demanding on behalf of the proscribed the return of all their confiscated property. Antony and Octavian agreed to buy back a quarter of the properties from their new owners. The news was published and immediately welcomed by victims of the proscription.

The final agreement did little more than confirm what everyone knew to be the unstable status quo. Sextus was officially installed as governor of what he had already captured—Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily. To these was added the Peloponnese (southern Greece). He was honored by membership of the College of Augurs, the committee of senior statesmen who were charged with taking the auspices at Rome, and he was nominated for the consulship in the following year, 38 B.C. Sextus’ followers in Sicily had their personal positions secured: all the exiles from Italy in his army (excepting, always, Julius Caesar’s assassins) were to have their civil rights restored; the buyback offer to proscribed senators and equites was confirmed; the runaway slaves in Sextus’ force were to be freed; and Sextus’ soldiers were to receive the same demobilization awards as those serving the triumvirs.

Sextus could claim that this was a reasonably good deal for him, in that he was no longer an outlaw. The Treaty of Misenum brought him inside the political fold. Privately, though, he already regretted rejecting Menodorus’ advice to avoid coming to terms with the triumvirs.

By contrast, Antony and Octavian had every right to be pleased with themselves. They had given Sextus nothing essential to their interests, but had won something beyond price. Although they may not have realized it at the time, they had initiated the process of detaching opposition politicians from Sextus. Once it became clear that the triumvirs were not planning a new bloodbath, many began trickling back either to Italy or to join Antony when he returned to the east. To Sextus’ alarm, the Pompeian constituency was set to decline.

The principals celebrated the peace with a series of banquets. They drew lots to decide the order. Sextus acted as host first, on his flagship (“My only ancestral home left to me”). The two sides did not trust each other; the triumvirs had their ships moored nearby, guards were posted and the dinner guests carried daggers underneath their clothes. On the surface all was smiles and friendship. Sextus gave a warm welcome to Antony and Octavian. The atmosphere softened and the conversation became coarse and convivial. Jokes were made about Antony’s passion for the queen of Egypt, a topic that Octavia’s brother and husband would ordinarily have found embarrassing.

As at Brundisium, the bond between the parties was incarnated in a marriage union. At the dinner table, Sextus’ infant daughter was formally engaged to the three-year-old Marcellus, Antony’s stepson and Octavian’s nephew.

According to Plutarch, Menodorus came to Sextus and spoke to him out of the hearing of his guests. “Shall I cut the cables and make you master not just of Sicily and Sardinia, but of the whole Roman empire?”

Sextus thought for a moment, and then burst out: “Menodorus, you should have acted, not spoken to me beforehand. Now we must be content with things as they are. I do not break my word.”

This famous anecdote has a suspiciously glib quality, yet it may be true, for it illustrates two facets of Sextus’ character. When he called himself Pius, “Dutiful” or “Honest,” the reference was primarily to his father’s memory, but it also indicated that he saw himself as a Roman of the old school, honorable and straightforward. In addition, the story points to a certain passivity that can be detected throughout his career, an absence of the killer instinct that marked out, in their different ways, Antony and Octavian.

On the following two days, Antony and then Octavian entertained Sextus, erecting dining tents on their sea platform. After this they left for their respective destinations—Octavian to Gaul, where there were disturbances; Antony to the east and the Parthians; Sextus back to Sicily. Most of the refugees in Sextus’ entourage said goodbye to him and left for Rome.

With the onset of autumn Octavian did something that, on the face of it, was out of character: for once letting his heart sway him, he fell passionately in love. The object of his affection was Livia Drusilla; about nineteen years old, she was intelligent and beautiful, although with a small mouth and chin. However, she suffered from one signal disadvantage: she was already married, to an aristocrat and cousin of hers, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Not only that, but she was heavily pregnant.

To add to the complications, Octavian’s wife, Scribonia, gave birth to her daughter, Julia, sometime in 39 B.C. Despite the happy event, the marriage—a political union if ever there was one—was not going well. As was pointed out earlier, Scribonia was substantially older than her husband; too, she was reputed to be a gravis femina, a dignified or serious woman. This did not much suit a young man with a reputation for copious adultery. On the very day that Julia arrived in the world, her father divorced her mother. “I couldn’t bear the way she nagged at me,” he explained.

In September—perhaps on his birthday, the twenty-third—Octavian conducted a rite of passage. He did not have a hairy body, and at twenty-four had still not found it necessary to shave: now the moment had come. Being prone to devise a ritual for almost every aspect of daily life, the Romans made a ceremony of their first shave—the depositio barbae, which in most cases took place about the time a boy came of age, usually at sixteen or seventeen.

Octavian made a great to-do over the ceremony, throwing a magnificent party and paying for a public festival. The event could be seen as a statement that, with the arrival of peace, the “boy who owed everything to his name” had attained his political as well as physical maturity. But it was whispered that his true motive was to please Livia.

Livia had an impeccable family background. While Octavian was unquestionably smitten, it is also true that marriage with her would give him a valuable connection to the Claudii, one of Rome’s most aristocratic clans. The triumvir’s father had reached the praetorship and so qualified as a nobilis. He himself had been enrolled as a patrician; however, he was still regarded as something of a provincial upstart. The union afforded Livia’s family access to her lover’s political power, in return for which she contributed her ancestry.

Livia Drusilla’s life, although short, had been full of incident. She was born on January 30, 59 or 58 B.C., probably at Rome. Not long after the Ides of March in 44 B.C., a husband was found for her. At fourteen or fifteen years old, Livia was approaching the upper limit of a girl’s customary marriageable age. Most marriages were arranged by the parents and love (“friendship gone mad”) was not expected to enter anybody’s calculations. A daughter was often a pawn in the alliances—social, economic, or political—that a great family struck to maintain its position in Roman public life. Husbands could be much older than their wives, and for the physically immature the wedding night must have been a savage introduction to sex.

Despite the potentially inauspicious opening to her married life, the Roman wife was a powerful figure in the household, being its domina, or mistress. Old forms of marriage in the early Republic, according to which she lived in complete subjection to her husband, the all-powerful paterfamilias, had given way by the third century B.C. to a new and freer arrangement by which the woman remained under her father’s authority and from the age of twenty-five held possession of her own property.

The man Livia married was Tiberius Claudius Nero, from another branch of the Claudian clan, the Claudii Nerones; he was probably in his mid- to late thirties. Of impeccable birth, he had great promise, but (as it turned out) poor judgment.

Tiberius took a stand against the First Triumvirate during the fifties B.C., but then, with the onset of the civil war in 49, turned his back on his optimate friends and sided with Julius Caesar. His services were recognized generously and Tiberius must have felt that fortune was smiling on him, but then on the Ides of March 44 B.C. the Caesarian regime came crashing down. Tiberius immediately returned to his old optimate allegiance. When the Senate voted for an amnesty for the assassins, he went an obsequious step further and supported a proposal to reward them.

In 42 B.C., Livia became pregnant. She was very anxious to have a boy, and to find out in advance what the sex of her child would be she took an egg from under a broody hen and kept it warm against her breast; also, she and her attendants held it in turn in their hands. In due course, she hatched a fine cock chick already with a comb. The prophecy was exact. On November 16, Livia gave birth to a son at the family home on the Palatine Hill at Rome. As was the Roman custom with first-born males, he was given his father’s praenomen, Tiberius.

After the defeat of the republican cause at Philippi, Tiberius agilely changed course again. He now became a supporter of Mark Antony; in that capacity, he was elected praetor for 41 B.C., the same year in which Antony’s brother, Lucius, was consul.

Although we have no idea what opinion Livia held of her husband, she demonstrated a personal quality he certainly did not share: a steady loyalty, even, or perhaps especially, when under pressure. When Tiberius, with his usual poor judgment, decided to follow Lucius Antonius’ star, Livia and the infant Tiberius went along with him to Perusia. The family endured the terrible privations of the siege, and after Perusia fell Tiberius was the only Roman officeholder in the city to refuse to capitulate.

He somehow managed to escape with mother and child; the family went on to Neapolis, where Tiberius tried to foment a slave revolt by promising them freedom. Octavian’s forces soon broke into the city and the family had to flee again. Following bypaths to avoid the soldiery and accompanied by only one or two attendants, including a nurse to carry Tiberius, they secretly made their way to the coast. The baby twice started crying and nearly gave them away. The family found a ship—it must have been arranged for in advance—and sailed to Sicily, where the elder Tiberius expected a welcome from Sextus Pompeius.

In fact, Sextus received him coolly and was slow to grant him an audience; doubtless he was considered something of an embarrassment. Soon he and Livia set off again, this time to Greece. But what to do now? Antony was no more interested than Sextus in having anything to do with this undependable nobleman. He sent Tiberius to Sparta, which had long been in the Claudian clientela. Here the family at last received a warm welcome. However, some unrecorded danger arose, and a hurried departure once more became necessary. According to Suetonius, Livia and the baby nearly lost their lives when, fleeing by night, they ran into a sudden forest fire and were encircled by it. In this mysterious incident, Livia’s hair caught fire and her dress was scorched.

At the Treaty of Misenum, Sextus eventually placed Tiberius’ name on the list of exiles to be restored, and so, at long last, he, Livia, and little Tiberius were allowed to abandon their nomadic life. At some point in the late summer of 39 B.C., they returned to Rome. They found themselves in comparatively reduced circumstances. As an exile and opponent of the Triumvirate, Tiberius had forfeited his property, including the grand house on the Palatine. The deal struck at Misenum promised only to return one quarter of it.

It was at or about this moment of bittersweet celebration that Livia learned that she was pregnant again. It would be unwise to conclude from this that she was content with her lot. Livia must have felt that she had done her best for her husband under extremely trying, even harrowing, circumstances. It was time she looked out for herself.

It is easy in the light of hindsight to criticize Tiberius’ behavior. Many of his contemporaries in the ruling class faced the same dilemmas and were equally uncertain and inconsistent in their responses. Where, they wondered desperately, were the old, fixed points of guidance in a political landscape made unrecognizable by successive earthquakes?

Where Livia was concerned, Octavian was determined to let nothing stand in his way. He met her very soon after her return to Rome; indeed, she may have been introduced to him by Scribonia. He quickly made up his mind to marry her, and she decided equally quickly to say yes. Tiberius complaisantly agreed to a divorce.

It is likely that, soon after the depositio barbae, in late September or early October, Octavian and Livia became engaged. It was a slightly scandalous event, but a grand betrothal banquet was held. Like other fashionable people of the time, Livia owned little slave boys called deliciae, or darlings (often Syrians or Africans), who ran around naked and amused people with their chatter. Like court jesters, they had license to say the unsayable. On this occasion, one of these boys saw Livia and Octavian sharing a dining couch and Tiberius lying on another alongside a male guest. He went up to Livia and said: “What are you doing here, mistress? For your husband [pointing to Tiberius] is over there.”

The couple paused before translating their engagement into marriage. The problem was Livia’s unborn child by Tiberius. Octavian went to consult the appropriate religious authority, the pontifices: could he marry Livia while she was pregnant?

The pontifices offered their seal of approval and it seems that Livia now moved in with Octavian in his house on the Palatine. However, the wedding did not take place until after the birth of her second child, who was born on January 14 and given the praenomen Drusus.

People suspected that he was the product of adultery with his step-father. This was obviously wrong, for Octavian had not met Livia when she conceived in the spring of 39. Nevertheless, the story was too good to disbelieve, and Suetonius records that the following epigram went the rounds:

How fortunate those parents are for whom

Their child is only three months in the womb.

The birth of Drusus cannot have been a very difficult one, for three days later the couple wed. The Roman marriage ceremony, a changeless ritual, dramatized the bride’s removal from her father’s house to the groom’s. Livia’s father was dead; apparently, Tiberius gave her away. She must have spent the night before the wedding at his home.

On the day itself, Livia gathered her hair in a crimson net and put on an unhemmed tunic, secured at the waist by a woolen girdle tied with a double knot. Over this she wore a saffron-colored cloak; she was shod in saffron-colored sandals and fastened a metal collar around her throat. Her hair was protected by six pads of artificial hair separated by narrow bands; a veil of flaming orange covered the top half of her face. It was crowned by a wreath of verbena and sweet marjoram.

In this spectacular outfit, Livia stood surrounded by family and friends and greeted the groom when he arrived with his people. An animal sacrifice to the gods was then offered (probably a pig, although it could have been a ewe or even an ox).

Livia then said to Octavian, in an age-old formula, “Ubi tu es Gaius, ego Gaia”—“Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”

This was the heart of the ritual, and everyone present shouted “Feliciter,” “Congratulations.”

Octavian now led Livia in a street procession from Tiberius’ house to his own, not a long journey as they both lived on the Palatine Hill. Flute players led the way, followed by five torchbearers. As they walked along, people sang cheerfully obscene songs. Three boys whose parents were still alive accompanied the bride; one held a torch of hawthorn twigs and the other two took Livia by the hand.

On reaching her new home, garlanded with flowers for the occasion, Livia was obliged to conduct an inconvenient and messy ritual: she wound wool around the doorposts and coated them with lard or (harder to find, one would imagine) wolf’s fat. Then, men who had been married only once lifted her through the front door; this was to avoid the risk of her tripping on the threshold, a very bad omen. They were followed by three bridesmaids, two of whom carried the symbols of domestic virtue, a distaff and spindle for home weaving.

After a wedding breakfast and some more rude songs, Livia was led to the bridal bed. Octavian took off her cloak and untied the girdle, after which the wedding guests made their excuses and left.

The law gave the paterfamilias absolute authority over his children, so the little Tiberius, a toddler of three, stayed behind with his father. Octavian also handed over the newborn Drusus. Livia’s feelings about this are unknown, but a story told about her suggests that her attention was fixed, rather, on the future splendor of her position.

Apparently, when she was returning shortly after the wedding to a house she owned at Veii a few miles from Rome, an eagle flew by and dropped into Livia’s lap a white pullet it had just pounced on. Noticing that it held in its beak a laurel twig with berries on it (the laurel was a sign of victory, and generals wore a laurel wreath at their triumphs), she decided to keep the bird for breeding and to plant the twig. Soon the pullet raised such a brood of chickens that the house became known as Ad Gallinas Albas, White Poultry, and the twig grew so luxuriantly that Octavian plucked laurels from it for his official wreaths.

Five years later, in 33 B.C., if she had not negotiated their earlier return, Livia was able to reclaim her sons, for her former husband died, from what cause is unknown—his last stroke of bad luck.

Octavian’s political situation was by no means secure, but he had managed to hold on to the gains of the Treaty of Brundisium. Through cold-blooded courage he had survived the anger of the mob and of the soldiers, his two fundamental bulwarks. The agreement at Misenum had settled nothing, but had at least won him a breathing space and measurably weakened Sextus’ position. His willingness to risk his life was a sign of a growing self-confidence, of a conviction that he was owed respect for his achievements as much as for his inheritance.

Octavian’s marriage is the first occasion for which we have evidence when he gave priority to his feelings. The union had its political importance, too. Livia was one of many exiles who had gathered around the last forlorn hope of the defeated Republic, Sextus Pompeius, given up on him, and returned home to Rome. That she was willing to wed the Republic’s archenemy is interesting evidence that the ruling class was beginning to reconcile itself to an altered world.