The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (19 page)

Antonia nevertheless remained on the Palatine, acting as a companion to her venerable mother-in-law.
³¹
Like Livia, she is known to have had her own apartments and highly specialised staff, dozens of whose remains were buried alongside those of Livia’s slaves and freedmen in the
Monumentum Liviae
, thus affording us a through-the-keyhole look at Antonia’s daily routine. They tell us that she was helped with her toilet by an
ornatrix
(a dresser) called Pamphilia and that a
sarcinatrix
(craftswoman) called Athenais mended her clothes. A personal physician, Celadus, tended to her medical well-being, and Eros, a
lecticarius
(a litter-bearer), chauffeured her about the city. Cold drinks were served to her by a cupbearer named Liarus while a chanteuse called Quintia serenaded her, accompanied in a duet perhaps by a male singer called Tertius. Another key member of her household was the freedwoman Caenis, who acted as her secretary, a woman who was to make far more of an impact on Roman imperial history than her modest origins might predict.
³²

Antonia also kept slaves outside Rome and was a considerable landowner in her own right, benefiting from bequests made by wealthy family friends such as Berenice I of Judaea, and also from her father’s career in the east. Papyri miraculously preserved in the dry sands of Egypt testify that Antonia owned estates in the Arsinoite district of that country, possibly received courtesy of the division of Antony’s assets there.
³³
These same dusty fragments also provide insights into the kind of day-to-day disputes that took place on these estates. In one case, a bailiff called Dionysius complained to local authorities that a neighbouring landowner’s sheep had caused damages to wheat stores on Antonia’s estate, while in a document dated to 14 November 36, a farmer in her employ who signs himself ‘Aunes, aged 35 [years] with a scar on his left thumb’, reports the loss of his red-skinned pig.
³⁴

We have no first-hand correspondence to suggest whether or not Antonia concerned herself much with mundane disputes such as missing pigs, but through the letters of male family members, we do get a sense of her everyday responsibilities on the domestic front, chief of which was the shared education with Livia of the various children living on the Palatine under these two matriarchs’ protection.
³⁵
As well as the youngest members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the children of senatorial families growing up under Livia’s supervision,
their charges included young princes and princesses from the royal families of Armenia, Thrace, Commagene and Parthia who made long visits to Rome in a show of
entente cordiale
between the Mediterranean superpowers.
³⁶
One such protégé was a grandson of King Herod the Great and the heir to the kingdom of Judaea, Marcus Julius Agrippa. His mother, Berenice, was a great friend of Antonia’s, and consequently Julius Agrippa was sent as a child to be brought up by Antonia alongside her own son of the same age, Claudius. He remained a fixture in Roman circles until 23.
³⁷

Such arrangements made great PR for the Julio-Claudian regime, reinforcing their territorial authority as well as earning Livia and Antonia veneration as the maternal figureheads of the empire. But official praise for the pair as benevolent patrons of other people’s children is offset by the less than rosy descriptions of their treatment of Claudius recorded by the latter’s biographers.
³⁸
Famously characterised as the downtrodden, imbecilic black sheep of his illustrious family, Claudius was hampered from childhood by disabilities including a limp and physical tremors, the effects, it is now surmised, of cerebral palsy. An earnest student of literature, yet requiring the constant, much resented chaperonage of a tutor, Claudius cut a fragile figure on public occasions, swathed chin to toe in a thick cloak, and his appearances had to be carefully choreographed.
³⁹
That this involved careful consultation with the boy’s mother and grandmother is revealed by a rare preserved letter from Augustus to Livia, dating from around two years before the former’s death and apparently part of an ongoing correspondence between them on the matter. In the following extract, Augustus debates whether Claudius should be allowed to appear with the family at the upcoming Games of Mars, and in the process permits us an intriguing glimpse of Julio-Claudian family politics at work, for his postscript makes clear that the rearing of children within the Palatine household was very much a family affair, and that while Antonia was permitted to be privy to the arrangements for her son, decisions about him rested principally with Augustus, in close consultation with Livia:

My dear Livia,

As you suggested, I have now discussed with Tiberius what we should do about your grandson Claudius at the coming Games of Mars. We both agreed that a decision ought to be taken once and for all. The question is whether he has – shall I say? – full command of all his senses.
If so, I can see nothing against sending him through the same degrees of office as his brother; but should he be deemed physically and mentally deficient, the public (which always likes to scoff and mock at such things) must not be given a chance of laughing at him and us. I fear that we shall find ourselves in constant trouble if the question of his fitness to officiate in this or that capacity keeps cropping up …

As regards the immediate question in your last letter, I have no objection to his taking charge of the priests’ banquet at the Festival of Mars, if he lets his relative, the son of Silvanus, stand by to see that he does not make a fool of himself. But I am against his watching the Games in the Circus from the imperial box, where the eyes of the whole audience would be on him … in short, my dear Livia, I am anxious that a decision should be reached on this matter once and for all, to save us from further alternations of hope and despair. You are at liberty to show this part of my letter to our kinswoman Antonia for her perusal …
⁴⁰

Though Augustus later revised his unflattering view of his grandson’s qualities, commenting in another letter to Livia that he had actually been impressed by the boy’s skills as an orator, Claudius’s disabilities apparently attracted the withering scorn of his female elders, not just his grandmother Livia and sister Livilla, but Antonia herself, who was reported to have disparagingly referred to her younger son as a fool and ‘a monster: a man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun’.
⁴¹
Livia meanwhile was said to have avoided communication with him except through brief notes, and joined forces with Antonia in stopping the budding young scholar from writing a history of the civil war that preceded Augustus’s inauguration.
⁴²

In this last respect, Livia and Antonia were in fact doing nothing less than what every good Roman mother was expected to do for her sons. Although affectionate relationships between mothers and sons were by no means unheard of – as letters between second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius and his mother Domitia Lucilla will later demonstrate – Roman women did not generally receive praise in the ancient historical record for being doting and sensitive. Remember Seneca’s disapproval of Octavia for being too emotional over the death of Marcellus. In the eyes of Roman moralists, the best thing a mother could do for her son, apart from breastfeeding him herself, was to steer him towards suitable intellectual pursuits, and away from potentially dangerous and corrosive areas of study. It was an achievement that Cornelia, among others, had been fêted for, and one that future
mothers of Roman emperors would also try to emulate. In an illustration of the disconnect between the colourful behind-the-scenes portraits of life on the Palatine painted by biographers like Suetonius, and the officially disseminated ideal of a woman’s role, Livia actually received praise in official documents posted later in Tiberius’s reign on account of her rigorous supervision of Claudius’s education.
⁴³

Though Livia’s accomplice in this and other respects, Antonia understandably had a far more modest public portrait profile than her mother-in-law, reflecting her lesser importance to the men of her family. While over 100 statues and coins survive that can be identified with some confidence as Livia, the same can be said for only thirteen portraits of Antonia, and in contrast to Livia’s ever-metamorphosing public image, they survive in only one relatively static prototype.
⁴⁴
The master portrait for this group is the so-called ‘Wilton House Antonia’, named in honour of the residence of its owner, Thomas Herbert, eighth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. When Herbert bought the bust in 1678, so close was the resemblance to ancient coin portraits of Antonia that the name ‘Antonia’ had already been scratched onto its left shoulder, immortalising its identity.
⁴⁵
The head, which is now in the Sackler Museum at Harvard, depicts a woman past her first youth – though still heavily idealised, given that Antonia was well into her fifties at the time of its creation – with strong individualised features, thin pursed lips and a chin which recedes slightly when viewed from the side.
⁴⁶

A portrait of Antonia conforming to the ‘Wilton House’ example came to light during excavations of the forum of the ancient North African city of Lepcis Magna in modern Libya. Thanks to the 1934 discovery of an accompanying inscription written in neo-Punic, we can deduce that it belonged to an imposing statue group honouring the imperial family set up on the platform of the town’s temple of Augustus and Roma during the 20s. Though the sculpture of Antonia is one of the few originals that have been found from this cluster, the inscription allows the reconstruction of the original composition of the group, which at first glance appears to have been a magnificent snapshot of the new look Julio-Claudian dynasty under Tiberius, untrammelled by tensions and showing a united front. Dominating the centre was a chariot occupied by Germanicus and Drusus Minor, the adoptive and biological sons and heirs respectively of Tiberius. It in turn was flanked by life-sized statues of the two young men’s mothers and wives, so that Germanicus was accompanied by his
mother Antonia and wife Agrippina Maior on one side. At the heirs’ back, towering over the junior members of the family group, were four larger-than-life statues of Livia, Tiberius, the deified Augustus and the goddess Roma. The surviving head of Livia’s statue measures 68 cm (27 inches) in height, and that of her dead husband Augustus an even more gargantuan 92 cm (36 inches), giving some idea of the colossal scale, and leaving no doubt of their seniority.
⁴⁷

In showing two budding statesmen, Germanicus and Drusus Minor, accompanied by their mothers rather than by their fathers, the Lepcis Magna group was highly unusual.
⁴⁸
Its primary function was to honour these two great hopes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, born to two women from opposite branches of it. But there is another story here. If the whole survived today, the Lepcis Magna group would capture perfectly in marble the complex, interbred tangle of relationships, rivalries and resentments that were to wreck Augustus’s and Livia’s dynastic legacy and tear the family apart.

The seeds of this division had been sown back in the year 4, when Augustus reshuffled the dynastic pack and forced Tiberius to adopt Antonia’s eldest son Germanicus as a condition of his eventual succession. Barely out of his teens, yet already a dashing contrast to his unfortunate younger brother Claudius, Germanicus had gone on in the year 5 to form what would prove a pivotal union with his cousin Agrippina Maior, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, who was then around nineteen years old – a relatively late age for a girl of the imperial family to be wed for the first time.
⁴⁹
The marriage temporarily unified the two branches of the Julio-Claudian family, since any offspring it produced would be the great-grandchildren of both Augustus and Livia.

Effectively orphaned at the age of twelve when Julia was banished to Pandateria in 2 BC, Agrippina managed to avoid the scandalous pitfalls which befell her mother and younger sister Julia Minor. Growing up, she was known to have been a great favourite of her grandfather Augustus, who maintained an affectionate correspondence with her, and praised her in a letter for her intelligence though he also advised her to adopt a plainer style of writing and speaking, such as he favoured himself.
⁵⁰
For many ancient – and modern – observers, Agrippina, in contrast to her disgraced mother, represented much of what was admirable in the ideal Roman matron. Tacitus’s description of her as ‘determined and rather excitable’ was tempered
by his acknowledgement of her ‘devoted faithfulness to her husband’, while to the nineteenth-century historian Elizabeth Hamilton, who wrote a three-volume history of Agrippina’s life in 1804, her subject exemplified the value of an educated woman to society, although the author did not approve of what she portrayed as Agrippina’s ambition to share her husband’s fame.
⁵¹

In a storyline that bears strong resemblance to the first marriage of her mother Julia to Marcellus, Agrippina and Germanicus quickly became the golden couple of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Although Germanicus’s fellow heir Drusus acquired a wife in his adoptive brother’s sister Livilla, they lacked the glamour of their counterparts, Germanicus a popular paragon of handsome chivalry, and Agrippina proving herself a fine advertisement for motherhood, giving birth in due course to no fewer than nine children, six of whom survived infancy.
⁵²
They included two siblings who would eventually rank among the
enfants terribles
of Roman history – a son Gaius, better known as Caligula, and a daughter, Agrippina Minor (‘Agrippina the Younger’).