The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (34 page)

A female audience, milling about the public places where portraits of Domitia and Julia Flavia appeared, would have recognised that, unlike the achievable
nodus
, such styles as the Flavian emperors’ female relatives sported were the preserve of the very wealthy only, who could afford to devote so much leisure time and slave labour on the creation of these elaborate concoctions. Still, some aristocratic women evidently did emulate the new trends. Juvenal mocked the vanity of a female who ‘weighs down her head with tiers upon tiers and piles her head high with storeys upon storeys’, so that even though she might look short from the back she would suddenly look unnaturally tall from the front.
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However, like any other organic matter, few samples of real hair survive to us from antiquity, obscuring the relationship between formal portraits and everyday styles, although some pieces have been found in sites such as Britain, Gaul and Judaea, ranging in shades from blonde to black. Mummy portraits from the province of Egypt feature women
with hairstyles just like those modelled on sculpted portraits from the imperial capital at Rome, but this still does not mean that the women featured went through the elaborate ritual of having their hair styled like this on a day-to-day basis.
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We might well wonder why the socially conservative Flavians, who in many respects sought to disassociate themselves from the extravagant excesses of the previous regime under Nero, would adopt what looks to our eyes so frivolous a hairstyle as the
Toupetfrisur
as the signature look for public portraits of female family members. In fact, these rigorously and laboriously styled coiffures bespoke a message of carefully tamed, cultivated, civilised order which chimed perfectly with their husbands’ and fathers’ broader political agenda. From the age of adolescence, a respectable Roman woman never wore her hair loose in public. Untamed locks were the signature style of sexually unchaste or barbarian women like the British warrior queen Boudicca, or women in mourning whose show of unkemptness was appropriate in the context of their grief, or else the special preserve of goddesses, who were exempt from the usual civic norms. For the Flavians, the impressive technical feat represented by the
Toupetfrisur
echoed the dynasty’s ambitions to impose morality, control and order on the empire.
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Another politically relevant reform of the portrait tradition for both men and women of the Flavian era was the flirtation with the ‘realistic’ style which had last found favour in the republican era. Throughout the Julio-Claudian period, portraits both of the men and the women of the imperial family had generally presented a youthful, airbrushed appearance to the world, even when the subject had reached old age. But beneath the new heavy and ostentatious hairstyles adopted by their Flavian successors, women’s faces began to show their age again. One marble bust of a middle-aged woman widely thought to be Domitia in later life, now located in the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas, illustrates this new phenomenon.
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Her hair is painstakingly coiled into four domed rows of precision-drilled curls, a tour de force exhibition of the
ornatrix
’s art, but instead of the taut, youthful contours of the typical Julio-Claudian visage, she has a heavy-set countenance, her brow sinking frowningly over heavy-lidded eyes, and with the indents of her naso-labial lines clearly visible against her puffy cheeks.
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In steering portraiture back in the direction of the ‘realistic’ style sported by male portrait statues in the republican period, the Flavians presumably hoped to appeal to nostalgic memories of that era inhabited
by paragons of female virtue women such as Cornelia, long before Agrippina Minor and Poppaea blotted the Roman first ladies’ copy-book.
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But behind the dazzling palace façade and the magnificent moral fashions, Domitian’s and Domitia’s marriage was in fact showing depressing signs of sliding into the worst habits of the Julio-Claudians.

In around 83, two years after her husband’s accession, Domitia was accused of adultery with a celebrated pantomime actor who went by the name of Paris, apt given the mythical Paris’s crime of running off with Helen of Troy, herself the wife of a king. While the thespian Paris was publicly executed and his grieving fans who tried to mark the spot of his murder with flowers were threatened with the same fate, Domitia and the emperor were divorced.
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Domitia was not the first woman of the imperial house to be indicted for getting involved with someone in show business. Amongst the accusations levelled at Augustus’s daughter Julia had been the charge of cavorting with an actor called Demosthenes, while Nero’s first wife Claudia Octavia had been framed for adultery with an Egyptian flute-player, to justify her execution in exile. The ubiquity of such cases underlines that accusations of sexual impropriety, particularly with actors or other servile lovers, were a classic excuse to get rid of women for more political purposes.
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If, however, there was an explicit political motive for giving Domitia her marching orders, it does not emerge clearly from our sources, though her failure to produce an heir is a plausible theory.
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Since the penalty for adultery was deportation, we can presume that like other disgraced Roman wives, Domitia was banished from the city, although there is no indication of whether she was destined, like Julia, Agrippina Maior and other imperial women, for exile on Pandateria.

For the time being, Domitia’s position as leading lady of the empire was usurped by the emperor’s niece Julia Flavia. Now aged around eighteen, she had some experience of the public spotlight already. Since her father Titus had remained unwed after Berenice’s departure from Rome, she had served as the face of his coinage, depicted in association with the goddess Ceres, the most popular role model for imperial women. Despite surviving sculptures that show her sporting the lavish spiralling head of curls worn by other fashionable ladies of her generation, her official coin portraits show her with a far more modest chignon reminiscent of some of Livia’s later profiles, a nod to the Flavians’ admiration for Rome’s first empress, though in an
abrupt departure from Livia’s portrait tradition, both Julia Flavia and her aunt Domitia are sometimes shown wearing what looks to be a crescent-shaped diadem in their hair. Such queenly insignia had not been seen on an imperial woman’s head before.
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On coming of age, Julia Flavia had been made the bride of her cousin, Flavius Sabinus, but the match was not, if Suetonius’s account is correct, her father’s first choice.
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When she was still a young girl, Titus had urged his younger brother to throw over Domitia and take Julia Flavia as a wife instead in a bid to strengthen the Flavian dynasty, a suggestion Domitian violently repudiated, supposedly due to his passion for Domitia, though the unhappy precedent set by Claudius’s marriage to his niece Agrippina Minor would also have justified his refusal.
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Following the departure of Domitia in 83, Julia Flavia’s assumption of the role of companion to her uncle proceeded to generate just the kind of gossip that Domitian would have wished to avoid. Details are sketchy and contradictory, but it appears that tongues began to wag as the pair were seen living, in the words of one commentator, ‘as husband with wife, making little effort at concealment’.
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Julia Flavia’s husband Flavius Sabinus was executed by the emperor for treason, and the rumours intensified with suggestions that Julia now exercised a special political influence over her uncle, persuading him to raise to the consulship an ex-prefect of Egypt named Ursus, who had only recently been under threat of execution for showing insufficient deference to the emperor.
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But within as little as a year, the saga of the emperor’s personal life took yet another twist. Domitia staged a comeback. Crowds are reported to have gathered in the streets and demanded the empress’s return, an echo of public protests that demanded the recall of Julia in 2 BC, and of Claudia Octavia following the false charges laid against her by Nero in 62. In contrast to those two sad cases, the result this time was that Domitian, said by some to have been regretting the separation – though conceivably also seeking to quash the rumours about himself and his niece – was reconciled with his wife. Julia Flavia remained on the Palatine, but subsequently died in around 87 or 88 at the approximate age of twenty-two in what was whispered to be a failed abortion attempt, imposed on her by the father of her child – Domitian.
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This confusing picture of incest and betrayal sits oddly with the subsequent deification of Julia Flavia ordered by Domitian after her death when coins were emblazoned with images showing her being
carried to the heavens on the back of a peacock.
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The stigma that had once made emperors like Augustus and Tiberius so cautious about deifying their women had clearly fallen by the wayside – Vespasian’s daughter Domitilla, who did not live to see her father become emperor, was also honoured as a goddess on his coinage.
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But the story that Julia Flavia had aborted her uncle’s child refused to go away. Juvenal, writing obliquely about the affair only a few years later, critiqued the hypocrisy of those who preached morality while behaving in the opposite manner – the ‘adulterer’ here being Domitian and the ‘bitter laws’ a reference to his revival of Augustus’s moral legislation:

Exactly so was the adulterer of more recent times, defiled by a union worthy of tragedy, who tried to revive bitter laws to terrify everyone, even Venus and Mars, at the very moment when his Julia was unsealing her fertile womb with numerous abortion-inducers and pouring out lumps which resembled her uncle.
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Amid the obfuscation, one clear fact emerges. Julia Flavia’s fate was eloquent proof that, despite the ease with which the honour of deification was now bestowed on a woman of the imperial family, divine honours were less of a personal tribute than a routine benefit intended more for the glorification of her ruling emperor than the recipient. They jarred, moreover, with her own fragile mortal lot. However important a prop she might be at one time to the emperor’s public profile, she was both disposable and replaceable – a bit-player in a narrative bigger than her own, a narrative which would always threaten to swallow her up.

The final decade of Domitian’s reign was a tumultuous one, marred by repeated clashes with the Senate, who chafed at the emperor’s autocratic style of government and insistence on being addressed as ‘Lord and God’, and the execution of numerous of his opponents. Among those who were eliminated was the consul of 95, Flavius Clemens, the husband of Domitian’s own niece Flavia Domitilla, on a charge of atheism. Flavia Domitilla herself was added to the long line of imperial women who had been exiled to Pandateria, where she died, though she was later claimed as an adherent of Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and made a saint.
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So great was Domitian’s paranoia in the face of perceived threats
that it was said to have led him to install mirrored walls in his palace so that he could see his enemies coming. But a genuine plot to dispatch him was eventually hatched by his own courtiers, a plot that it was universally assumed the emperor’s wife Domitia was privy to. One source claims specifically that the empress had come to fear for her own life, and, when she chanced to find a ‘death list’ scribbled by her husband of those whom he planned to do away with next, she informed the intended victims, who brought forward their plans for assassination. The emperor was stabbed to death in his bedroom on 18 September 96.
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Domitian was the last of the Flavians. He and Domitia never did have children to continue the family line. After his death, his body was given to the care of the family’s old nurse Phyllis, who had him cremated in her garden on the Via Latina and smuggled his ashes into the temple of the Flavian
gens
, which Domitian had established as the family mausoleum on the site of his birth home in Rome’s ‘Pomegranate Street’, on the Quirinal hill. Phyllis chose to mix his ashes in with those of his niece Julia Flavia, whom she had also raised from infancy.
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A later version of Domitian’s obituary had it that Domitia had requested her husband’s body, which had been hacked into pieces, and commissioned a sculptor to model a statue from its reassembled form, a statue which then appeared in the Capitol in Rome. This sixth-century account was perhaps invented to explain cracks in the statue in question, cracks which may have been the partially healed scars of the
damnatio memoriae
against Domitian.
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An eye-witness description of the unbridled and savage pleasure with which Domitian’s portraits were vandalised by his subjects after his death affords us an idea of the kind of scenes that must have greeted similar mandates to destroy sculptures of damned women such as Messalina.

It was a delight to smash those arrogant faces to pieces in the dust, to threaten them with the sword, and savagely attack them with axes, as if blood and pain would follow every single blow. No one controlled their joy and long awaited happiness, when vengeance was taken in beholding his likenesses, hacked into mutilated limbs and pieces, and above all, in seeing his savage and hideous portraits hurled into the flames and burned up, in order that they might be transformed from things of such terror and menace into something useful and pleasing.
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