SOME FAMOUS WOMEN OF IMPERIAL ROME
· Three Types of Roman Womanhood ·
· Livia · Octavia · Julia ·
· Corruption of the Age not Due to Women ·
· Persecution of Virtue · Multiplication of Divorces ·
· Good Women in Public Life ·
· Plotina · Julia Domna · Julia Mæsa ·
· Soæmias · Mamæa ·
· The Old Type Gives Place to the New ·
If one wishes to gain a clear notion of the dominant traits of the Roman woman of twenty centuries ago, there is no better way than to walk observantly through the old galleries where so many of them still live in marble, side by side with the men who made or marred their fortunes. There, graven in stone, one sees at a glance the strength, the passion, the pride, the ambition, that left its stamp upon an age. There too is the weakness, the sensuality, the arrogance, the cruelty, that ruined a life and brought misery upon a generation. Most of these women belonged to a class that held a conspicuous place in the public view by virtue of its position. Some were wicked, a few were great, and many were good though they rarely get the credit of it. To make them live again is not easy, perhaps not possible, but we gather from many a record curious and interesting facts regarding them. Their surroundings are measurably familiar to us. We know how they looked, how they dressed their hair, how they wore their robes, how they carried themselves. With here and there a trait, an act, a passing word, an anecdote, in their relations to men and society, we may compose a picture which, if not exact, will give a fair idea of the manner of women they were.
There were three matrons in the family of the first emperor who may be taken as representatives of three dominant types of Roman womanhood. In Livia, we have the woman of affairs; in Octavia, the woman of the family; in Julia, the woman of the gay world. The first had before all things the genius of administration which was the special gift of her race; the second united the sweetest family affections with loyalty and moral strength; the last was of the numerous and dangerous class that made of society an occupation, and of pleasure an end.
Of the long line of capable women who had so strong and so lasting an influence in Roman affair—sometimes for good and sometimes for ill—the first and the best known was Livia. Standing as she did in the blazing light that shines upon a throne, we see her on many sides—if not always clearly, at least in bold outlines. That she had beauty, tact, fascination, and a gracious address, doubtless counted for much in her youth; but it was through her wise judgment, far-seeing intellect, well-poised character, and keen practical sense of values that this remarkable woman shared the fortunes and held the affection of Augustus for more than half a century, and had a voice in the destinies of Rome for seventy years. She has been given the purity of Diana, the benevolence of Ceres, the wisdom and craft of Minerva. There are many busts and statues of her, but they vary, and it is not possible to know which best represents the real woman. We see her in marble as Ceres—a commanding figure, with strength in every line. The passion that lies in the delicate, half-sensuous curve of the lips is overshadowed by the will that shows itself in the firm poise of the head, and the intellect that sits in the ample forehead and looks out of the serene eyes. “In features Venus, in manner Juno,” says Ovid, who had ample reason to know the power of this discreet matron. She frowned upon the license of the gay set to which he belonged, and it is not unlikely that she had something to do with the hopeless exile that pressed so heavily on his last years. But he declares that “she has raised her head above all vices,” dwelling upon her strength and the fact that “with the power to injure, she has injured no one.”
Whatever the faults of Livia may have been, no shadow rested on her womanly honor. Probably she had no choice when, at eighteen, the emperor took her from her husband—who found it best to submit amiably where the caprices of his sovereign were concerned—and made her his wife, this complaisant but elderly soldier of culture and influence acting as her father or guardian in the ceremony, and dying soon after. If he bore any ill will it does not appear, as he left his two children to the care of his successor. At the same time, Augustus sent away his own wife, the too jealous and exacting mother of Julia, on the day of his daughter’s birth. The only failing of Scribonia seems to have been that she was imperious and did not bear her wrongs with sufficient equanimity.
This new union lasted fifty-two years, and the last recorded words of the husband were, “Livia, farewell, and do not forget our love.” To some one who asked her how she retained her influence so long, she replied: “That comes from my moderation and my honesty. I have done with joy all that he wished, without trying to meddle with his affairs or showing the least jealousy as to his infidelities, which I never seemed to see.” As a recipe for the management of husbands the last might be open to grave objection, from a woman’s point of view, but it was the undisputed privilege of Roman men, indeed of all men in early times,—to say nothing of later ones,—to be made comfortable under any circumstances; and they made no pretense to morality. As to meddling, Livia evidently did it as though she did it not, as it was well known that she tempered the harshness of her husband and modified many of his stern decrees.
Perhaps a better explanation of his devotion might have been found in the rare union of beauty and intelligence with the domestic virtues which he took so much pleasure in extolling. In the waning of her personal charms, she took care not to lose the attractions of a versatile intellect and agreeable manners, also to sheathe in velvet the delicate, closely welded chains of daily habit. She knew how to submit and she knew how to rule. Since life is always a series of compromises, perhaps its finest art lies just here. Maintaining the traditions of her sex, she wove and made her husband’s clothes. As she had six hundred or more attendants to fold her own garments and minister to her comfort, it is not likely that these domestic duties weighed very heavily. Doubtless a little supervision sufficed for a great deal of credit. A well-managed household does not imply doing things one’s self so much as the knowledge and ability to put the machinery in running order; and Livia was before all things executive, which has much more to do with brains than with virtues.
Like her husband, or because of him, she hated luxury and ostentation in her daily life. Her house was small and simple, but decorated with taste. The pleasures of sense had little weight with her; indeed, there was a trace of asceticism in her character and in her way of living. She had various theories which we call fads. These are specially noticeable in an epicurean age, when a fortune was spent on a dinner. She limited herself to a diet of fruits and vegetables, drank a certain wine that suited the health better than the palate, and had great faith in the virtues of cold water. Augustus was cured of a grave malady by cold baths, but rumor said that the young Marcellus died of them. Just why Livia was blamed is not clear, as the treatment was prescribed by Musa, the great physician; but it was new, and she had made it a fashion.
That she had many lovable traits is shown not only by the lifelong devotion of her husband, but in the adoring affection of those who served her. In recent years a large columbarium has been found which she consecrated to the ashes of her numerous household, each of whom had his little urn with a fitting inscription. She used her large fortune generously, helped the persecuted, established a school for poor but well-born children, and did a great many charitable things. It may be true that she was cruel to her enemies, but she was loyal to her friends and untiring in their interests. Wisely holding the threads of a large and diverse patronage, she kept herself in touch with the intelligence of the new age, and was inspired by a broad and catholic public spirit. She is said to have built and endowed the Temple of Concord, also a portico rich in ancient paintings, which bore her name. If she was at home at the wheel or loom and looking after the personal comfort of her husband, she was equally so in the coteries of the learned and in the councils of State. She was called cold, but there were slumbering depths of feeling in that strong soul which few had fathomed. When her son Drusus died, it is said that only the tender interference of her husband prevented her from starving herself to death in the violence of her grief. But she quickly regained her poise, and went about her duties public and private with no outward sign of the sorrow that had come to her like a bolt out of a clear sky. She had much of the fortitude of the Stoics in the days when philosophy was the fashionable religion. But she went to the wise and learned Arius for help and consolation, as women of later ages have gone to a spiritual adviser. Seneca holds her up as a model of strength and well-regulated sensibility. He dwells upon her heroic qualities and contrasts her favorably with the more emotional Octavia, who mourned her life away over the death of her son and other domestic misfortunes.
There was another and less sympathetic side to her character. Without imagination, and little touched with sentiment, her life seems to have been guided by a calm reason which was always at the service of a towering ambition—a trait which, sooner or later, is sure to make the gentlest man or woman hard and cruel toward any one who stands in its way. This ambition was her master passion, and in its direction lay her faults. To her judgment and discrimination was added the craft of a diplomatist. Her grandson Caligula called her a “Ulysses in petticoats.” That she had any hand in the singular falling away, one after another, of her husband’s direct heirs, or that she ever passed the point where intrigue becomes crime, is the purest surmise. She had too many enemies in his family, who feared and envied her, to escape calumny; but though many dark rumors were in the air, nothing was ever proved. One youth was ill and died in Gaul, another in the far East. It is too much to suppose that she could safely have helped them out of the world at that distance, even had she wished to do so. That she schemed long and successfully to raise her son Tiberius to the throne is certain. That he repaid her with a great deal of ingratitude is equally so. Perhaps he could not forget that it was her ambition which compelled him to send away his much-loved wife, Vipsania,—whom he could never meet afterward without tears,—to marry the already notorious Julia, for whom he had a distinct aversion. But no one then stopped to consider sensibilities. If Livia was sometimes hard and cruel, she lived in an age when people who did many kind and generous things had no hesitation in walking over a rival, crushing an enemy, or even courteously suggesting to a friend who became inconvenient that it would be wise for him to take himself out of the world. The man of to-day is content with crushing rivals and ruining enemies in the name of high-sounding virtues, but he has grown humane, and lets them live. The time when fierce ambitions drove innocent victims out of life is gone by. But we can judge people only by the standards of their own day, and there is much evidence that Livia surpassed those of her time in justice and compassion.
Fortune certainly favored the aspiring empress. Her gentle sister-in-law, Octavia, died in good time for her ends. The brilliant Julia, who won hearts and stood in her way, plunged recklessly to her own ruin, taking with her into a hopeless exile the wronged but troublesome Scribonia. Of this step-daughter’s sons, two were dead in a far country, and the remaining one was chained for his vices to a desolate rock in the sea. Of her daughters, one followed in the footsteps and the fate of her unfortunate mother; the other was the first Agrippina, a proud, imperious woman with her mother’s beauty and her father’s inflexible will and courage. This granddaughter of Augustus, so noted for her virtues, her talents, and her sorrows, had followed her husband’s fortunes with wifely devotion, commanded the adoring soldiers in his absence, and returned heartbroken, with his ashes, to stir up Rome against his supposed murderer, whose wife, one of Livia’s friends, was implicated. Sure of the justice of her cause and the sympathy of the people, she defied the cruel Tiberius and the cool Livia,—who was bent upon saving her possibly innocent favorites,—to be finally sent to starve on the rocky islet where her erring mother had expiated her follies and her vices. She was a tragical figure, this spirited and haughty Agrippina with the face and air of a Minerva and the fiery spirit of Mars, who paid so heavy a penalty for her virtue and her loyalty. It is said that Livia interceded for her, though without avail; also that she supported the second hapless Julia until her death. Whether this was a stroke of diplomacy, or the impulse of a pitying heart, we cannot know.
The center of a hostile group, it is clear that Livia’s rôle was a difficult one, and the skill with which she disentangled these conflicting interests is the best proof of her insight and worldly tact. She had the instinct of leadership which divines men, women, and possibilities, and is swift to bend circumstances to its own ends. If she had her full share of troubles and chagrins, she hid them within her heart, kept her own counsel in perilous crises, and pursued her way with the calmness of a strong soul. By a singular fatality, every human barrier was swept from her path, some by fate and their own misdoings, some by more kindly nature, and some by intrigues, the mysteries of which we cannot fathom. In the end she dominated friends and enemies alike.
But, in spite of her success, the last of her eighty-eight years were burdened with griefs. Her heart was wounded in the tenderest point by the son for whom she had toiled and schemed; her pride was humiliated, and her hopes were dashed. That she played the sovereign and became capricious and exacting, was perhaps in the nature of things. No one was ever more flattered and honored by an admiring people. The Senate paid court to her, her receptions were officially announced, her signature was attached to decrees, she was attended by lictors when she went out, and had an altar on which her name was adored. She had a conspicuous place among the white-robed vestals and was made a priestess of Augustus. When she was ill the world mourned; when she recovered there were fêtes and votive offerings. “A woman in all things more comparable to the gods than to men, who knew how to use her power so as to turn away peril and advance the most deserving,” said one of her contemporaries. She remained to the end a stately figure among women who have held the reality of power without its titles, not through the arts of the coquette, but through tact, wisdom, foresight, and intellectual force. With less temperament and esthetic quality, she recalls Aspasia in her vigor, her mental grasp, and her power to hold the affection of a great man in an age when such love seems to have been rare. Perhaps we find a closer resemblance in Mme. de Maintenon, who combined her strength, her cold reason, and her political sagacity with a finer modern culture. It may be that the latter used her power less wisely, but she was a sadder woman. She reached the goal of her ambition only after the loss of her illusions, if she ever had them, and the task of catering to the caprices of a spoiled monarch was too much for her. The records of her life reveal too surely the tragedy of a soul; she lacked the stoical endurance to suffer and make no sign. Livia apparently never ceased to love the husband of her youth, and they worked in sympathy. With this firm foundation of happiness, all things were possible. One can point to no mistakes that were made through her counsels, and their weight is shown in the letters of Augustus himself. Of her wisdom and moderation, no better evidence is needed than the unparalleled cruelties of her son as soon as her restraining influence was gone.
We have able and gifted women to-day who are companions or mothers of great rulers, but I can recall no one not a reigning queen who has a like influence or has received equal honors. Have women of masterful character lost the subtle art of fascination to make it available, or are modern rulers smaller men, who fear a rival? With us, women of this type find their place as presidents of charitable associations or powerful clubs, or leaders of a conservative society. Sometimes they are better known as wives and helpers of men with political aspirations. But we rarely hear of them in the latter rôle, as they are usually lost in a glory which they often make but do not visibly share.
In striking contrast to the many-sided Livia is the less dominating but more sympathetic Octavia, who lives through her virtues and her sufferings rather than her talents. This much-loved sister of Augustus represents the conservative element of the new age, with its amiable weaknesses and time-honored graces. The idol of her brother, who, nevertheless, did not hesitate to sacrifice her to his own interests and ambitions, she was the victim of lifelong misfortune. She was said to be more beautiful than her rival, Cleopatra. If her likeness in marble can be trusted, she had not the air of command that one sees in so many statues of Roman women. There is more of sensibility in the poise of the delicately shaped head, with its broad, low forehead. In the drooping corners of the full, tender mouth lies the sorrow of years fallen into a settled melancholy. But there is no lack of strength in the face, which shows also a quality of clear sense and practical judgment. She was noted for dignity, reserve that verged upon coldness, and great simplicity of manner. Her reputation was without a cloud. It was the wish of her brother to take her from her first husband and marry her to Pompey, in order to cement an alliance, but this proposal she absolutely refused.
After the death of Marcellus she was given, for reasons of State, to the cowardly and perfidious Antony, the Senate even setting aside a law that required a woman to wait ten months before remarriage. It was thought that her beauty, with her graces of mind and character, might win him from his follies—sad illusion, and source of many tragedies. She composed grave differences and used her influence for peace. When she returned from Athens, where she spent the first years of her marriage and was greatly loved for her gentle qualities and her fortitude in sorrow, she entreated her brother to forego his warlike purposes. “The eyes of the world are necessarily turned on one who is the wife of Antony and the sister of Cæsar,” she said; “and should these chiefs of the empire, misled by hasty counsels, involve the whole in war, whatever the event, it will be unhappy for me.” She gained concessions from each, and averted the immediate trouble.
But this conciliating spirit did not prevent the fickle Antony from breaking her heart, as he had that of the fiery and ambitious Fulvia. The strongest proof of her sweetness of temper and greatness of soul may be found in the fact that she brought up the children of Fulvia with her own, also the children of Cleopatra, after the latter’s death.
The worst fault ascribed to Octavia was aiding in the divorce of her own innocent daughter from Agrippa, the stern old soldier who was chosen by Augustus as a desirable husband for his only child, the young and widowed Julia. Whatever ambitions she may have had were crushed by the death of her youthful son. Naturally she did not love the intriguing sister-in-law, who ruled all about her in a way that was none the less sure because it was quiet. It is even possible that she was not unwilling to do what came in her path to circumvent the schemes of Livia for her own family. “She detested all mothers,” says Seneca, “and, above all, Livia,” who had domestic joys which she had not. But Seneca may not have been quite just, as he preferred women of a strong, heroic type, and this mother of sensibilities so acute that she fainted when Vergil read his eulogy of Marcellus in her presence, was not much to his liking. It is more probable, however, that resistance was useless. Where the emperor decreed, she had only to obey. Once, indeed, she had shown her loyalty and her strength by refusing a like proposal in her own case, but the marriage of Julia was vital as a matter of State, and it is not likely that Augustus would have sacrificed a thing upon which he had set his heart, to the happiness of any woman whatever. Perhaps, too, she shared the common belief that private inclination must never stand in the way of public benefit. It was the noblesse oblige of good rulers.
Octavia no doubt had her little foibles, though it is not at all certain that this step was due to one of them; but she did not forget the duties of her position. She had wide fame as a loyal, charitable, self-sacrificing, and virtuous woman. In the spirit of the new age, she patronized talent, and gave a public library to the portico which Augustus had built in her honor, filling it with valuable paintings of classical subjects. In the failure of her hopes and the loss of her illusions, she still devoted herself to the children of Antony as well as her own, and interested herself in arranging suitable marriages for them. But these things failed to bring consolation to a bruised heart, or serenity in the troubles that had fallen upon her. She shut herself from the world after her last humiliations, and died of her griefs at fifty-four, revered and idolized by the Roman people, who resented her wrongs as much as they pitied her sufferings. But the son she never ceased to mourn had been in his tomb many a year, and the fickle husband who deserted her had ended his career in disgrace long before. She did not live to see the downfall of Julia, the death of her august brother, or the final triumph of Livia. She was spared, too, the misfortunes that befell some of the children of her love and care.
The details of Octavia’s life are few and meager. Fate gave her a prominent part to play on the world’s stage, and she played it well, but with an evident longing to fall back upon her affections. She was never a woman of initiative, but she was clearly one of moral force, framed to temper the friction of more powerful individualities, but to be herself crushed in their collisions. She stands for the purest and most gracious type of Roman womanhood. Many were stronger, many were more brilliant, but few left a memory so fragrant or so sweet.
There was another woman in the household of Augustus, who represented the new age on its worst and most dangerous side. In Julia we have the woman who lived to amuse herself, and left a name which has become a synonym for the appalling corruption of Roman society. No one was placed so high, no one fell so low; and no one has been so often quoted to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” But it has often been the wrong moral and the wrong tale. Bred austerely for a throne, versed in all the culture of her time, this brilliant, haughty, impetuous daughter of the emperor led the fast set at Rome for a few years, dazzled the world with her wit and her toilets, shocked it with her escapades, only to sink at last from her lofty pedestal to untold depths of infamy and a living tomb.
Given, a woman with the sensual, dominating inheritance of the Cæsars and the pride of a new race that knows no law but its own will, without the pride of character which serves always as a balance-wheel to the passions; imagine her a widow at seventeen, and married again, with no choice, to a plain but distinguished soldier, nearly thrice her age, whose lack of patrician birth humiliated her, and whose bourgeois habits were not to her liking; surround her with idle and conscienceless men who make love a pursuit and the arts of flattery a study—and we have already the elements of a tragedy. This hard-headed husband wearied her; his ways were foreign to her; his world of interest was not hers. Even the public spirit which led him to give so many fine temples and works of art to the city that honored him annoyed her. She had the tastes of a dilettante, but she believed firmly in the divine right of emperors and emperors’ daughters to command all things for themselves.
Nor did this petted child like any better the provincial notions of her old-fashioned father. It did not suit her to sew and spin with her stepmother, whose staid decorum irritated her. She belonged to the pleasure-loving set of an age in which luxury was uppermost and vice was a fine art. Fatal hour in any age when fashion laughs at morals and glories in the cachet of would-be elegant sin! “If my father forgets that he is Cæsar, I who am his daughter have the right to remember it,” said Julia, by way of comment on his democratic ways. One day at the theater he noticed the contrast between the dignified Livia, simply attired, but surrounded by grave statesmen and men of distinction, and the gaily dressed Julia with her train of gilded, dissolute youth. After his usual fashion of writing little notes when he had anything to say, he sent the latter a line of reproof. “Do not blame my young friends,” was her ready answer; “they will grow old with me.” On another occasion, after he had found fault with her showy appearance, she presented herself the next day in a plain and modest costume. To his compliment on the becoming change, she replied: “To-day I am dressed for my father; yesterday it was for my husband.” The subtle satire in this remark was only apparent to those who knew that she dressed for all the world rather than for either.
She was gifted, witty, and cultured, we are told; but to be lettered in the age of the Cæsars did not necessarily mean learning or serious tastes. One must dabble a little in philosophy, read the Hellenic poets, patronize famous Roman writers, and be able to talk of the Greek artists who were designing temples and flooding the imperial city with sculpture of various grades. It was even possible to have a long-haired philosopher to dress the intellect, as the maid dressed the person—the one a slave like the other. But all this might end in little more than the trifling of the dilettante, and was quite consistent with very bad morals—as it has always been and is to-day. To discourse of Ovid’s “Art of Love” was agreeable enough, and not mentally exacting. To be sure, the poet did not bring his admirers into very respectable society; indeed, we should think it not only altogether vulgar, but altogether base. But it appealed to the tastes of these spoiled darlings of fortune who had nothing else to do but amuse themselves—it did not matter how, so long as due regard was paid to the so-called elegancies. From love, as the Romans understood it, to unlimited license was but a step. They did not live in the “beyond” of refined sentiment. They mixed very little intellect or imagination with their passions, though they put a certain art into the stimulants of their sensations. When Catullus wished to add a last touch of seriousness to what he called his emotions, he said that he loved Lesbia “not merely as men commonly loved a mistress, but as a father loves his sons and his sons-in-law.” There was little romance in this epicurean life, in spite of a great deal of simple family affection outside of it, which these perfumed sybarites looked upon as bourgeois. Splendor and not too decorous pleasure were all-sufficient. Anything else they would have laughed at as moonshine. “When Queen Money gave a dowry,” said Horace, with his inimitable satire, “she gave beauty, nobility, friends, and fidelity.” With the exception of Horace and Vergil, who had already grown too moral for the highest fashion, Roman poetry was incredibly coarse and demoralizing; but this was the literary food of the reckless and dashing group that gravitated from the palace on the Palatine to Baiæ, the Newport of the Roman world, rushing from one novelty to another, from one excess to a deeper and more highly spiced one, until its rapid course was run.
Of this society Julia was the center, the life, and the inspiration. The days were past when the stern father put a man of high lineage peremptorily in his place for presuming to address her in the beautiful city by the sea. The complaisant husband, absorbed in affairs, no doubt thought it best to let her go her own way, but he died possibly unsuspecting. Again the still youthful widow was married in the interest of the State and of Livia—to Livia’s son. The brooding, gloomy student was equally far from filling the heart of the graceful woman who was overflowing with the joy of life, and intoxicated with a sense of power that knows no law. Livia may have been faulty enough, but she was above the degradation of the senses. In Julia the virtues of the Roman matron seem to have been lost. When her conduct came to the knowledge of her inflexible father, he was as bitter as he had been tender. Her maid hung herself, and Augustus only said: “I would rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia.” Of the youth entangled with her, some were exiled and some took themselves out of a world that was no longer possible for them. Among the latter was the clever, fascinating, but dissolute son of Antony, who had been carefully reared by Octavia and befriended by the emperor, only to repay their kindness by striking both in the tenderest point. But Julia, the beautiful, brilliant, flattered queen of society, was sent away from all her pleasures, her luxuries, her gay companions, her matchless position, to languish for fifteen years in a desolate exile, with no friend but the mother who shared with her the bare necessaries of a squalid existence. No wine, no luxury, no fine clothes, no men-servants without special restrictions and surveillance. A rock for a home, the sea and the sky for companions, and not even hope for consolation. And she was little past thirty-five! Once she was removed to a stronghold of Calabria, with a larger guard and no added comforts, but a little less severity. Many times the Roman people, who had loved her buoyant spirit and winning personality, begged her inexorable father to forgive her. “I wish you all had such daughters and such wives,” was his only reply. She died shortly after her father, to lie, unsung and forgotten, far from her kindred in an unknown grave. Not a word is left to tell us the details of that long tragedy. Her daughter Julia inherited her vices and suffered a like fate.
It is needless to recall here the notorious women who followed in the footsteps of Julia, and added to all her sins a cruelty which she had not. The world is fami
