Love, Lust & Loss in the Roman Empire
Nunc est bibendum – ‘Now let the drinking begin!’ – sang the poet Horace when he heard news of the death of Cleopatra, ‘…a woman so out of control that she could hope for anything at all, drunk, as she was, on the sweet wine of success.’
The war had been won by the young Augustus, great-nephew and adopted son of the murdered and deified Julius Caesar. Publicly it was a war against Egypt and its queen, but everyone knew that in reality it was the last in a long succession of Roman civil wars, a power struggle between Augustus and Mark Antony. Caesar’s heir won and ruled supreme for no less than 44 years after his rival’s death.
Cleopatra had been Caesar’s lover and was never Rome’s enemy, but a loyal ally whose misfortune was to live in an era when Rome’s leaders kept killing each other. Augustus portrayed Antony as enslaved by his passion for the queen, making him forget his duty to the Republic. It helped when he rejected his Roman wife, Augustus’s older sister Octavia, who like all aristocratic women was married off to cement the political alliances formed by their menfolk. Antony’s reputation was blackened, but the exchanges were not one-sided.
‘Why have you changed?’ he wrote in an open letter addressed to Augustus, phrased in language we would think more suited to the bar of a rugby club than a public debate. ‘Is it because I’m screwing the queen?... Have I just started this or has it been going on for nine years? How about you – is it only Drusilla [Augustus’s wife] you screw? Congratulations, if when you read this letter you have not been inside Tertulla or Terentilla, Rufilla or Salvia Titiseniam, or all of them. Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?’
Antony has gone down in history as a passionate, hard-drinking, hardfighting womaniser outwitted by the coldly calculating, unemotional Augustus. The latter was small, prone to illness and dogged by persistent stories of cowardice. As Shakespeare and Hollywood clearly felt, this contrast between the pair makes for great drama, and so with these images in our mind it is a little surprising to hear Antony chiding his former ally for his numerous affairs with married women. Another story claimed that at a feast Augustus hustled a senior senator’s wife out of the main hall, returning a little later, the lady’s elaborate hairstyle and dress dishevelled and her face flushed.
It is easy to forget how young Augustus was – just 18 years old when Caesar was murdered in 44 BC and only 33 when he defeated Antony. Contemporaries saw him as a violently unpredictable youth, overready to issue death sentences on captured opponents. Some of his friends maintained that in his late teens he abstained from sex for a year in order to preserve his health and strengthen his speaking voice. It was a feat they clearly felt showed uncommon self-discipline.
Later they would excuse his serial adulteries with the wives of other senators as a secret intention to find out what the husbands were planning. The Romans felt political espionage was more readily acceptable than promiscuity for the sake of pleasure, which was the sort of thing only bad rulers and tyrants did. Historians often mock sources that tell us how Augustus resisted Cleopatra’s charms when they met in the days after Antony killed himself and before she took her own life. Given his record as a serial adulterer, perhaps the ancient authors had a point. For us, Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed love is the great affair of the age. Yet maybe we should think again about Augustus and his wife (called Drusilla by Antony in his letter but better known to us as Livia). These days it is hard to see her save through the sensational prism of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Siân Phillips’s chilling portrayal in the famous BBC drama, but when they fell in love he was barely 25 and she was not quite 20. Both were already married to other people and Livia was pregnant for the second time. Augustus divorced his own wife as soon as she had given birth to a daughter – his only child, Julia. He also made Livia’s husband divorce her, then waited until she too gave birth and married her a few days later, making her former husband stand in at the ceremony for Livia’s long-dead father.
The marriage endured for the remaining 52 years of his life. Livia became pregnant once, but the child was stillborn and it is tempting to speculate that the delivery did her lasting damage. Divorce was an easy matter at Rome, where all you had to do was utter the formula ‘take your things and go’. Yet they did not divorce, in spite of Augustus’s desperate desire for an heir. Livia came from an aristocratic family and was well connected, but so were many other eligible women. Something stronger than political advantage kept him married to this beautiful and fiercely intelligent woman, even when he took his sexual pleasures elsewhere – gossip claimed that Livia picked the girls for him. The most likely explanation is that they remained in love.
Augustus also loved his daughter, and joked that he ‘had two spoiled daughters... the state and Julia’. It did not prevent him from marrying Julia off to further his dynastic ambitions. Her first husband was her cousin, Octavia’s son Marcellus, who died young. The second was Agrippa, her father’s contemporary and close ally, with whom she had five children, although she may not have been faithful to him during his long absences in the provinces.
Yet she was careful, and the children were his – she joked that she never ‘took a passenger on board, unless the ship’s hold already has a full cargo’. When Agrippa died she was made to take a third husband, Livia’s older son Tiberius. Soon pregnant, she miscarried, and this may have destroyed what little closeness they had ever had. Tiberius went abroad, retiring from public life, and she stayed in Italy and had a string of affairs – one with Iullus Antonius, the son of Mark Antony.
Julia was attractive, witty, educated as well as any man, and enjoyed the company of other bright young aristocrats, but she was not discreet. She was also Augustus’s daughter, the same Augustus who had passed laws promoting marriage and inflicted heavy punishment on adultery.
In 2 BC , when he learnt of Julia’s conduct, he is said to have coped less well than he did with the many deaths of family and friends. Iullus died, and the other lovers were exiled. Julia was sent to the tiny island of Pandateria and forbidden all male company save for a few slaves chosen for their ugliness. A few years later she was permitted to live in a villa on the mainland, but still kept in isolation. For a man like Augustus, the needs of his regime trumped private affection, and the licence he felt to take lovers was not extended to his daughter.
He never saw Julia again.
Augustus: From Revolutionary To Emperor, by Adrian Goldsworthy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25).
The war had been won by the young Augustus, great-nephew and adopted son of the murdered and deified Julius Caesar. Publicly it was a war against Egypt and its queen, but everyone knew that in reality it was the last in a long succession of Roman civil wars, a power struggle between Augustus and Mark Antony. Caesar’s heir won and ruled supreme for no less than 44 years after his rival’s death.
Cleopatra had been Caesar’s lover and was never Rome’s enemy, but a loyal ally whose misfortune was to live in an era when Rome’s leaders kept killing each other. Augustus portrayed Antony as enslaved by his passion for the queen, making him forget his duty to the Republic. It helped when he rejected his Roman wife, Augustus’s older sister Octavia, who like all aristocratic women was married off to cement the political alliances formed by their menfolk. Antony’s reputation was blackened, but the exchanges were not one-sided.
‘Why have you changed?’ he wrote in an open letter addressed to Augustus, phrased in language we would think more suited to the bar of a rugby club than a public debate. ‘Is it because I’m screwing the queen?... Have I just started this or has it been going on for nine years? How about you – is it only Drusilla [Augustus’s wife] you screw? Congratulations, if when you read this letter you have not been inside Tertulla or Terentilla, Rufilla or Salvia Titiseniam, or all of them. Does it really matter where or in whom you dip your wick?’
Antony has gone down in history as a passionate, hard-drinking, hardfighting womaniser outwitted by the coldly calculating, unemotional Augustus. The latter was small, prone to illness and dogged by persistent stories of cowardice. As Shakespeare and Hollywood clearly felt, this contrast between the pair makes for great drama, and so with these images in our mind it is a little surprising to hear Antony chiding his former ally for his numerous affairs with married women. Another story claimed that at a feast Augustus hustled a senior senator’s wife out of the main hall, returning a little later, the lady’s elaborate hairstyle and dress dishevelled and her face flushed.
It is easy to forget how young Augustus was – just 18 years old when Caesar was murdered in 44 BC and only 33 when he defeated Antony. Contemporaries saw him as a violently unpredictable youth, overready to issue death sentences on captured opponents. Some of his friends maintained that in his late teens he abstained from sex for a year in order to preserve his health and strengthen his speaking voice. It was a feat they clearly felt showed uncommon self-discipline.
Later they would excuse his serial adulteries with the wives of other senators as a secret intention to find out what the husbands were planning. The Romans felt political espionage was more readily acceptable than promiscuity for the sake of pleasure, which was the sort of thing only bad rulers and tyrants did. Historians often mock sources that tell us how Augustus resisted Cleopatra’s charms when they met in the days after Antony killed himself and before she took her own life. Given his record as a serial adulterer, perhaps the ancient authors had a point. For us, Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed love is the great affair of the age. Yet maybe we should think again about Augustus and his wife (called Drusilla by Antony in his letter but better known to us as Livia). These days it is hard to see her save through the sensational prism of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Siân Phillips’s chilling portrayal in the famous BBC drama, but when they fell in love he was barely 25 and she was not quite 20. Both were already married to other people and Livia was pregnant for the second time. Augustus divorced his own wife as soon as she had given birth to a daughter – his only child, Julia. He also made Livia’s husband divorce her, then waited until she too gave birth and married her a few days later, making her former husband stand in at the ceremony for Livia’s long-dead father.
The marriage endured for the remaining 52 years of his life. Livia became pregnant once, but the child was stillborn and it is tempting to speculate that the delivery did her lasting damage. Divorce was an easy matter at Rome, where all you had to do was utter the formula ‘take your things and go’. Yet they did not divorce, in spite of Augustus’s desperate desire for an heir. Livia came from an aristocratic family and was well connected, but so were many other eligible women. Something stronger than political advantage kept him married to this beautiful and fiercely intelligent woman, even when he took his sexual pleasures elsewhere – gossip claimed that Livia picked the girls for him. The most likely explanation is that they remained in love.
Augustus also loved his daughter, and joked that he ‘had two spoiled daughters... the state and Julia’. It did not prevent him from marrying Julia off to further his dynastic ambitions. Her first husband was her cousin, Octavia’s son Marcellus, who died young. The second was Agrippa, her father’s contemporary and close ally, with whom she had five children, although she may not have been faithful to him during his long absences in the provinces.
Yet she was careful, and the children were his – she joked that she never ‘took a passenger on board, unless the ship’s hold already has a full cargo’. When Agrippa died she was made to take a third husband, Livia’s older son Tiberius. Soon pregnant, she miscarried, and this may have destroyed what little closeness they had ever had. Tiberius went abroad, retiring from public life, and she stayed in Italy and had a string of affairs – one with Iullus Antonius, the son of Mark Antony.
Julia was attractive, witty, educated as well as any man, and enjoyed the company of other bright young aristocrats, but she was not discreet. She was also Augustus’s daughter, the same Augustus who had passed laws promoting marriage and inflicted heavy punishment on adultery.
In 2 BC , when he learnt of Julia’s conduct, he is said to have coped less well than he did with the many deaths of family and friends. Iullus died, and the other lovers were exiled. Julia was sent to the tiny island of Pandateria and forbidden all male company save for a few slaves chosen for their ugliness. A few years later she was permitted to live in a villa on the mainland, but still kept in isolation. For a man like Augustus, the needs of his regime trumped private affection, and the licence he felt to take lovers was not extended to his daughter.
He never saw Julia again.
Augustus: From Revolutionary To Emperor, by Adrian Goldsworthy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25).