Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Livia, the wife of Augustus, superintending the weaving
of robes for her family.]
THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
MCMXI
Copyright, 1911, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Published, October, 1911
THE DEVINNE PRESS
CONTENTS
I WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME
II LIVIA AND JULIA
III THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA
IV TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA
V THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA
VI AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Livia, the Wife of Augustus, Superintending the Weaving of Robes for
her Family . . . _Frontispiece_
A Roman Marriage Custom
Eumachia, a Public Priestess of Ancient Rome
The Forum under the Caesars
The So-called Bust of Cicero
Julius Caesar
The Sister of M. Nonius Balbus
Livia, the Mother of Tiberius, in the Costume of a Priestess
The Young Augustus
The Emperor Augustus
A Silver Denarius of the Second Triumvirate
Silver Coin Bearing the Head of Julius Caesar
The Great Paris Cameo
Octavia, the Sister of Augustus
A Reception at Livia's Villa
Mark Antony
Antony and Cleopatra
Tiberius, Elder Son of Livia and Stepson of Augustus
Drusus, the Younger Brother of Tiberius
Statue of a Young Roman Woman
A Roman Girl of the Time of the Caesars
Costumes of Roman Men, Women, and Children in the Procession of a Peace
Festival
Bust of Tiberius in the Museo Nazionale, Naples
Types of Head-dresses Worn in the Time of the Women of the Caesars
A Roman Feast in the Time of the Caesars
Depositing the Ashes of a Member of the Imperial Family in a Roman
Columbarium
The Starving Livilla Refusing Food
Costume of a Chief Vestal (Virgo Vestalis Maxima)
Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins
Bust, Supposed to be of Antonia, Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia,
and Mother of Germanicus, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Caligula
A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters of
Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side and
Germanicus on the Other Side
A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter of
Agrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus
Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the
"Hague Cameo"
Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars
The Emperor Caligula
Claudius
The Emperor Claudius
Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius
The Philosopher Seneca
The Emperor Nero
Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero
Britannicus
Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome
Agrippina the Younger
The Emperor Nero
The Death of Agrippina
WOMEN OF THE CAESARS
I
WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME
"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper and
unfitting," wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives," "are
permitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed to
take his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that the
mistress of the house in any family does not enter the anterooms
frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:
there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is
related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house
which is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives are
admitted."
This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of
Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked
distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among
ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among
the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the
greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached
that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his
comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization
sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.
The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military
peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical régime of domestic servitude,
is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time
when the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under the
authority of man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of the
father, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that time
belongs to remote antiquity.
When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, and
especially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from a
few slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had already
acquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary for
social and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could at
that time choose between two different legal family régimes: marriage
with _manus_, the older form, in which all the goods of the wife passed
to the ownership of the husband, so that she could no longer possess
anything in her own name; or marriage without _manus_, in which only
the dower became the property of the husband, and the wife remained
mistress of all her other belongings and all that she might acquire.
Except in some cases, and for special reasons, in all the families of
the aristocracy, by common consent, marriages, during the last
centuries of the republic, were contracted in the later form; so that
at that time married women directly and openly had gained economic
independence.
During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions,
this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according to
ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian,
either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in
default of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertile
and subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the _tutor
optivus_, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter's
guardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian
or several, according to the business in hand, or even to change that
official as many times as she wished.
To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure,
if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the _tutor
cessicius_, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship.
However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the
unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one
limitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet even
this was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the
invention of the _tutor fiduciarius_. The woman, without contracting
matrimony, gave herself by _coemptio_ (purchase) into the _manus_ of a
person of her trust, on the agreement that the _coemptionator_ would
free her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.
[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the bride
entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]
There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal
condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost
complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social
equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundus
muliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig
ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never
willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them
the ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society
were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover,
the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and
Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as
desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor
yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the
comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We
know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not
only learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies,
these,--but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in
philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers
of the Orient.
Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on
equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves
that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received and
enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals
and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly
relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man,
recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In
short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable
prisoner.
She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was
never excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as
best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for
spectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and have
recourse directly to the magistrates. We have record of the assembling
and of demonstrations made by the richest women of Rome in the Forum
and other public places, to obtain laws and other provisions from the
magistrates, like that famous demonstration of women that Livy
describes as having occurred in the year 195 B.C., to secure the
abolition of the Oppian Law against luxury.
What more? We have good reason for holding that already under the
republic there existed at Rome a kind of woman's club, which called
itself _conventus matronarum_ and gathered together the dames of the
great families. Finally, it is certain that many times in critical
moments the government turned directly and officially to the great
ladies of Rome for help to overcome the dangers that menaced public
affairs, by collecting money, or imploring with solemn religious
ceremonies the favor of the gods.
One understands then, how at all times there were at Rome women much
interested in public affairs. The fortunes of the powerful families,
their glory, their dominance, their wealth, depended on the
vicissitudes of politics and of war. The heads of these families were
all statesmen, diplomats, warriors; the more intelligent and cultivated
the wife, and the fonder she was of her husband, the intenser the
absorption with which she must have followed the fortunes of politics,
domestic and foreign; for with these were bound up many family
interests, and often even the life of her husband.
[Illustration: Eumachia, a public priestess of ancient Rome.]
Was the Roman family, then, the reader will demand at this point, in
everything like the family of contemporary civilization? Have we
returned upon the long trail to the point reached by our far-away
forebears?
No. If there are resemblances between the modern family and the Roman,
there are also crucial differences. Although the Roman was disposed to
allow woman judicial and economic independence, a refined culture, and
that freedom without which it is impossible to enjoy life in dignified
and noble fashion, he was never ready to recognize in the way modern
civilization does more or less openly, as ultimate end and reason for
marriage, either the personal happiness of the contracting parties or
their common personal moral development in the unifying of their
characters and aspirations. The individualistic conception of
matrimony and of the family attained by our civilization was alien to
the Roman mind, which conceived of these from an essentially political
and social point of view. The purpose of marriage was, so to speak,
exterior to the pair. As untouched by any spark of the metaphysical
spirit as he was unyielding--at least in action--to every suggestion of
the philosophic; preoccupied only in enlarging and consolidating the
state of which he was master, the Roman aristocrat never regarded
matrimony and the family, just as he never regarded religion and law,
as other than instruments for political domination, as means for
increasing and establishing the power of every great family, and by
family affiliations to strengthen the association of the aristocracy,
already bound together by political interest.
For this reason, although the Roman conceded many privileges and
recognized many rights among women, he never went so far as to think
that a woman of great family could aspire to the right of choosing her
own husband. Custom, indeed, much restricted the young man also, at
least in a first marriage. The choice rested with the fathers, who
were accustomed to affiance their sons early, indeed when mere boys.
The heads of two friendly families would find themselves daily together
in the struggle of the Forum and the Comitia, or in the deliberations
of the Senate. Did the idea occur to both that their children, if
affianced then, at seven or eight years of age, might cement more
closely the union of the two families, then straightway the matter was
definitely arranged. The little girl was brought up with the idea that
some day, as soon as might be, she should marry that boy, just as for
two centuries in the famous houses of Catholic countries many of the
daughters were brought up in the expectation that one day they should
take the veil.
Every one held this Roman practice as reasonable, useful, equitable; to
no one did the idea occur that by it violence was done to the most
intimate sentiment of liberty and independence that a human being can
know. On the contrary, according to the common judgment, the
well-governing of the state was being wisely provided for, and these
alliances were destroying the seeds of discord that spontaneously
germinate in aristocracy and little by little destroy it, like those
plants sown by no man's hand, which thrive upon old walls and become
their ruin.
This is why one knows of every famous Roman personage how many wives he
had and of what family they were. The marriage of a Roman noble was a
political act, and noteworthy; because a youth, or even a mature man,
connecting himself with certain families, came to assume more or less
fully the political responsibilities in which, for one cause or
another, they were involved. This was particularly true in the last
centuries of the republic,--that is, beginning from the Gracchi,--when
for the various reasons which I have set forth in my "Greatness and
Decline of Rome," the Roman aristocracy divided into two inimical
parties, one of which attempted to rouse against the other the
interests, the ambitions, and the cupidity, of the middle and lower
classes. The two parties then sought to reinforce themselves by
matrimonial alliances, and these followed the ups and downs of the
political struggle that covered Rome with blood. Of this fact the
story of Julius Caesar is a most curious proof.
The prime reason for Julius Caesar's becoming the chief of the popular
party is to be found neither in his ambitions nor in his temperament,
and even less in his political opinions, but in his relationship to
Marius. An aunt of Caesar had married Caius Marius, the modest
bankrupt farmer of revenues, who, having entered politics, had become
the first general of his time, had been elected consul six times, and
had conquered Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutons. The self-made man
had become famous and rich, and in the face of an aristocracy proud of
its ancestors, had tried to ennoble his obscure origin by taking his
wife from an ancient and most noble, albeit impoverished and decayed,
patrician family.
But when there broke out the revolution in which Marius placed himself
at the head of the popular party, and the revolution was overcome by
Sulla, the old aristocracy, which had conquered with Sulla, did not
forgive the patrician family of the Julii for having connected itself
with that bitter foe, who had made so much mischief. Consequently,
during the period of the reaction, all its members were looked upon
askance, and were suspected and persecuted, among them young Caesar,
who was in no way responsible for the deeds of his uncle, since he was
only a lad during the war between Sulla and Marius.
This explains how it was that the first wife of Caesar, Cossutia, was
the daughter of a knight; that is, of a financier and revenue-farmer.
For a young man belonging to a family of ancient senatorial nobility,
this marriage was little short of a _mésalliance_; but Caesar had been
engaged to this girl when still a very young man, at the time when, the
alliance between Marius and the knights being still firm and strong,
the marriage of a rich knight's daughter would mean to the nephew of
Marius, not only a considerable fortune, but also the support of the
social class which at that moment was predominant. For reasons unknown
to us, Caesar soon repudiated Cossutia, and before the downfall of the
democratic party he was married to Cornelia, who was the daughter of
Cinna, the democratic consul and a most distinguished member of the
party of Marius. This second marriage, the causes of which must be
sought for in the political status of Caesar's family, was the cause of
his first political reverses. For Sulla tried to force Caesar to
repudiate Cornelia, and in consequence of his refusal, he came to be
considered an enemy by Sulla and his party and was treated accordingly.
[Illustration: The Forum under the Caesars.]
It is known that Cornelia died when still very young, after only a few
years of married life, and that Caesar's third marriage in the year 68
B.C., was quite different from his first and second, since the third
wife, Pompeia, belonged to one of the noblest families of the
conservative aristocracy--was, in fact, a niece of Sulla. How could
the nephew of Marius, who had escaped as by miracle the proscriptions
of Sulla, ever have married the latter's niece? Because in the dozen
years intervening between 80 and 68, the political situation had
gradually grown calmer, and a new air of conciliation had begun to blow
through the city, troubled by so much confusion, burying in oblivion
the bloodiest records of the civil war, calling into fresh life
admiration for Marius, that hero who had conquered the Cimbri and the
Teutons. In that moment, to be a nephew of Marius was no longer a
crime among any of the great families; for some, on the contrary, it
was coming to be the beginning of glory. But that situation was
short-lived. After a brief truce, the two parties again took up a
bitter war, and for his fourth wife Caesar chose Calpurnia, the
daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58, and a most
influential senator of the popular party.
Whoever studies the history of the influential personages of Caesar's
time, will find that their marriages follow the fortunes of the
political situation. Where a purely political reason was wanting,
there was the economic. A woman could aid powerfully a political
career in two ways: by ably administering the household and by
contributing to its expenses her dower or her personal fortune.
Although the Romans gave their daughters an education relatively
advanced, they never forgot to inculcate in them the idea that it was
the duty of a woman, especially if she was nobly born, to know all the
arts of good housewifery, and especially, as most important, spinning
and weaving. The reason for this lay in the fact that for the
aristocratic families, who were in possession of vast lands and many
flocks, it was easy to provide themselves from their own estates with
the wool necessary to clothe all their household, from masters to the
numerous retinue of slaves. If the _materfamilias_ knew sufficiently
well the arts of spinning and weaving to be able to organize in the
home a small "factory" of slaves engaged in such tasks, and knew how to
direct and survey them, to make them work with zeal and without theft,
she could provide the clothing for the whole household, thus saving the
heavy expense of buying the stuffs from a merchant--notable economy in
times when money was scarce and every family tried to make as little
use of it as possible. The _materfamilias_ held, then, in every home,
a prime industrial office, that of clothing the entire household, and
in proportion to her usefulness in this office was she able to aid or
injure the family.
More important still were the woman's dower and her personal fortune.
The Romans not only considered it perfectly honorable, sagacious, and
praiseworthy for a member of the political aristocracy to marry a rich
woman for her wealth, the better to maintain the luster of his rank, or
the more easily to fulfil his particular political and social duties,
but they also believed there could be no better luck or greater honor
for a rich woman than for this reason to marry a prominent man. They
exacted only that she be of respectable habits, and even in this regard
it appears that, during certain tumultuous periods, they sometimes shut
one eye.
Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quite
in ruin, owed his money to the bequest of a Greek woman whose wealth
had the most impure origin that the possessions of a woman can possibly
have. Is this tradition only the invention of the enemies of the
terrible dictator? In any event, how people of good standing felt in
this matter in normal times is shown by the life of Cicero.
Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable,
and well educated, but not rich. That he was able to pursue his
brilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to his
marriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he,
and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome. But it is well known
that after long living together happily enough, as far as can be
judged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46
B.C. ended by being divorced. The reasons for the divorce are not
exactly clear, but from Cicero's letters it appears that financial
motives and disputes were not wanting. It seems that during the civil
wars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent he
desired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulent
years she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertain
political fortune of her husband.
[Illustration: The so-called bust of Cicero. All but the head is
modern. Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the Palazzo
Barberini.]
Cicero's divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to the
gravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage. He
was the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia,
and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with this
seventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate the
great writer.
This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic,
prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the
Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of
the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even
Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and
combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state
those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times
literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated,
encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life,
should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the
great diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which
modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in
its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that
every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the
opposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal
attraction impels him--these are the supreme blossoms of modern
individualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in the
rich soil of modern civilization.
The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectual
development of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline that
poorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had to
impose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard and
barbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and the
majority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, have
conceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as a
duty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity of
the aged, and these have endeavored to promote the success of marriage
not merely to the satisfaction of a single passion, usually as brief as
it is ardent, but according to a calculated equilibrium of qualities,
tendencies, and material means.
The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variance
with human nature, but they are the principles to which all peoples
wishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion as
mobile as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when the
family was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because it
held within itself many functions, educational, industrial, and
political, now performed by other institutions. But reason itself is
not perfect. Like passion, it has its weakness, and marriage so
conceived by Rome produced grave inconveniences, which one must know in
order to understand the story, in many respects tragic, of the women of
the Caesars.
The first difficulty was the early age at which marriages took place
among the aristocracy. The boys were almost always married at from
eighteen to twenty; the girls, at from thirteen to fifteen. This
disadvantage is to be found in all society in which marriage is
arranged by the parents, because it would be next to impossible to
induce young people to yield to the will of their elders in an affair
in which the passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reach
the age when the passions are strongest and the will has become
independent Hardly out of childhood, the man and the woman are
naturally more tractable. On the other hand, it is easy to see how
many dangers threatened such youthful marriages in a society where
matrimony gave to the woman wide liberty, placing her in contact with
other men, opening to her the doors of theaters and public resorts,
leading her into the midst of all the temptations and illusions of life.
The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For the
very reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, the
Romans were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble;
indeed, even when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved to
the man the right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely because
that particular marriage did not suit his political interests. And the
marriage could be dissolved by the most expeditious means, without
formality--by a mere letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that love
might outweigh reason and calculation in the young, the law granted to
the father the right to give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law,
instead of leaving it to the son; so that the father was able to make
and unmake the marriages of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting,
without taking their will into account.
The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereign
equality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was,
notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection of
her husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that she
should close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth as
a bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say,
drive her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where her
children were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage.
So it was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics were
much perturbed and shifting, there were not a few women of the
aristocracy who had changed husbands three or four times, and that not
for lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because their
fathers, their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain moment
besought or constrained them to contract some particular marriage that
should serve their own political ends.
It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman from
austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how it
was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation,
to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her must
have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoys
today, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as personal
choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages are
nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or,
rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by which
it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man.
In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understand
the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desired
woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of the
family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead,
it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little
danger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for
the family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome
was unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it
did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total
self-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own
aspirations and passions, in behalf of the race.
[Illustration: Julius Caesar]
This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental
world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping her
ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought to
secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education,
religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste,
faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent
dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the
liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of
such liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.
It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of
solving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all
civilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest,
difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the
unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the
modern world. And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all,
in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing
to deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a régime of tyranny in
order to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yet
when liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy her
personal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does,
and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race.
She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises a
greater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthier
classes, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities
that bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys,
however vast his egoism, he is always constrained in a certain measure
to check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging,
and defending against rivals his social, economic, and political
situation.
But the woman? If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorized
to live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinion
that imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest,
weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches,
homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instincts
latent in every human being? She runs the mighty danger of changing
into an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courted
and possessed of power--at least as long as her beauty lasts--the more
she ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her own
pleasure.
This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by strong social
discipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesive
forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is
relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and
voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.
[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]
One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to
find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none
other than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profound
in the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for a
discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the
gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured
exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the
European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial
frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the
great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.
We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the
world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the
inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in
life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before
the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose
ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they
tempered their minds.
II
LIVIA AND JULIA
In the year 38 B.C. it suddenly became known at Rome that C. Julius
Caesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of the
triumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus in
the military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, had
sent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religious
authority of the state, a curious question. It was this: Might a
divorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriage
with another man before the birth of her child? The pontifical college
replied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriage
would not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be no
impediment. A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus had
divorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman of
nineteen. Livia's physical condition was precisely that concerning
which the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter into
this marriage she had obtained a divorce from Tiberius Claudius Nero.
The two divorces and the new marriage were concluded with unwonted
haste. The first husband of Livia, acting the part of a father, gave
her a dowry for her new alliance and was present at the wedding. Thus
Livia suddenly passed into the house of her new husband where, three
months later, she gave birth to a son, who was called Drusus Claudius
Nero. This child Octavianus immediately sent to the house of its
father.
To us, marriage customs of this sort seem brutal, shameless, and almost
ridiculous. We should infer that a woman who lent herself to such
barter and exchange must be a person of light manners and of immoral
inclinations. At Rome, however, no one would have been amazed at such
a marriage or at the procedure adopted, had it not been for the
extraordinary haste, which seemed to indicate that it was undesirable
or impossible to wait until Livia should have given birth to her child,
and which made it necessary to trouble the pontifical college for its
somewhat sophistical consent. For all were accustomed to seeing the
marriages of great personages made and unmade in this manner and on
such bases. Why, then, were these nuptials so precipitately concluded,
apparently with the consent of all concerned? Why did they all, Livia
and Octavianus not less than Tiberius Claudius Nero, seem so impatient
that everything should be settled with despatch?
[Illustration: Livia, the mother of Tiberius, in the costume of a
priestess.]
The legend which then formed about the family of Augustus, a legend
hostile at almost every point, has interpreted this marriage as a
tyrannical act, virtually an abduction, by the dissolute and perverse
triumvir. I, too, in my "Greatness and Decline of Rome" expressed my
belief that this haste, at least, was the effect not of political
motives but of a passionate love inspired in the young triumvir by the
very beautiful Livia. A longer reflection upon this episode has
persuaded me, however, that there is another manner, less poetic
perhaps, but more Roman, of explaining, at least in part, this famous
alliance, which was to have so great an importance in the history of
Rome.
To arrive at the motives of this marriage we must consider who was
Livia and who was Octavianus. Livia was a woman of great beauty, as
her portraits prove. But this was not all. She belonged also to two
of the most ancient and conspicuous families of the Roman nobility.
Her father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, was by birth a Claudius,
adopted by a Livius Drusus. He was descended from Appius the Blind,
the famous censor and perhaps the most illustrious personage of the
ancient republic. His grandfather, his great-grand-father, and his
great-great-grandfather had been consuls, and consuls and censors may
be found in the collateral branches of the family. A sister of his
grandfather had been the wife of Tiberius Gracchus; a cousin of his
father had married Lucullus, the great general. He came, therefore, of
one of the most ancient and glorious families. Not less noble was the
family of the Livii Drusi who had adopted him. It counted eight
consulships, two censorships, three triumphs, and one dictatorship.
Thus the father of Livia belonged by birth and adoption to two of those
ancient, aristocratic families which for a long time and even in the
midst of the most tremendous revolutions the people had venerated as
semi-divine and into whose story was interwoven the history of the
great republic. Nor had the first husband given to Livia been less
noble, for Tiberius Claudius Nero was descended like Livia from Appius
the Blind, though through another son of the great censor. In Livia
was concentrated the quintessence of the great Roman aristocracy: she
was at Rome what in London to-day the daughter of the Duke of
Westminster or the Duke of Bedford would be, and her noble rank
explains the rôle which her family had played during the Civil War. In
the great revolution which broke out after the death of Caesar, the
father of Livia in the year 43 had been proscribed by the triumvirs; he
had fought with Brutus and Cassius and had died by his own hand after
Philippi. In 40, after the Perusinian war and only two years before
Livia's marriage with Octavianus, Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia had
been forced to flee from Italy in fear of the vengeance of Octavianus.
Who on the other hand was Octavianus? A parvenu, with a nobility
altogether too recent! His grandfather was a rich usurer of Velitrae
(now Velletri), a financier and a man of affairs; it was only his
immediate father who succeeded by dint of the riches of the usurer
grandfather in entering the Roman nobility. He had married a sister of
Caesar and, though still young when he died, had become a senator and
pretor. Octavianus was, therefore, the descendant, as we should
express it in Europe to-day, of rich bourgeois recently ennobled.
Although by adopting him in his will Caesar had given him his name,
that of an ancient patrician family, the modest origin of Octavianus
and the trade of his grandfather were known to everybody. In a country
like Rome where, notwithstanding revolutions, the old nobility was
still highly venerated by the people and formed a closed caste, jealous
of its exclusive pride of ancestry, this obscurity of origin was a
handicap and a danger, especially when Octavianus had as colleagues
Antony and Lepidus, who could boast a much more ancient and illustrious
origin than his own.
We can readily explain, therefore, even without admitting that Livia
had aroused in him a violent passion, why the future Augustus should
have been so impatient to marry her in 38 B.C. The times were stormy
and uncertain; the youthful triumvir, whom a caprice of fortune had
raised to the head of a revolutionary dictatorship, was certainly the
weakest of the three colleagues, because of his youth, his slighter
experience, the feebler prestige among his soldiers, and, last of all,
the greater obscurity of his lineage. Antony, especially, who had
fought in so many wars, with Caesar and alone, who belonged to a family
of really ancient nobility, was much more popular than he among the
soldiers and had stronger relations with the great families. He was
therefore more powerful than Octavianus both in high places and in low.
A marriage with Livia meant much to the future Augustus. It would open
for him a door into the old aristocracy; it would draw him closer to
those families which, in spite of the revolution, were still so
influential and venerable; it would be the means of lessening the
hatred, contempt, and distrust in which these families held him. It
was for him what Napoleon's marriage with Marie Louise and the
consequent connection with the imperial family of Austria had been for
the former Corsican officer, become Emperor of the French. Since, now,
a lady who belonged to one of these great families was disposed to
marry him, it would have been foolish to put obstacles in the way; it
was necessary to act with despatch; time and fortune might change.
Such are the motives that may have induced Augustus to hasten the
nuptials. But what were the motives of Livia in accepting this
marriage, in such stormy times, when the fortunes of the future
Augustus were still so uncertain? A passage in Velleius Paterculus
would lead us to believe that he who devised this historic marriage was
none other than that same first husband of Livia, Tiberius Claudius
Nero himself! According to our ideas it is inconceivable; but not at
all strange according to the ideas of the Roman. It is probable that
Tiberius Claudius Nero, feeling that the triumph of the revolution was
now assured, had wished by this marriage to attach to the cause of the
old aristocracy the youngest of the three revolutionary leaders.
Already well along in years and infirm,--he was to die shortly
after,--Nero, who well knew the intelligence of his young wife, was
perhaps planning to place her in the house of the man in whom all saw
one of the future lords of Rome. Thus he would bind him to the
interests of the aristocracy. In the person of Livia there entered
into the house of Octavianus the old Roman nobility, which, defeated at
Philippi, was striving to reacquire through the prestige and the
cleverness of a woman what it had not been able to maintain by arms.
All her life long, with constancy, moderation, and wonderful tact,
Livia fulfilled her mission. She succeeded in resolving into the
admirable harmony of a long existence that contradiction between the
liberty conceded to her sex and the self-denial demanded of it by man
as a duty. She was assuredly one of the most perfect models of that
lady of high society whom the Romans in all the years of their long and
tempestuous history never ceased to admire. Even and serene,
completely mistress of herself and of her passions, endowed with a
robust will, she accommodated herself without difficulty to all the
sacrifices which her rank and situation imposed upon her. She changed
husbands without repugnance, though her marriage to Octavianus occurred
but five years after the proscriptions, while he was still red with the
blood of her family and friends. Likewise she renounced her two sons,
the future emperor Tiberius, who had been born before her second
marriage, as well as the one who had been born after. So too when, a
few years later, Tiberius Claudius Nero died, appointing Augustus their
guardian, with equal serenity she took them back and educated them with
the most careful motherly solicitude. To the second husband, whom
politics had given her, she was a faithful companion. Scandal imputed
to her absurd poisonings which she did not commit, and accused her of
insatiable ambitions and perfidious intrigues. No one ever dared
accuse her of infidelity to Augustus or of dissolute conduct. The
great fame, power, and wealth of her husband did not disturb the calm
poise of her spirit. In that palace of Augustus, adorned with
triumphal laurel, toward which the eyes of the subjects were turned
from every part of the empire, in that palace where, in little councils
with the most eminent men of the senate, were debated the supreme
interests of the world,--laws and elections, wars and peace,--she
preserved the beautiful traditions of simplicity and industry. These
she had learned as a child in the house of her father,--a house as much
more illustrious with inherited glory as it was poorer in wealth than
that which Victory had prepared for Augustus on the Palatine.
[Illustration: The young Augustus.]
We know--it is Suetonius who tells us--that this house on the Palatine
built by Augustus, in which Livia spent the larger part of her life,
was small and not at all luxurious. In it there was not a single piece
of marble nor a precious mosaic; for forty years Augustus slept in the
same bedchamber, and the furniture of the house was so simple that in
the second century of our era it was exhibited to the public as an
extraordinary curiosity. The imperial pair had several villas, at
Lanuvium, at Palestrina, at Tivoli, but all of them were unpretentious
and simple. Nor was there any more pomp and ceremony about the dinners
to which they invited the conspicuous personages of Rome, the
dignitaries of the state and the heads of the great families. Only on
very special occasions were six courses served; usually there were but
three. Moreover, Augustus never wore any other togas than those woven
by Livia; woven not indeed and altogether by Livia's hands,--though she
did not disdain, now and then, to work the loom,--but by her slaves and
freed-women. Faithful to the traditions of the aristocracy, Livia
counted it among her duties personally to direct the weaving-rooms
which were in the house. As she carefully parceled out the wool to the
slaves, watching over them lest they steal or waste it, and frequently
taking her place among them while they were at work, she felt that she
too contributed to the prosperity and the glory of the empire.