Part 14

Judging by what we know of her, no age has produced a more beautiful character than that of Octavia. In her were exemplified the fairest of those qualities which are especially inculcated by the principles of Christianity. Goodness, long-suffering, forbearance, and gentleness: these were exhibited in her life to a degree which after ages refused to believe possible under paganism; which goes to show that the idea that the noblest graces of character could not ripen previous to the present era is an unwarranted assumption. It arises from the fact that in the accounts we have of the ancient world there is more said of the exercise and the consequences of violent passions and human depravity than there is of pure love and kindly forbearance; but this may be accounted for by the well-attested axiom that peaceful lives furnish no history. If Octavia, living in the very centre of all the varied influences which fomented around the Palatine Hill, could maintain a pure and noble character, we may be very sure that the women who followed her example in the humbler walks of life were not so few as the Pagan satirists and the Christian apologists combine in leading us to suppose. There is no record of Octavia's having taken part in any of those activities by which Livia and other feminine members of the Cæsarian household endeavored to affect the course of political events. When all hope of there being any male issue of Augustus to inherit his rule was abandoned, the chance that Octavia's son by her first husband would be the next emperor seemed to become a certainty. Of her bereavement in his death we will speak later on. As the women with which this chapter deals were all of one family, and consequently were at home under the same roof, and, moreover, as the art of building had at this time attained its perfection at Rome, it will enable us to form a better picture of the life of these women if we see them in the house, their peculiar sphere.

About the time that Augustus married Livia, he built for himself a new residence. The Domus Augustana was erected on the Palatine Hill, and from the fact that this site was adopted for the imperial abode the magnificent structures reared upon it were called palaces; thus a word of differentiation was provided for the dwelling houses of the rulers. Livia's palace was not a large building, judging from what was considered necessary at a time when rich families were served by hundreds of slaves; but Livia was married to a man who was quite willing to have others of a lower rank outstrip him in extravagant living, so long as he had the power to decide whether or not it were best for the interests of the State that they be allowed to live at all; and as the Augusta had some influence in these decisions, she may have been able contentedly to visit the wife of Mæcenas, who lived in a house of far greater magnificence than her own. As the better class of Roman abodes were all constructed after the same general plan, it is not difficult, in imagination, out of the materials of information which we possess, to reërect upon its ruins, which still exist, the Domus Augustana.

The portico which adorned the outside extended the whole length of the front of the house, and possibly around the sides. It was a colonnade of native travertine--some of the later occupants of the imperial throne were hardly satisfied with the costliest marble. The vestibule was a large apartment, which was always freely open to clients and callers. The _Salve_ inscribed or worked in mosaic upon the threshold of the outer door expressed the generous hospitality which characterized all Roman dwellings of that time. From the vestibule another door led to the _atrium_, the most important room in the house. It was large, and decorated with all the splendor which the wealth of the owner could warrant, and with such beauty as his taste might dictate. It was roofed, with the exception of an opening in the centre, called the _compluvium_, through which was admitted the rain water into a cistern in the floor. In the early times the _atrium_ was the common room of the family, and in it were carried on the domestic occupations presided over by the mistress of the house, but in the days of Livia it was the audience chamber of the owner. The walls of this apartment were highly decorated with landscape paintings, or else lined with beautiful marbles. Some of the paintings which covered the walls of the Domus Augustana have been preserved, and in the great spaces through which they were seen their brilliant colors must have been very effective.

Opening from the _atrium_ was the _tablinum_; here were the family archives, the statues, pictures, and other ancestral relics. Around these great apartments ware smaller chambers, which were commonly used for the lodging of guests, though it is probable that Livia's establishment included a house set apart for this purpose. Behind the apartments we have described, and reached through _fauces_, or narrow passages, was the real interior and private portion of the palace. First there came the peristyle. This was a large, oblong court, open to the sky in the middle and surrounded by a colonnade of polished marble pillars. The centre of this court was filled with shrubs and flowers, grown in great boxes of earth; and the beauty and comfort of this charming "drawing room" were enhanced by the cool fountains of water with which Rome was so bountifully supplied. Here was Livia's forum. Here was the fitting stage where she displayed those gifts of mind and graces of person which never lost their potent influence with her husband and gave her title of Augusta a real political significance.

Opening from the peristyle was the _triclinium_, or dining hall. It was here that the extravagance of the Romans was especially exhibited. In _La Palais de Scaurus_, by Mazois, there is a pen picture of a _triclinium_, every detail of which is authenticated by ancient authorities. It reveals a luxury and a disregard of expense to which our day furnishes no parallel. But the banquet hall of the Augustan house was not equipped in so costly a fashion; there was still cherished some remembrance of the ancient Sabine simplicity.

In addition to the apartments mentioned, there were spacious halls and salons used for such purpose as that of a picture gallery or a library. The bed chambers were usually placed between the outer walls of the house and the more important rooms; the only remarkable features about them were their smallness and inconvenience. There was an upper story, which was used principally for sleeping apartments, and probably there were no windows opening to the street except on this second floor. The rear part of the house was given up to the kitchen, the bakery, and the mill for grinding flour. Above all, in a literal and also commendatory sense of the word, was the solarium. This was a delightful retreat on the roof, furnished with plants, flowers, and fountains.

It was to such an abode as this that Livia came, and there brought her influence to bear on one of the most brilliant epochs of the world's history. After her repudiation by Antony, Octavia and her children also came to reside at the Domus Augustana; and there lived also the little Julia, the daughter of Scribonia and Octavius.

How early in her career Livia commenced laying her plans for the succession of her son to the imperial rule, we do not know; nor is there any certainty as to the extent of her culpability in carrying them out. It is most likely that her hope that she might bear a son to Augustus who would have an indisputable claim to the heritage allowed her at first to view with complacency the already existing putative but more removed successors. Time wore on, and her expectations failed of realization. Her sons, Tiberius and Drusus, were growing up, and both were manifesting those qualities which showed them worthy of taking the reins of government. The habit of exercising an influence in the affairs of State, through the confidence placed in her by her husband, made the prospect of having to relinquish that power, in the event of the death of Augustus, constantly more intolerable; but the woman who was called "a female Ulysses" was likely to win her way.

Julia, though the only child born in the purple, might not inherit the imperial sceptre, being a woman. But Octavia had a son of her first marriage, named Marcellus, of whom Augustus was especially fond. While he was but a youth of seventeen, Julia, then fourteen years old, was given to him in marriage; and thus it was hoped the succession would be continued by means of the union of the daughter and the nephew of the emperor. These anticipations were doomed to disappointment, as Marcellus died shortly after the marriage. One historian, Dion Cassius, informs us that it was whispered about that Livia was responsible for the death of Julia's husband, being jealous because Cæsar heaped upon him favors which were denied to her own sons; but, while relating this, the historian claims that it was a groundless accusation. However, we have it on the authority of so trustworthy a witness as Seneca that Octavia, in this sad bereavement, for once was unworthy of herself. He says that "she turned to hate all mothers, and the angry passion of her sorrow was directed principally against Livia, because that now the hope and prospects that had belonged to her own son were transferred to the son of Livia." Such unreasoning grief in this otherwise noble woman was a mark of common human frailty; but it does not present so pleasing a picture as that memorable scene in which Virgil, at the command of Augustus, read before Octavia the sixth book of his Æneid, in which he has commemorated Marcellus. Grief-stricken and dejected as she was, Octavia probably gave but little attention to the opening lines; but her interest was aroused as the poet proceeded to describe Æneas's visit to the under world, where dwelt those who had been dearest to her, and whither she knew herself to be rapidly tending. When she heard the lines--

"This youth, the blissful vision of a day, Shall just be shown on earth, then snatched away,"

she was startled by the description of her own son, and, hiding her face, she burst into tears; and when the poet uttered the words "_Tu Marcellus eris_," which he had wisely withheld to the end of the passage, she could endure no more and swooned because of the intensity of her sorrowful emotion. The information that she ordered Virgil to be presented with ten thousand sesterces for every line of the passage relating to her son is interesting, but does not add particularly to the beauty of the scene. Shortly after this, occurred her death. Augustus caused certain public buildings which he was at this time erecting to be dedicated in honor of his sister.

Now that Julia was married, she was freed to some extent from that severe discipline in which Augustus deemed it necessary to bring up the girls of his family. Her training had been very strict. She had even been obliged, at a time when other girls of far inferior birth were perfecting themselves in more fashionable accomplishments, to assist her aunt and her stepmother in spinning wool for her father's clothes. She was denied any freedom of intercourse with the youths of her own age. Augustus once wrote to a young nobleman: "You have not behaved with proper respect in paying a visit to my daughter at Baiæ." But natural inclination, always stronger than discipline in determining the direction of a moral career, led Julia into evil courses. For many years, however, her father saw nothing less innocent in her conduct than that wit and gayety of spirit which he easily condoned. She well knew how to turn the edge of the mild rebukes of a fond parent. On one occasion, seeing her surrounded at a public exhibition by a number of the young fashionables of the city, and noticing that she did not maintain that dignity of deportment which he thought becoming in the daughter of an emperor, Augustus wrote her a letter expressing his displeasure and holding up before her the example of Livia, who encouraged in her company none but "grave and reverend signiors." Julia had a ready reply; this was the note scribbled on a tablet and sent back to her father: "These young men will also have become old fogies by the time I am an old woman." One day, later in her life, her father found a slave engaged in plucking the gray hairs from his daughter's head. This operation suddenly ceased on his entrance, and he feigned not to have noticed it. Then he asked abruptly: "Julia, which would you rather be--gray or bald?" "Why, father, gray, of course," "You little liar," replied Augustus, "see here," and he held up some of the gray hairs which had fallen on her dressing gown.

Shortly after the death of Marcellus, Julia was again married, this time to the great warrior Agrippa, the staunch friend of her father. This also was distinctly a political marriage. Julia was eighteen, Agrippa was forty-two, while at the time of betrothal he was already wedded to Marcella, the daughter of Octavia. The usual divorce severed these bonds, and Marcella was given to Antonius, the son of the triumvir. Both Octavia and Scribonia were desirous of this matrimonial readjustment. They probably saw that Julia needed a firm disciplinarian like Agrippa to keep the questionable proclivities of her character from attaining too exuberant a freedom. It is also likely that they hoped that this union would result in heirs who would frustrate the expectations of Livia and her sons. But to their check thus played, Livia, in due time, answered with a decisive mate. To Julia and Agrippa there were born three sons and one daughter, named respectively Lucius, Caius, Agrippa Posthumus, and Julia. Thus Tacitus relates the dénouement: "Augustus had adopted Lucius and Caius into the Cæsarian family; and although they had not yet laid aside the puerile garment, his ambition was strong to see them declared princes of the Roman youth, and even mentioned for the consulship; at the same time, he affected to decline these honors for them. Upon the death of Agrippa, they were cut off, either by a decease premature but natural, or by the arts of their stepmother Livia: Lucius on his journey to the armies in Spain, Caius on his return from Armenia, ill of a wound. And as Drusus had been long since dead, Tiberius Nero was the only surviving stepson. On him every honor was accumulated, he was adopted by Augustus as his son and a colleague in the Empire ... and this was brought about, not by the secret machinations of his mother, as heretofore, but at her open suit. For over Augustus, now aged, she had obtained such absolute sway that he had banished his only surviving grandson, Agrippa Posthumus, a person of clownish brutality, with great bodily strength, but convicted of no heinous offence."

Julia had by this time worked out her own condemnation. Those stories of her flagrant misconduct which for years had been part of the common gossip of the baths and porticoes of the city at last reached the ears of her father. He tried not to believe them. Gazing fondly upon his only child, he said; "Just like her I am sure that Claudia must have looked, of whom our forefathers told that she was slandered. But she proved her innocence." Those to whom he said this listened respectfully; but behind his back they sneered. After Agrippa's death, Julia had made another political marriage. Tiberius had been compelled to put away his wife, Vipsania, the daughter of Agrippa, whom he dearly loved,--she was probably the only human being for whom this morose man ever had any real affection,--and was forced, much against his will, to replace her by Agrippa's widow. Tiberius knew Julia as her father did not; and, rather than live with her, he betook himself to a voluntary exile in Rhodes. By thus doing, he seemed to frustrate all his mother's plans for his advancement; but she, with deadly persistency, determined that there should be in Cæsar's family no other candidate for the imperial position, which must soon be vacated. There is some hint of Julia's misdoings coming to light through the discovery of a plot, in which Livia had no part, to shorten the emperor's days; but there is no proof, nor does it seem probable, that Julia was a conspirator against her father's life. She was probably the tool of others. Augustus, however, was constrained to institute an investigation, which revealed to him all the turpitude of his daughter's conduct; she was banished to an island in the Bay of Naples, and there strictly guarded until the day of her death.

The case of Julia gives no occasion for pity, except for the gray-haired old man who had lost by death all those upon whom he had rested his ambitious hopes for the future of his house. None were left save Livia,--probably Augustus himself never for a moment entertained a suspicion that his wife was the cause of his misfortunes,--Tiberius, whom he never loved, and this woman, whom he wished had died in her infancy. And yet the edge is taken from any sympathy one might have for Augustus, when it is remembered that, notwithstanding his stern demand for chastity on the part of the women of his own family and all of noble birth, his own conduct, if Suetonius reports truthfully, was no better than that of his daughter. But to condemn licentiousness in their women and to practise it themselves did not seem to the men of Rome to be either illogical or inconsistent.

Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman's influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman--and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application--there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician's own personal interests or those of some male favorite. And women could never have favorites outside their own families with safety to their honor. Whenever women have sought high favors either from men or for men, their personal charms have ever been their principal argument and illicit love their chief inducement.

One of the most radical of the early changes made in the Roman constitution was brought about by the piqued vanity of a woman. Fabius Ambustus, a man of power and renown in the ancient Republic, had two daughters. One of them was married to a patrician named Sulpicius, while the other was espoused to Stolo, a plebeian tribune. This office was the highest to which at the time a man of plebeian birth could lawfully aspire. One day the wife of Stolo, being at her sister's house, was startled by the sound of the lictor's staff at the door--a mode of announcement to which plebeian ears were unaccustomed. Being laughed at by Sulpicia, she went to her own home in high dudgeon, and henceforth neither Fabius Ambustus nor Stolo could gain any relief from her complaints until they had brought it to pass that the Senate consented to the conferring of magisterial office upon plebeians, with the consequence that her husband also might be attended by a lictor with his axe and rods. The story is important because it illustrates the greater portion of the Roman woman's interest in politics.

Livia was now the sole woman of influence in the imperial palace. Scribonia had voluntarily accompanied her daughter into exile; and the daughter of Julia, who had inherited both her mother's name and her failings, was banished from the city. It was not difficult now for Livia to secure the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus as his son and also as his heir. This, however, was not done without causing some misgivings in the minds of the Romans, who, as Tacitus says, feared to be under bondage to a woman "with the ungovernable spirit peculiar to her sex."

On the nineteenth of August, A.D. 14, Livia and the intimate friends of Augustus were gathered around the emperor's deathbed. "Tell me," said the great emperor, "have I played well my part?" Posterity has never questioned the nature or the truth of their answer. Then he said: "Let all applaud and clap their hands." His last words, which throw more light on the character of this great woman than all the good and bad that is said of her, were: "Livia! live mindful of our union; and now, farewell."

The Augusta had sent urgent messengers to recall her son; and she caused the people to be kept in ignorance of the true condition of her husband until the news of his death and of the succession of Tiberius could be announced at the same time. But, although she had labored so persistently, and, if the historians are correct, so unscrupulously, for the accession of her son, with the death of Augustus, Livia's power also came to an end. Tiberius was impatient of any female interference, even that of his mother. She was made priestess of the deified Augustus; but Tiberius declared that public honors should be adjudged to women with extreme moderation, and he refused to allow a lictor to be appointed for her service. Still, after a fashion of his own, he treated her with the greatest respect until the day of her death; and he always allowed her politic counsels to have considerable weight in his decisions, well aware that no one else would so jealously guard his interests.

There is one incident which redounds to the credit of Tiberius, whose sadly damaged reputation needs everything that can be said in his favor, and which is worth noticing because it not only illustrates his manner of dealing with the imperious Augusta, but also indicates the kind of purposes for which the political power of influential women was exercised. Livia, presuming on her position, demanded that Piso should be punished for insulting her by suing Urgulania, one of her favorites, for the payment of money which was clearly due to him. Tiberius refused so unjust a request, but gave his mother to understand that no less a person than himself would plead her cause before the judges. He fulfilled his word by loitering so long on his way to the court that by the time he reached it the judges had awarded the claimant his right, so that the empress found no way open by which she could save her friend except by paying the money herself.

Livia's old age was embittered to herself, and still more discredited with many of her contemporaries, by a new phase of the old feud which had for so long rent the imperial family. Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, had been married to Germanicus, the son of Antonia and the elder Drusus. In the wedded life of these two was exemplified an excellence of conjugal union that was almost perfect. Germanicus was a brave and able soldier and a man whose moral character was far superior to the standard of his time. Agrippina was a woman whose purity of life was worthy of the principles which guided the matrons of the ancient Republic, but whose disposition would not permit her to relinquish any privilege which was open to the women of the new times and warranted by her position.