In 2 BC, the same year that Ovid’s The Art of Love was perhaps published, scandal surrounding Augustus’s daughter Julia could no longer be suppressed. The rumours had long built up and now the dam burst. Julia had sold her body for money, went the riveting chatter; she had had sex on the very public spot in the Forum from which her father had proposed his ‘moral’ legislation; and one of her many lovers from the glamorous, fast set of the aristocracy was none other than the son of Augustus’s old enemy, Mark Antony. The stories may have been no more than rumours seeded in a daughter’s rebellion against a father who had long used her as a political pawn. Nonetheless, they put Augustus in a deeply embarrassing situation. They threatened to undo all his hard work. Cracks were appearing in his pious imperial edifice.
The reaction of the first citizen was merciless. He went to the Senate, denounced his own daughter, damned her memory by having all sculptures of her destroyed, then sent her into exile on Pandeteria, an island off the western coast of Italy near Campania. Although she was granted permission to move to a nicer part of Italy, she spent the rest of her life in exile. Eventually, her income withheld, she died of malnutrition. For committing exactly the same kinds of ‘crime’, Julia’s daughter was also permanently banished in AD 8. Augustus’s unsentimental show of consistency between his ‘children’ in the Roman state and his own biological children was perhaps just another performance – one designed to put his family above suspicion. This is suggested by another rumour that was doing the rounds: Augustus, the newly entitled ‘Father of the Fatherland’, was said to have been regularly provided with young girls and respectable married women for his pleasure. He would strip them naked and ‘inspect them as if they were the wares of Torianus the slave dealer.’ And the supplier of these goods? His own wife, Livia Drusilla. The stories remained, however, just gossip. The public show of rectitude had to go on.
By the time Augustus died in AD 14 his sleight of hand was completed. The Roman people and the Roman Senate had witnessed the discreet replacement of the republic with a new system of rule by one man. At every step they were persuaded, mesmerized and, if necessary, bullied into accepting that a reassuring, comforting continuity between the two eras existed. Whatever Augustus’s intention may have been, be it the sinister deception of a tyrant or a genuine attempt by a statesman to return the state to a traditionally styled constitutional government, depends on one’s point of view. It was probably a bit of both. What is certain is that there was no grand master plan. In establishing the new regime Augustus improvised as he went along albeit with inventiveness, genius and cold, sometimes cruel calculation. If some in the political élite were violently dragged into the new age kicking and screaming, the Roman people knew full well who looked after their interests most powerfully. When, in 19 BC, Rome was hit first by a plague and then a grain shortage, it was not only the people who took to the streets begging the saviour Augustus to come to their aid and sort out the crisis; so too did the Senate, and even those in the political élite who hated Augustus. He had, quite simply, made himself indispensable.
On his deathbed Augustus called for a mirror and gave instructions to his attendants that ‘his hair should be combed and his drooping features rearranged’. Afterwards he asked the friends he had summoned whether, in the comedy of life, he had played his part well. Before then sending everyone away, he quoted the last lines of a comedy by Menander:
Since the play has been so good, clap your hands
And all of you dismiss us with applause.16
Soon after his death, Augustus was deified. His corpse was deposited in perhaps his most striking building – his own mausoleum. It was located in the Campus Martius, had been under construction for the last twenty years of his reign, and is still standing in part today. Some 40 metres (130 feet) high, the original monument was crowned with a colossal bronze statue of the first Roman emperor, his most explicit display of self-glorification. The ancient traveller and geographer Strabo considered it to be the one Roman monument most worth seeing.17
But it was a typically subtle piece of glorification. The design followed the humble circular shape of an ancient Etruscan burial mound, but its execution and its description as a ‘mausoleum’ elevated it to rival one of the Seven Wonders of the World – the tomb of the ancient Carian dynast Mausolus. It was one last flourish, one last clever artifice, one last bow. The age of emperors had begun in style. It had been created by a consummate performer. Under another performer, however, that age would reach its greatest crisis.
III
NERO
The mid-March evening at the fashionable pleasure resort of Baiae passed in gaiety and fun. One aristocratic lady had travelled by sedan chair from Antium, further north along the coast, to join a smart coterie of high-society guests. The event that brought them together was the festival of Minerva, the goddess of art and wisdom. After gazing at the beautiful, anchored ships from a waterside mansion and enjoying a lavish dinner, it was now time for the woman to return home. As the night was starlit and the sea flat, she chose to do this not by sedan chair but by boat. Despite the favourable conditions, however, that decision would prove near-fatal. For on board the garlanded ship a death trap had been devised. The deck had been carefully engineered with lead weights to cave in and crush the female guest reclining below. The woman for whom the trap was intended was Agrippina, the mother of Emperor Nero. The man who had set the trap was the emperor himself.
Agrippina suspected nothing. After all, Nero had spent the entire evening in her company in a studied spirit of reconciliation and filial love. As the emperor said his goodbyes on the shore, he spoke intimately, childishly with his mother. Lavishing attention on her, he gave her a long, lingering hug. Then Agrippina boarded the ship, went below deck and the boat set off. As soon as it was sufficiently far out at sea, however, a member of the rowing crew activated the device. To Agrippina’s horror, the wood in the deck above her head splintered violently, and suddenly the roof came crashing down. But as the weighted ceiling dropped, it stopped within centimetres of her: the sides of her couch had been high enough and strong enough to protect her from the full impact of the blow. Bewildered, she slowly extricated herself and looked around. One of her companions close by had been killed instantly. While Agrippina gathered her strength below, the crew above made a second attempt on her life by capsizing the boat. Now another companion came to Agrippina’s aid. Realizing what was afoot, the imperial freedwoman declared that it was she who was the emperor’s mother. The crew of the ship, unable to tell the difference in the dark, duly piled in and clubbed her to death with their oars. Meanwhile, as quietly as she could, Agrippina dived into the sea and slipped away.