According to Plutarch, Menodorus came to Sextus and spoke to him out of the hearing of his guests. “Shall I cut the cables and make you master not just of Sicily and Sardinia, but of the whole Roman empire?”
Sextus thought for a moment, and then burst out: “Menodorus, you should have acted, not spoken to me beforehand. Now we must be content with things as they are. I do not break my word.”
This famous anecdote has a suspiciously glib quality, yet it may be true, for it illustrates two facets of Sextus’ character. When he called himself Pius, “Dutiful” or “Honest,” the reference was primarily to his father’s memory, but it also indicated that he saw himself as a Roman of the old school, honorable and straightforward. In addition, the story points to a certain passivity that can be detected throughout his career, an absence of the killer instinct that marked out, in their different ways, Antony and Octavian.
On the following two days, Antony and then Octavian entertained Sextus, erecting dining tents on their sea platform. After this they left for their respective destinations—Octavian to Gaul, where there were disturbances; Antony to the east and the Parthians; Sextus back to Sicily. Most of the refugees in Sextus’ entourage said goodbye to him and left for Rome.
With the onset of autumn Octavian did something that, on the face of it, was out of character: for once letting his heart sway him, he fell passionately in love. The object of his affection was Livia Drusilla; about nineteen years old, she was intelligent and beautiful, although with a small mouth and chin. However, she suffered from one signal disadvantage: she was already married, to an aristocrat and cousin of hers, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Not only that, but she was heavily pregnant.
To add to the complications, Octavian’s wife, Scribonia, gave birth to her daughter, Julia, sometime in 39 B.C. Despite the happy event, the marriage—a political union if ever there was one—was not going well. As was pointed out earlier, Scribonia was substantially older than her husband; too, she was reputed to be a gravis femina, a dignified or serious woman. This did not much suit a young man with a reputation for copious adultery. On the very day that Julia arrived in the world, her father divorced her mother. “I couldn’t bear the way she nagged at me,” he explained.
In September—perhaps on his birthday, the twenty-third—Octavian conducted a rite of passage. He did not have a hairy body, and at twenty-four had still not found it necessary to shave: now the moment had come. Being prone to devise a ritual for almost every aspect of daily life, the Romans made a ceremony of their first shave—the depositio barbae, which in most cases took place about the time a boy came of age, usually at sixteen or seventeen.
Octavian made a great to-do over the ceremony, throwing a magnificent party and paying for a public festival. The event could be seen as a statement that, with the arrival of peace, the “boy who owed everything to his name” had attained his political as well as physical maturity. But it was whispered that his true motive was to please Livia.
Livia had an impeccable family background. While Octavian was unquestionably smitten, it is also true that marriage with her would give him a valuable connection to the Claudii, one of Rome’s most aristocratic clans. The triumvir’s father had reached the praetorship and so qualified as a nobilis. He himself had been enrolled as a patrician; however, he was still regarded as something of a provincial upstart. The union afforded Livia’s family access to her lover’s political power, in return for which she contributed her ancestry.
Livia Drusilla’s life, although short, had been full of incident. She was born on January 30, 59 or 58 B.C., probably at Rome. Not long after the Ides of March in 44 B.C., a husband was found for her. At fourteen or fifteen years old, Livia was approaching the upper limit of a girl’s customary marriageable age. Most marriages were arranged by the parents and love (“friendship gone mad”) was not expected to enter anybody’s calculations. A daughter was often a pawn in the alliances—social, economic, or political—that a great family struck to maintain its position in Roman public life. Husbands could be much older than their wives, and for the physically immature the wedding night must have been a savage introduction to sex.
Despite the potentially inauspicious opening to her married life, the Roman wife was a powerful figure in the household, being its domina, or mistress. Old forms of marriage in the early Republic, according to which she lived in complete subjection to her husband, the all-powerful paterfamilias, had given way by the third century B.C. to a new and freer arrangement by which the woman remained under her father’s authority and from the age of twenty-five held possession of her own property.
The man Livia married was Tiberius Claudius Nero, from another branch of the Claudian clan, the Claudii Nerones; he was probably in his mid- to late thirties. Of impeccable birth, he had great promise, but (as it turned out) poor judgment.
Tiberius took a stand against the First Triumvirate during the fifties B.C., but then, with the onset of the civil war in 49, turned his back on his optimate friends and sided with Julius Caesar. His services were recognized generously and Tiberius must have felt that fortune was smiling on him, but then on the Ides of March 44 B.C. the Caesarian regime came crashing down. Tiberius immediately returned to his old optimate allegiance. When the Senate voted for an amnesty for the assassins, he went an obsequious step further and supported a proposal to reward them.
In 42 B.C., Livia became pregnant. She was very anxious to have a boy, and to find out in advance what the sex of her child would be she took an egg from under a broody hen and kept it warm against her breast; also, she and her attendants held it in turn in their hands. In due course, she hatched a fine cock chick already with a comb. The prophecy was exact. On November 16, Livia gave birth to a son at the family home on the Palatine Hill at Rome. As was the Roman custom with first-born males, he was given his father’s praenomen, Tiberius.
After the defeat of the republican cause at Philippi, Tiberius agilely changed course again. He now became a supporter of Mark Antony; in that capacity, he was elected praetor for 41 B.C., the same year in which Antony’s brother, Lucius, was consul.
Although we have no idea what opinion Livia held of her husband, she demonstrated a personal quality he certainly did not share: a steady loyalty, even, or perhaps especially, when under pressure. When Tiberius, with his usual poor judgment, decided to follow Lucius Antonius’ star, Livia and the infant Tiberius went along with him to Perusia. The family endured the terrible privations of the siege, and after Perusia fell Tiberius was the only Roman officeholder in the city to refuse to capitulate.
He somehow managed to escape with mother and child; the family went on to Neapolis, where Tiberius tried to foment a slave revolt by promising them freedom. Octavian’s forces soon broke into the city and the family had to flee again. Following bypaths to avoid the soldiery and accompanied by only one or two attendants, including a nurse to carry Tiberius, they secretly made their way to the coast. The baby twice started crying and nearly gave them away. The family found a ship—it must have been arranged for in advance—and sailed to Sicily, where the elder Tiberius expected a welcome from Sextus Pompeius.
In fact, Sextus received him coolly and was slow to grant him an audience; doubtless he was considered something of an embarrassment. Soon he and Livia set off again, this time to Greece. But what to do now? Antony was no more interested than Sextus in having anything to do with this undependable nobleman. He sent Tiberius to Sparta, which had long been in the Claudian clientela. Here the family at last received a warm welcome. However, some unrecorded danger arose, and a hurried departure once more became necessary. According to Suetonius, Livia and the baby nearly lost their lives when, fleeing by night, they ran into a sudden forest fire and were encircled by it. In this mysterious incident, Livia’s hair caught fire and her dress was scorched.