Livia’s reputation for murderous scheming, once acquired, proved impossible to expunge. This was partly because in the ancient world (as in the magical world of the fairy tale) stepmothers were expected to behave badly. The great Greek tragedian Aeschylus described a reef in the sea as a “stepmother to ships.” Women, living as they did in a male-dominated society, must have felt that they could only protect their futures by advancing their sons’ interests. Enough of them lived up to the stereotype, persecuting the children of their husband’s first marriage, that fathers sometimes had their children adopted and brought up in another family.
Although Augustus never formally adopted Marcellus, he had treated him as an honorary son, so Livia found herself cast as a stepmother, with all the ugly connotations that that status entailed. There is no evidence that she acted in any way improperly, although it is legitimate to assume that she would do her best for her own boys. Augustus and Octavia were kind to children to whom they were not related by blood—notably, Antony’s offspring by Fulvia and Cleopatra; it is hard to imagine them failing to notice and correct any cruelty on Livia’s part.
The accusations against Livia need to be set in the context of the Romans’ exaggerated fear of death by poisoning. It was, for example, widely and probably inaccurately rumored that poison had been sprinkled on Pansa’s wound after the fighting at Mutina in 43 B.C., and that this had either been arranged by the then Octavian, or at least been done in his interest. Cicero’s speeches as a criminal lawyer reveal a high incidence of reported poisoning cases.
Surprising deaths were likely to have been from undiagnosed natural causes. Poison scares often coincided with plagues, and there are well-attested cases of food poisoning, especially from contaminated fish. The practice of boiling down wine in lead pans to create a cooking sauce will have led to many illnesses and premature deaths. Some years later a close friend of Augustus, Nonius Asprenas, gave a party after which 130 guests fell ill and died, presumably from food poisoning. Asprenas was taken to court for murder, but (after a show of support by the princeps) was acquitted.
There was little that Livia could do in the face of this anonymous gossip. A woman had no locus as a public figure and was obliged to suffer slander in silence.
XVIII
EXERCISING POWER
23–17 B.C.
Travel was slow and often dangerous; weeks might pass before the princeps learned of a serious development on the Parthian frontier, months before any substantial reaction could be implemented. The pace of communications also slowed the analysis of complex problems. Important branches of knowledge—geography, for example, and economics—were in their infancy, so there were insufficient reliable and accessible data on which to base policy decisions. From a modern perspective, events took place in slow motion and in a fog.
Augustus and Agrippa took the business of empire seriously, realizing that it would be difficult to achieve anything without being on the spot themselves. Both men spent years away from Rome, traveling from province to province. Sometimes they exchanged places, one of them picking up where the other left off.
For some years after the settlement after Actium, the eastern provinces were largely left to their own devices. In 26 B.C., there was an unsuccessful Roman expedition to Arabia Felix (the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula, today’s Yemen), probably aimed at opening up a trade route; in the following year, Galatia (in central Anatolia) was annexed as a province.
When the princeps sent Agrippa to the east in 23 B.C., we do not know exactly what his mission was. He made the island of Samos his headquarters and it can be assumed that his presence was intended to be a reminder of Roman power. It is possible that he also had an important unpublicized task—to gain intelligence on the Parthians. It would be useful to settle the unfinished business of the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 B.C., and, in particular, to negotiate the return of the army standards that the Parthians had captured (as well as those lost in 36 B.C. by Antony). The princeps was not interested in resuming hostilities and hoped for a long-term entente.
He intended either to join Agrippa or to take over from him, but was detained by trouble in Rome. The river Tiber overflowed its banks and flooded the city. The plague of the previous year continued throughout Italy and farmers stopped tilling the fields. Food shortages followed. The panic-stricken and angry mob did not trust old-style republican politicians to govern effectively and called for Augustus to be appointed dictator. It besieged the Senate House and threatened to burn it down with the senators inside it if they did not vote for the appointment.
The episode showed how fragile the princeps’ underlying position was. The careful balance between autocracy and a restoration of the Senate’s authority had been designed to reconcile the ruling class to the Augustan order. However, it irritated the people—that is, the hundreds of thousands of citizens who lived in or near Rome. They wanted to see Augustus seize absolute power openly and unambiguously.
Not only would it have been unwise to listen to such calls, it would have been illegal, for Mark Antony had abolished the dictatorship in 44, shortly after the Ides of March. Any attempt to restore the post would infuriate mainstream senatorial opinion. Augustus made it clear that he would do no such thing.
When facing disgrace a Roman would tear his clothes in public, and this was what the princeps did to dramatize his refusal to be moved. He went up to the crowd, bared his throat, and swore that he would rather be stabbed to death by its daggers than accept the appointment. Instead, he had himself made commissioner for the grain supply, rapidly put an end to the food shortages, and arranged for the annual appointment of two former praetors to supervise the distribution of grain in the future. Although, so far as we know, Augustus did not reform the system of production and distribution, he did his best to ensure that shortfalls were quickly made good and he used his own financial resources to alleviate famine.
At long last in the autumn of 22, Augustus, probably taking Livia with him, set out on a leisurely journey eastward. His first stop was Sicily. News came from Rome of more unrest among the people, who had elected only a single consul in the hope that Augustus would occupy the vacancy. This he refused to do, but recalled Agrippa to return from the east and restore order at Rome. It was now, in 21 B.C., that, in a further sign of his growing authority, Agrippa married the eighteen-year-old Julia despite her father’s absence.
Agrippa then moved on to his next assignment in Gaul and Spain. He campaigned in Aquitania and elsewhere; he also encouraged the building of Roman-style cities and networks of roads. He then went to northern Spain, where he resumed Augustus’ not entirely successful war of pacification. In 19 B.C., he finally subdued the unruly tribes whom the unmilitary princeps had found it so hard to defeat a few years before.
In the meantime, Augustus devoted time and attention to adjusting the boundaries and rulers of the smaller client kingdoms along the empire’s eastern frontier; but his real aim was to do a deal with King Frahâta of Parthia. His tactic was to run a diplomatic campaign alongside the threat of a military one. A pretender to the Parthian throne had kidnapped one of Frahâta’s sons and escaped with him to Rome. Augustus had sent the boy back to his father on condition that all the Roman standards and any surviving prisoners-of-war were returned. He now invited Frahâta to live up to his side of the bargain.