And perhaps more than Rome. In the fretful days and weeks that followed Caesar’s assassination, evidence of a seemingly cosmic doom was to be seen in the skies. The days began to darken. The sun was lost behind a bruised and violet gloom. Some, like Antony, believed that it was turning its gaze away in horror ‘from the foul wrong done to Caesar’.39 Others, more bleakly, dreaded retribution for the crimes of the entire age, and the onset of an eternal night. These anxieties intensified yet further when a comet was seen burning in the sky for seven days in a row.*5 What did it mean? Once again, there was a variety of opinions. Already, in the immediate wake of Caesar’s death, crowds of angry mourners had set up an altar to him in the Forum; and now, as the fiery star streaked across the sky, a conviction gathered weight that the soul of the slain Dictator was ascending to heaven, ‘there to be received among the spirits of the immortal gods’.40 Others, though, were unconvinced. Comets, after all, were baneful things. Readers of the future, practised in the interpretation of such wonders, had no doubt that a sign of fearful portent was being given. An age was passing, the world nearing its end. One soothsayer, warning that it was forbidden humanity to know the full scale of the horrors that were fast approaching, and that to reveal them would cost him his life, delivered his prognostications even so – and promptly dropped dead on the spot.
Meanwhile, in Rome, in legionary camps and in cities across the empire, hard men spoke fine words and methodically planned for war.
And wolves, in lofty cities, made the nights echo with their howls.
*
*1 Two historians, Marcus Octavius and Licinius Macer, claimed that the rapist had been the girl’s uncle, who then, ‘to conceal the result of his criminal action’, killed his niece, and handed her newborn twins over to the swineherd.
*2 Lictors did not carry the axe within the limits of Rome itself. This symbolised the right of citizens to appeal against capital convictions.
*3 The statue was originally of Alexander’s horse. Caesar had brought it to Rome from Greece, and replaced Alexander’s head with his own.
*4 Varro, the most learned of Roman scholars, explained that the she-wolf was to be identified with a goddess named Luperca. In Latin, ‘lupa pepercit’ meant ‘the she-wolf spared them’.
*5 No fewer than nine of the sources which mention this comet date it to the week of Caesar’s funeral games – which, if true, would immeasurably have added to its impact.
2
BACK TO THE FUTURE
A Tide in the Affairs of Men
Late one January, a decade and a half before the soul of the murdered Caesar blazed across the skies of Rome, a girl was born destined herself to become a god.1 Even in the womb, the immortals had been keeping careful watch over her. Pregnancy was a perilous business. Only supernatural oversight could guarantee success. Right from the moment of conception, the unborn child had been growing under the protection of a succession of deities. As she finally emerged into the world from her squatting mother, to be raised aloft by the midwife, washed clean of blood and then given her first taste of milk, various goddesses were still on hand to keep track of her progress: Levana, Rumina, Potina.*1
The gods, though, were no longer alone in deciding whether the infant would survive. ‘The ten long months of tedious waiting’2 endured by her mother were over – and now the girl had passed into the power of her father. A Roman was made, not born. A baby in its first week of life was a nameless, rightless thing, ‘more like a plant than a human being’ until the loss of her umbilical cord.3 Whether in that time she would be acknowledged or exposed and left to die was the decision of her father, and her father alone. No man in the world held quite such authority over his offspring as a Roman.*2 The absolute rule denied a consul was readily ceded by children to their father. A son might come of age, marry, win the utmost glory and honour, and yet still remain under the patria potestas, ‘paternal control’. A father’s power over his child was literally one of life and death. This did not mean, however, that it was widely exercised. Just the opposite. Absolute power was combined, in the Roman parenting ideal, with mercy, forbearance and devotion. ‘What father, after all, is in a rush to lop off his own limbs?’4 Even the disposal of an unwanted newborn, though perfectly legal, tended to be shrouded in secrecy. It spoke of poverty, or adultery, or perhaps deformity in the child. Invariably, it was a matter of shame.
There was to be no rejection that January, though. Eight days after the girl’s birth, at a ceremony which combined solemn rituals of purification with joyous partying, she was finally given a name: Livia Drusilla.*3 Her father could well afford to raise her. Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus boasted a name as distinguished as any in Rome. From his own father, a famously principled statesman who in his day had been the city’s foremost champion of the poor, he had inherited connections that spanned the whole of Italy.5 The name of ‘Livius Drusus’, in a time of upheaval and civil conflict, had considerable heft. It was not, though, the only one to which the infant Livia Drusilla was heir. In Rome, where the great game of dynastic competition was at least as much about forging alliances as foiling rivals, adoption was a widely practised tactic. It was considered perfectly legitimate for the son of a skilful politician to be adoptive rather than natural – and such a man was Drusus Claudianus. It was his last name that revealed as much. Legally the son of Livius Drusus though he had ended up, he had not abandoned the memory of the house into which he had been born. That he was called ‘Claudianus’ marked him out, not just as someone adopted, but as the scion of a family as celebrated and formidable as any in Rome.
The fame of the Claudians was as ancient as the Republic itself. Attius Clausus, the founder of the dynasty, had migrated to Rome from the Sabine hills a few miles to the north of the city a mere five years after the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud. Less than a decade later he had become consul. From that moment on, the Claudians had never ceased to dominate the magistrate lists of the Republic. Staggeringly, they had even managed to secure five dictatorships. The name of the most celebrated Claudian of them all, an iron-willed innovator and reformer by the name of Appius Claudius ‘the Blind’, was stamped across the very plains and valleys of Italy. In 312 BC, at a time when the Republic was looking to secure its still precarious control of the peninsula, he had ordered the building of a mighty road southwards from Rome. Known as the Via Appia, this was ultimately extended as far as Brundisium, the great port on the heel of Italy which served as the gateway to the East. Such a feat of engineering, the mooring which bound Rome to her wealthiest provinces, was precisely the kind of accomplishment which best illustrated, in the opinion of foreign observers, ‘the greatness of her empire’.6 Who were the Claudians to disagree?