Queens of the Ancient World by Ingrid de Haas

Author:Ingrid de Haas [de Haas, Ingrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

12 - Livia

In 27 BC, one hundred years of civil wars ended in Rome, but there was a herculean task ahead for Octavian (later Augustus) to rebuild the republic. This turned out to be impractical, and so a new era began: the era of the Roman empire. Augustus was greatly helped by his wife Livia but, as in the case of Agrippina and other educated women in a position to influence their husbands or sons, Livia has been slandered by ancient historians.

She has been called ambitious, so ambitious that she wanted to rule the Roman world herself. She was allegedly manipulative, domineering, and conniving. She has also been accused of murdering her step-grandchildren Gaius, Lucius, and Agrippa Postumus, her husband’s nephew Marcellus, and many others, including Augustus himself.

But some ancient historians did see the good side of Livia, and we know that she was intelligent, an excellent role model for elite Roman women (mothers and wives), unbelievably supportive of her husband, and beautiful to boot.

Never in Rome had there been a man more powerful than Augustus. And Livia became the most powerful woman up to that time, an empress in all but name, but it is unlikely that she wanted to get her hands on the throne and keep it for herself.

Livia Drusilla (sometimes called by the diminutive Livilla) was born sometime in the early 50s BC (probably 59 or 58) into one of the most ancient aristocratic families of Rome that had held an amazing number of magistracies. Among others, she was a direct descendant of Appius Claudius Caecus, who had been dictator and twice consul in the third century BC, and who had built the first aqueduct and the Appian Way. (She even had a mythological ancestor, Clausus, who, according to the Aeneid, had helped Aeneas get settled in Italy.) Livia would later become related by blood to four emperors: she was mother of Tiberius, grandmother of Claudius, great-grandmother of Caligula, and great-great-grandmother of Nero. Through marriage she was related to one more: Augustus.

Her life before Augustus had its ups and downs. Being raised as an aristocrat meant that she received a good education and knew much about politics, but when her father and her husband chose sides in the civil war against the young Octavian, and he was later victorious and began the proscriptions, she and her family had to flee Rome (in 40 BC), going first to Sicily and then to Greece (the proscriptions were public lists of citizens that allowed anyone to seize or kill them; their property was confiscated. During this proscription 300 senators and thousands of others lost their lives.)

She had been married young (43 BC) to her cousin Tiberius Claudius Nero. After amnesty was declared in 39 BC, she returned to Rome with her husband and son (Tiberius, born in 42). That same year, pregnant with her second son, Drusus, she met Augustus, and ancient historians want us to believe that it was love at first sight, never mind that they were both married to someone else at the time.

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