Livia Drusilla: Wife of Augustus

After flicking through the Year 7 textbooks on Ancient Rome and sadly finding them quite devoid of women, I decided to go hunting for an influential woman from the time period. I stumbled upon Livia Drusilla and chose to research her, not because she was the influential wife of the first Emperor of Rome, but because I used to love Buffy the Vampire Slayer and there was a character in the series called Drusilla. Anyway, Livia Drusilla also had a son called Tiberius which is a Star Trek reference, for those nerdy enough to know Captain Kirk’s middle name. Sometimes our introduction to a person from history may be quite random, but I can tell you, that I am so glad that I discovered the story of this incredible woman from Ancient Rome; Livia Drusilla.

Because she was a woman in ancient times, of course, the record of her birth is not one that made the history books, but to find out when she was born, we have to count back the years from when she died. She lived to the ripe old age of 86, so she was probably born in either 59 or 58 BCE.

Now things can get a bit confusing when studying Ancient Rome as key figures often like to change their names. For example, Livia’s second husband, the one that became the first Emperor of Rome, his original name was Gaius Octavius – also known as Octavian—but when he became emperor, he changed his name to Caesar Augustus.  You might have heard of his uncle Julius Caesar, the one that got stabbed 23 times by a bunch of senators. To avoid confusion, I am just going to call him Augustus from here on in.

Marriage in Ancient Rome, especially in the upper echelons of society, was often not particularly romantic. Often the girls were very young and were married off to older men to create political and family alliances. And divorce was quite accepted. By the time Augustus met Livia, he had already been married 2 times. In fact, he was still married to his second wife at their time of their meeting. Livia was also married when they met and she was pregnant with her second son when they divorced their previous partners and decided to get married. Scandalous!

Now even though women were able to socialise and some may have had influence over their husband, women were not permitted to be senators or hold political positions, they could not vote, nor hold positions in the military and they had no rights over their own children. This is why, for a woman to wield any kind of influence in society, she needed to have a measure of influence over her husband. Women rarely even got to have any statues of themselves put up around the city in ancient Rome. I would like to say that things have changed, but in the interests of addressing the historical concept of continuity, not much has changed. In 2022, less than 5% of the statues that exist in Australia are of women. So, by that logic, in 2000 years, the female representation in statues has improved 5%. If we keep going at this rate it should only take up 20 000 years to get statue equality.

Now, because both Augustus and Livia had been married before, they both brought step children to their marriage. Augustus had a daughter called Julia and Livia had her two sons Tiberius and Nero. Although, Livia was only 20 when they were married, and they stayed together until Augustus died 52 years later, but they never had any children together. And this created issues for Livia’s reputation.

Unless you have been living under a pop-culture rock, you have probably heard of the trope of the wicked step-mother. Think Snow White, Cinderella, Tangled, and Hansel and Gretel to name a few. As a step-mother myself, I do take issue with the stereotype because I am sure there are many wise, kind and caring step mothers out there. But these stereotypes did not start with the fairy tales of Brothers Grimm, in fact the star of our episode, Livia Drusilla, was one of the original step-mothers to be branded with this label. So, let’s find out who the perpetrator of these wicked rumours was and what grounds he had for spreading such vitriol.

The reason we know so much about Livia Drusilla, a woman from almost 2000 years ago, is not just because she appears on some ancient Roman coins and was lucky enough to be immortalised in more than 80 statues, but there were about five historians from Ancient Rome who mention her. Two of them were alive at the same time as she was and three of them were not even born until after she died, but presumably, when writing, they did have access to primary sources that no longer exist.

Two of the historians who wrote about her after her death were a historian called Tacitus, and another called Cassius Dio. Let’s just get the chronology straight, Livia died in the year 29 CE, and our historian friend, Tacitus, was not born until 56 and Cassius Dio was not born until at least 130-ish years later, so I am going into this with a slight question mark over the reliability of their information. So, if you’ve got some men telling the story 150 years later maybe their information is not quite accurate. 

There were two sides to Livia that were presented by these historians. On the one hand Tacitus calls her “a selfish, overbearing mother and wife whose influence was resented by the Roman people” and on the other hand he speaks of her “graciousness, traditional compliance and moral strictness”.

Tacitus also calls her a “multiple murderess”. That is quite an accusation, so what does he mean?

He is referring to the fact that her husband, the emperor, died before she did. And although he never had any sons, he had adopted two sons of his daughter, so that they could inherit his position as the Emperor of Rome after he died. Unfortunately, both of these two sons also died. One died of illness at 21 when he was away at military training and the other son died at the age of 23 while he was away in a place called Lycia. She was accused of poisoning both of these adopted sons, so that her own son, Tiberius, could become the next emperor. She was not even in the same city as them when they died. She was also accused of poisoning some figs in the garden, which her husband then picked and ate and died. Really? The logistics are so implausible. A) what kind of lethal poison is going to be able to be painted on figs without her husband being able to taste something very funky. And B), figs are quite prolifically fruiting trees, so the idea of a 75-year-old woman going out in the hot August summer and painting 100s of figs on the off chance that her husband would pick one is a little bit ludicrous. The man was in his late 70s when he died, so I do not 100% trust this fig rumour that was printed by historians who weren’t even alive at the time that it happened. 

As a result of the deaths of her two adopted step sons and her husband, her own son Tiberius, who had been adopted by Augustus, was now set to become the second emperor of Rome. He was emperor until his death.

While her husband Augustus was alive, and during his 4 decades of his as emperor of Rome, Livia was known as his advisor. But after his death, when the senate tried to grant her the title of “mother of the country” her son successfully blocked the motion. Perhaps he was a little jealous of her popularity. Needless to say, they had a rather strained relationship toward the end of her life in her mid 80s when she was ill, he did not go to visit her, nor did he attend her funeral. Tacitus may have tried to dull Livia Drusilla’s sparkle, and historians may have tried to pin the deaths of the emperor and his heirs on her, but she was remarkable by the fact that in a social system were women had few rights, she managed to challenge the narrative and be a woman who was remembered for her power and influence in the early years of the Roman Empire.