Augustus married her off, three times, for his own political purposes, but she revelled in being the woman her step- mother was not. Her third husband, Tiberius, had been very happily married to Vipsania, the daughter of Augustus’ leg-man Agrippa, when Augustus insisted on their betrothal. Can Livia really be acquitted of at least eager complicity with the emperor’s heartless promotion of her son? Soon afterwards, Julia was involved in the mysterious affair which led to her (and Ovid’s) abrupt dismissal into exile. Tiberius’s misanthropy, like his angry modesty, had ample motive, but he remained in pole position.
Dennison argues that Livia’s devious reputation derives exclusively from circumstantial evidence. Although Tiberius alone survived, from a field of much more personable imperial prospects (including the disgraced Julia’s three sons), he still believes that historians have concluded wrongly, post haec ergo propter hanc, that Livia procured their deaths. We are promised repeatedly that there is no evidence for this or that allegation, but it is difficult to imagine what kind of proof would convince Livia’s defender that she was indeed the first of a series of manipulative imperial viragos.
The most flagrant instance came later, in the alarming form of Nero’s mother Agrippina, but can Livia have been quite as serenely virtuous as she is presented here? She was Augustus’s confidante, adviser and accomplice throughout his reign. Not only did he procure her the title of Augusta (and the unprecedented right to be escorted by a lictor), he also adopted her as his daughter — and graced her with the name Julia — so that her position would be secure after his death. Augustus was at pains to have them seen (even on late coinage) as an exemplary patrician couple, almost as marmoreal as the Rome he left behind, but he and Livia were, in some respects, more like oriental tyrants than antique Romans. And the form of marriage typically favoured by tyrants was incest, between brother and sister. Like Mausolus and Artemisia in fourth-century Caria, Livia and Augustus trusted each other as they could trust no one else. She supplied what Catullus had craved, in vain, from his great love, Clodia Metelli: amicitia, not so much friendship as an unbreachable alliance.
Dennison ignores the emperor’s dying words, in which he hoped that he had given a good performance and deserved good notices. As an impresario, he had supplemented the usual bread and circuses with orchestrated solemnities such as the Carmen Saeculare which, as Stuart Lyons shows in his admirably detailed monograph, Music in the Odes of Horace, offered pious backing to Augustus’s ‘coup d’etat permanent’. Politics and national theatre had merged under a majestic actor-manager and the prima donna who outlasted him by 15 years.
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