From the issue dated September 27, 2002
|
|
|
Rehabilitating LiviaBy focusing on the biases of ancient historians, a scholar provides an antidote to old views of Roman rulersBy SCOTT MCLEMEE For anyone who saw the BBC series I, Claudius, the image of Livia will be forever linked with the elegant and darkly humorous performance by Siân Phillips, the Welsh actress. The wife of Augustus Caesar, and mother of his successor Tiberius, the manipulative Roman matron spun an intricate web of intrigue, shaping the course of the empire from behind the scenes. Like some beautiful but deadly spider, she poisoned anyone who got in her way. And a lot of people got in her way. Viewers learned to expect a funeral whenever they saw Livia preparing food or drink. It's all propaganda, according to Anthony A. Barrett, a professor of classics at the University of British Columbia. His new biography, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome (Yale University Press), is the first broad study in English of her career. The BBC did not create its villainous portrait of Livia out of thin air. Every scheme that Robert Graves attributed to her in the historical novels on which the BBC series was based can be found in the writings of Roman historians. But ancient sources were by no means dispassionate on palace intrigue. The real Livia, argues Mr. Barrett, was a much more complex and interesting figure than anything found in the melodramatic slanders of antiquity. "Traditional studies of ancient history have largely been a matter of looking at classical literary sources," he says. "What's happening now is that we are reading those writings with a much more critical eye, with more cynicism perhaps, recognizing their deep-seated prejudices. We're also placing increasing emphasis on material evidence, coins and statues and so forth." Mr. Barrett's reading of Roman writers, informed by archaeological evidence from the periods they describe, has given him a distinctive profile in contemporary classical scholarship. (Interviewed in early August, his next stop was the excavation of a Roman fort in Britain.) The new book is part of his continuing challenge to the conventional wisdom on the Julio-Claudians, the family that produced the first six Caesars and held supreme power in Rome 2,000 years ago. In Caligula: The Corruption of Power (Yale, 1990), Mr. Barrett examined the life of a political leader whose name has become a byword for deranged tyranny. According to Suetonius's second-century chronicle, best known as The Twelve Caesars, Caligula (who was Livia's great-grandson) declared himself a god and wanted to appoint his favorite horse as consul. He reportedly copulated with everyone in sight, and executed people with equal abandon. Mr. Barrett is skeptical. Conceding that the dictator was robustly obnoxious by any standard, he argues that the body count of Caligula's enemies was well within the norm for an ancient ruler. He points out that none of the images of the emperor that he himself authorized bear the symbols associated with deification. And if Caligula did name his horse to public office, that may not have been proof of madness but, rather, a gesture of contempt for senators who considered the position of consul important. Some scholars are impressed by Mr. Barrett's work without being persuaded by it. In Caligula: Emperor of Rome (Thames & Hudson, 1991), Arther Ferrill, now a professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington at Seattle, treats the ruler as a sociopathic menace. "Tony Barrett's scholarship is outstanding," says Mr. Ferrill. "It's the attitude that I disagree with." He argues that Mr. Barrett takes to its logical conclusion a tendency that dominated 20th-century classical studies: giving the Julio-Claudians the benefit of the doubt by stressing the biases of those who chronicled them. "If you read the ancient authors, their pages reek with hostility," Mr. Ferrill says. "But if you read American authors on Adolf Hitler, their pages will also reek with hostility, and that doesn't make them wrong." The Price of Ambition Mr. Barrett suggests that the animosity Livia generated among some ancient authors was shaped by Roman politics, both sexual and factional. When she was born, in the first century BC, Rome had been a republic for generations, with power divided among a small group of wealthy and influential families. But the city faced chronic economic and social problems as its military influence grew. By the time Livia was a young woman, a new form of government was emerging -- an unhappy compromise between republican and monarchical forms. It was a tense era, in which writing history was a form of partisan combat. The daughter of an elite family, Livia Drusilla was married in her teens to an aristocrat named Tiberius Nero. The wedding took place not long after the assassination of Julius Caesar, as Rome was plunging into turmoil. Her husband combined a knack for political opportunism with a tendency to fail at everything he tried. But by her early 20s, Livia's great beauty had caught the attention of Julius Caesar's adopted son Octavian, who, emerging victorious from the civil turmoil, assumed the title of Augustus Caesar. Livia and Augustus left their respective spouses to marry. (Tiberius Nero, ever eager to please, seems to have regarded the divorce as a way to ingratiate himself with the new ruler.) As wife of the emperor, Livia enjoyed considerable influence behind the scenes, but kept a low profile. "During the reign of Augustus," says Mr. Barrett, "Livia gives the impression of a restrained, moderate woman, happy to stay in the background, taking pleasure in domestic things." That changed after his death and the succession of Tiberius, one of Livia's sons by her first marriage. "When he becomes emperor, we suddenly see another side of Livia -- assertive, in control, with a strong sense of her own importance. The latter, I suspect, was her true personality." But finding the "true personality" of a woman who lived 2,000 years ago, and in the shadow of powerful men, proves extremely difficult. "We know little of her private interests," writes Mr. Barrett, "or how she tried to relax." He does, however, mention a peculiar competition she entered with Julia, a granddaughter of Augustus, over who could acquire the smallest dwarf. "This was settled honorably," the historian dryly reports, "as Julia owned the smallest male, at two feet, one palm (about sixty-seven centimeters), but Livia could boast the smallest female dwarf, Andromeda, height not recorded." In his subtitle, Mr. Barrett draws an analogy between Livia's position and that of an American president's wife. The two phases of her political career bring to mind a recent contrast. "With Nancy Reagan, we know she had enormous influence," he says. "But it was exercised behind the scenes. Hillary Clinton's role was much more open, she exercised her influence in public, and that produced a very negative reaction. It's quite similar with what happened in Rome." Augustus valued Livia's political savvy, but his successor clearly did not. "If we can believe the testimony of her son, Livia could be extremely irritating," Mr. Barrett says. "Tiberius very much thought that women should sit back while men ran things." According to one ancient historian, Dio Cassius, who wrote almost 200 years after Livia's death, she both sent and received official letters, at times signing both her name and Tiberius's. On at least one occasion, she made sure an inscription listed her name first. Tiberius, a moody person even in the best of times, eventually withdrew to a palace on the island of Capri. "One of the reasons may well have been that he was fed up with Rome because of the interference from his mother," says Mr. Barrett. Meet the Press But negative judgments of Livia also come from authors who loathed Tiberius. Suetonius, for example, reports that Tiberius collected pornography, "so that an illustration of the required position would always be available if anyone needed guidance in completing their performance." As ever more power became concentrated in the hands of the Julio-Claudian family, the tales of malevolence and debauchery multiplied. "Historians like Tacitus and Suetonius," says Mr. Barrett, "represent the view of the senatorial families who resented their displacement. The idea that the emperors' wives and sisters might have power they regarded as doubly illegitimate." Unlike several other women in the family, Livia was not subjected to charges of sexual excess. But many deaths were rumored to be her toxic handiwork; she was accused of poisoning Augustus, and several of his potential heirs who might have driven her from power. "Poisoning cases are notoriously difficult to prove, even today, with forensic science," says Mr. Barrett. "I'm very suspicious of the charges." One sign of poisoning offered by ancient authors was that the deceased person's heart did not burn on the funeral pyre. Whatever its symbolic implications, such "evidence" arguably reveals more about Roman attitudes toward an ambitious woman than it does about Livia. In Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire (Yale, 1996), Mr. Barrett made a similarly revisionist argument about Caligula's sister, who married Claudius (his successor) and died on orders from her son Nero (the last of the Julio-Claudians to hold the title of Caesar). "Seneca treats Agrippina as a ruthless murderess, dispatching her husband with a poisonous mushroom," says Mr. Barrett. "I argue that she was nothing of the sort. She tried to exercise moderation on Claudius and Nero." Ancient sources reveal that Agrippina wrote her memoirs, which have unfortunately been lost to posterity. Upward Mobility Not all of Livia's press in the ancient world was bad. Mr. Barrett provides a comprehensive survey of what her contemporaries wrote about her, including admiring remarks about her intellect by Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher, and praise for her virtue by Ovid. (The poet was in exile at the time, so he may have been trying to get on her good side.) Mr. Barrett points out that Livia's image is not found on coins from the reign of Augustus, but began to appear during her son's rule -- strong confirmation that she took on a more visible role in her later years. She was also portrayed in many sculptures and friezes. And as hostile as many senators grew to Tiberius (who lacked Augustus's great tact in asserting his authority), their attitude toward Livia was at least mixed. When she died at the age of 81, in AD 29, writes Mr. Barrett, "the Senate passed an extraordinary measure for an arch in her honor, in recognition of her acts of kindness and generosity." It was the first and last time such an honor was given to a woman. Then, a dozen years later -- under the reign of Claudius, her grandson -- Livia was deified, just as Augustus had been. She would be worshiped for the next four centuries. Her unfortunate son Tiberius, by contrast, remained both dead and merely human. Biographical Questions Mr. Barrett's study has only just been published. Other experts have yet to judge his portrait of Livia as an aggressive but not lethal political animal. But among many classicists, his work faces a reservation that has nothing to do with the Julio-Claudians themselves: a deep-seated suspicion of biography as a genre for scholarship on the Roman elite. That doubt dates to the work of Ronald Syme, an Oxford classicist whose influential book on the rise of the Caesars, The Roman Revolution, appeared in 1939. It is a criticism that still seems valid to Myles McDonnell, an adjunct professor of history at Columbia University, who cited it in a review of Mr. Barrett's and Mr. Ferrill's Caligula biographies. Syme's "particular criticism is that biographers ignored the power base behind individual emperors, which are oligarchies, essentially," says Mr. McDonnell in an interview. "Syme traced how the same groups are frequently in power from one reign to another, even if the reigns are hostile to one another." In the wake of Syme's argument, classicists tend to favor the historiographical method known as prosopography. Where biography focuses on the individual, prosopography creates group portraits, providing cross sections of whole tiers of the socio-economic structure during a historical period. But Judith Hallett, a professor of classics at the University of Maryland at College Park, thinks the low repute of biography among her peers is unfortunate. "Before World War II, some of the most important Ph.D. theses tended to be biographies," she says. "You can get all kinds of insight and perspective from biography, and it's definitely an important tool for feminist scholarship. I hope it's coming back to classics." A philologist rather than a political historian, she notes that biography may be an especially appropriate literary form: "When you deal with people like the Julio-Claudians, who are themselves commemorated and attacked in biographies [in the ancient world], it would seem like an obvious scholarly approach to take." That debate may yet shape the agenda of classical research. Next May, the Association of Ancient Historians will devote its annual conference to the theme of biography. A certain demanding goddess appears to have presided over the planning: The keynote speaker is Anthony A. Barrett. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 5, Page A14
|
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education