The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars

The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars by Annelise Freisenbruch Page A

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Authors: Annelise Freisenbruch
Tags: General, History
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ghosts of these women nevertheless loomed large over the political landscape out of which the empresses and queens of early medieval and modern Europe were born. Though anxieties about the power of women to corrupt the political process had existed long before the arrival of Livia on the Palatine, those concerns had crystallised around her and her successors, and in turn became integral to the moral criteria by which female sovereigns and consorts would be judged for generations to come.
    It is a legacy that we live with today. Never before have the wives of prime ministerial and presidential candidates been subject to somuch public scrutiny – fêted and mocked for their fashion choices, criticised for their political pronouncements, and called upon to give speeches and interviews promoting their spouses as caring family men. All the while, back-room spin doctors scrutinise their personal and professional backgrounds, looking for weaknesses to exploit. In March 2009, a frenzied media reaction greeted the arrival of the wives of world heads of state attending the G20 conference in London – resulting in more attention being paid to them than the economic agenda of the meeting. In today’s personality-driven political culture, no politician’s wife – or indeed, in certain cases, husband – can expect to escape such scrutiny altogether. Some will embrace it – a few may even prove guilty of taking advantage of their proximity to the political process. Others will hide from it, yet reluctantly allow themselves to be pushed into the spotlight if it will help their partner’s personal approval ratings. The question of what the proper role of a politician’s spouse or family members should be in his or her campaign and administration is one that elicits many different responses. And in that respect, the ‘first ladies’ of the Roman Empire still speak powerfully to us today.

1. Livia supervising the making of clothes for her family, in a drawing by the French artist André Castaigne. Wool-working was the archetypal pastime of the Roman matron.

 

2. The actress Siân Phillips gives a famously malevolent performance in the role of Livia, in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius .

 

3. The lush gardenscapes from the summer dining room of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta are among the most magnificent Roman paintings ever recovered.

 

4. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, detail from Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Livia, Octavia and Augustus (1819). Octavia swoons at hearing the name of her son Marcellus, watched by Livia, who was suspected of involvement in the young man’s death.

 

5. This portrait bust of Octavia was found at Velletri, just south-east of Rome, her family’s home town. It has strong facial similarities to portraits of her brother. Like Livia, Octavia wears her hair in a nodus style.

 

6. Mark Antony ( right ) courted controversy by featuring not just his own profile but that of his lover Cleopatra on coins issued by eastern Roman mints under his control.

 

7. The miniature image of Augustus’s daughter Julia on the reverse of this issue of 13–12 BC is flanked by the heads of her two infant boys, Gaius and Lucius.

 

8. This marble bust of Antonia Minor is known as the ‘Wilton House Antonia’, named after the residence of its one-time owner, the eighth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery.

 

9. The American painter Benjamin West’s canvas Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus was unveiled in 1768, and earned him the patronage of King George III.

 

10. In Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma , a young boy at the cinema pictures the local pharmacist’s wife, described as ‘worse than Messalina’, greeting customers queuing for sex outside her car, and then gyrating on top of the vehicle in Roman costume.

 

11. By using a line drawing of a Roman bust thought to depict Messalina as the title-page illustration for their landmark

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