Augustus

Octavia never recovered. She refused to have a portrait of her son or to permit anyone to mention his name in her presence. She came to hate all mothers and, more especially, Livia, whose Tiberius would now inherit the happiness she had been promised. She spent more and more of her time in darkness and paid little attention to her brother. Becoming something of a recluse, she stayed in mourning for the rest of her life.

She did attend a special reading by the poet Virgil of extracts from his new epic about the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid. Its hero is the Trojan prince, Aeneas; the poem tells the story of his escape from the sack of Troy and his arrival at Latium, where he rules over a kingdom that is the precursor of Rome. At one point in the narrative, Aeneas visits the underworld, where he meets not only the great dead but also the shades of the unborn. He notices a good-looking but downcast youth, and asks who he is.

The phantom of Aeneas’ dead father tells him that it is the future Marcellus:

Fate shall allow the earth one glimpse of this young man—

One glimpse, no more….

Alas, poor youth! If only you could escape your harsh fate!

Marcellus you shall be. Give me armfuls of lilies

That I may scatter their shining blooms and shower these gifts

At least upon the dear soul, all to no purpose though

Such kindness be.

Virgil’s style of recitation was “sweet and strangely seductive.” When he reached the line “Tu Marcellus eris,” “Marcellus you shall be,” Octavia is said to have fainted, and was revived only with some difficulty.

Almost certainly the young man was one of the many Romans who succumbed to the epidemic sweeping through the city, but soon rumors were put about of foul play. It was whispered that Livia had poisoned him because he had been preferred to her sons for the succession. If true this would have been an ill-judged move, for in the following year Augustus arranged for his daughter, Julia, Marcellus’ widow, to marry Agrippa, a formidable alliance likely to produce dynastic progeny.

The main victim of this arrangement was Octavia’s daughter, Marcella, who was divorced from her husband, Agrippa, to make room for her first cousin. In the regime’s innermost circles, no room was left for sentiment, and the Julian family’s women were disposed of according to the political imperative of the hour. Apparently the princeps took the decision on the advice of Maecenas, who told him, “You have made him [Agrippa] so powerful that he must either become your son-in-law, or be killed.”

Livia’s reputation for murderous scheming, once acquired, proved impossible to expunge. This was partly because in the ancient world (as in the magical world of the fairy tale) stepmothers were expected to behave badly. The great Greek tragedian Aeschylus described a reef in the sea as a “stepmother to ships.” Women, living as they did in a male-dominated society, must have felt that they could only protect their futures by advancing their sons’ interests. Enough of them lived up to the stereotype, persecuting the children of their husband’s first marriage, that fathers sometimes had their children adopted and brought up in another family.

Although Augustus never formally adopted Marcellus, he had treated him as an honorary son, so Livia found herself cast as a stepmother, with all the ugly connotations that that status entailed. There is no evidence that she acted in any way improperly, although it is legitimate to assume that she would do her best for her own boys. Augustus and Octavia were kind to children to whom they were not related by blood—notably, Antony’s offspring by Fulvia and Cleopatra; it is hard to imagine them failing to notice and correct any cruelty on Livia’s part.

The accusations against Livia need to be set in the context of the Romans’ exaggerated fear of death by poisoning. It was, for example, widely and probably inaccurately rumored that poison had been sprinkled on Pansa’s wound after the fighting at Mutina in 43 B.C., and that this had either been arranged by the then Octavian, or at least been done in his interest. Cicero’s speeches as a criminal lawyer reveal a high incidence of reported poisoning cases.