Augustus

Ovid was a well-known member of the smart set, whose first lady was Augustus’ daughter, Julia, now thirty-eight years old and off the leash with Tiberius absent in Rhodes. She had been brought up strictly. Suetonius notes that she was under instruction “not to say or do anything, either publicly or in private, that could not decently figure in the imperial day-book.” Among other things, this meant not consorting with young men, and any who were so bold as to make even the most innocuous advance risked being told off by the princeps. He wrote to Lucius Vinicius, for example, a young man of good position and conduct: “You have acted presumptuously in coming to Baiae to call on my daughter.”

Despite or perhaps because of her upbringing, Julia grew into a free-spirited woman, with contradictory personality traits. She was well read and reportedly had a gentle and humane personality. However, anecdotes also survive of her sharp tongue and willfulness. Once she entered Augustus’ presence wearing a revealing dress. On the following day she appeared in the most conservative of stolas. Her father expressed his delight and said: “This dress is much more becoming in the daughter of Augustus.”

Julia replied: “Yes, today I am dressed to meet my father’s eyes; yesterday it was for my husband’s.”

Augustus knew better than to shout at his daughter, but he repeatedly advised her to show more restraint. He believed she was just high-spirited, and once observed that he had two spoiled daughters to put up with—Rome and Julia.

Among friends, Julia acted and spoke without reserve; like Ovid, she saw nothing harmful in some quiet lovemaking. However, she took precautions. Contraception in ancient Rome was a hit-and-miss affair. Some women practiced coitus interruptus; others applied sticky substances, such as old olive oil, to the mouth of the uterus, or used vaginal suppositories. All these methods were unreliable, and Julia is said to have restricted full intercourse to times when she was pregnant. She once remarked: “Passengers are never allowed on board till the hold is full.”

But she was very aware of her social position, and let no one forget it.

Very probably Julia’s way of life differed little in kind from that of other fashionable women of her class, although it may have done so in degree. We are told that she took part in drinking parties in the Forum, walked the streets looking for excitement, and committed adultery with various leading Romans, among them Mark Antony’s son by Fulvia, the forty-three-year-old Iullus Antonius. Despite these indiscretions, she and her friends took care for many years that no reports of sexual promiscuity reached her father’s ears.

In 2 B.C., however, convincing evidence of her behavior was passed to the princeps, although the identity and motives of the informant are unknown. His reaction revealed a total loss of emotional control. He was so shocked and, it would seem, ashamed that he refused for a time to receive visitors. He wrote a letter informing the Senate of the case, but stayed at home and allowed a quaestor to read it out on his behalf. When he heard that a confidante of Julia, a freedwoman called Phoebe, had hanged herself, he cried out: “I should have preferred to be Phoebe’s father!”

Iullus was either executed or forced to kill himself, and the other men in Julia’s circle were banished to various parts of the empire. Nor was there much mercy toward Julia: Augustus sent her into exile; arranged Tiberius’ divorce from her without consulting him; and gave orders that “should anything happen to her” after his death she should not be buried in the Mausoleum. He never forgave her and never saw her again.

The striking feature of these events is not so much Julia’s immodesty, but her father’s overreaction. Augustus’ own private life could not stand scrutiny, but he had no qualms about applying a double standard. His anger leaps from the pages of the ancient sources, and was surely sincere. Julia’s behavior defied the central beliefs of the regime. For a quarter of a century the princeps had promoted the old ways and the old days—tradition, sobriety, duty, womanly modesty, marriage. And now his own family, of whose virtues he had boasted, was shown to harbor rot in its core! He had expected his daughter to be a virtuous matron, on the model of Cornelia, but it turned out that she was a moral descendant of the vicious Sempronia, who had conspired with Catilina. Like her, Julia was witty, intelligent, and shameless.

Far exceeding the penalties specified by his own legislation, Augustus used the “solemn names of sacrilege and treason for the common offence of misconduct between the sexes.” The men involved were probably tried in a treason court, although if the official version of what happened is the whole story, Julia’s offense was personal and not really a crime against the state.