Titans of History

The lovers who had designated themselves gods were vanquished by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony committed suicide, and Cleopatra, rather than facing the shame of being paraded in chains through Rome, had a venomous snake smuggled to her in a basket of figs. When Octavian’s soldiers came for her, they found the queen laid out on her golden bed, the pinpricks of an asp’s deadly fangs on her arm. Cleopatra had wanted to be the greatest of her dynasty, but she turned out to be its memorable last. She gambled her bid for empire on her relationship with a general who rarely won a battle—and she lost everything.

AUGUSTUS & LIVIA

63 BC–AD 14 & 58 BC–AD 29

He found Rome in brick and left it in marble.

Rome’s first and greatest emperor, Augustus, was the heir of Julius Caesar and founder of the Julio-Claudian imperial dynasty, which ruled until the fall of Nero.

Born in genteel obscurity as Octavius, he was the great-nephew of the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar, who adopted the boy as his son. Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC—when Octavius was only nineteen—made him the great man’s heir, politically and in terms of his vast fortune. Now calling himself Caesar Octavian, he was initially mocked or ignored as a young novice but showed his mettle, first challenging the swashbuckling cavalry general Mark Antony, then joining him in alliance against Caesar’s assassins. The First Triumvirate—Antony, Octavian and Lepidus—defeated the assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC and then divided the Roman empire—with Octavian getting Rome and the west and Antony the east, where he went into political and romantic partnership with Cleopatra of Egypt. As Antony and Cleopatra’s ambitions alienated the Romans, the two sides went to war: Octavian—who was no soldier but whose forces were commanded by the talented general Marcus Agrippa—defeated his nemesis at Actium in 31 BC, leaving him master of the empire. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Octavian now combined various different roles in the Roman republic into a new position—princeps, emperor, which he held until his death. At first, the position was not meant to be hereditary. Still only thirty-three, Augustus (“Revered One”) as he now called himself, was slim and cold, a punctilious manager, delicate, unemotional, censorious, adulterous, a master of men and politics. He reformed government, provincial administration and justice, regulated taxation, patronized writers such as Horace, Virgil and Livy, embellished Rome, and tried not to expand the empire beyond its already vast borders, campaigning mostly against the Germans. In 9 AD, he was heartbroken by the loss of a legion under Varus in Germany. His last years were dominated by his wife Livia and the issue of succession. But however demented and murderous some of his successors, he had created a system of sometimes hereditary, sometimes elective autocrats—the emperors—that lasted until the end of the Roman empire. As it turned out, the dynastic future belonged to his wife and her family.

Livia was born in 58 BC into the family of Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, a magistrate from an Italian town whose blood lines carried a proud heritage. She was betrothed to her cousin Tiberius Claudius Nero in 42 BC and gave birth to her first son also named Tiberius Claudius Nero—the future emperor.

It was a tumultuous time, however, to be starting a family. In the civil wars that followed the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, both Livia’s husband and her father supported the assassins of Caesar against Caesar’s heir, the young Octavian. When Octavian and his ally Mark Antony defeated Caesar’s murderers at Philippi in 42 BC, Livia’s father committed suicide. Then her husband joined the new anti-Octavian forces that gathered around Mark Antony, whose alliance with Caesar’s heir had proved short-lived. As a result, the family was forced to abandon Italy in 40 BC to escape Octavian’s proscription of his enemies.

After a brief time in Sicily and then Greece, Tiberius Claudius Nero and his wife were persuaded to return to Rome in 39 BC, when Octavian offered an amnesty to supporters of Mark Antony. Back in the capital, Livia was introduced to Octavian for the first time, and by all accounts he immediately became besotted with her. By this stage, she was pregnant with a second son, Drusus, but despite this, her husband was persuaded to divorce her and present her as a political gift to Octavian.

From the moment of her marriage to Octavian, Livia carried herself in public as a reserved, dutiful and loyal wife. As her husband’s political strength grew, so her status gained recognition. In 35 BC she was made sacrosanctas, which gave her inviolability equal to that of a tribune.