Livia: Empress of Rome

Powerful, cunning, uncompromising, even murderous (allegedly)... meet Rome’s first empress and one of ancient history’s ultimate power players. Livia Drusilla has long been cast as the bloodthirsty matriarch of the early Roman Empire — wife of Augustus, mother of Tiberius, and alleged poisoner of rivals. But how much of this infamous image is fact and how much is fantasy? In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Emma Southon to peel back the layers of scandal and explore the real story behind Livia’s complex legacy. Was she a scheming killer, or simply a shrewd survivor in a ruthless world? MORE Zenobia: Queen of Palmyra https://open.spotify.com/episode/4o7gMb5tLk8f6nF0Qirzcv The Assassination of Julius Caesar: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0xKUDPitfx3rN1kN1hPI4H Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:05Tristan Hughes?

  Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. I'm Orkut here. I'm recording this intro right next to a loch in central Scotland for a very special upcoming Ancients episode. Stay tuned for that. Today's episode is all about one of the most extraordinary women from early Imperial Rome: the Empress Livia, the wife of Augustus, the mother of his successor Tiberius, and a woman who's developed quite an infamous reputation down through the centuries. But what's the fact and what's the fiction? That is what we're delving into today. I knew very little about Livia's story, so it was fascinating to learn more from our wonderful guest, Dr. Emma Southon. I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.

• 2:01Tristan Hughes?

  She was one of the most powerful women in the early Roman Empire. The wife of Augustus, first Empress of Rome, Livia Jussila. Throughout history, Livia has had quite the infamous reputation. Ever since ancient times, she's been portrayed as scandalous and manipulative. A murderous villainess who oversaw the deaths of multiple members of Augustus's family to ensure that her son, Tiberius, became the next emperor. There were even rumours that she poisoned Augustus. But how much should we believe of these rumours? Who was the real Livia? Our guest is Dr Emma Southon.

• 2:46Tristan Hughes?

  Emma, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you back on The Ancients.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  It is such a pleasure to be back. It feels like it's been ages. I've missed you. I've missed your audience. I am thrilled whenever I get asked back.

• 2:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, it has been too long. I've missed you too. It's been over a year since we did Zenobia together. And now we're back to talk about another extraordinary woman from the ancient Roman world. I guess fair to say with Livia, quite a scandalous reputation today, doesn't she? But do you feel, big question to start off, more of a villain or more of a victim when it comes to Livia?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think she's a victim. I will say that. I don't know that she's that much of a villain. Like, the villain reputation that she has comes very much from Robert Graves. But she's definitely not a victim either, because she is seemingly in control of everything that is happening and she has genuinely astonishing power in the Roman Empire. And if anything, I don't think that she is the serial killer that some portrayals of Livia have her being, like a kind of creeping, evil, black widow in the centre of a web of matters. But I don't ever see her as a victim. And I think that she would hate to be seen as a victim.

• 4:05Tristan Hughes?

  So with the sources that we have, Bolivia, can you explain them first of all? Because if this is the reign of Augustus, the beginning of the Roman Empire period, it feels like there probably, you have quite a lot of sources to play with.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  There are because you cannot talk about Augustus really without talking about Livia, not least because Livia's son from her marriage before Augustus becomes Augustus's heir. And so, nobody is able to talk about him without talking about her. So, all of the sources which discuss him, so all of the histories of the period, the Tacitus, the Suetonius, the Plutarch and Dio, all of them have at least something about Livia. And then, anything that covers the kind of last gasping few breaths of the Roman Republic and its quote unquote "restoration" by Augustus have to include how Livia comes into his life,

• 5:01Speaker 03

  how Livia becomes such an important part of his reign, and then how it comes about that she becomes so important in the next reign because she covers too. So, anything that's on Tiberius also has to cover her because she's so important in his reign as well. And he's so like "mom" about everything.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  And she just will not step back out of the position that she has held in Augustus's reign. So, we have tons of sources on her. And most of them are baffled by her position because it's so unique. Nobody has ever had a position before her like that. And it's a tough act for anybody to follow because she is simultaneously very, very private. Like, everything that she does technically is very much within the acceptable realm of Roman womanhood. And she is, never takes any position that she shouldn't take, she's very good at that. But at the same time, she obviously has so much power. She can grant consulships, she can get people a good job, she can make sure that people get the good legions,

• 6:07Speaker 03

  or give them money, or sponsor them so that they can do whatever they want to do. And so, she, she does have genuine political power and that freaks people out. So, they talk about her a lot.

• 6:21Tristan Hughes?

  Generally speaking, with the people who do talk about Livia, if you've got almost that kind of, I don't want to say contrast, but as you say, very private, but also clearly has a lot of power. If they're a bit baffled by Livia, generally, how do these people writing about her, how do they portray her?

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Generally not brilliantly. They veer between kind of neutral and outright hostility. The most famous ones really are from Tacitus, who primarily covers her in the reign of Tiberius, because he doesn't really cover Augustus at all. And he is very, very good at insinuating that she, with a kind of the odd little descriptor. So he'll just say things like, "through the treachery of a stepmother", and therefore imply that she was involved with things. And then Dio, who is writing 250 years after Livia, so he's writing in about the 230s, and working from Tacitus very clearly. And then he embellishes a lot. So

• 7:19Speaker 03

  a lot of the stories that you get, which are a bit more detailed about terrible things that Livia did, tend to come from Dio. And those two sources are very hostile towards her. Like, in those, she is the wickedest stepmother of all wicked stepmothers. She is the worst wife of all wives. She is basically just a malevolent woman at the centre of power. And the fact that she is at the centre of power is very, is in and of itself bad. But other people, when they write about her, unless she was alive at the time, in which case they're unbelievably flattering. So there's a bit with Ovid. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus, and then while in exile, wrote a lot of very flattering poems in a

• 8:03Speaker 03

  desperate attempt to come back. And at one point, he says that she is "the face of Juno and the body of Artemis". And you're like, I'm going to be honest here, this is a woman who's in her 60s.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  And a Roman sixties as well. Like, I think that you're just being, if that's the best thing you can say about it, then that's not great. But it's so, they're either very, very flattering or very, very cruel.

• 8:25Tristan Hughes?

  You also mentioned there, of course, I mean, big names like Tacitus and Cassius Dio, those are two of the most recognisable Roman historian names that that come down to us today. So, I mean, their negative portrayals, do you think their agendas, when they're writing their stories that have survived, do you think they have significantly influenced why Livia's name, you know, sometimes today, does have a more infamous scandalous reputation?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yes, definitely. Because they're so important in understanding that period. And people like Suetonius, who give us most of the gossip about the emperors, he's not that interested in her because he's writing a biography of Augustus and a biography of Tiberius. So she doesn't really appear that much. But with the people who are writing histories of the period, like Tacitus and Dio, she therefore can appear a lot because they can attach her to everything that happens. And specifically those two attach her to the deaths of every man in the Julio Claudian family, of which there are like a distressing amount. Like, it's a very unlucky

• 9:32Speaker 03

  family to be born into if you're a boy. The girls seem to do okay, but the boys die with a terrifying frequency. And it does eventually work out to be quite convenient for Livia. But so they attach her to her every possible death, including eventually the death of Augustus, who they suggest she might have had a hand in as well, just in order. And then they create from this, this narrative of her, and they never say it outright, they just imply it by bringing it up over and over again, that she murdered her way through the Julio Claudian family, or the Julian family, in order to make sure that her son would be the next emperor.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  And therefore she would hold on to her power. And so, and then eventually when Augustus is on his deathbed and he's kind of maybe thinking about making somebody else the, she kills Augustus in order to make sure that her plan will continue. And that's what you get then in I Claudius, the TV show and the book. And then that is the one that becomes like cemented in people's image of her.

• 10:40Tristan Hughes?

  It's the I Claudius portrayal, isn't it? That is really.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Sean Phillips is.

• 10:45Tristan Hughes?

  Exactly. That is endured for decades, hasn't it? I mean, and we will explore some of those stories, but it was important to highlight this straight away to understand, you know, why you get those portrayals and where they originate from with certain of our sources. I must also ask then, Livia, she's very important at the time of Augustus and of her son Tiberius. With the wealth of sources that you have, it's not just written sources, is it? Do you also have archaeology that helps historians understand sort fact from fiction with the actual figure of Livia?

• 11:18Speaker 03

  We do tons of it and interesting types of it as well. So we have all of her public statuary. So she, she is the female face of Augustus's reign and he is like recreating Roman culture from scratch really. So she gets put out as this kind of unaging vision, ideal of feminine virtue over and over again in all of his statuary on his coins. She appears over and over again as kind of various female virtues of chastity and pecuny and all of these other things. And she is put out as this, this idea of family and continuity and female virtue that he wishes to portray.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  But then we also have the archaeology of her actual life. So we have things like her. Palaces that she lived in, so Livia's house on the Palatine is still there and various homes that she owned all over Italy, which you can see because of the like bricks which have been stamped with her name on.

• 12:19Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And there's a mausoleum in Rome, which is a columbaria, so it's a like a private mausoleum, which was a place for people who were enslaved in the house of Livia to be buried. So it's exclusively people who were in her household and very often just their names and job titles. But we can kind of reconstruct what it was like inside her house from knowing that there was somebody in her house whose job was exclusively to look after her white dresses and someone whose job it was to just look after her gold cups.

• 12:54Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Somebody whose job is very, like, it's a word that has never been used before again in in Latin and nobody knows what it means, but either means somebody who had looked after her handbags or someone who folded her clothes. And that was their job. So we have all of like this huge amount of archaeology of how she, how she is portrayed by Augustus and by his regime, which is as modest and always young, always very kind of neat and tidy and the kind of feminine virtue of wool spinning and that kind of thing. And then we have this, what her life was actually like, which is that she had a whole load of people, a whole load of clothes and a whole load of cups.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Like a lot of stuff and buildings and holiday homes. And yeah, she was extraordinarily rich. So it's nice to be able to see multiple sides of her.

• 13:47Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely extraordinary clothes and cups. There you go.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:50Tristan Hughes?

  If we go back to the beginning then, so pre the Emperor Augustus in the late Roman Republic, I mean, do we know much about Livia's early years, Emma?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  We do, because they're unbelievable. She had a whole life in the first like twenty years of her life. She did more in the first twenty years than I've managed in about forty. Because she is, she's married by the time she's fifteen. So she gets married in forty-three BCE, so the year after Julius Caesar is executed. And she marries a guy called Tiberius Nero, who is very much on the anti Julius Caesar side of things.

• 14:27Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  And, and that's where she's up. The next year, she gives birth to Tiberius. So she's sixteen when she gives birth to him. And immediately gets caught up in the civil wars that happen in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's assassination. On the opposite side to Octavian, who then becomes Augustus. So one of the first things we know about her is that she is, has to escape from a town in Italy, which Octavian is besieging. Because she joins the, well, her husband joins the rebellion against him, basically, and against his land confiscations. And they have to escape, and they almost have to leave Tiberius the baby behind, because he is crying so much that he is going to give them away.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  And it's only that she manages to calm him down. But it's literally an escape from, by night, in order to get to Greece. They then go to Greece where they have to, for some reason, possibly her husband just upset some people, they have to escape from Sparta as well, when the house is burned down. But she has to flee across the empire. And by the time she is like nineteen, she has already had to travel around in a civil war, choosing the wrong side, basically. And then at some point, when she is pregnant with her second child, she meets Octavian in person, and he just falls head over heels in love with her. And he's a few years older than her.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  And he's also calling himself Julius Caesar and has a big army and is scary. And essentially, he is like, I would like to marry you. And she's like, well, I'm married and pregnant. He's like, I see no problems.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't see what problem is. And so they wait until she has her second child, Druusus, and then get married like days later. And he just steals her from her husband, basically. And we kind of have to assume by how incredibly dedicated she is to his cause after that, that she was also into him, or at least learned to be into him. Because she, you know, genuinely spends the next fifty years of her life supporting him in every possible way. And wait, like above and beyond what she would need to. But it is a extraordinary, and she's twenty when she marries Octavian. And she's on her second marriage, her second child, her like second flee from opposing armies.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  And then she has this whole life of becoming and being an empress ahead of her. So. And she comes from this very, very ancient, very noble family.

• 17:06Tristan Hughes?

  Right. That's what I was going to ask. Like, how prestigious a background did she have? That could have also made her very attractive to Octavian.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  You know, this also is potentially one of the reasons why he grabs her, although there's no shortage of Claudian women around. But she comes from this Claudian family who are incredibly ancient. They have hundreds of consuls and very famous names going right the way back to the time of Romulus in their family. And they have things like the Appian Way is named after a Claudian, Claudius Appius. And they, and you know, the first aqueducts in Rome are Claudian. They are the family of Rome, really. Until Augustus comes along and gloms onto them and makes them the Julio Claudians. So she has this real weight of kind of old, traditional republican power behind her

• 17:57Speaker 03

  in this little twenty year old body.

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• 19:29Tristan Hughes?

  So this is the time he said, the civil wars are there. It's before Octavian becomes the Emperor Augustus and you've still got the likes of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. So this is the 30s B.C. Do we know during that period where Octavian is rising, but you've still got the likes of Mark Antony opposing him? Kind of, you know, the turbulent relationship that they have. Do we know much about the dynamic between the young Livia and young Octavian during that decade, whilst it is before he becomes the emperor, before he becomes Augustus?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  We know less so, other than kind of generic things like Suetonius says that whenever he would talk to her about important things, he would always make notes so that he wouldn't say the wrong thing, which makes her sound like if he did say the wrong thing, she'd give him a kick. But we don't know a huge amount about what they're up to, other than the fact that they were trying to have children. And they desperately want a child and they do, they have a child who is either stillborn or dies very early. And then are unable to have any of their own. They've both got children from their previous marriages. But neither of them, they're not, for whatever genetic reason, able to have children together.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  And so that seems to be the main focus because Augustus, particularly in those era. In that time is using, you know, marriage and children as a way to legitimise himself, to legitimise his reign, to try to stabilise everything. So he's marrying his sister off, he's marrying any, his daughter off, he's marrying everyone to everyone. In an attempt to create the kind of a web of alliances that eventually falls apart. But they, the main focus of those early years seems to be wanting children.

• 21:10Tristan Hughes?

  And is Octavian faithful to Livia in this early stage of his life?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  No, no Roman man was ever faithful. If they had been, they would have thought they were weird. Now, apparently he has a predilection for virgins. So, and one of the things that gets thrown at her actually is that she would procure them for him. But in his younger years, but no, very much not. He has a thing for writing like a horrible poetry around women as well. So, yeah. And there's that very classic or quite famous letter that Mark Antony writes to Octavian.

• 21:43Tristan Hughes?

  I was thinking about this letter. Yes, please tell us about this letter.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically it's after he has run off with Cleopatra and abandoned Octavia, who is Augustus's sister. And he has said, so what if I'm having sex with the queen? Like, are you telling me that you haven't had sex with every woman in Rome? And then he lists off a load of names. Like, why do I have to keep it in my toga if you don't have to keep it in yours, basically? And he's not wrong, but the difference is that Octavian, Augustus sees a PR opportunity. Whereas Mark Antony only sees the reality of what's in front of him. And he never understands that Octavian doesn't really care that he's having sex with Cleopatra. What he cares about is that it looks bad and he could use it.

• 22:28Tristan Hughes?

  Is it after then that final showdown between Octavian and Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the Battle of Actium and then the Battle of Alexandria, when Octavian is the top dog, you know, Mark Antony is out of the picture and we get to the twenties B.C. Is this really when we start getting more information about Livia II in the sources and just in her story?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is when we start to get, because Augustus then makes the family and the the Julio Claudian family so central to his propaganda and reshaping what the Roman family is, that he starts to bring her to the fore and starts to put her way more in in his statuary and his coinage, on his art, and he starts to pull her out so that he can parade around their wonderful marriage. And he reshapes himself because he's been a warlord up until this point. He's been a general and now he can't be a general anymore because there's no one left to fight. So he has to be a statesman and a statesman has a wife.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  And so all of a sudden, he becomes very interested in making sure that she and his daughter as well are presenting themselves and are being presented as idealized women. And so we start to get more of her, you know, walking around and people worrying about who she's friends with, people. And but also that means that she gets to have much more control over things like who she wants to sponsor. You know, she starts taking in children that she can raise, who will be the next generation of Roman senators. She starts, which may sounded like she's collecting children, which is

• 24:06Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, kind of, yes.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  But they start looking to the future at that point, basically. And as a, as a unit, they start to build what we now know of as the Julio Claudian family and the system, and she's very much a part of that.

• 24:23Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned the portrayals in art and coinage, I'm guessing architecture as well. Can you explain a few examples of that and how they're portrayed together? You know, in this, this next chapter in October, I guess we should say now Augustus's story. If he's now been proclaimed Augustus. Can you explain a bit about how they portray themselves together in this next chapter of their life?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  So they now start to portray themselves as kind of the parents of the, the parents of the state, essentially. He becomes the father of the country and as a result, she becomes kind of by default, the mother of the country. And you start to get lots of these portraits of them being very pious. So lots of them with their head covered, lots of statues of them being. So she always has very, very tied up, neat, modest hair, basically. Because she is, there are all of these ideas of control and modesty that are around women that are very tied up to hair.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  So she always has this very specific haircut and hair kind of in a little bun. That is not dissimilar from how my hair is at the moment, now I'm thinking about it. But, and she's always in a mantle, like a proper Roman woman, married Roman woman. She often will have her hair covered in some way. And she is always being presented as a kind of republican ideal of a, a perfect, chaste, modest, pious wife. And then you hear stories about her and she sounds terrifying.

• 26:02Tristan Hughes?

  And so how does she exercise power differently during this period? You mentioned that the, the gathering of children, but is she also kind of like a patron of, of arts and stuff like that? Is, is there a way through which she can really show her power in a very different way than Augustus does? You know, is this very kind of public overt leader of the people?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yes, well, she has her own kind of moments of public over. She has the portico of Livia is built.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, okay.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Quite early on, which is, you know, a big space which is built in the forum and then named after her. And is a real big statement of her importance to the regime. Because then everybody has to say, oh, do you want to meet for ballgames at the portico of Livia? And it's a real statement. But what she does is she largely does everything in the way that she is supposed to, which is that she has dinners with people, she meets people, she talks to people, she maneuvers people around. So, for example, the Emperor Gauber, who is emperor for like eight months in sixty eight to sixty nine after the death of Nero.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  His career is sponsored almost entirely by Livia at the beginning. So she like pays for him, she makes sure that he gets positions at the beginning. She she is responsible for him eventually becoming a very bad emperor. And she, there's also this wonderful moment, this actually happens in Tiberius's reign. But I think that it's telling of what she's used to doing, which is that she basically draws up a list of people that she wants for a particular set of magistracies. So to be praetor, to be consul or whatever, she's like, these are the guys that I want for the next round. And he says, no. And she gets so furious at Tiberius that she starts pulling out all of these letters

• 27:54Speaker 03

  that Augustus has written about him and chasing him around the house. And is like, when you were eighteen, Augustus said you were horrible. Oh, and like, basically, that's her, like, she's so used to being able to say, well, I want Gauber to have the consulship and have Augustus say, okay. When Tiberius says no, she's just completely thrown by it. So that is how she is able to exercise this power.

• 28:19Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  And it's through advising Augustus and saying, well, I think we should do this. And I think that Galba should be praetor and she can do this so much.

• 28:32Tristan Hughes?

  But Emma, I guess that's, of course, that's important highlight, isn't it? Because it is still quite an experimental time. Of course, Augustus has seen Julius Caesar die a horrific death because he pushed the boundaries a bit too much. So I guess is Livia, you know, really helping and try and advising Augustus, especially in these early stages, to make sure he doesn't take a wrong step, particularly when you've got these senators and probably got quite a few hawks looming around him i- in the senate and in Rome at the time.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and having her there as a partner almost makes him look more reasonable in what he's doing. She's almost a kind of legitimizing cover because he's like, you know, look, I'm just acting like any guy would. It's not me out here being like, I'm not a dictator, I'm not consul for life, I'm not a military guy, I'm now just a man with his wife and we're just giving you advice. She gives me advice, I give you advice. It just so happens that you all agree 100% of the time that our advice is the best.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  So they're able to present themselves as just a normal family, like everyone's wife gives them advice. Um, it just so happens that my wife gives the best advice. And and just so happens that my wife knows all of the senators. Another thing that we see in the reign of Tiberius, which is never mentioned during the reign of Augustus, but is again a thing that Tiberius stops her doing, so we know that she was doing it, is she would have dinners at her house with the senators. So she would have them over for dinner in her private residence, rather than in the emperor's private, in the emperor's kind of public residence. So, which Tiberius says she's not allowed to do anymore, she's only allowed to meet with women. But she's like, if she's there, she's also not

• 30:17Speaker 03

  advi- just advising Augustus, she's also talking to all the senators. It was like, you know, might be a great idea. What if I, you tell me and I'll tell Augustus? Or no, what would be a lovely idea? Uh, if you all listen to what I had to say. So she's very involved from quite early on in building what Augustus builds from the ground up.

• 30:36Tristan Hughes?

  And as you say, she's helping certain figures. You mentioned the future emperor Galba there earlier. But with Augustus, I sometimes think of, you had a few intellectuals around him as well, didn't you, like Virgil with the Aeneid and so on. Do we think that Livia had her own circle of intellectuals or people she really valued, philosophers and so on in her own circle?

• 30:57Speaker 03

  She does have philosophers around her, although it's never considered to be particularly feminine to surround yourself with philosophers. So it's not something that they ever make a big deal of for her, like unlike later emperors, when it's become a bit more acceptable for women to be intellectual at the time that she is. Like she has philosophers who are like her personal philosophers, but they are always her personal philosophers. She's never like sponsoring their careers in a public way, like the way that, you know, Augustus has Mycenas. And then he's paying for Virgil and he's promoting the works of certain people like Horace as being kind of fundamental to his project.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  For her to do that, it would not be considered appropriate feminine behaviour, that would be considered to be a bit too public to be intellectual. And coming out of the late republican tradition where it's considered to be, that's the kind of thing that a clodia or a full via would do would be to hang out with artists. And therefore it's a bit libertine and she is never a libertine woman. The veneer of conservatism, which is disguising the amount of radical politics that they are doing.

• 32:09Tristan Hughes?

  I certainly would never call myself an expert on this period, but it always feels to me almost looking in that the 20s B C is this kind of transitional period where, you know, Augustus and Livia. Are trying to make sure they don't overstep the mark, but increasing their power, making sure they don't follow in Caesar's footsteps. Do we know how Livia also balances that out with raising her two sons at that moment of time? Of course, they're both teenagers, aren't they? And they're now finding themselves at the centre.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Not a lot, actually.

• 32:36Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough, okay.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  It is not something that aristocratic women really do, which is raise their own children particularly. They get them teachers and they get them wet nurses. And it would be considered quite weird for her to be overly involved in the raising of her children. They get involved with them when they're adults and then they suddenly become very invested. But aristocratic women and children don't necessarily go, like you just farm them out until they're eight.

• 33:06Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we move on to the year 23 B.C.? Because this feels, it's quite a big year for Augustus and Livia, isn't it? You've got illness and you also have a death, like the first big death of that, of the family.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  It is the, it is the first big death of the family and it's huge for Livia and huge for Augustus. This is the death of Marcellus, who is the son of Octavia from her first marriage. And is at that time, the 16 year old husband of Julia, who is Augustus's daughter from his previous marriage.

• 33:40Tristan Hughes?

  And Octavius is Augustus's sister.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  He's his sister, yeah. So he has basically been marked out as the person that Augustus seems to be choosing as his successor. So he is giving him lots of privileges, he's giving him lots of space. He has been giving him commands in the army already, even though he's a teenager, he's married. He's made him a son-in-law, which is quite a big deal. And it all of a sudden, there is a plague that runs through Rome. Augustus, he's Augustus by now, gets sick from it. Marcellus gets sick from it, but Marcellus dies. And he is then given a huge public funeral.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  And this is treated, this is the first time that the Julia Claudian family is treated like they are a royal family, really. Because his death is not just a private death, it is now a death for the empire. He's written into the Aeneid all of a sudden. Then everybody kind of mourns him. And then because he has died so young, he is a teenager. And rumours start to swirl that this was maybe not a natural death. And then although that doesn't seem to have happened that much at the time. People start to look back on it afterwards and say, include him in the list of suspicious deaths in the Julio Claudian family. But it is, it's the point at which all of the

• 35:06Speaker 03

  good luck that they have had up until this point, like Octavian's run up until 23 is kind of fairly flawless. Like, he wins everything, he has eliminated all of his enemies, everybody loves him, almost no one's trying to kill him. And then 23, Marcellus dies, and it's the first time that one of his plans has kind of not gone through. And from there, things start to kind of hurdle a little bit.

• 35:34Tristan Hughes?

  It kind of, doesn't it? And I can imagine what Livy is thinking at the same time, because over the following years, as you've hinted at there, like, this isn't the first. Marcellus, sadly, is not the first. I mean, Augustus's plans seem to just fall left, right and centre like dominos.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  They do. And that point, it starts to become, like, within a few years, being marked out as his heir seems to be like a curse. Like, so then, having kind of run out of nephews, Augustus then adopts two of his own grandchildren. So his daughter, he then marries off to Marcus Agrippa, his best friend, and they have a load of children, and he adopts the oldest two and takes them as his sons. And then he starts raising them as his children and to be his heirs. So he's clearly grooming them from a very young age to take over the empire. They're called Gaius and Lucius. Marcus Agrippa dies, but he's like, he is in his

• 36:31Speaker 03

  50s, so that's like, not considered to be so terrible. But then in very rapid succession, within six years of each other, Gaius dies of illness in Marseille, and then Lucius dies. He's stabbed to death because he's not very clever. And he's at war with an enemy in the east, and they say to him, do you want to come over and we'll just have a sit down and talk about this? And he goes, yeah, all right. And they were like, oh, chokes on you, this was actually an assassination. Yeah, it's actually really easy. So they stab him and he dies of his stab wounds. And then he adopts his final grandson, who's called Agrippa Posthumus, who then turns out to be a bit odd or a bit violent in some way,

• 37:15Speaker 03

  and he has to exile him because he just can't be trusted to be like in the city. And at this point, it's just getting a bit like this is kind of four guys who have been made his heir and who have died. And he adopts Tiberius, who is Livia's oldest son, who is basically the only adult man left around. Everyone else is a baby. And by the time you get to about four CE, there's no one left. And so he has to make Tiberius his heir. And Tiberius is a perfectly fine heir, but people around who don't really want there

• 37:57Speaker 03

  to be another emperor who are not still kind of getting used to this idea that there's one guy who is in charge of everything and an extra judicial, extra legal fashion. It looks incredibly suspicious that all of these young men have just keeled over as soon as Augustus starts to like them. And then Augustus dies, and that doesn't help either. And then the final one is Germanicus, who was a big favourite of Augustus, who he seems to have wanted to be make a co-heir possibly with Tiberius, and he forces Tiberius to adopt him. But he also dies when he's very young in mysterious

• 38:38Speaker 03

  circumstances, right, like quite early on in Tiberius's reign while Livia was still alive. So everybody, by the end of this, and by the time you get to people like Tacitus and Dio writing 150 to 100 years later, they're like, there's coincidence and there's coincidence.

• 38:55Tristan Hughes?

  Because if we focus on those figures who died whilst Augustus was still alive, you know, and it ultimately ends up with Tiberius being named his successor, is that the fact that it is Livia's son, that you do ultimately later get these stories that suggest, oh, given that these other intended heirs of Augustus die unusually young, Livia must have been involved some way or something like that. There's no evidence. It's just that rumour starts to emerge that she's involved in their demises.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  She's basically, it's kind of a, you know, quibono, who benefits situation, which is that young people dying is always upsetting. And they are all very young, you know, they're all teenagers. I think that Lucius is the oldest at about 21. And when young people die, everyone thinks there must be something that could have prevented it, like these are, there must be some kind of preventable death. So there's actually a line in Plutarch, which is completely not to do with this at all. But he says in a epitaph, he says, like, when a young person dies, we always assume poison. And that is what happens here. Like, even though, you know, Marcellus dies of something that Augustus is also sick from, he just doesn't recover. Gaius dies in Marseille. And so if Livia

• 40:05Speaker 03

  can poison from us, like from Rome to Marseille, then that's pretty impressive. Lucius dies of a stab wound, which you can't call poison, no matter how hard you try. And if you think that she was involved in it, then you have to think that she was like in with the Parthians, like Rome's great enemy, making plots to secretly kill people, which again, very impressive, but I don't think so. It's a cascade of bad luck that people perceive her to be benefiting from it, which in a way she does. But it would be harder for her to have done it than for her to not have done it.

• 40:38Tristan Hughes?

  That's an absolutely fair point.

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• 42:09Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we explore another relationship Livia has during the reign of Augustus? One which I think is really interesting to cover because I guess we can also use it to explore her relations with women in this emerging imperial family, which is of course Augustus's young daughter, Julia.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:30Tristan Hughes?

  Now, Emma, can you give us a bit of a backstory to Julia? You've mentioned how she was married to Marcellus, who died young in 23 B.C., and then marries the much older Agrippa, Augustus's best friend. But can you explain a bit more about who she was and her character and how she ultimately comes to blows with Livia?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  She does. So she is the daughter of Augustus's first wife, Scribonia, and they don't get on at all, and Augustus divorces her on the day that Julia is born.

• 42:59Tristan Hughes?

  That's not good. That's not good for the child, I must say.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  It's not. And then he kind of abandons them, and you get the feeling that he probably would have kept them in, like, had little to no interest in her for most of the time, except that he didn't have any children with Livia. And so he takes her and takes her into the palace and then starts to raise her and uses her as a proxy for a son, basically, as a way of making sons-in-law. So her job is that she marries men and has children, and then the men that she marries have been marked as his successors. So she marries Marcellus when she is a teenager. When he dies, she marries Marcus Agrippa. When, they have six children. When Marcus Agrippa dies, then she is married to Tiberius.

• 43:46Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And that's when things start to go wrong, because they absolutely despise each other. And in fairness to Julia, she's very well behaved up until that point. So for like first 30 years of her life, she does exactly as she is told. She has the children, she marries the men, she doesn't cause too much trouble. But she is married to Tiberius. They despise each other quite violently. And they both go off the rails at the same point. But she, basically, her revenge or her rebellion against her father is that she just starts having sex with absolutely everybody. And it seems that she's always had quite a kind of lively personality, like she's always been interested in having parties, she's and telling jokes and looking pretty and hanging out with fun people.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Much to the kind of disapproval of Livia on Augustus. There are always, there's this fourth century. Collection by a guy called Macrobius, which has all of these kind of jokes that they tell. And it's always Augustus being like, why can't you have better friends like Livia? Like, why do you have to be surrounded by handsome young men? Why can't you be more like your stepmother, who is always surrounded by like, old wise men? And why can't, like, why do you have to pluck out all of your grey hairs? Why are you wearing makeup? Why are you wearing such a pretty dress? That kind of thing. And she just kind of goes a bit wild. And the stories are of her having an affair with Mark Antony's surviving son.

• 45:11Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, which is a real kind of like two fingers up to dad. And then real wild stories about her having sex on the rostra in the. Forums, so in like the centre of the Roman Republic of having sex on or nearby a statue of liberty, which opponents to Augustus used. Like really publicly and flagrantly and quite aggressively, like flaunting the fact that she's really angry at dad. And when he finds out about it, which is quite quickly.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  He has her exiled to an island and says that she is never allowed to speak to a man ever again, unless they're very ugly.

• 45:58Tristan Hughes?

  Is that line really in there? Unless they are very ugly.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:02Tristan Hughes?

  She cannot speak to a man.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So eventually he relents and after five years, she is allowed to move back to mainland Italy and live in a town, but he still will not allow men to visit her.

• 46:14Tristan Hughes?

  And with Livia, do you think Livia is involved in that at all? It doesn't sound like they had a very good relationship.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  They did not have a particularly good relationship, but everything that you get actually is Augustus being furious. Like, because the people, and Livia seems to largely stay out of it, although there's a question over whether she owned the house that he, that she was exiled to. But she certainly doesn't feel any sympathy towards Julia because when Augustus dies, she does nothing to help her. And, but, and Augustus is furious and I suspect Livia is equally furious. Like whenever people say, won't you let Julia come back to Rome? He's like, no, I'd literally rather die. He never, ever forgives her.

• 46:59Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's move on then to 14 AD. This is the death of Augustus and Livia's still around. But even Augustus's death, this is also a story where Livia, that more scandalous side of Livia that has survived to us today, thanks to the likes of Tacitus and Cassius Dio, it rears its head here as well.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  It does. I actually kind of love this story because basically it seems that the, the core of it is that when Augustus died, he's like 80, 86, I think. She didn't let the information out with the palace for a little while and she made sure that everybody was on board with Tiberius before she told anybody that he was dead. And as a result, this kind of then spirals into stories. And the earliest sources are kind of a bit tiptoe about it. So they'll be like, oh, maybe I'm not a hundred percent make, there were rumours and suspicions. And Pliny says some, like Pliny the Elder, who is a natural historian, polymath.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  He says that there was kind of suspicions that there were intrigues involved. So you get this kind of innuendo about it. And then you get Cassius Dio, who has no time for innuendo whatsoever. And he's like, right, this is what happened. She knew that he was going to make his, his adopted son Agrippa Posthumus, he was going to bring him back from exile and he was going to make him emperor instead of Tiberius. And she wasn't having any of that and she found out about it. So, but she knew that he had tasters and that she couldn't poison him. So they went for a walk around their garden and picked figs from the tree. But beforehand, she had painted poison on some of the figs. So she picked one that she knew there wasn't poison on and ate it and then picked a poisoned one and gave it to him and that's how she killed him.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Which, you know, as a story is great. And if she did, also great. But also, he was eighty six years old, she probably could have just waited a minute.

• 48:56Tristan Hughes?

  I'm glad that we mentioned the poisoned fig story because it is, uh, it's quite an image to think about. And I guess also, we should mention the kind of the weird Agrippa Posthumus. I mean, he doesn't survive long after Augustus's death. Anyway, do you think Livia is involved? I don't want to say understandable, but if you're in their mindset, you know, Tiberius is the new emperor. You don't want a potential rival there. So do you think she is potentially involved in, in sending someone to get rid of, to do away with Agrippa Posthumus when Augustus dies?

• 49:26Speaker 03

  I think probably yes. That is much more likely that she would at least have approved of that. And I think she probably also approved because Julia also dies that year. They starved Julia to death.

• 49:39Tristan Hughes?

  Oh goodness.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Which, yes, is extremely cruel. But there, and I think that, yeah, they either she or she and Tiberius together agree that they can't have any rivalry to his claim. And so these are the two adults who are of Augustus's bloodline because Tiberius isn't, they make him part of a bloodline by posthumously adopting Livia. So the moment that Augustus dies, Livia becomes his sister. Like legally, she is then Julia Augusta, his sister, wife.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Which makes then it totally find that Tiberius is his son very weird. But the the whole, yeah, so the idea that you need to get rid of these these two adult rivals who might be able to say that they have a better claim to Augustus's inheritance than Livia and Tiberius do is extremely reasonable to me. And she's not, you know, the things that Augustus does while they are married, and some of them are incredibly brutal. And she clearly has no problem with eliminating rivals if you need to. She doesn't do it in the kind of Mr. Burns way that we imagine people

• 50:54Tristan Hughes?

  Excellent, yes.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Doing it like she's not like full via Mark Antony's wife who sticks pins in Cicero's tongue and stuff like that. She is just much more like, you know, we'll get it done, kill them, I don't need to. And I think that that she would be extremely fine with that happening.

• 51:11Tristan Hughes?

  She's incredibly experienced of the early imperial life by that time, isn't she? Of, you know, several decades married to Augustus and the like. I guess we should also mention perhaps something that may well also motivate her, that the fact that now you mentioned earlier, she has two sons, Tiberius and Druusus. By this time, Druusus, though, he he's dead, so it is just Tiberius, her only son left.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Druusus dies well off on campaign in Germany, and so Tiberius is everything. And he only has one son as well, but so there is a very slim margin for her, her family to survive really, or her direct line to survive and thrive. And so it's very important. And I do also think that after what she lived through, you know, she did experience the civil wars to, and a large part of why everybody accepts Augustus's kind of claim to suddenly be a king who isn't a king, and then Tiberius's claim to be a successor that isn't a successor is that nobody wants that again.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Nobody wants the prescriptions, nobody wants the battles, nobody wants Romans killing Romans.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And she can justify that to herself and everybody can justify it to themselves that if you have to kill kind of one difficult man on an island in order to prevent a civil war, then maybe it's okay. And she can, and in order to keep this peace going, maybe we need to make some sacrifices. And whether you agree with her or not is up to you. But you can see how she could, you know, she has been chased as a young woman while holding her baby twice out of burning cities. And you could see how she would not want either herself or anyone else to experience that.

• 52:57Tristan Hughes?

  So Tiberius, when he succeeds Augustus, I mean, he's in his 50s or 60s, isn't he? And Olivia's in her 60s or thereabouts. So how does she fare in the early years of Tiberius? Then if she's left in a prominent position as Augusta by Augustus when he dies, how important a role does she play in Tiberius's reign, let's say, in the early years, first of all?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  A much more important role than Tiberius would like.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Because Tiberius is very conservative. And I think that what he would like is for quite a conservative version of the principate whereby he genuinely is just the first man who gives advice and everybody takes it if they want to. And the fact that nobody will, like, everybody keeps treating him like he is an emperor and he kind of struggles to understand that he is. So he really does try immediately to get Livia out of the more political side of her life. So he starts vetoing her choices. He stops, tries to stop her from having so much contact with senators and with prominent men and with political figures.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  He shuts down her parties and tries to force her into a much more kind of passive role. And her response is to get out these letters and say, you're only there because of me, basically, like, your stepdad never liked you anyway. And I have saved these letters for decades, just in case they ever needed them, and to chase them around the house. And she clearly is by that point, very settled into her position as a powerful woman, as a woman who knows what she's doing. Who can and should be able to advise her son, who doesn't know what he's doing and

• 54:45Speaker 03

  does go on to mess it up quite badly. So like, nobody remembers Tiberius with any great love. And one wonders if they might have liked him more if he'd taken his mother's advice, because she knew a thing or two about public opinion and how to shape it.

• 55:00Tristan Hughes?

  So is there a moment early on, you know, a few years in, when Tiberius is just like, right, I'm fed up, no, go away, or I'm removing certain honours from you, or whatever, I'm going to do it my way. And, you know, it all goes horribly wrong. But I know it's always so kind of like, people always want to find a moment where it all starts going wrong, or where Livia's influence with her son starts to diminish. But is there a rough time where we can see that that change in their opinion almost?

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Well, eventually he quits Rome altogether in order to get away from.

• 55:29Tristan Hughes?

  Is it to get away from his mum?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Pretty much, to get away from everybody. But he does badly want to get away from his mum as well. And he spends more and more time outside of Rome, because she won't leave him alone, essentially. And he doesn't even come back to Rome when she dies. Like, he doesn't go to her funeral or anything. He won't deify her. And so eventually he does. Yeah, he does quit Rome in order to get away from her, which is quite a big deal.

• 55:58Tristan Hughes?

  So during the reign of Tiberius, Emma, Livia, she's getting older. But you did mention earlier, there's another big death that happens at this time, with the death of Germanicus and that Livia, I don't want to say involved, but she's mentioned in this story. Can you explain this story and how it affects Livia?

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Yes. So Germanicus is the husband of Augustus's granddaughter Agrippina, Agrippina the Younger, and is very, very popular. He's like the Princess Diana of the early Roman world. Like, people, like, will flock to see him. They love him. He's handsome, he's successful, he's got loads of children, everyone adores him. Augustus adored him. And people basically love him more than they love Tiberius. And so when he goes off on a mission to the east and goes to Syria, and then dies of some mysterious illness, everyone, including his wife, believed that Tiberius and Livia conspired to kill him. And they believe that he was poisoned by a guy called Piso and his wife Ergonilla.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  And so when Piso and Ergonilla come back to Rome, they are prosecuted for this murder. And it is like the most high profile. You know, it is imperial family against imperial family, like mega tabloid thing. And Piso is taken to trial. He's a, you know, a very close friend of Tiberius's, but he is taken to trial and eventually kills himself. But Livia takes his wife Ergonilla into her house and won't let her be prosecuted. And whenever people come by and say, we would like to arrest her on suspicion of murder. She's just like, no, I don't think you are actually. And she protects her. She just will not allow her to be prosecuted.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  And it is a real flex on her part that Tiberius doesn't feel he can do for his friend. But Livia feels no compunction by this stage. She's in her seventies and she's like twenty CE ish and she's just feels she's got nothing left to care about at this stage. Like, what are you gonna do to me? It does make her very unpopular. They're also because they refuse to come to Germanicus's funeral. Basically, they just won't leave the palace for it. And so this fuels this idea that she paid for them to kill Germanicus because he was more popular than her son. But on a base level, it is a real, like, right at the end of her life, she has become more powerful even

• 58:26Speaker 03

  like in terms of what she can get away with than even the emperor, because he can't make her do it. No, no one can make her give up her friend. And her friend goes on to live a very happy life for another couple of decades.

• 58:41Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting trying to imagine that, Emma, you know, all of those decades that she's walked the tightrope really well with Augustus, you know, rising to this position of prominence. By the time she's in her seventies, just like, no, not as fast about popularity anymore. I'm in this prestigious position. I'm going to stick after my friend kind of thing and happy to sacrifice some. But so it's interesting how that, that you, you see that emerge more in the later stages of her life. I will ask quickly because we don't have too much time. But of course, she doesn't live too long after that. What do we know about the final years and ultimately the death of Livia?

• 59:14Speaker 03

  So her power wanes because Tiberius leaves Rome, a bit after that, and moves to Capri and starts communicating with the empire via letter, which allows his right hand man, Sir Janus, Janus, to really take control of everything. And Livia is by that time quite elderly and quite frail and has, without having her son there as her kind of conduit to power, she has no conduit to power. He has isolated her from a lot of the Senate. So she does spend the last few years of her life in a much less powerful position and a kind of very much a figurehead position within the family.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  And with no access to any real power anymore because Sir Janus has taken it all. And this is what happens when you have a monarch, the person who has access, the most access to him gets the most power. And when she dies, Tiberius is not heartbroken, really. He won't come back for the funeral. He refuses to deify her. He gives her kind of the smallest funeral that he can get away with giving her, given that how incredibly important that she is. And then everyone thinks that he's a terrible son. It makes him even less popular. And leaves Sir Janus to kind of go rampaging through the state until such a time as Antonia stops him, actually. But yeah, so it's not a sad end really because she still dies in her palace, pretty much at the top of her game.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  And eventually she is deified by her great grandson. But she is, I suspect that if you had let her, she would have been like Augustus, like still writing letters and still deciding who was going to be the praetor and the urban prefect, right up until the moment she drew her last breath. But she just wasn't quite able to do it.

• 1:01:03Tristan Hughes?

  It's quite something indeed. Well, what a life she lived, what an extraordinary figure she is. And he's ultimately Claudius, is the Emperor Claudius who's her grandson or who defies her.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Finally.

• 1:01:16Tristan Hughes?

  And lastly, how do you think we should ultimately remember Livia today? Not a villain, not a victim. I mean, how should you, how should we think of Livia?

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  I think that you should remember Livia as like an incredibly political woman. I think that her womanhood often gets in the way of how incredibly savvy she was. Like, because of the way that the world worked in the Roman Empire, she was only able to access her position because of who she was married to. Like, she would never have had that by herself. But of all of the women who have access to the amount of power that she had, she works it like so much better than everyone else. Like, before her, you have Fulvia and Cleopatra. And after her, you have people like Agrippina the Younger, Messalina, who try to be like Augustuses.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  And she is the only one who does it well. And I think that she would be an unbelievable, like Margaret Thatcher, if she had been allowed to. And so I think that's probably how you should think of her as a politician, more than anything else, like who is very invested in her political project, which is allied with her husband's political project.

• 1:02:33Tristan Hughes?

  Emma, this has been absolutely fantastic. Last, but certainly not least, your most recent book, or it's one of your recent books, isn't it? Which explores the stories of many extraordinary women from ancient Rome, including Livia?

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  It doesn't include Livia because Livia already has two biographies and I wanted to do women who didn't have their own biographies. And he, but it does include Julia, so it has got Julius Caesar in there. But it's a history of the Roman Empire and 21 women and goes from the beginning to the end of the Western Empire through 21 women that you've probably never heard of.

• 1:03:05Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Emma, just goes to me to say, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  It's always my pleasure.

• 1:03:16Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Emma Southern returning to the podcast to talk through the extraordinary story of Livia, the first Empress of Rome. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

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• 1:04:11Speaker 02

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