Happy Birthday, You Unhappy Bastard

October 30th, Julia The Elder

Julia The Elder,
October 30th, 39 BC

If the hierarchy of Roman society was shaped like a pyramid, then at the very bottom were slaves, actors, prostitutes and gladiators. You can probably understand how slaves ended up down there, but actors? Nowadays, you'd put famous actors up at the other end of the meritocratic pointy thing despite them performing a job that consists entirely of playing dress up.

One of the rights enjoyed by and fiercely protected by Roman citizens was the right to bodily autonomy. Nobody could tell a woman that she must not, or must, have an abortion, for example, because only barbaric and idiotic societies would do something like that. But someone like a prostitute, an actor or a gladiator engaged in a profession in which they were considered to have 'sold' their bodies and hence forfeited that right. Therefore, they were down there at the flat end.

At the other end sat the EmperorEmperor, you won't be surprised to know, and in between, senators, the equites (or knights) and then the plebs. If you were feeling particularly finickity, you might add another layer below the plebs labelled 'women'. Movement between these strata was almost impossible, except if you were, incongruously, a freed slave who could operate at the very bottom or at the very top of society, depending on the social status of their former master.

In the imperial model introduced by Augustus, the power of the Empire rested almost entirely in the hands of one man, even though, nominally, it was spread between him, the consuls and then the senate. Augustus did a magnificently funny job of dangling the senate on puppet strings, having them firmly believe that they were vitally important whilst reducing their administrative role to the equivalent of not very much.

If you've ever wondered what a senator did in the years of the Roman Empire, the answer is pretty simple - fuck all.

Augustus gave them fancy rings to wear and togas with pretty stripes on them and sat them in the best seats at the theatre, but they did, in effect, absolutely nothing. Of course, they all thought they were hard at work, upholding the noble role of senatorial power, and they held various magistracies, but mostly, they wandered about, exploiting the lavish lifestyles their rank enabled but being kept firmly at arm's length from where they might get in the way and ruin things.

One time, at the suggestion of Augustus, they all agreed it was an amazing idea to introduce a law that forbade bribing people to vote for them in the upcoming elections for the praetorian prefecture. It was such an important position, reasoned Augustus and all the candidates, such worthy and honourable men, that the upcoming election must not be sullied by the taint of bribery. In any other situation, the senators would have reeled with horror at the thought of not being able to bribe their way into office and been massively grumpy. No way would they have passed such a law. But this was a special case, argued Augustus, that required special measures and, chests swollen with their own inflated sense of self-worth, the senators duly and solemnly swore the measures into law, thereby outlawing all bribery in elections.

Augustus then appointed every candidate who was nominated anyway, rendering the election pointless. He played them like a piano.

The actual seat of power in the Empire wasn't in the Senate House; it was in the bedroom of the Imperial Palace. Augustus' third wife, Livia, had infinitely more influence on the politics of Rome than any senator did, and then the influence spread out in a deliberately small circle of people who were incredibly close to the Emperor. As Augustus weeded out those he couldn't trust, he was left with an increasingly small number of people he trusted. With the adoption of the hereditary model, this included those that the Emperor adopted as his own, including the future Emperor, Tiberius. He ended up adopting four sons, and the reason was that his only biological child was a woman, Julia the Elder. The Imperial Family was where the actual power in the Roman world lay.

In reality, there was no reason whatsoever why Julia couldn't have inherited power and been Empress; Roman inheritance laws didn't forbid her from inheriting her father's estate. Plus, there was the added complication of there being absolutely no laws or constitutional hurdles in place to dictate who, if anyone at all, could inherit the office of Emperor. It would have been outrageous to have a woman in charge, but then it was pretty outrageous to have anyone inherit power in the first place.

Julia was born on the 30th of October, 39 BC in Rome. Her mother was the noblewoman Scribonia, whom her father had married the previous year to cement a pact with the son of Pompey the Great, Sextus Pompey. The pact with Sextus soon fell apart, hence the marriage, and Augustus divorced Scribonia as soon as Julia was born.

As the daughter of an emperor, Julia's job was mostly to marry people, although her father loved her very dearly and was fiercely protective of her. An early arranged marriage to the son of Mark Antony never happened after Antony and Augustus decided to go to war.

As Augustus had no male heirs, Julia's job was to provide him with grandsons, and so at the age of 14, she was married to Marcellus, her first cousin and son of Octavia, Augustus' sister. Marcellus then became the obvious choice as heir. The marriage didn't last long, just two years, and came to an end when Marcellus died of a fever in 23 BC. They had no children.

In 21 BC, at the age of 18, Julia was then married to Augustus' right-hand man and most trusted general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, he whose name is across the front of the Pantheon in Rome, who was 25 years her senior. It was during this marriage that rumours of Julia's fondness for taking lovers began to grow. Either way, their first son, Gaius, was born in 20 BC, followed by a daughter, Julia the Younger in 19. A third child, another son, Lucius, was born in 17, at which point both of the boys were adopted by Augustus. Julia was pregnant with their fourth child when Agrippa died suddenly in 12 BC, and she subsequently named the boy after him, calling him Marcus Agrippa Postumus. Augustus did not, at first, have that son adopted, but as soon as he was born, she was married again, this time to her stepbrother, Tiberius (the Emperor one). To complicate matters, Tiberius had been married to Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippa's previous marriage.

I told you they kept it close, right?

Tiberius was resentful of being forced to divorce Agrippina, whom he loved dearly, and Julia found him abrasive and cold. In 6 BC, Tiberius gave up the life he had been ascribed as a military man (in which he was successful) and retired to Rhodes to sit around by the pool drinking mojitos, leaving Julia in Rome by herself. Her position as the mother of two heirs to the Empire and wife of another would normally have kept her safe, but that didn't account for her father's newfound drive to have the morality of Roman life brought in check.

The restoration of traditional Republican moral values was one of the central policies that drove Augustus' attempts to change Rome, along with measures to reinforce the sanctity of marriage, which included stringent measures against and punishment of adultery. Everyone engaged in a bit of adultery, of course, but the problem with Julia was less that she was fucking anyone she liked but who she was fucking. One of her lovers was Iullus Antonius, the son of Mark Antony, who had been spared by Augustus following his father's defeat and was raised by Octavia, Augustus' sister, making him Julia's first husband's stepbrother.

Try and keep up.

Iullus Antonius was put to death, and when news of these affairs broke in 2 BC, Augustus was put in an awkward position. Doing nothing at all wasn't an option because he would look like a hypocrite, and also, the people she had been fucking were far too powerful to ignore. Where he might have hoped to simply shift her lovers off to far realms and say no more about it, the removal of so many noblemen would have to be explained. So, somewhat reluctantly, Julia was exiled to Pandateria, the modern-day island of Ventotene, along with her mother, Scribonia, for company, and her marriage was annulled. Nobody was allowed to visit without her father's permission, including her children. Marcus Postumus was adopted by Augustus after her eldest son, Gaius, died aged 23 in AD 4.

After that, she was moved to the mainland and was given more freedom, but she was never allowed to return to Rome. Marcus Postumus grew up to be violent, lazy and insolent, and he was banished and disowned in AD 6. Julia's daughter, Julia the Younger, was also exiled in AD 8, again for adultery.

When Augustus died in AD 14, Tiberius, who had initially shown some sympathy for her plight, made her life even worse, restricting her to house arrest, banishing her from seeing any visitors and removing her allowance, leaving her destitute. Postumus was disinherited and posed no legal threat to the accession of Tiberius, but for good measure, he was murdered.

She died sometime in AD 14, in uncertain circumstances. Cassius Dio said that Tiberius deliberately starved her to death. Tacitus suggests that she starved herself to death on hearing the news of Postumus. Julia the Younger died in AD 28 after 20 years in exile.

According to Augustus' will, neither of them were buried in his mausoleum.

You know, earlier on, when I suggested that there might be another layer near the bottom of the hierarchical social pyramid, in between the plebs and the slaves, where one might put Roman women? Right at the very bottom of society?

Now you know why.

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