Livia: Empress of Rome

Speaker 1 Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tudorberg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great?

Speaker 1 With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists.

Speaker 1 You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II.

Speaker 1 Just visit historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 2 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 2 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 10 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 3 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 4 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 13 Studies show that 100% of everybody in the world wants to curl up indoors and do nothing because it's so darn cold out there.

Speaker 13 That's why many people are turning to Bambas, whose pillowy plush slippers and warm merino wool socks have been said to be the most comfortable in the history of feet.

Speaker 13 Bambas products have been found to boost coziness by up to 1 million percent. Okay, enough fake statistics, but could bomba socks and slippers really be the cure?

Speaker 13 Go to bombas.com/slash audio and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombbas.com and use code audio.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 14 Only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line.
But first.

Speaker 14 There, the last one.

Speaker 14 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 14 refreshes.

Speaker 1 Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. I'm all good 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Emma Southern. I really do hope you enjoy.
Let's go.

Speaker 1 She was one of the most powerful women in the early Roman Empire, the wife of Augustus, first empress of Rome, Livia Drusilla. Throughout history, Livia has had quite the infamous reputation.

Speaker 1 Ever since ancient times, she's been portrayed as scandalous and manipulative, a murderous villainess who oversaw the deaths of multiple members of Augustus' family to ensure that her son, Tiberius, became the next emperor.

Speaker 1 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 Southern.

Speaker 1 Emma, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you back on the ancients.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 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 about to talk about another extraordinary woman from the ancient Roman world.

Speaker 1 I guess it's 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?

Speaker 14 Oh, 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And she has genuinely astonishing power in the Roman Empire.

Speaker 14 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 murders

Speaker 14 but I don't ever see her as a victim and I think that she would hate to be seen as a victim.

Speaker 1 So with the sources that we have for Livia 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 they're probably you have quite a lot of sources to play with.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 Dio, all of them have at least something about Livia.

Speaker 14 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, 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 two.

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 about everything.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But at the same time, she obviously has so much power. She can grant consulships.
She can get people a good job.

Speaker 14 She can make sure that people get the good legions or give them money or sponsor them so that they can do whatever they want to do. And so

Speaker 14 she does have genuine political power and that freaks people out. So they talk about her a lot.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If they're a bit baffled by Livia, generally, how do these people writing about her, how do they portray her?

Speaker 14 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...

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So he'll just say things like through the treachery of a stepmother and therefore imply that she was involved with things.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So 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.

Speaker 14 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 center of power.

Speaker 14 And the fact that she is at the center of power is very, is in and of itself bad.

Speaker 14 But other people, when they write about her, unless she was alive at the time, in which case they're unbelievably flattering.

Speaker 14 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 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

Speaker 14 and a roman 60s as well like i think that you're just being if that's the best thing you can say about her then that's not great but it's so

Speaker 1 they're either very very flattering or very very cruel you also also mentioned there, of course, I mean, big names like Tacitus and Cassius Dio, those are two of the most recognizable Roman historian names that come down to us today.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 14 Yes, definitely. Because they're so important in understanding that period.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So she doesn't really appear that much. But with

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like it's a very unlucky family to be born into if you're a boy. The girls seem to do okay, but the boys die with a terrifying frequency.

Speaker 14 And it does eventually work out to be quite convenient for Livia.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 so they attach her to her every possible death, including eventually the death of Augustus,

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 and they never say it outright.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And therefore she would hold on to her power. And so...

Speaker 14 And then eventually when Augustus is on his deathbed and he's kind of maybe thinking about making somebody else the heir, she kills Augustus in order to make sure that her plan will continue.

Speaker 14 And that's what you get then in iClaudius, the TV show and the book. And then that is the one that becomes like cemented in people's image of her.

Speaker 1 It's the iClaudius portrayal, isn't it? That is really...

Speaker 14 Yeah, the Sean Phillips is.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That has endured for decades, hasn't it?

Speaker 1 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 that helps historians understand sort fact from fiction with the actual figure of livia we do tons of it and interesting types of it as well.

Speaker 14 So we have all of her public statuary. So she is the female face of Augustus's reign, and he is like recreating Roman culture from scratch, really.

Speaker 14 So, she gets put out as this kind of unaging vision ideal of feminine virtue over and over again in all of his statuary.

Speaker 14 On his coins, she appears over and over again as kind of various female virtues of chastity and fecundity and all of these other things. And she is

Speaker 14 put out as this

Speaker 14 idea of family and continuity and female virtue that he wishes to portray. But then we also have the archaeology of her actual life.
So we have things like her palaces that she lived in.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So it's exclusively people who were in her household and very often just their names and job titles.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 somebody whose job is very, like, it's a word that has never been used before or again in Latin and nobody knows what it means, but either means somebody who looked after her handbags or someone who folded her clothes.

Speaker 14 And that was their job.

Speaker 14 So we have all of like this huge amount of archaeology of

Speaker 14 how she is portrayed by Augustus and by his regime, which is as modest and

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 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 absolutely extraordinary clothes and cups there you go yeah If we go back to the beginning then, so pre the emperor Augustus in the late Roman Republic.

Speaker 1 I mean, do we know much about Livia's early years, Emma?

Speaker 14 We do because there's unbelievable. She had a whole life in the first like 20 years of her life.
She did more in the first 20 years than I've managed in about 40 because she is

Speaker 14 married by the time she's 15. So she gets married in 43 BCE.
So the year after Julius Caesar is executed.

Speaker 14 And she marries a guy called Tiberius Nero, who is very much on the anti-Julius Caesar side of things.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 14 And that's where she's up. The next year, she gives birth to Tiberius.

Speaker 14 So she's 16 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.

Speaker 14 So one of the first things we know about her is that she

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And it's only that she manages to calm him down, but there's literally an escape from by night in order to get to Greece.

Speaker 14 They then go to Greece where they have to, for some reason, possibly her husband just upsets and people, they have to escape from Sparta as well when the house is burned down.

Speaker 14 But she has to flee across the empire. And by the time she is like 19, she has already had to travel around in a civil war, choosing the wrong side, basically.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 he's a few years older than her 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

Speaker 14 i don't i don't see what problem is and so they wait until she has her second child drusus 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 50 years of her life supporting him in every possible way and way, like above and beyond what she would need to.

Speaker 14 But it is a extraordinary, like, and she's 20 when she marries Octavian. And she's on her second marriage, her second child, her like second flea from opposing armies.

Speaker 14 And then she has this whole life of becoming and being an empress ahead of her. So, and she comes from this very,

Speaker 14 very ancient, very noble family.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 They have hundreds of consuls and very famous names going right the way back to the time of Romulus in their family.

Speaker 14 And they have things like the Appian Way is named after a Claudian, Claudius Appius, and they and the first aqueducts in Rome are Claudian. They are the family of Rome, really,

Speaker 14 until Augustus comes along and gloms onto them and makes them the Julio Claudians.

Speaker 14 So she has this real weight of kind of old traditional Republican power behind her in this little 20-year-old body.

Speaker 1 This episode is sponsored by Ruler.

Speaker 1 Finding a therapist who not only has time for new clients, but also actually takes your insurance can feel impossible. Deciding to reach out and ask for help is huge.

Speaker 1 To then be hit by wall after wall can be so demoralizing.

Speaker 1 Many therapists don't take insurance packages at all, which means that you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription. That's where Ruler comes in.

Speaker 1 They partner with over a hundred insurance plans, making the average co-pay just $15 per session.

Speaker 1 Now that's real therapy, from licensed professionals chosen based on your particular situation, at a price that actually makes sense.

Speaker 1 You use your insurance benefits to maintain your physical health, so why wouldn't you do the same for your mental health?

Speaker 1 Thousands of people are already using ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com slash ancients to get started.

Speaker 1 After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you.
That's rula.com slash ancients.

Speaker 1 You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

Speaker 15 Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. Flu season is here, and our pharmacies have you covered with a free flu shot with most insurance plans.
Plus, it's cough and cold season.

Speaker 15 And now through December 2nd, stock up on all the season's essentials and get ready for relief with discounts on items like Musinex Cold and Flu Kickstart, Mucinex Fast Max products, VIX Daquil and Nyquil combo pack, Alka Selser Plus, also airborne and afrid.

Speaker 15 Offers end December 2nd. Restrictions apply and offers may vary by location.
Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Speaker 2 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 2 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 10 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 3 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 4 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 16 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows home so you don't have to.

Speaker 16 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one.

Speaker 16 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 1 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 ultimately Cleopatra.

Speaker 1 So, this is the 30s BC. I mean, do we know during that period where Octavian is rising, but you've still got the likes of Mark Antony opposing him?

Speaker 1 Kind of, you know, the turbulent relationship that they have, do we know much about the dynamic between young Livia and young Octavian during that decade, whilst it is before he becomes the emperor, before he becomes Augustus?

Speaker 14 We know less so,

Speaker 14 other than kind of generic things.

Speaker 14 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...

Speaker 14 if he did say the wrong thing, she'd give him a kick.

Speaker 14 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 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 legitimize legitimize himself, to legitimise his reign, to try to stabilize everything.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 the main focus of those early years seems to be wanting children.

Speaker 1 And is Octavian faithful to Livia in this early stage of his life?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And one of the things that gets thrown at her, actually, is that she would procure them for him

Speaker 14 in his younger years. But no, very much not.
He has a thing for writing like a horrible poetry around women as well.

Speaker 14 And there's the very classic or quite famous letter that Mark Antony writes to Octavia.

Speaker 1 I was thinking about this letter. Yes, please tell us about this letter.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Basically, it's after he has run off with Cleopatra and abandoned Octavia, who is Augustus' sister, and he has said, so what if I'm having sex with the Queen?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like, why do I have to keep it in my toga if you don't have to keep it in yours, basically?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 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 is it after then that final showdown between octavian and mark anthony and cleopatra the battle of actium and then the battle of alexandria when octavian is the top dog you know mark anthony is out of the picture and we get to the 20s bc is this really when we start getting more information about livia too in the sources and just in her story yeah so this is when we start to get because Augustus then makes the family and the

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 his statue, in his coinage, on his art. And he starts to pull her out so that he can parade around their wonderful marriage.
And he

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And a statesman has a wife. 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 which that may sound like she's collecting children which she is

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 You mentioned the portrayals in art and coinage, I'm guessing architecture as well.

Speaker 1 Can you explain a few examples of that and how they're portrayed together, you know, in this next chapter in Octavian, I guess we should say now Augustus's story if he's now been proclaimed Augustus.

Speaker 1 Can you explain a bit about how they portray themselves together in this next chapter of their life?

Speaker 14 So they now start to portray themselves as kind of the parents of the

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 so she always has very very tied up neat modest hair basically because she is

Speaker 14 there are all of these ideas of control and modesty that are around women that are very tied up to hair 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

Speaker 14 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 perfect chaste modest, pious wife.

Speaker 14 And then you hear stories about her, and

Speaker 14 she's just terrifying.

Speaker 1 And so, how does she exercise power differently during this period? You mentioned the gathering of children, but is she also kind of like a patron of arts and stuff like that?

Speaker 1 Is there a way through which she can really show her power in a very different way than Augustus does, you know, as this very kind of public, overt leader of the people?

Speaker 14 Yes. Well, she has her own kind of moments of public, overt, she has the Portico of Livia is built

Speaker 14 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 board games at the Portico for Livia?

Speaker 14 And it's a real statement. But what she does is

Speaker 14 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 galba who is emperor for like eight months in 68 to 69 after the death of nero his career

Speaker 14 is

Speaker 14 sponsored almost entirely by Livia at the beginning. So she like pays for him.
She makes sure that he gets positions at the beginning.

Speaker 14 She she is responsible for him eventually becoming a very bad emperor. And she,

Speaker 14 there's also this wonderful moment.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And she gets so furious at Tiberius that she starts pulling out all of these letters that Augustus has written about him and chasing him around the house.

Speaker 14 And is like, when you were 18, Augustus said you were horrible.

Speaker 14 And like, basically, that's her, like, she's so used to being able to say, well, I want Galber to have the consulship and have Augustus say, okay.

Speaker 14 When Tiberius says no, she's just completely thrown by it. So that is how she is able to exercise this power.
Right.

Speaker 14 And it's through advising Augustus and saying, well, I think we should do this. And I think that Galga should be praetor.
And she can do this so much.

Speaker 1 But Emma, I guess that's, of course, that's important to highlight, isn't it? Because it is still quite an experimental time.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 you know, really helping and advising Augustus, especially in these early stages, to make sure 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 in the Senate and in Rome at the time.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And having her there as a partner almost makes him look more reasonable in what he's doing.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It just so happens that you all agree 100% of the time that our advice is the best.

Speaker 14 So they're able to present themselves as just a normal family. Like everyone's wife gives them advice.

Speaker 14 It just so happens that my wife gives the best advice.

Speaker 14 And just so happens that my wife knows all of the senators.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So we know that she was doing it, is she would have dinners at her house with the senators.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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 just advising Augustus.

Speaker 14 She's also talking to all the senators. It was like, you know, might be a great idea.

Speaker 14 What if I, you tell me and I'll tell Augustus or no, what would be a lovely idea if you all listen to what I had to say.

Speaker 14 So she's very involved from quite early on in building what Augustus builds from the ground up.

Speaker 1 And as you say, she's helping certain figures. You mentioned the future emperor Galba there earlier.
But with Augustus, I sometimes think of he had a few intellectuals around him as well, didn't you?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 14 She does have philosophers around her, although it's never considered to be particularly feminine to surround yourself with philosophers.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 She's never like sponsoring their careers in a public way, like the way that,

Speaker 14 you know, Augustus has Mycenae 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.

Speaker 14 For her to do that,

Speaker 14 it would not be considered appropriate feminine behaviour. That would be considered to be a bit too public to be intellectual.

Speaker 14 And coming out of the late Republican tradition, where it's considered to be, that's the kind of thing that a a Clodia or a Fulvia would do, would be to hang out with artists.

Speaker 14 And therefore, it's a bit libertine. And she is never a libertine woman.

Speaker 14 The veneer of conservativism, which is disguising the amount of actually

Speaker 14 radical politics that they are doing.

Speaker 1 I certainly would never call myself an expert on this period, but it always feels to me almost looking in.

Speaker 1 that the 20s BC 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 increasing their power, making sure they don't follow in Caesar's footsteps.

Speaker 1 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 in the same place.

Speaker 14 They're not, actually.

Speaker 1 Fair enough. Okay.

Speaker 14 It is not something that aristocratic women really do, which is raise their own children particularly.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 Shall we move on to the year 23 BC? Because this feels it's quite a big year for Augustus and Livia, isn't it?

Speaker 1 You've got illness and you also have a death, like the first big death of that, of the family.

Speaker 14 It is the first 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 that julia claudia octavia's is augustus's sister he's his sister yeah So he has basically been marked out as the person that Augustus seems to be choosing as his successor.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 He's made him his son-in-law, which is quite a big deal. And all of a sudden, there is a plague that runs through Rome.
Octavia, Augustus, he's Augustus by now, gets sick from it.

Speaker 14 Marcellus gets sick from it, but Marcellus dies. And he is then given a huge public funeral.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It is now a death for the empire. He's written into the Aeneid all of a sudden.
Then everybody kind of mourns him.

Speaker 14 And then because he has died so young, he is a teenager, rumors 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

Speaker 14 people start to look back on it afterwards and say

Speaker 14 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 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.

Speaker 14 And it's the first time that one of his plans has kind of not gone through.

Speaker 14 And from there, things start to kind of hurdle a little bit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, Augustus's plans seem to just fall left, right, and center like dominoes.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 then having kind of run out of nephews, Augustus then adopts two of his own grandchildren.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Marcus Agrippa dies, but he's like, he is in his 50s. So that's like not considered to be so terrible.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And he's at war with an enemy in the east.

Speaker 14 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 jokes on you this is actually an assassination um yeah turns out really easy so they stab him and he dies of his stab wounds and then he adopts his final grandson who's called agrippa posthumous who then turns out to be a bit odd or a bit violent in some way 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, there's kind of four guys who have been made his heir and who have died.

Speaker 14 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...

Speaker 14 has to make Tiberius his heir. And Tiberius is a perfectly fine heir, heir, but to

Speaker 14 people around

Speaker 14 who don't really want there 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 in an extrajudicial, 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.

Speaker 14 And then Augustus dies, and that doesn't help either. And then the final one is Germanicus, who was a big favorite of Augustus,

Speaker 14 who he

Speaker 14 seems to have wanted to make a co-heir possibly with Tiberius, and he forces Tiberius to adopt him.

Speaker 14 But he also dies when he's very young in mysterious circumstances, right like quite early on in Tiberius's reign while Livia is still alive.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's no evidence. It's just that rumor starts to emerge that she's involved in their demises.

Speaker 14 She's basically, it's kind of a, you know, a qui bono who benefits situation, which is that young people dying is always upsetting. And they are all very young.
You know, they're all teenagers.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like these are, there must be some kind of preventable death.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And that is what happens here. Like,

Speaker 14 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 can poison from

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 That's an absolutely fair point.

Speaker 15 Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. As winter approaches, make sure you set aside some time for self-care now through December 2nd.

Speaker 15 Get great savings on personal care essentials when you shop in store or online. Buy two participating self-care items and save $3.

Speaker 15 Shop for items like Treseme Shampoo, Dove Shampoo, Dove Men's Care Body Wash, Dove Body Wash, and Axe Shower Gel, and save $3 when you buy two or more items. Offer ends December 2nd.

Speaker 15 Restrictions apply. Offers may vary.
Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Speaker 2 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 2 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 10 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 3 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 4 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 1 Shall we explore another relationship Livia has during the reign of Augustus?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 BC, and then marries the much older Agrippa, Augustus' best friend.

Speaker 1 But can you explain a bit more about who she was and her character and how she ultimately comes to blows with Livia? She does.

Speaker 14 So she is the daughter of Augustus' first wife, Scrabonia, and they don't get on at all. And Augustus divorces her on the day that Julia is born.

Speaker 1 That's not good. That's not good for the child, I must say.

Speaker 14 It's not.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 So her job is that she marries men and has children. And then the men that she marries have been marked as his successor.
So she marries Marcellus when she is a teenager.

Speaker 14 When he dies, she marries Marcus Agrippa. When they have six children, when Marcus Agrippa dies, then she is married to Tiberius.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 They despise each other quite violently. And they both go off the rails at the same point.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like she's always been interested in having parties and telling jokes and looking pretty and hanging out with fun people much to the kind of disapproval of livia and augustus they're always there's this fourth century collection called 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?

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 14 Why 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.

Speaker 14 And the stories are of her having an affair with Mark Antony's surviving son.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 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 forum.
So in like the center of the

Speaker 14 roman republic of having sex on or nearby a statue of liberty which opponents to augustus used but like really publicly and flagrantly and quite aggressively like

Speaker 14 flaunting the fact that she's really angry at her dad and when he finds out about it which is quite quickly 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.

Speaker 1 Is that line really in there? Unless they are very ugly, she cannot speak to a man.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 And with Livia, do you think Livia is involved in that at all? It doesn't sound like they had a very good relationship.

Speaker 14 They did not have a particularly good relationship, but everything that you get actually is Augustus being furious. Like,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But she certainly doesn't feel any sympathy towards Julia because when Augustus dies, she does nothing to help her.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 He never, ever forgives her.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 14 It does.

Speaker 14 I actually kind of love this story because basically it seems that the core of it is that when Augustus died, he's like 80, 86, I think, she didn't let the information out of the palace for a little while.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And the earliest sources are kind of a bit tiptoey about it. So they'll be like, oh, maybe I'm not 100%.

Speaker 14 There were rumors and suspicions.

Speaker 14 And Pliny says some like Pliny the Elder who is a natural historian polymath 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 posthumous 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And that's how she killed him.

Speaker 14 Which, you know, as a story is great. And if she did, also great.
But also he was 86 years old. She probably could have just waited a minute.

Speaker 1 I'm glad that we mentioned the poison fig story because it is quite a crazy image to think about. And I guess also we should mention the kind of the weird Agrippa posthumous.

Speaker 1 I mean, he doesn't survive long after Augustus' death anyway. Do you think Livia is involved? I don't want to say understandable, but if you're in their mindset, Tiberius is the new emperor.

Speaker 1 You don't want a potential rival there. So do you think she is potentially involved in sending someone to get rid of, to do away with Agrippoposthemus when Augustus dies?

Speaker 14 I think probably, yes. That is much more likely that she would at least approved of that.
And I think she probably also approved because Julia also dies that year. They starve Julia to death.

Speaker 1 Oh, goodness.

Speaker 14 Which, yes, is extremely cruel. But there.

Speaker 14 And I think that, yeah, they...

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 which makes then it totally fine that Tiberius is his son. Very weird.
But the the whole, yeah, so the idea that you need to get rid of these

Speaker 14 two adult rivals who might be able to 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.

Speaker 14 Burns way that we imagine people

Speaker 14 doing it. Like she's not like Fulvia, Mark Antony's wife, who sticks pins in Cicero's tongue and stuff like that.
She is just much more like, you know, well, get it done, kill them. I don't need to.

Speaker 14 And I think that she would be extremely fine with that happening.

Speaker 1 She's incredibly experienced of the early imperial life by that time, isn't she? You know, several decades married to Augustus and the like.

Speaker 1 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 Drusus.

Speaker 14 by this time Drusus though he he's dead so it is just Tiberius her only son left yes so Drusus dies while off on campaign in Germany and so Tiberius is everything

Speaker 14 and

Speaker 14 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 too.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Nobody wants the prescriptions, nobody wants the battles, nobody wants Romans killing Romans.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And she can, and in order to keep this peace going, maybe we need to make some sacrifices.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And you can see how she would not want either herself or anyone else to experience that.

Speaker 1 So Tiberius, when he succeeds Augustus, 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 14 Let's say in the early years, first of all, a much more important role than Tiberius would like.

Speaker 14 Because Tiberius is very conservative and I think that what he would like is for quite a conservative version of the principal 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 can and should be able to advise her son, who doesn't know what he's doing and does go on to mess it up quite badly. So like nobody remembers Tiberius with any great love.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it all goes horribly wrong. But I know it's always so kind of like people always want to find.

Speaker 1 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 change in their opinion almost?

Speaker 14 Well, eventually he quits Rome altogether in order to get away from

Speaker 14 is it to get away from his mum 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

Speaker 14 yeah he does quit rome in order to get away from her which is quite a big big deal

Speaker 14 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 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 absolutely like will flock to see him they love 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, believe that Tiberius and Livia conspired to kill him.

Speaker 14 And they believe that he was poisoned by a guy called Piso and his wife Ergonilla and so when Piso and Ergonilla come back to Rome they are prosecuted for this murder and it is like the most high profile

Speaker 14 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 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

Speaker 14 and she protects her she just will not allow her to be prosecuted 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.

Speaker 14 She's in her 70s and she's like 20 CE-ish and she's just feels she's got nothing left to care about at this stage. Like, what are you going to do to me? It does make her very unpopular.

Speaker 14 Also, because they refuse to come to Germanicus' funeral, basically, they just won't leave the palace for it.

Speaker 14 And so this fuels this idea that she paid for them to kill Germanicus because he was more popular than her son.

Speaker 14 But on a base level, it is a real, like, right at the end of her life, she has become more powerful, even like in terms of what she can get away with than even the emperor, because he can't make her do it.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 By the time she's in her 70s, just like, no, not as fussed about popularity anymore. I'm in this prestigious position.

Speaker 1 I'm I'm going to look after my friend kind of thing and happy to sacrifice some of that. So it's interesting how that, that you, you see that emerge more in the later stages of her life.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 14 So her power wanes because

Speaker 14 Tiberius leaves Rome a bit after that and moves to Capri and starts communicating with the empire by a letter, which allows his right-hand man, Sejanus, Yiannus, to really take control of everything.

Speaker 14 And Livia is by that time quite elderly and

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 She does spend the last few years of her life in a much less powerful position in a kind of very much a figurehead position within the family and with no access to any real power anymore because Sejanus has taken it all.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And then everyone thinks that he's a terrible son. It makes him even less popular and leaves Sejanus to kind of go rampaging through the state until such a time as Antonia stops him, actually.

Speaker 14 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. And eventually she is deified by her great-grandson.
But she is...

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 1 It's quite something indeed. Well, what a life she lived.
What an extraordinary figure she is. And it's ultimately Claudius.
Is it the Emperor Claudius who's her grandson or whoever who deifies her?

Speaker 14 Finally.

Speaker 1 And lastly, how do you think we should ultimately remember Livia today?

Speaker 1 Not a villain, not a victim. I mean,

Speaker 1 how should we think of Livia?

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Like before her, you have Fulvia and Cleopatra and after her you have people like Agrippina the Younger and Meselina who try to be like Augustuses.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 she is the only one who does it well. And I think that

Speaker 14 she would be an unbelievable like Margaret Thatcher

Speaker 14 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

Speaker 14 project, which is allied with her husband's political project.

Speaker 1 Emma, this has been absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 14 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 who, but it does include Julia.

Speaker 14 So it has got Julia 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.

Speaker 1 Well, Emma, just goes to me to say, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

Speaker 14 It's always my pleasure.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 12 I hope you enjoyed the episode.

Speaker 1 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 favor.

Speaker 1 If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating, we would really appreciate that.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 2 Hi, folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

Speaker 2 You know, whether you are doing traditional Thanksgiving, a friend's giving, or something in between, Whole Foods Market has great everyday prices on all the things you need for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 10 No way antibiotics ever birds bring quality to your table at a great price.

Speaker 3 You can enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

Speaker 4 And remember, Prime gives you shop online and delivery or pickup as you like.

Speaker 17 Every year I tell myself I'm going to start holiday shopping early and every year I wait until the last minute. But this time I actually nailed it.

Speaker 17 I sent Omaha Steaks gift boxes to my family and they were a hit. There's something about opening that box.
Those beautifully cut, perfectly aged steaks, the juicy burgers, even the cozy comfort meals.

Speaker 17 My dad called me the next night to rave about his rib ice, said it was the best steak he's ever grilled. Honestly, I think Omaha Steaks might be my new go-to gift.

Speaker 17 It's thoughtful, it's delicious, and it shows up right at your door, perfectly packed and ready to impress. Save big on gourmet gifts and more holiday favorites with Omaha Steaks.

Speaker 17 Visit Omahasteaks.com for 50% off site-wide during their sizzle-all-the-way sale. And for an extra $35 off, use promo code HOLIDAY at checkout.
Terms apply. See site for details.

Speaker 17 That's omahasteaks.com, code holiday.