Faustina I and II: Imperial Women of the Golden Age 0195379411, 9780195379419

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments ix
Maps xi
Introduction 3
ONE: Sources 13
TWO: The Empresses and Women’s Power 19
THREE: The Succession to Hadrian 41
FOUR: The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175 57
FIVE: Public and Private in the Dynasty 91
SIX: The Deified Faustinas: Association, Assimilation, and Consecration 119
SEVEN: Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines 139
Who’s Who 155
Family Trees 161
Abbreviations 165
Chronology 169
Notes 173
Glossary 213
Bibliography 215
Persons Index 233
Subject Index 241

Citation preview

Fau s t i na I a n d I I

WOMEN IN ANTIQUITY Series Editors: Ronnie Ancona and Sarah B. Pomeroy This book series provides compact and accessible introductions to the life and historical times of women from the ancient world. Approaching ancient history and culture broadly, the series selects figures from the earliest of times to late antiquity. Cleopatra A Biography Duane W. Roller Clodia Metelli The Tribune’s Sister Marilyn B. Skinner Galla Placidia The Last Roman Empress Hagith Sivan Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon A Royal Life Elizabeth Donnelly Carney Berenice II and the Golden Age of Ptolemaic Egypt Dee L. Clayman Faustina I and II Imperial Women of the Golden Age Barbara M. Levick

FAU S T I NA I AND II IM PERI AL WO ME N OF T HE GO LDE N AGE

Barbara M. Levick

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form, and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levick, Barbara. Faustina I and II: imperial women of the golden age / Barbara Levick. pages cm.—(Women in antiquity) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-19-537941-9 1. Faustina, Annia Galeria, Empress, consort of Antoninus Pius, Emperor of Rome, 104–140 or 141. 2. Faustina, Annia Galeria, Empress, consort of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, –175. 3. Empresses—Rome—Biography. 4. Rome—History—Antoninus Pius, 138–161. 5. Rome—History—Marcus Aurelius, 161–180 I. Title. DG292.5.L48 2014 937.07092′52—dc23 [B] 2013020157

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To my dear friend Mavis Haut and her children Daniel, Beatrice, and Asia

Brief is the life that each man leads, and brief the corner of the earth where he lives, and brief even the longest survival of his fame, and that too passed down through a succession of manikins who are very soon to be dead, with no knowledge even of themselves, let alone of a man who died long ago. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3.10 ‘The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment . . . then nursing the baby, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains . . .’ . Dolly shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain she had endured from sore nipples which she had suffered with almost every baby. ‘Then the children’s illnesses, and the everlasting anxiety; then bringing them up, their nasty tendencies’ . . . , ‘lessons, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on top of it all, the death of these children’. And the cruel memory that never ceased to tear her mother’s heart rose up of the death of her last born, who had died of croup. —L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenin , trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Classics, 1954), 637

Contents

Acknowledgments Maps xi

one two three four five six seven

ix

Introduction 3 Sources 13 The Empresses and Women’s Power 19 The Succession to Hadrian 41 The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175 57 Public and Private in the Dynasty 91 The Deified Faustinas: Association, Assimilation, and Consecration 119 Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines 139

Who’s Who 155 Family Trees 161 Abbreviations 165 Chronology 169 Notes 173 Glossary 213 Bibliography 215 Persons Index 233 Subject Index 241

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Acknowledgments

i should like to express my warmest thanks to those who have helped me with this work, whether with encouragement, advice, technical help, or the gift or loan of books and articles: Stefan Vranka, Sarah Pirovitz, and the readers for the Oxford University Press, who have greatly improved the book, and most recently Marc Schneider and Elisabeth A. Graves; Ronnie Ancona; Karen Forsyth; Lien Foubert; Olivier Hekster; Daphne Henwood; Chris Howgego, Annika Kuhn, and Toni Ñaco del Hoyo; Sarah Pomeroy; and, as always, Anne Wilson.

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Central Italy

Asia Minor

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Fau s t i na I a n d I I

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Introduction

The Women This book is about two women of high importance, Faustina I and Faustina II (c. 97–140; 130–175). They belonged to the largely Spanish and Narbonensian Roman aristocracy of the late first and the second centuries ad.1 These provinces were where the money was in the western empire and produced their first emperor in Trajan (r. 98–117). Mother and daughter bore the same name, and each was the wife of a ruler who governed the empire at its height in the mid–second century ad. Their husbands Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161) and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) have reputations as golden as that of their whole age. We are not told anything of the looks of either Faustina, but a flattering idea of their appearance can be gained from coins and sculpture, and the portrait of the mother in the Vatican Museum has been analysed as a combination of seductiveness with dignity: her face, quite long, with large, wide-open eyes, was very harmonious.2 The elder married in about 110, and the younger, in 145; each of them was prolific: The elder bore four children, and the younger, at least a dozen, only the minority surviving to maturity. The health of these shoots of the dynasty was a constant preoccupation to their parents. But the Faustinas were also behind the throne for forty years. Sharing the power of the admirable men who occupied it makes them worth study, especially so for two reasons. First, the younger, Faustina II, took on and enhanced the position of her mother, making it clearer what the emperor’s wife was able to do and what she represented to the public. Secondly, that role had time to develop and fluctuate in the century and a half since the foundation by Augustus (27 bc –ad 14) of the

monarchy politely known from the title of its head as the principate: we can see where she stood in the court when it was in its maturity and whether our empresses support the idea that women had lost power since the first century. Would either of them have felt at home in the earlier court? Lastly, the Faustinas in some circles had reputations that are in stark contrast to those of their husbands: promiscuous, with a taste for rough trade. Are those stories justified? And if not, how did they arise, and why, to blot the Golden Age? We have one-sided and detailed accounts, modified from one author to another. It calls for explanation.

Feasibility Is this study feasible? The first chapter shows the poverty and disingenuousness of the sources. Poverty can be illustrated simply from the problems and controversies that haunt the order, not to mention the ages and names, of the children of Faustina II (chapter 5, appendix); disingenuousness, from the way both Faustinas are handled in the literature (chapter 4). Then there is the difficulty of writing about women, whether as individuals, as a related pair, as mother and daughter, or as groups. It never occurred to ancient historians, intent on the public business of war and politics, to write about them for their own sake. We rely on references casual or tendentious in the sources, as well as on the public presentations of art, inscriptions, and coins. In the first century one empress wrote memoirs, but they are lost.3 It would be good to have some insight into the Faustinas’ own views and feelings, as we have into the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius himself through his Meditations, but we have only the briefest glimpses. Neither, though, can their menfolk be known: misrepresentation begins with speech and autobiography before it passes into history-writing. The age of the Faustinas is called the ‘Antonine age’, from the name of the first of the dynasty, Antoninus Pius, and his successors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (r. 180–192). In this period and afterwards the role of the women of the dynasty, as we shall see, was to become a leading feature in its presentation to its subjects, so strengthening its position, giving backbone to the dynasty, and providing more information about the women; and in turn that presentation was exploited by sceptics of all 4

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classes, to undermine the status of the dynasty, if not its stability. If we cannot know the women directly, we can make out the place they occupied in the imperial family and regime. One of the most serious difficulties in the way of any ancient historian may reside in the nature of history itself as it is currently conceived: ancient writers and modern scholars pursue different aims. History lacks authority and cannot claim truth. Its interest lies in interpreting the narratives that make it up: it is a branch of literature. Elegant as some of the work has been, I join those who repudiate the notion that all we have is a series of narratives and that the search for an elusive ‘truth’ is futile. Everyday language denies that, and so does the practice of the law courts, where a true as well as a just verdict can be reached on the basis of evidence. The historian interpreting the materials has to come as close to that truth as he or she can.4 What can be said of women in Roman history, then, in particular of Faustina I and II? First, the women’s ‘power’ must be discussed (chapter 2). Given the importance of family in Roman politics, women, though never holders of secular office in a militaristic state, were always vital as links between influential families and occasionally intervened decisively in events, as Pompeia Plotina reputedly did upon the death of her husband, Emperor Trajan. The marriage alliances and family connexions of Trajan, Hadrian (r. 117–138), and Antoninus Pius were highly significant in the succession strategies that they had to adopt in the absence of direct male heirs; and for Marcus Aurelius, who had a son of his own body to succeed him, it was significant which men of senatorial rank, able but above all loyal, took his daughters in marriage. Hence the need for something to be said of Hadrian’s succession plans and of the family, the Annii, who produced the Faustinas (chapter 3). The role of these women as ‘empresses’, in public opinion and reality, is a central topic, and so is the hardly visible seam that joined their public and private lives (chapters 4 and 5). The rulers of Rome from Augustus onwards derive their modern title of ‘Emperor’ from the word imperator, ‘commander’, the salutation from their soldiers that greeted them when they came to power. There was no female equivalent, for it was a military title; but I shall leave out the inverted commas that would indicate the unsuitability of the title ‘Empress’. At the other extreme, far from the intimate private life of vulnerable human beings that we can glimpse from the letters of the devoted correspondents Marcus Aurelius and his tutor Fronto,5 comes the significant rise of the two women to divine status, paralleled Introduction

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by some of their predecessors but much more intensively cultivated and exploited by their widowers (chapter 6). The nomenclature of their descendants in and after the second century reflects their perceived importance under Commodus and the Severan dynasty of 193–235 (chapter 7). The transgressive women of early Roman imperial history, such as Claudius’s (r. ad 41–54) wives and even Augustus’s Livia (38 bc –ad 29), have been well studied.6 Not only that, but justice has been done to women as the perpetuators of ‘dissident history’, the oral traditions of politicians who stood up to tyrannical emperors: the autobiography of the younger Agrippina (15–59), great-grandchild of Emperor Augustus, Emperor Claudius’s last wife, and Emperor Nero’s mother, preserved the reputation of her own mother, who bore the same name.7 Now women such as the late Republican statesman Cicero’s wife and daughter, who conformed better to accepted rules of female decorum, are getting attention.8 But what the rules were is a question for students of social history and, in particular, of gender. One aspect of this is the empress’s role as example and that of the imperial marriage likewise; it was not only hairstyles that served as empire-wide models, spread by the empirewide distribution of imperial portraiture.9 This role goes back to the reign of Augustus, who in 18 bc made himself a target for ridicule in the Senate when he recommended that members guide their wives as he did Livia.10 The empresses of the second century were more successful than their predecessors in their accepted role, and the part played by Faustina I and II can be set against the impression left in the eighties and nineties of the first century ad by the shadowy but not quite reputable Flavia Julia and Domitia Longina (respectively, Emperor Titus’s daughter and Emperor Domitian’s [r. ad 79–96] wife) and by Pompeia Plotina and Vibia Sabina, the wives of Trajan and Hadrian. Sabina plays a prominent part in the early chapters of this book, as a counterweight both to Hadrian, the husband who allegedly hated her, and to the model wives of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. The mother and daughter, Annia Galeria Faustina I and II,11 are significant in another way, as links in a chain of imperial women for whom varying levels of recognition and power were available (hence the ‘transgressions’). They come between the discreet Matidias (Trajan’s niece and great-niece, another mother and daughter), the discreetly manipulative Plotina, and the philosophical Sabina and in the Severan dynasty, Julia Domna, the powerful Syrian wife of Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) 6

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and mother of the feuding brothers Caracalla (r. 211–217) and Geta (r. 211), and her sister Maesa and nieces Sohaemias and Mamaea, the mothers of Elagabalus (r. 218–222) and Alexander Severus (r. 222–235). These women had very high profiles indeed. One task of this book is to assess the place of Faustina I and II in this chain. Faustina I was too short-lived as a consort to make a great impression, but Faustina II was at the heart of the court from her childhood and so deep in palace politics, and her possible involvement in the revolt of Avidius Cassius (175) must be examined (chapter 4). They do not have the high profiles of some of their notorious predecessors, such as Livia, Messalina, and Agrippina II. This is due in part to the want of a historian of genius to present them, but the evident eclipse of women in politics after the Julio-Claudian period presents too complex a picture for this to be an adequate explanation. The fate of another woman of the imperial circle, Appia Annia Regilla, married to the Athenian millionaire sophist and consul (143) Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus (see chapter 4), provides a salutary corrective to optimistic views about the position of women in Graeco-Roman society.12 The brilliant cultural phenomenon of the second century has given rise to reflections on the bland and happy age with which historians from Edward Gibbon onwards have comforted themselves before plunging into the horrors of the third century. In particular, it has enhanced curiosity about relations between the Greek-speaking east and the Latin Italy and the west. Such relations are exemplified in the marriages of Regilla and of Faustina II’s daughter to Ti. Claudius Pompeianus (cos. II 173) of Antioch in Syria and in Faustina II’s own alleged relations with a senator from the same province (chapter 4), and they are brought sharply to attention by the marriage of Septimius Severus to the Emesene Syrian Julia Domna.13 Whatever the deficiencies of the literary sources, there is an abundance of inscriptions and coins imperial and provincial that provide firm evidence for the empresses’ public status in Rome, Italy, and various parts of the empire, as well as some insight into imperial thinking. This material, the product of extraordinary public and private wealth and beneficence, is richer than for any period except the reign of Septimius Severus, just as the number of portraits of Faustina II in the round is exceeded only by those of Livia (chapter 5). The coin portraits show how much Faustina I and II were identified with each other by artists and how close a precedent Faustina II was for Domna, as her titulature Introduction

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was for Domna’s. That fact reinforces warnings against attempts to trace character from coin portraits.14 The study of these sources leads, then, to two theses, one dependent on the other. First, these two women of wealth and noble descent were prime, through the publicity accorded them and their relationship as like-named mother and daughter, in the formation of the Antonine dynasty. Second, the internal dynamics of the dynasty, notably the harmony (concordia) between husband and wife and between the generations, were put forward for emulation and accepted as norms in the wider community.

The Antonine Age This was the period of which Edward Gibbon wrote that ‘the vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom’. In a modern formulation, that of C. F. Noreña, it was a time when ideological unification reached its peak, helping to bring about a convergence of social power that was broader than during any other comparable period before or after. One can see why this came to be seen as a golden age.15 First, there was an apparent contrast with succeeding political crises and long-term military, economic, and administrative problems. Secondly, there were two well-defined and important ways in which inhabitants of the empire could feel that they had never had it so good: imperial oppressiveness against the upper, articulate classes was relaxed as emperors felt more confident in their position; and warfare at first was peripheral. A backward-looking culture was assiduously maintained among the elite as relief for its everyday labours.16 The Antonine empire has more recently been described by R. Syme as ‘an alliance of the propertied classes under a benevolent autocracy’, but with the exclusion of ‘the larger and more useful portion of mankind’, and, as Noreña points out, this was the age in which the moral term optimus (best) was applied to emperors; dominus (master) came in with Commodus and the Severan dynasty.17 One can see why A. R. Birley in his biography of Marcus Aurelius found an air of the eighteenth century about it.18 Hadrian was an efficient and attentive emperor, though unsatisfactory to the Senate in his dealings with them. He also provides a link between Trajan and the dynasty that followed. Division into ‘periods’ 8

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may turn out deceptive, but some dangers can be avoided if students are clear as to the criteria that are to make up a ‘period’ and if the several strands that seem to make one up—political, religious, economic—can be examined separately. Family continuity in the dynasties within the period that covered the Flavians, Trajan and Hadrian, and the Antonines makes one trivial example: Trajan’s wife, Plotina, it seems, was a sister of Titus’s wife, Marcia, dead before he came to power in 79.19 There was continuity, too, in imperial ambition. Aggressive war against traditional enemies, Moors and northern Britons, and most significantly and dangerously against Parthians and Danubian tribes, did not come to an end, but the defence of the empire also preoccupied its rulers. There were minor disturbances under Pius, and it was the troublesome activities of the tribes of northern Britain that led him to extend direct Roman control above Hadrian’s Wall to the Forth–Clyde isthmus with his turf wall of 139–142, which was occupied until about 164. Spain suffered an incursion of rebels from Mauretania in 171, not the last, in Marcus’s reign. Even more serious problems confronted him: His coemperor, L. Verus, had to be sent against invading Parthians (162–166), but most threatening of all was the situation in the northeast, which required Marcus’s own presence from 168 onwards; there were incursions into Greece and Italy itself by the Costoboci and others in 170. One source claims that Marcus was about to annex new provinces beyond the Danube at the time of his death in 180;20 nothing of that kind was attempted by his son Commodus. Neatly, the ‘Good Fortune’ (Felicitas) of the age was celebrated on coinage in connexion both with military success (victoria) and with the birth of Marcus and Faustina’s twin sons in 161, for both contributed to the sense of well-being in the community.21 Rome’s previous successes meant that there was time for reflection (Marcus’s Meditations attest it), self-doubt, and preoccupation with physical well-being. That was sharpened by the plague, usually identified as smallpox, that came from the east in 166 with the returning troops of L. Verus. The effects have been debated—the mortality, perhaps 20–30 per cent in some areas; the subsequent decline of physical well-being; and the secondary results, which may have contributed to the ‘Third Century Crisis’. It reached the far west, as a Gloucester ‘death pit’ of at least ninety-one bodies attests, as well as a dedication from Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, set up to all the gods and goddesses at the behest of the Oracle of Apollo at Claros, to whom Marcus himself may have appealed. The impact was acute, as the literary sources also prove, Introduction

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but it may have been intensified by other disturbing factors, such as invasion from beyond the frontiers.22 Increasing uneasiness has also been traced by M. Boatwright through building at Rome: peaceful advance represented in Hadrian’s Hellenizing temple, a switch to preoccupation with Italy in the Temple of Faustina (chapter 4), attention to Roman boundaries intensified in Marcus Aurelius’s Arch, but with an increasing focus on family and homeland. Much is incontestable, but the interpretation is strained; but Romans had always drawn sharp differences between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘military’ (domi militiaeque).23 Apart from the plague there is no reason to suppose that the health of the population of Rome and Italy or that of the rest of the empire was worse than it had been in previous centuries; in fact, if the empire was at its economic acme in the earlier second century, it may have been better. Certainly medical aid was widely available to those with money, and doctors were rewarded. Mortality rates would have been no worse than they had ever been at Rome and in Italy and the empire; indeed in the first half of the century the population of the empire was at least stable, if not increasing, and as yet depreciation of the coinage was inconsiderable.24 The preoccupations that attract our attention, the dark reverse of successful imperialism, bring to mind strains that afflicted Victorian culture. In an article published almost forty years ago, H.-G. Pflaum asked big questions about the Antonine age and found it divided into two parts: Hadrian’s caution hardened into immobility under Antoninus Pius, who literally moved little farther from Rome than his villa at Lorium, thirteen miles northwest on the Via Aurelia. For this Marcus had to pay with unremitting warfare. The ‘happiness of the age’ that Tacitus claimed for the new regime of Nerva and Trajan, from 96 onwards, and attributed to political freedom for the senatorial class, lasted only four decades, however much it continued to be celebrated on the coinage as ‘freedom’. B. Rémy’s subsequent defence of Antoninus Pius as an active and interventionist emperor may not convince, but whether more proactive policies would have made any long-term difference to Rome’s relations with the enemies on her frontiers is another question, just as it is unclear whether Marcus himself could have dealt a fatal blow to the Germans and Sarmatians if he had not been hindered by the plague, by the revolt of Avidius Cassius nearly a decade later, and by his own decline.25 The anxiety, the preoccupation with physical health, perhaps amounting to hypochondria, noted in Antonine literature needs comment, if indeed it was hypochondria rather than a reasonable response 10

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to the level of health possible at that time.26 The correspondence between Marcus and Fronto (beset by chronological problems)27 abounds in exchanges about their own physical state,28 and that of their nearest and dearest, that illustrate, even stress, the writers’ tenderness towards each other and their families; they are not to be compared with letters of the Republican statesman M. Tullius Cicero (cos. 63 bc ) and his friends, which had a vastly greater proportion of urgent political matter. Faustina I survived at least four pregnancies, and Faustina II, at least ten. Both left their husbands widowers, Antoninus a robust countryman, Marcus an intensely hard-working judge and administrator, a serious philosopher, and eventually an undaunted soldier. Marcus seems to have developed an ulcer, ameliorated by a medicine that contained opium and would have relieved his insomnia. The skill and prestige of the Pergamene Galen, the imperial physician, brought his profession to new heights.29 On the other hand, the extravagant pietist orator Aelius Aristides—another sick man—was a centre of attention at Rome and Athens, both of which he lauded. The satirist Lucian of Samosata offers a refreshing antidote to these solemnities and insights into contemporary culture.30 Wonderworkers and newfangled cults sucked in members of the ruling class: a prophetic snake, Glycon, and its minder Alexander of Abunoteichus—a city of Bithynia renamed Ionopolis by imperial permission—are excoriated in Lucian’s Alexander, along with Glycon’s senatorial devotees, P. Mummius Rutilianus, suffect consul in 146 and governor of Asia in the early sixties, who in his old age married Alexander’s daughter; and the ‘silly Gaul’ M. Sedatius Severianus, suffect consul in 153 and the governor of Cappadocia, who lost his life in the Parthian attack of 161.31 It is dangerous to write in psychological terms. Is there maybe more in R. Syme’s charge that the governing class was not adequate to its duties?32 Wealthy, well read, and certainly well meaning, it reached positions of high responsibility without overmuch effort, especially effort in the field, and after Domitian without much of a threat from tyrannical emperors, though Hadrian was capricious and dangerous. But military needs were becoming more urgent. It was under Antoninus Pius, G. Alföldy claims, that the failure of the ‘classical’ system of imperial administration became obvious: that is, the smooth rise to consulships (the magistracies that were the mark of a senator’s membership in the leading group within the order) and provincial commands for men born to high rank. Under Pius the aristocratic system reached the peak of its Introduction

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development, with necessary irregularities setting in under Marcus.33 Indeed, in the third century army command was to pass to members of the equestrian order. The empire was at its height, and was threatened, in Britain, on the Danube, and by the Parthians. A sense of inadequacy bred guilt, and that ate inwards, to be relieved only by supernatural powers unheard of before. In a time of war and plague Marcus consulted priests and magicians, the Egyptian Arnuphis, and Lucian’s target Alexander, whose recipe for victory (two lions thrown into the Danube) he duly followed.34 Attempts to provide a more favourable interpretation of the second-century religious climate, grounding it in philosophy and ideas approaching Christianity, do not convince.35

Nomenclature Fecundity in the second-century imperial family and the series of adoptions designed to keep succession policy on course or to advance particular individuals produced a complex and unstable set of proper names. In this volume for clarity’s sake the final official or familiar name is normally used, even anachronistically: so for the Emperors ‘Pius’ (a title he was awarded only after his accession),36 ‘Marcus’ (the emperor’s forename since childhood), and ‘L. Verus’ (he dropped the name Commodus and took that of his adoptive brother when they became joint emperors in 161). Even more anomalously, to avoid confusion, I shall refer to ‘Faustina I’ and ‘Faustina II’ and similarly to other homonymous women, such as Matidia the elder and the younger. On the other hand, since we are at the acme of the Roman Empire, Romanized versions of Greek geographical and personal names need no apology.

12

Faustina I and II

C ha pt e r

One

Sources

Stark Facts and Their Want The chronology shows how unsatisfactory the state of our knowledge of the second century is.1 We do not know exactly when either Faustina I or Faustina II was born, nor are we certain when they died. There are no biographies of them and no precise epigraphic commemorations. Scholars have depended on calculations from the dates of their parents’ weddings and their siblings’ births; from the dates of their own marriages, not certain for Faustina I; and (in the case of Faustina II) from their last known childbirth. Their deaths are mentioned in passing in the Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio’s history.2 It looks as if Faustina I was born in the late nineties ad, and her daughter Faustina II, in or soon after 130. That is a calculation from her marriage in 145 and the child conjecturally born in 170 (chapter 5), but it may have been a year or two later: thirteen was not out of the question as the age for a high-born Roman girl’s marriage.3 Scholars are divided on the death of Faustina I, 140 or 141, and even that of her daughter, notorious because of its circumstances: probably late in 175 (chapter 4). This set of facts—about our knowledge—is instructive: there is little interest in the Faustinas for their own sake, only so far as they intervened as adults in the lives of their families, especially those of their imperial husbands and sons.

Literary Sources The mangled correspondence of M. Cornelius Fronto, a leader of the Roman bar to rival Cicero and suffect consul in 142, brings us close to the imperial family:4 a tutor to Marcus Aurelius and L. Verus, he regretted

Marcus’s determined turning away from rhetoric and towards philosophy. Fronto gives contemporary insight into the themes and tone of letters between intimates of unequal status, in which Fronto was sometimes bold enough to give trenchant advice on controversial private matters, such as an inheritance (chapter 4). We hear what they intended us to hear (as with the letters of the younger Pliny), but that in itself is revealing. Both Fronto and Marcus display extravagant affection and concern for each other and their families. To Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, Fronto was a friend; for the younger Faustinas, he will have been an avuncular figure.5 Occasional anecdotes in the writings of the court physician Galen (c. 129–200) throw light on the imperial circle and the health of the men at its centre. The emperor himself, late in life, was to write his philosophical Meditations, which, although addressed to himself and insistent on candour, throws carefully filtered light on his relations with his predecessor and with his own wife, Faustina II, and other connexions.6 For considered historical judgment, the literary sources are hardly fit for the purpose. No Tacitus, no Suetonius, no Plutarch. Of contemporary historians, only Lucius Cassius Dio remains. Dio, from Nicaea in Bithynia, born about 164 into a senatorial family, was consul circa 205–206 and consul for the second time in 229, with the emperor as a colleague. When his work on the portents that led Septimius Severus to hope for supreme power was well received, he was inspired, so he tells us, to write on the civil strife that followed the murder of Commodus, 193 onwards. The favourable reception of this too encouraged Dio to go on to the whole of Roman history. He claims to have spent ten years researching and twelve in writing it, concluding with his own retirement in 229.7 For the second century what remains of his work, of which books 70–72 covered the reigns of the three Antonine emperors, exists only in fragmentary epitomes, notably those of books 36–80 by Xiphilinus (no longer available for the reign of Pius), Zonaras, and Peter the Patrician, and excerpts, the Excerpta Valesiana and the Suda.8 As a senator Dio was unrelentingly hostile to Commodus: when he came to power Rome passed from an age of gold into one of iron and rust.9 The History of Herodian, a native of western Asia Minor who may have been writing under Philip the Arabian (244–249) and taking his work to Rome’s millennium, begins only with the death of Marcus and is of disputed value; it seems to have derived in part from Dio.10 While Tacitus the historian had no immediate successors, biography, practised in his Agricola and by Hadrian’s secretary Suetonius, continued 14

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in vogue, with emperors as subjects. Hence we have Sextus Aurelius Victor’s On the Caesars.11 These moralizing biographies, the work of a pagan senator and modelled on those of Suetonius, came out probably in about 360. The Epitome purporting to be a summary of Victor’s composition dates to the end of the fourth century; it is independent but drawn from a related source.12 In succession to Suetonius, and on his scale, we possess a work slightly later than Victor’s, the Historia Augusta.13 This set of biographies of emperors and usurpers ad 117–284, with a gap from 244 to 260, is a continuous source for the history of the second and third century. They purport to be by six authors writing in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine (284–337); probably they are by a single pagan author writing under Theodosius (379–395) or about a decade later, who in the first half of his work divides his subjects between emperors and subsidiary figures such as heirs and pretenders (in our period Aelius Caesar and Avidius Cassius), paying more attention to the first. As he advances he becomes less anchored to the evidence available to him. So the lives of Hadrian, Pius, M. Aurelius, and Septimius Severus are considered comparatively reliable; but even the worst-regarded, such as the Verus, include authentic material. The bent of the work is pro-senatorial and hostile to hereditary monarchy and to military intervention in politics.14 Besides the controversy about its nature and authorship, which is reaching resolution, the Historia Augusta presents the difficulty of its own sources. They include Cassius Dio and the imperial biographer Marius Maximus, an author cited no fewer than twenty-four times in the Historia, so that discussion about the value of that work is aggravated by disagreement about the standing of Marius.15 The author may be a senator and general contemporary with Septimius Severus, and he and Cassius Dio may have known each other’s work. The senator Marius began his career in about 178; was suffect consul in 198 or 199; was governor of Syria, Africa, and Asia and prefect of the city in 217–218; and was (regular) consul again in 223. Alternatively the author may be this man’s son, regular consul in 232, or an unknown with the same name. Marius’s popular biographies (perhaps from Nerva to Elagabalus) may continue those of Suetonius, with Marcus occupying two books and Septimius Severus possibly three. They were organized by category and included documents and scandalous material. Marius has been reviled for his frivolity and prolixity; in R. Syme’s view his work belongs to the category of the ‘mythistoricus’, a writer of fictional history Sources

15

denounced in the Historia Augusta itself. For the biography of Pius, on the other hand, B. Rémy regards Marius as a source of very good quality. Marius has now come under scrutiny with the revision of H. Peter’s work on the fragments of Roman historians, making a fresh judgment possible. As a connoisseur of court life and a follower of Suetonius, Marius has been taken to be hostile to Faustina II and indeed to all imperial women and so to have credited wives such as Plotina, Faustina II, and Julia Domna with adultery and poisoning. But that generalization is based on the allegation in the Historia Augusta that he wished to traduce Faustina. One may place him as an authority of substance, but certainly one with a taste for scandal that he satisfied on women, with even less discrimination than Suetonius. The use of Marius Maximus (among others) by the author of the Historia Augusta would account for its double-edged attitude towards Hadrian, with the emperor’s autobiography feeding more favourable passages.16 Marius’s work, then, may indeed lie behind the Historia Augusta biographies up to that of Elagabalus (218–222), but some scholars, notably R. Syme, minimizing Marius’s contribution, have postulated a respectable unknown author (‘Ignotus’), who is either an annalistic historian like Tacitus or another biographer. More will be said on this subject in chapter 4, where the scandals surrounding the empresses are dealt with.17 Certainly Marius was used by the author of the Epitome and by that of the Kaisergeschichte, a putative ‘imperial history’ of the first half of the fourth century that covered the period from the second century onwards to the death of Constantine. The ‘KG’ was postulated by A. Enmann to account for resemblances among compilers who consulted it, such as Aurelius Victor, his ‘epitomator’, Eutropius, the Historia Augusta, and Orosius.18 For the taste for comprehensive Roman and world histories survived. John Malalas of Antioch, circa 480–570, wrote an imaginative (to use a euphemism) world history in Greek, the Chronographia, with stress on his native city, in eighteen books extending beyond 563.19 It is also worth mentioning Zosimus, a Treasury lawyer, who early in the sixth century wrote a pagan Greek New History (Historia Nova) of the Roman Empire from Augustus to 410, the first three centuries in book 1.20 In Latin we have the court official Eutropius’s Brief History in ten books (about 369), carrying Roman history down to 364, and the Spaniard Orosius’s seven books of Histories against the Pagans, written with the 16

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encouragement of St. Augustine and proceeding from the Creation to ad 417.21 St. Jerome, circa 347–420, besides rendering Scripture in Latin, translated and expanded the early fourth-century Greek Chronicle of world history by Eusebius of Caesarea.22

Legal and Documentary Sources No historian of the empire can neglect legal treatises and compilations, such as the second-century Institutes of Gaius and the Codex and Digest compiled under Justinian (527–564), though their explicit references to female members of the imperial family are rare.23 As if to balance the wretchedness of the literary evidence, what we have from official sources—coins and medallions (medals struck for commemorative purposes and distributed by the emperor), inscriptions, and to a lesser extent, documentary papyri—is rich;24 the second century in its prosperity was lavish in the production of coins, imperial and local, and of inscriptions, imperial, municipal, and private. As to the epigraphic record, in the second century we are at the height of the ‘epigraphic habit’, when matters of importance, public and private, were most commonly recorded on stone or bronze and when the interests of the emperor and of provincial magnates converged most closely. Much is colourless routine, but there are sparks of individuality, and there is interest in considering which parts of Italy and the empire thought it worthwhile to honour the empresses. Two problems here involve the progress of the habit in different areas, which was dependent on the pre-existing culture and the availability and cost of suitable materials—bronze, marble, and limestone (Britain suffered on both counts and has nothing to show of our two women)—and the uneven survival and recovery of monuments, through being reused or built into later structures, dug out by archaeologists, or uncovered by metal detectors. Inscriptions can be as controversial as the literary evidence, notably when they are damaged, as with one that records a famous will taken to bear on the wealth of the family of the Faustinas.25 The bases that display inscriptions honouring members of the imperial family often supported statuary in singletons or groups, in Italy and especially in Rome itself at least approved by the emperor, his wife consulted, if at all, only as a matter of courtesy. By far the greatest contribution has been made by the rich output of coins, imperial and local, in the Antonine age. Without regarding them Sources

17

as propaganda, imperial issues clearly represented how emperors saw themselves and hoped that they would be seen by their subjects. The images and legends were probably selected by courtiers or discerning mint officials and offered to the emperor for approval; on some occasions he may have chosen them himself. The idea that the empresses, too, acquired a ‘right to coin’ is treated in chapter 2. The mints had developed sophisticated vocabularies, verbal and pictorial, and it is instructive to trace their development and to see what is derivative and what is original. The coins make allusions to historical events, such as victories and the births of imperial children, and many are dated. Moreover, they carry portrait busts of members of the dynasty, which resemble those in marble or on gemstones, notably in the hairstyles of their female subjects. That has helped scholars to construct sequential typologies of the portraits and, more importantly, and with the aid of the literary evidence, to propose birthdates for the long series of the progeny of Marcus and Faustina II. The most influential scheme has been presented in the methodical study published by K. Fittschen (chapter 5), but much remains uncertain and may be confirmed or destroyed by the discovery of new evidence.26

18

Faustina I and II

C ha pt e r

T wo

The Empresses andWomen’s Power

What ‘Power’? Faustina I and II were well placed to enjoy the kinds of power available to women in antiquity. As to (1) physical strength, Faustina I and II were both champions at childbirth, but that did not count in a militaristic society. Passing to the level playing field, (2) intellectual and moral weight, we find ancient women’s education deficient, for their minds and qualities of character were thought as inferior as their bodies.1 Even philosophers who wrote otherwise did not consider that their views entailed a change in women’s place.2 Still, Marcus Aurelius’s high-born mother became a connoisseur of Greek, and Faustina I was her social equal. Certainly Faustina’s daughter, the child and destined wife of an emperor, had the best education feasible for a woman. But women could not take political, as opposed to certain priestly, posts and so could not wield (3) the power of office, especially not military authority.3 Only when Faustina II had been ‘Augusta’ for twenty years was she allowed a seemly connexion with the army as ‘Mother of the Camps’ (chapter 4). To be sure, Roman women with full civic privileges could deploy all the power brought by (4) the control of money and the possession of other property, including slaves. Wealth gave power to aristocratic Roman women, and empresses had a modicum of the vast imperial wealth at their disposal.4 A Roman woman could be instituted heir and institute her own and accept legacies (subject to the limitations imposed by the Lex Voconia5), if no longer under the power of the head of the family or of a guardian (having been released from tutelage by becoming the mother of three children or by special dispensation). Women in prosperous

parts of the empire, such as Pamphylia in Asia Minor, came to possess enough disposable income to play a part in the acts of generosity that were expected from the well off: perhaps 10 per cent of it.6 Faustina I and II would find no obstacle to managing their own money: we find them well equipped, with slaves at their command, and even expecting to have a say in the disposal of the emperor’s wealth. The property of the Faustinas themselves is clearly attested from literature and the brick stamps produced in workshops that belonged to them. The ‘Magnum Collegium’ of the arcae (treasure chests) of the two empresses embraced the slaves who were responsible for the administration of their wealth.7 Within the family women were expected, like male members, to obey its head (paterfamilias); how far they went depended on personality as well as on law and convention: lawyers ordained that if a master was intimidated into freeing his slave, the manumission was invalid.8 Obey is a harsh word. S. Treggiari has drawn a fine distinction: Roman compliance in marriage is not obedience but, rather, cooperation. Nor could it be counted on, or Marcus would not have congratulated himself on finding it in Faustina II.9 Hence came (5) empresses’ all-important ‘influence’, open likewise to a patriarch’s male relatives, friends, and dependants. That had a recognized, if restricted, role, as a sixth-century writer on politics allows: ‘It is obvious that élite wives will help in regard to women’s matters, particularly since they are the best by nature, the best brought up—and they happen to live with the best people, the élite! It is fitting for that sex, being both clever and perceptive, to look after their sisters’.10 But the influence of a woman had to be taken seriously by an entire court, especially if she survived her husband. Neither Faustina qualified, dying in her mid-forties. It could be a force in its own right, like a man’s approved but unofficial ‘authority’ (auctoritas); though it often went by a less flattering term, potency (potentia). Any of these forms of power, manifested in the imperial family, could generate (6) the charisma, tenuous but effective among the credulous or those who had an interest in believing, of a human being who is to some extent or potentially superhuman by descent or attainment (chapter 6). Historical developments must be allowed for: so the control of money led to changes in the transmission of property between cognates and went along with the use of nomenclature derived from female ancestry. When M. Cornelius Fronto wrote to his son-in-law C. Aufidius Victorinus (consul 158) in 164, he remarked that his line would be continued in Victorinus’s son, M. Aufidius Fronto, through Fronto’s only surviving 20

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child, Cratia; and an old lady whose frivolity is deplored by the younger Pliny, Ummidia Quadratilla, had a grandson who shared her family name, C. Ummidius Quadratus Severus Sertorius (consul 118).11

How NecessaryWere Emperors’ Wives? When Tiberius came to sole power in 14 he was doubly a divorcé, both marriages and divorces brought about by politics. He had long decided against remarriage—or Augustus decided for him: he already had heirs. Vespasian took over in 70 as a widower with two grown-up sons. He did not endanger the position of Titus and Domitian by remarrying into the nobility. Titus, too, remained a widower, but Domitian exemplified two trends in imperial marriage connexions: concern for the place of the individual within the dynasty and concern for relations with the senatorial aristocracy. He refused Titus’s daughter and then took that of a great Neronian general with imperial connexions.12 That marriage saved Domitian from subordination to Titus and made a political statement: the new dynasty was conciliating the surviving Julio-Claudian nobility. The elderly Nerva, too, was a widower in 96 when he was thrust into power by the assassination of Domitian, but his successor, Trajan, already had a wife suitable to his father’s original station and Spanish origin. Pompeia Plotina, born in about ad 60 and married to Trajan in about 76, stemmed from the province of Narbonensis, wealthy, Italianized, and thanks to the Greek settlement of Massilia, partly Hellenized. There were many families descended, like hers, from men enfranchised by Pompey the Great in the seventies bc. The Pompeia Marullina honoured with a statue at Nemausus is probably a connexion of hers, and A. von Domaszewski inferred from Hadrian’s forebear Marullinus that he was connected with her family. That would help to explain the favour that Hadrian enjoyed.13 Trajan was not a candidate of long standing when he emerged in 97 from command of an army on the Rhine,14 but Hadrian, his first cousin once removed (the grandson of M. Ulpius Traianus’s sister Ulpia), was another native of Italica in Spain, though born in Rome. He was marked out for special attention early in the reign of a childless emperor. The existence of a wide network of prolific families added to the problems of emperors who were not themselves fertile.15 Branches must be united. Permanent disappointment and dissidence had to be avoided, The Empresses and Women’s Power

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and that meant prevaricating. Hadrian, praetor in 106, reached the consulship in 108—among the secondary holders of the year. Hadrian’s choice of wife was a matter of importance, for his own prestige and for the honour it would confer upon the woman’s family. She was Vibia Sabina, and her mother, Salonia Matidia, was also of the collateral line of Trajan, closer to him than Hadrian himself. Trajan was pursuing the same consolidating strategy as his predecessors in the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, but the disposal of several generations of imperial women—Trajan’s sister Ulpia Marciana, Hadrian’s sister the younger Domitia Paulina, and her daughter Julia Paulina—was also part of the bringing of eminent families into the circle.16 The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this section is that an emperor with existing heirs needed no wife. She could, however, offer bonuses: the good advice of a friend whose interests were largely bound up with the emperor’s; prestige of birth to confirm the superiority of the emperor’s position; and her own circle of friends and protégés, whose value to him depended on her goodwill. Finally, the way she could be presented was useful to her husband.

The Qualifications of an Empress: Family, Wealth, Character, Education, and Intellect What qualified the elder Faustina to be the wife of a Roman emperor? There is a wider question, for T. Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus was married to her long before he became the designated heir of Hadrian, and as a rising senator he had a wide choice.17 What qualified her, then, to be the wife of a noble in the imperial orbit? The two sets of qualities would be similar; those of the potential empress would be higher on the scale. For birth and even more for wealth Faustina I was in the front rank. Her father was M. Annius Verus, third-time consul in 126.18 He gave one of his two sons to the heiress Domitia P. f. Lucilla, whose family had been growing richer for half a century, supplying material for building programmes from Nero to Trajan; the name most frequently found on Roman brick stamps is that of Domitia Lucilla. Annius’s younger son, Libo, consul in 128, received a wife whose name, like his own, recalled the Augustan aristocracy. Faustina’s mother was Rupilia Faustina, who has been held to be the daughter of Trajan’s niece and Hadrian’s cherished mother-in-law, the elder Matidia (later deified), by a 22

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first marriage to a man of high Republican and Augustan ancestry.19 Such connexions give rise to a suspicion that Faustina derived her name ultimately from links with the twin children of the dictator of 81 bc, L. Cornelius Sulla Felix—‘the fortunate’. He called them Faustus and Fausta. There can be no doubting the wealth of the family. The property of the Faustinas is attested from literature and brick stamps produced in workshops that belonged to them.20 It is when they were ensconced in power that we hear of the Great Guild of the Treasuries of the two Faustinas; these presumably contained both their private resources and what had come to them as empresses, perhaps jewellery and bullion as well as coin.21 Rupilia Faustina had owned named estates, the Quintanensia.22 Altogether the wealth of the female members of the Antonine dynasty, broadly so called, went back several generations. Marcus’s aunt Annia married the grandson of the scandalous old Quadratilla. Their son, another Ummidius Quadratus, married Marcus’s younger sister Annia Cornificia Faustina. Some of Quadratilla’s wealth will have percolated down to these later generations.23 Perhaps most opulent of all was Domitia Lucilla the Elder.24 The family fortune derived from the busy forensic activities and equally busy brickworks of Domitius Afer, consul in 39. That fortune descended to her daughter, the younger Domitia Lucilla (the persistence of these names through the female line is eloquent for the power of money). Domitia Lucilla was the mother of Marcus, and presumably it was when her daughter Cornificia married young Ummidius Quadratus that she asked Marcus if he would give her part of his paternal inheritance. He went better than that and gave her the whole, saying that he was content with his grandfather’s inheritance. Domitia could leave her daughter her own entire fortune.25 This is an instructive story. It illustrates the authority in her family of an extremely wealthy woman and Marcus’s readiness to fall in with her wishes. It also bespeaks the extraordinary wealth of Faustina’s father, the third-time consul Annius Verus, who had other heirs to accommodate. Marcus gave as the reason for his generosity that he did not want his sister to be poorer than her husband. Perhaps that was a joke, if Marcus was capable of one: the bridegroom was already going to benefit from Annius’s fortune. Personal qualities were also important. Writing to Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, on her birthday, Fronto said that women from all over should have come to greet her, those who loved their husbands and children and were virtuous; the genuine and truthful; the kind-hearted, The Empresses and Women’s Power

23

friendly, humble, and so on—‘since you possess all these virtues’.26 After her death Marcus celebrated her in conventional terms: piety, generosity, shunning of evil thoughts and extravagance (dietary too). Any Roman aristocrat might have expected this as well as birth, money, beauty, and fertility (ground for divorce if deficient).27 The younger Pliny’s encomium of one prematurely dead young woman will suffice: Fundanus’ younger daughter has passed away. I have never seen anything more life-enhancing or more lovable than that girl, nor more worthy, not just of a longer life but almost of immortality. She had not yet completed her fourteenth year and she already possessed the foresight of a mature woman, the dignified bearing of a Roman matron, which she still combined with the sweetness of a young girl and proper shyness of maidenhood. How she used to cling to her father’s neck! How she would hug us, her father’s friends, lovingly and modestly! How she cherished her nurses, attendants, and teachers according to the service that each performed for her! How diligent and understanding her reading always was! How guarded and cautious her games! How self-restrained and even enduring she was in her last illness! She obeyed her doctors, exhorted her sister and her father and kept herself going with her strength of mind when her bodily powers had failed. . . . She had already been promised to an excellent young man, the wedding day had been fixed, and we guests invited.28 Real beauty was not all-important: if an empress was not beautiful, she could be made so, verbally or pictorially. Livia had been an acclaimed beauty but was chosen by the Triumvir Octavian as a bride in 38 bc also for aristocratic birth and political connexions.29 Her predecessor, Scribonia, though allegedly lacking personal charm, had those same qualifications. The same criteria, along with actual kinship, bound the entire Julio-Claudian dynasty.30 However, marriage is a contract, and Faustina’s bridegroom was not even an emperor-in-waiting. Something was due to the bride’s virginity or to her father. C. Sogno has a striking answer.31 Pliny the Younger insists on moral equality but also on the attractiveness of the groom, the high colour of his complexion. That is, the promised reward was erotic. Yet the bride’s father had his own interest in the performance of the groom, if his 24

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own bloodline were to be carried on through his daughter, a method of transmission that we have seen receiving increased recognition. Well-born women rose as best they could above their role as unifying gene-bundles. They need not even function as servants beyond the traditional spinning that Augustus expected from his womenfolk.32 When they addressed their wishes to an emperor, however, the approved approach was prayer, not the threats that could steepen a downward path.33 Everything depended on personality and individual luck. With the additional support that wives and the children they produced could bring, a family could be immeasurably strengthened. Support could fall away as branches competed for shares of power and prestige. But the role of the legendary Sabine women carried off by Rome’s founder Romulus and his men was diplomatic: they reconciled battling husbands and fathers. The story that involves Faustina I in Pius’s plan for their daughter’s marriage (chapter 3) may be fiction, but it was believable. Education, up to a point, was a desideratum in a bride, who would be responsible for the early education of her children, and intellect was a prized adornment. However, the possession of a brood of children made it unnecessary, in the eyes of Romans, for a woman to display anything else; marriage itself, at an early age, followed by pregnancy, marked the transition from childhood to adulthood and a natural break in education that did not affect boys. Childless Plotina was known for her interest in philosophy, and Sabina was the patron and close friend of the celebrated poet Balbilla. At the end of the second century, Julia Domna’s ‘circle’ of philosophers and learned men is renowned; she had only two sons to tend, born well before Severus came to power in 193. These were activities that conformed with the values of the Victorian age. The full range of what was possible within such varied constraints of class, wealth, convention, and individual male caprice has been explored by E. A. Hemelrijk.34 Nothing is heard of intellectual activity on the part of either Faustina. This seems decisive against any such pursuits. Pius was no intellectual, but Marcus was intent on philosophy and rhetoric from an early age. Industry improved natural talent, and he was provided with eighteen known tutors, two of them the foremost in their fields, Q. Junius Rusticus (consul 133) and Fronto himself, and in Greek Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus (143), a leading figure among second-century sophists; Marcus’s adoptive brother, L. Verus, is credited with eleven tutors. Nothing available to Marcus’s young cousin Faustina II, who married The Empresses and Women’s Power

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him at about fifteen years of age, would have compared with it.35 Her education would have continued, if at all, with her husband as tutor, as that of Calpurnia, third wife of the younger Pliny, continued with him. The man might be restrictive: the elder Seneca had allowed his wife only to dabble.36 Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, is the only woman mentioned by Fronto in connexion with intellectual matters. Apart from her friendly relations with him, she received a letter from the eminent representative of Stoicism, Marcus’s tutor Junius Rusticus.37 His Greek tutor, Herodes Atticus, had lived in her father’s house; Atticus had learned Latin, and she, Greek. Fronto, an exuberant consul in 142, wrote Domitia Lucilla a letter in Greek and asked Marcus to correct it: ‘I should not like your mother to despise me as a boor’. He fears her judgment on his style and correctness. A game of flattery is being played, but at least a standard is being put on show. It was she who secured his services as tutor to Marcus. But Fronto seems not to have been intimate with the much younger Faustina II. Domitia Lucilla’s role reminds us that age was another factor: intellectual interests and intervention in male debate were more acceptable in an older woman, as was activity as an adviser. She was responsible for the preliminary magistracy achieved by the future emperor of 193, M. Didius Julianus, and he was hardly an isolated protégé. It had been one of the publicly celebrated merits of Augustus’s wife to promote men’s careers. No wonder Fronto warns Lucilla to exclude false flatterers and their deceit.38

Dependency on Males and Vulnerability If a Roman emperor took a wife, her status depended on his. That might be thought sufficient to make a wife content. Hadrian’s first heir, L. Aelius Caesar, was known for his amours; he had a reply to his wife’s upbraiding: wife implied status, not pleasure.39 But the Senate, prompted by the emperor or of its own volition, could take what measures were open to it to enhance the standing of the emperor’s wife; so it did when Marcus allowed his the title ‘Mother of the Camps’ (chapter 4). In the second century the focus of power on the emperor was finally recognized: ‘Rome is where the Emperor is’, says Marcus’s son-in-law Ti. Claudius Pompeianus.40 And the early third-century jurist Ulpian famously recognized that the emperor was exempt from the law. That did not mean that his wife enjoyed the same privilege in her own right. 26

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Emperors granted their wives the same privileges in relation to the law as they enjoyed themselves.41 We should not be overenthusiastic about what they actually received: Ulpian’s comment relates to the Augustan marriage legislation and to privileges granted under that. So a woman’s power, such as it was, seemed to be an extension of her husband’s. Its precariousness was a cliché, and ‘no feature of human existence’, says Tacitus, ‘is as fallible and unstable as the reputation of wielding a power that depends on another’s strength’.42 Ironically, it was the more resented for being secondary: contemporaries and scholars can use signs of a woman’s advancement as a token of her husband’s advance towards monarchy. So with Faustina I in B. Rémy’s study of her husband, which is designed to lift Pius out of the bland limbo of his previous life as an historical figure (chapter 4). But there are clearer indicators. Novelties for women depend on other more complex factors in Roman social life and public opinion. Already in antiquity the dependence of women on concessions from dominant men made them vulnerable to reproach or at least lecturing. Women acquired a significant function in public life: to demonstrate the model marriages of leading politicians, if necessary in a negative sense, by being reproved by the husband himself or by his political rivals. Like the specially revered Vestal Virgins under republic and empire alike, an Augusta was obliged to mind her conduct. But unless their offences were gross, the position of their families in the imperial hierarchy protected them. In 122, when he was in Britain, Hadrian removed his Praetorian prefect and his secretary, the biographer C. Suetonius Tranquillus, from office for being too free with Sabina for court etiquette. And he would have divorced her as disagreeable and bad-tempered if he had been a private citizen, so he allegedly used to say.43 Augustus had played on this way of thinking to his own advantage, demonstrating superiority to his peers and claiming how well the impeccable Livia conformed to traditional mores. He told his fellow senators to admonish their wives as he did. Enquirers cornered him, demanding to know precisely what he said to Livia, and he came out with bland remarks about clothing, jewellery, and grooming, about going out and decorum, without regard, as Dio reports from a hostile source, for the fact that they had no relation at all to the reality of Livia’s way of life.44 After his adoption Pius’s reported first remark was a rebuke to Faustina I when she complained about a lack of generosity on his part towards his household or kinsmen: ‘Silly woman! When we took over the Empire we The Empresses and Women’s Power

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lost even what we had before’. Evidently some courtier or servant overheard the exchange, if it is genuine.45

Influence and Independent Action As powerbrokers women depended for their influence on their relationship with each party, on their own personality, and on the prestige they enjoyed with the public. Hadrian was openly homosexual,46 but he had an affinity with one woman who may have been a mother figure (whatever she allegedly felt towards him), Plotina, whose husband, Trajan, went in for young boys. Like Sabina, she lacked one means by which empresses were thought to influence their menfolk. By Pliny’s time, too, the power of women in bringing a claimant to the purple was taken for granted: in the Panegyricus he specifically rejects it as a factor in Trajan’s accession. A woman was worth cultivating more if she had no offspring to promote: she was free to take up the causes of other men.47 Plotina’s relationship with Hadrian depended in part on the familial tie, went back beyond the marriage she encouraged, and culminated in her role in his accession. It was reinforced by shared interests in Epicureanism. This form of power depended on personal relationships, sometimes in competition with relations with freedmen: the Claudian freedman Narcissus defeated the Empress Messalina and was brought down in turn by her successor, the younger Agrippina. Faustina II herself, then, had to reckon with Agaclytus and Geminas, freedmen who enjoyed great influence with Marcus and Verus.48 Even after the fall of Nero in 68 there were still occasions when a woman would take part in decisive political action. Domitian’s wife, Domitia Longina, is reported to have been party to his assassination in 96. The woman, who had lost influence when her husband gave up conciliating the nobility, was associated with palace freedmen, chamberlains and other servants, and a prefect of the Praetorian Guard.49 If the emperor fell, they as his associates would go, too. The clever option was to act first and to take part in the installation of the successor. Twenty years later, when Trajan died, Plotina allegedly took the initiative in the transfer of power to Hadrian by ensuring that he was adopted before Trajan died, or so the official timetable had it. The manoeuvre was successful, and only one accomplice was named: another member of the court. Here we see the woman wielding power on her own account 28

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when her husband’s was at an end; certainly Plotina signed letters to the Senate in his stead. Whether Plotina’s favour went further than the official record allows, so far as to conceal Trajan’s death so that a stand-in could be brought on to impersonate him and ‘adopt’ Hadrian, is another matter. Trajan’s body was taken to Seleuceia in Syria by the Praetorian prefect and former tutor of Hadrian P. Acilius Attianus, Plotina, and Hadrian’s mother-in-law, Matidia the Elder.50 If there was fraud, even foul play, Plotina cannot have acted alone; one of Trajan’s favourite servants is alleged to have killed himself soon after his death. Parallels in historical literature for such drastic action are plentiful.51 These stories served their turn for those who disliked the successful claimant, and each made it easier to produce another. In every case, however, the woman involved did have motive. Social structure could inspire story or deed alike. Hadrian showed due gratitude when Plotina died, exceptional according to Dio, but not significantly more than he might have shown to the widow of his ‘adoptive father’: he wore black for nine days, erected a temple to her, and composed some ‘hymns’ on her, presumably performed in public. Only the hymns, perhaps, went beyond what Faustina I and II were to receive from their widowers. But evidently in the funeral oration, Hadrian said: ‘Great as were her demands on me, she always succeeded in them’, which Dio interprets as meaning ‘they were such that they were not burdensome to me, nor did they leave me any room for demurring’.52 This passage illustrates Ulpian’s remark that an empress’s power depends on what the emperor grants her. It is also well illustrated by Hadrian’s eulogy on his mother-in-law, who had ‘often refrained from asking things that he would gladly have granted’.53 By implication, Hadrian found the truly helpful woman not Plotina but the elder Matidia. Ever since she had lost her second husband, Vibius Sabinus, she had been residing with Trajan and enjoying the opportunity of influencing him that this gave her.54 Lessons were learnt from the accessions of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian (chapter 3). The Faustinas played a part: The first provided Pius with a daughter who helped to legitimize his chosen heir, Marcus; and she gave Marcus his own heir, Commodus. It was through them that controversy was avoided. Hadrian’s Sabina had no such luck: nothing suggests that she had any influence over his arrangements. She was dead by the end of 137, before Hadrian’s first heir, L. Aelius Caesar, passed away, and Hadrian was alleged to have thought of disposing of her by The Empresses and Women’s Power

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poison.55 She had toured the empire, enjoying ostensible honour and private but notorious humiliation: the imperial couple were accompanied by Hadrian’s lover Antinous. The entourage also included Sabina’s friend the aristocratic poet Julia Balbilla, sister of C. Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus, consul in 109 and builder of one of Athens’s most conspicuous monuments. Balbilla expressed warm affection for Sabina in the verses she inscribed on the great statue of Memnon on the Nile that they both visited in 130. The fact that she used the Aeolic dialect, that of Sappho, has encouraged the idea that Balbilla was Sabina’s answer to Antinous. There is no ancient support for such poetic justice, and it is unlikely that Sabina could have got away with the insult to the emperor.56 She was duly consecrated (by March 138).

Marriage, Sons, and the Succession Famously, the Republican statesman Cicero found himself in 50 bc with a new son-in-law, chosen by his womenfolk; he was abroad at the time.57 As members of the imperial family women were well placed to make themselves felt when it came to significant marriages, and Faustina I is clearly visible here if she did operate as a go-between, even as a partisan, when the question of Marcus Aurelius’s engagement to her daughter came up. The paradigm is Agrippina the Younger, responsible for breaking the engagement between Claudius’s daughter and a young senator so that she might be given to her own son Nero. Less sensationally, when Hadrian married Trajan’s sister’s granddaughter, it was said that Trajan’s wife, Plotina, wanted the union, to which Trajan was indifferent, just as she is said to have favoured his career.58 A Roman woman could cherish pride in and ambition for her sons that were strengthened by her own formal powerlessness as a woman. Cornelia, mother of the reforming brothers Gracchi, called them her jewels. From the beginning of the empire came Livia’s championship of her son, the future tyrant Tiberius. Her efforts were derided in a senatorial motion of ad 14: Tiberius should take the title ‘Son of Julia’ (as Livia had now become). No attempt was made to insult Nero in the same way, and later such designations mention the father first. One is Antonine, of the prematurely dead child of Marcus, Annius Verus, as ‘Son of Faustina’; another, Severan: Geta’s as ‘Son of Julia [Domna]’.59 Agrippina the Younger is the most notorious example of the ambitious mother: her 30

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murder of her husband Claudius may be fictional, but there is no doubt of the sidelining of Claudius’s son Britannicus. In its most extreme and presumably apocryphal form the trait is exemplified in her saying, ‘No matter if he [Nero] kills me, just so long as he rules’.60 In the Antonine epoch a friend of Pius saw Domitia Lucilla at prayer in a garden before a statue of Apollo. He is said to have remarked that the worthy lady was busy praying for the death of Pius and the accession of her son.61 We should not overemphasize the power of imperial women in the matter of marriages. Nothing is said of any influence of Faustina II on the marriage of her son, Commodus (which is not to say that there was none). But as we shall see (chapter 4), she was thwarted in her wishes for the second marriage of her oldest surviving daughter, Anna Aurelia Galeria Lucilla (henceforward simply Lucilla); and that was an important choice when there was only one male heir to carry on the dynasty.

Ostensible Power: What Is an ‘Empress’? Significant as women were in dynastic policy, it was different when it came to formal power. Referring to the wives of Roman emperors, from Livia onwards, as ‘empresses’ is misleading when the woman’s position was inherently unofficial—and does not even coincide with grants of the title Augusta. The title, like that of ‘queen’, implies legitimate and formal rights derived from those of the husband, with attire, furniture, and ceremonial to match. An equivalent to the English title ‘empress’ did not even exist in Latin: imperatrix is ironically deployed by Cicero for the notorious Clodia, who in 56 bc was bent on destroying his client M. Caelius Rufus; only in the mid–fifth century ad is Pulcheria Augusta also imperatrix.62 Empresses and senior women of the ‘Divine House’ did have other honours. So we learn from what the younger Faustina’s daughter Lucilla lost in 180 when her father died and her married brother, Commodus, took over: not the seat in the imperial box at the theatre, where imperial children sat, but imperial standards, rods of authority wreathed in laurel, and ceremonial torches carried before her.63 From Livia’s time there were garments or jewellery for women who married into the imperial family or were born into it, the finery of imperial brides,64 though the military cloak woven with gold thread that Agrippina the Younger sported in 51 when defeated rebels were put on The Empresses and Women’s Power

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display was probably her own enterprise. When she left the palace as her power failed, Nero sent his mother garments, and her response was to ask if the rest did not belong to her; that is, they were the empress’s due regalia.65 The silken gold-embroidered robes that are specially mentioned as part of Marcus’s auction of 169 may by then have been hereditary possessions of the imperial consort; palace furniture went as well.66 When St. Abercius went to Rome he saw Faustina II robed in gold and with golden sandals—or so it was supposed until the queenly figure of his autobiographical grave inscription was persuasively identified as the Church herself.67 Even younger daughters had a special array; when Faustina’s daughter Cornificia, one of the children of Marcus who survived their parents, was about to cut her wrists at Caracalla’s behest, she removed it all, as a sign of grief or to protect precious materials.68 We hear of no resentment on the part of Faustina II over the celebrated auction. War and plague had brought the empire to financial straits. Marcus did not venture to raise further taxes in the provinces. Instead he did something (however inadequate: a debasement of the coinage was also necessary) to prove that he was in earnest about Rome’s needs and was not going to allow the imperial establishment to float regardlessly above an impoverished populace: the auction went on for two months.69 Gold, the supreme token of wealth and power, was a characteristic feature of the clothing of imperial women, notably in Agrippina’s military cloak. Jewellery was, as it often is, what a woman could get, and that, too, can be held against her, observes R. Just, writing of Athens.70 It was an old confession of male politicians, according to a speaker in Livy, that ‘[women] cannot partake of magistracies, priesthoods, triumphs, badges of office, gifts, or spoils of war; elegance, finery, and beautiful clothes are women’s badges, in these they find joy and take pride; this our forebears called the women’s world’.71 Outward show was not a novelty of the empire: Matrons rode in their ceremonial wagon as a special honour bestowed at the beginning of the fourth century bc ; that privilege descended to imperial women.72 There were other signs of respect, but even under the mid-sixthcentury Justinian and Theodora, Procopius claims that it was novel for subjects to be required to offer her, too, the obeisance that was afforded the emperor in its extreme form of prostration.73 Besides the imperium, the tribunician power, and other prerogatives that were derived from magistracies tenable only for males that gave the emperor his official 32

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control of the army and his authority in Rome and Italy as well as in the provinces, he wielded extralegal powers. As time went on some of them were explicitly incorporated into law, with others simply accepted to form with the regular official powers, the conglomerate that made up the position of the emperor, embodied as far as it had developed by then in the so-called Law on Vespasian’s power of ad 70.74 A woman could share this conglomerate, unnoticed or with his consent.

The Palatine The extralegal and quasi-monarchical power that women shared and on which they depended is represented by their residence. It had annexed public and sacral aspects even under Augustus: notably the Temple of Apollo in which the Senate could meet. It had been developing ever since the time of Augustus’s originally modest private house,75 and it conferred on all who took up residence the lustre of its associations. Gaius Caligula had made it grander, and Nero had constructed an extension intended to carry the house beyond the Palatine, but after that was destroyed in the fire of 64 he began his ‘Golden House’ on low ground towards the northeast and on the slopes of the Oppian and Caelian hills. The Flavians replaced part of the Golden House with a place of public entertainment, the Colosseum. Domitian, however, made changes on the Palatine that have left ruins that still dominate it. Daily salutations were accorded to the emperor (as to other Roman nobles by their dependants), and Livia, too, had held her levées there, receiving even senators.76 When Agrippina II was losing control over Nero she was sent away from the palace to prevent her eclipsing the emperor. Empresses who achieved their rank suddenly found themselves in a building familiar to them only as visitors and in some cases not recently, if their husbands struck for power from their provinces. Faustina I, by contrast, was a connexion of the imperial family, in the broader sense, of many years’ standing, an empress-in-waiting since Hadrian’s adoption of her husband. She was even more significant because Hadrian was a widower: there would be no overshadowing dowager. An eminent senator at the end of Tiberius’s reign lamented that power corrupts. Plotina was aware of this but claimed to be confident of herself: on approaching the Palatine—a place that, since the Flavian period at least, could be considered a divine residence—she said: ‘I enter The Empresses and Women’s Power

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here such a woman as I would wish to be when I depart’.77 Plotina, a mere senator’s wife till Trajan’s elevation, Faustina I, and Julia Domna nearly a century later may have felt bewilderment comparable with that of the wives of British prime ministers when they enter No. 10 Downing St.: the prime minister is swept off immediately on state business, the spouse left behind to wander the premises with no clear duty or function.78 Faustina II knew the palace from her childhood. The setting of Plotina’s utterance shows a deeper awareness of what the palace meant. It was to be a significant move on the part of Pius when in 139 he required his heir, Marcus, to live in the House of Tiberius on the Palatine: with the residence went the pomp of a court. As A. R. Birley has pointed out, Marcus insisted in the Meditations that it was possible to live the good life in a palace, and he notes that Marcus must have known Lucan’s lines telling a man to leave the palace if he wishes to be pious. The bodyguards, embroidered uniforms, candelabra, and statues bearing lamps that Marcus enumerates could affect a woman, too.79

‘Augusta’ and an Anomalous Distinction for Faustina II Caesar Augustus had accepted this designation in 27 bc , on a well-contrived motion of the Senate. Livia became Augusta in 14 when her husband died and left a request in his will that she should take his family name, ‘Julia’—as if he had adopted her—and that the Senate should confer his own honorific on her: it was a distinction for the widow of the old ruler—and mother of the new one. That double role gave scope for its development in several directions, until we come to the anomalous distinction granted to Faustina II (chapter 4).80 Gaius is said to have offered the title Augusta to his grandmother Antonia the Younger, mother of Claudius, and she, to have refused it; Claudius’s posthumous grant in 41 strengthened his own claims to legitimacy.81 Claudius’s wife Messalina, however, mother of his son Britannicus, was never Augusta: he was keeping to the Tiberian precedent and, according to M. B. Flory, avoiding the suspicion of being seen to favour a family succession (which is hard to believe).82 It was the younger Agrippina who, as the wife of a living emperor, made the striking shift away from the Livian precedent: but she was also Augustus’s descendant, mother of a prospective emperor—and a woman 34

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of strong personality. That shift made room for the later developments, for wives of Nero, even for Nero’s daughter, dead in infancy.83 In 69 Vitellius, ostentatiously reverting to Augustan precedent, granted the title Augusta to his mother, Sextilia—before he even allowed himself to be named Augustus.84 Later it was conferred posthumously on Vespasian’s deceased wife, the mother of Titus and Domitian, who appears on their coins as Domitilla Diva Augusta.85 The title ‘Diva’ implied that she had also been consecrated, presumably with the cult and priesthood that went with the deification of members of the imperial family at Rome (chapter 6). The brothers needed an august mother more than Vespasian needed an august wife. But ‘Augusta’ was also ascribed on coins of Titus’s daughter Julia, according to Flory in anticipation of the grandsons she might give the dynasty.86 An interval between a woman’s becoming the consort of an emperor and her elevation to Augusta, despite publicized protests such as Plotina’s, won respect for the empress (more importantly, for the emperor, who in addition to his other civilities kept his women in check).87 The title developed into something more analogous to that of Augustus (‘the Augusta’). When an Augusta died and was deified, her daughter in turn might become an Augusta—and almost a Diva-in-waiting. The title itself did not confer a ticket to heaven, but it gave something: Trajan’s sister Marciana and his niece Matidia I are examples of such elevation but did not provide an automatic precedent. But Vibia Sabina may show her husband following it. Sabina wed Hadrian in about 100. The year 112 brought her the prospect of additional distinction. Her grandmother Ulpia Marciana died at the end of August and was deified; on the same day her mother, Matidia I, became Augusta. Hadrian made Sabina Augusta perhaps as early as 119, when the elder Matidia died, or in 123. The younger Matidia never won the distinction, active as she became in public, at least under Pius: there would be the question of a husband’s position.88 By the age of the Antonines it was hardly necessary to ask what precedent there was for a particular grant. Faustina I received the title directly when Pius became Augustus in 138, on a formal vote approved by her husband. If that speedy grant, as B. Rémy argues, distinguishes her from her predecessors and marks a step towards monarchy, it was an infinitesimal one on a finely graded path; we have to take into account senatorial votes that had conferred the title on her predecessors.89 The Empresses and Women’s Power

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Nor is this grant to be taken to show that the emperor intended officially to associate Faustina I with himself in a new way: she could partake only of the familial and informal aspects of his power; and if it can be argued that those aspects had themselves become ‘official’, there were still severe limitations on what an empress could actually do without imperium or tribunician power. The supreme test would be what would have happened if an emperor had died before his consort. No sole rule or even a ‘regency’ awaited the second-century widow, as we shall see from the conduct attributed to Faustina II in 175 (chapter 4): she would be lucky not to be relegated to a dower house, like the younger Agrippina and twentieth-century British queen consort.90 When Pius was on his deathbed at Lorium he allegedly confided to Marcus, in the presence of his prefects, charge of the state and of his daughter Faustina II.91 She was to prove an extraordinary case because of her double claim to the title: daughter of an Augustus and of a deified Augusta, she became an Augusta when she bore her first child on 1 December 147, her husband still merely a Caesar.92 Of her daughters only Lucilla became one as the consort of Verus, retaining the title after his death and her remarriage, but at the side of her brother, Commodus, playing a secondary role to his wife, Bruttia Crispina Augusta (chapter 7). Informal expressions of respect—addressing the emperor as ‘my lord’—became customary and so obligatory. Domitian made it clear that he demanded it, and that counted against him, but Pliny the Younger found no difficulty in so addressing Trajan, and Plotina used it to Hadrian.93 There need be no doubt that the empress in turn was addressed with the equivalent, and we have the correspondence of Marcus and Fronto to prove that it was habitual to refer to the empress in that way.

The ‘Right to Coin’ Faustina II was given the right to coin after she became Augusta in 147, when her issues start. So we are told. Titles in the nominative case on the obverse of coins are taken to imply that the person named, if living, was responsible for the issuing of coinage and hence in charge of the disposal of public funds. Scholars encouraged by such obverses have credited empresses with this ‘right’, with all the political and propaganda 36

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advantages that it brings.94 What the right meant, if it existed, is unclear. In its fullest sense it should be the legal possession or command of adequate quantities of bullion and control of how much was struck and when and of what appeared on the dies. There is no evidence for any woman in formal control of any of these things, none that any effective right to strike coins rested with anyone but the emperor; at most it would have been a courtesy of mint officials to show proposed designs that involved her to the empress.95 A more sober view is taken by M. Keltanen, although she still credits the notion that the empress was in control: accepting the propagandistic nature of the coinage, she concludes that types were intended to support imperial ideology rather than a woman’s private purposes. Further, R. P. Duncan-Jones notes the disconcerting fact that it was Hadrian who first accorded his wife a substantial presence on the obverses, and ten years into his reign, providing the precedent for his successors.96 He calculates the proportion of ‘female’ to ‘male’ Hadrianic coinage as one in seven for precious metal and one in fourteen for bronze; under Pius the proportion rises with the two Faustinas being accommodated, but bronze approaches the proportion of precious metals, and that continues under Marcus. With Commodus and only one empress involved, the overall quotient of ‘female’ coinage goes back to the Hadrianic level. All this, in Duncan-Jones’s view, was the result of an initiative which provided the mint with a new production template. But to suppose that there was anything comparable with the system of six Roman workshops that operated under Philip the Arabian (244–249) would go beyond the evidence. More is needed to provide a convincing explanation of the expansion of ‘female’ coinage. If it was simply a question of devising a production template, it would have been quite simple to add more types that represented the emperor himself and his interests. Rather, the fullest informal honour was done to Sabina and to the elder and younger Faustinas by producing coinage that displayed them on the obverse and associated images on the reverse: They were named and portrayed, and the issues were varied and copious.97 Their prominence meant something for their position in the state and in society, given the control that the obverse had once implied. The women were shown to be significant in two ways: their image was exploited, first as presenting strong links between one element and another in the all-important dynasty, which reached a full flowering that had not been The Empresses and Women’s Power

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achieved since the days of Augustus, and secondly as displaying the qualities that the dynasty claimed pre-eminently to possess and propagate, so justifying its political pre-eminence.

Immediate Predecessors of Faustina I and II: Influence and Public Honours Plotina’s Epicureanism connected her with Hadrian, and she was able to approach him on behalf of the Garden, successfully petitioning, in Latin and a modest tone, that non-Romans might be eligible to head the school.98 A letter in Greek to the members of the school follows. Plotina’s Greek, as A. R. Birley remarks, bristles with verbal substantives ending in -ma, a characteristic of the style of Epicurus himself. She refers to the community of the Garden as ‘we’, and her identification with it goes well beyond mere tricks of style.99 Her intervention on its behalf in ad 121 suggests that Plotina was seeking an identity beyond that conferred by her imperial position, though not divorced from it, since she was exploiting it for the benefit of the school. Less well attested, and certainly inspired by a wish to incriminate baleful female influence exercised on the well-meaning Emperor Trajan, is the allegation in the Acts of Hermaiscus, part of the Acts of the Alexandrians, which purported to record the trials and martyrdoms of recalcitrant Alexandrian gentry, that Plotina was responsible for aiding the Jewish community in the city in its ongoing struggle with Alexandrian local authority.100 Plotina was considered powerful enough to be worth traducing. More favourably, and adding to her reputation as a woman prepared to use her influence to benefit those in conflict with imperial as well as local authority, comes the story that she was responsible for denouncing to her husband the misconduct of imperial procurators.101 A letter from Hadrian to Plotina, it seems, was preserved in an Egyptian school collection, an invitation to dine on his birthday, 24 January 120 or 121. Sabina receives no mention. She may have been at her own villa, probably at Tibur, either because she was on bad terms with Hadrian or because she was in mourning for the elder Matidia; neither explanation is needed. The letter’s content mirrors public perceptions.102 Formal progresses, however, were obligatory for the restless Hadrian’s household, and there were spin-offs, though it was not necessary for members to be present for imperial wishes to find expression. It was 38

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a practice in the Hellenistic world to name sections of a city, especially a new foundation, after the founder or those he wished to honour. The city divisions at Hadrian’s Egyptian foundation, Antinoopolis,103 constituted ten tribes, each, it is thought, with five subdivisions (demes). Hadrian himself presumably chose the tribal names; the demes, with names appropriate to their respective tribes, were at least approved by him. So the tribes of Antinoopolis present the emperor through his own names and then through those of his family: Paulinios, Matidios, and Sabinios after his sister, mother-in-law, and wife (the only living honorand). Our concern is with the names attached to the demes of women’s tribes. Matidios has Demetrieus and Thesmophorios, alluding to the Eleusinian mysteries, and Marcianios, Plotinianios, and Kalliteknios, the first two recalling Matidia’s mother and sister-in-law, while Kalliteknios (‘Endowed with beautiful children’) alludes to Matidia’s daughter Vibia Sabina. In Sabina’s own tribe the deme Heraieus echoes Hadrian’s Zenios: she is consort to Hadrian’s Zeus. Gamelieus refers to marriage, and Harmonieus, to concord in marriage but also, in a yet more poignant irony, to Harmonia, wife of the Theban King Kadmos: they lived to an advanced age and in the Elysian Fields enjoyed everlasting youth. Another deme name for Sabina’s tribe is Trophonieus, alluding to the hero whose oracle was at Theban Lebadea. But this may also have the associations with Eleusis implied in Gamelieus. What Sabina lacked in personal satisfaction, then, was partly made up for her by her position and its associations in the structure of a city—though one dedicated to the memory of Antinous. In chapter 5 we shall see what happened to the tribes in an established city, Prusias ad Hypium, when its constitution was reorganized under Antoninus Pius.

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C ha pt e r

T hr e e

The Succession to Hadrian

Prevarication Antoninus Pius and Faustina I came to their accession by a tortuous path. Both their families were high in court circles, Faustina the higher given the position of her father, Annius, after his third consulship, but not so high that they were in the immediate line. We do not know what considerations if any lay behind their marriage beyond the usual allying of birth, wealth, and political power. The greatest problem facing emperors, even after the efforts of the founder Augustus, was that of the succession. Rulers with a son of their own simply had to confer on him every power that would hinder another candidate from being put forward or any attempt to restore the republic. For childless rulers a tempting policy was to damp down resentment by prevaricating: relatives and associates were kept in hope of the decisive imperium, tribunician power, and adoption. Trajan had played that counterproductive game until the end: P. Aelius Hadrianus was shown high favour, so that he and others must have regarded him as the choice; but nothing irrevocable was done, not necessarily because of any aversion from Hadrian but to avoid political controversy.1 Hadrian’s providential command in Syria at the time of Trajan’s death in Cilicia, and Plotina’s support, bearing witness to a last-minute adoption, averted any crisis. Trajan’s final illness was sudden. Speedy proclamation, reinforced by the adoption, was essential. In the event, senators could say that an objectionable emperor had been installed through a woman, thus exculpating Trajan from the charge of wishing Hadrian on them; that interpretation found written expression in the pages of Marius Maximus. Hostility and the existence of potential rivals led to pre-emptive executions carried out by Hadrian’s supporters.

Hadrian kept up Trajan’s game. Up to his final return to Rome in 134, activity designed to secure the succession could be suspended, although there was talk, and Hadrian himself allegedly offered hints. According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian before the infamous execution of the four consulars intended to make one of the victims, C. Avidius Nigrinus, consul 110, his successor; so he claimed in his autobiography.2 One disadvantage of following Trajan’s game, then, was that eminent politicians thought of or touted as possible successors might suffer. Two others to fall later from the favour that depended on who had the emperor’s ear were D. Terentius Gentianus (consul 116), one of Trajan’s generals in Dacia and allegedly overpopular among senators, and eventually A. Platorius Nepos, consul in succession to Hadrian in 119, a supporter whom Hadrian had known for decades. According to the Historia Augusta, relations cooled, and Nepos denied Hadrian admission to his sickbed. Hadrian came to suspect him, presumably of contemplating a coup.3 When Hadrian travelled to Spain in 122 he would have remembered the poet Martial of Bilbilis, who had addressed epigrams to his fellow townsman L. Licinianus; like Hadrian, he was a protégé of the great L. Licinius Sura (third-time consul in 107), mentioned at the end of one poem.4 It was Sura who was alleged to have told Hadrian in 108 that he would be adopted by Trajan. Hadrian stayed at Barcino, hometown of Cn. Pedanius Fuscus Salinator, husband of his niece Julia and his first consular colleague in the reign (118). Fuscus and his wife were probably travelling with the emperor, and he was the likeliest heir at this stage, if other men in charge of armed provinces allowed. The family had produced the first Spaniard to reach the consulship since the Triumviral period: L. Pedanius Secundus, consul in 43, went on to the prefecture of the city. The decisive step up had come in the period 103–107 when Salinator—the name links him to a patrician family—became engaged to Julia, daughter of L. Julius Servianus (cos. II 102). This nexus came to nothing: R. Syme invokes disease as the reason; but the couple produced a son, another Pedanius Fuscus (?Salinator), grandson to Servianus.5

Hadrian’s Succession Plans: L. Ceionius Commodus and His Family By 134 Hadrian’s health was deteriorating. In January 136 he became sixty, and the climacteric of the sixty-third year, dreaded by Augustus, would soon be upon him. Augustus wrote to his adopted son Gaius 42

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Caesar in ad 1 about his relief at passing that year and, quite openly, about the coming inheritance of Gaius and his brother Lucius.6 Hadrian, too, eventually made elaborate preparations for the succession. Thoughts of it and the ructions it would cause must have troubled him before that. Late in 136 and under pressure from increasingly severe symptoms (of coronary heart disease, it is thought), Hadrian recognized that he must make a public decision and adopted L. Ceionius Commodus. He was born in 100/101 or even later and had been the opening consul of 136 with Sex. Vettulenus Civica Cerialis. The adoption made Ceionius into L. Aelius Caesar and his son (the future L. Verus) into a grandson of Hadrian.7 The new Caesar received tribunician power and proconsular imperium, thus becoming a partner in power of the incumbent princeps, as Agrippa, Tiberius, Titus, and Trajan had been, not just his heir; a further regular consulship was to follow in 138.8 L. Ceionius Commodus was stepson and son-in-law of the Avidius Nigrinus executed on the accession of Hadrian. Whether Nigrinus was publicly rehabilitated is uncertain; his daughter Avidia Plautia was openly proud of him.9 The adoption was said to have been unpopular, and it certainly disappointed young Pedanius Fuscus and his grandfather Julius Servianus. Fuscus and his mother, Julia Paulina, but not Servianus, may have been in Hadrian’s retinue when he was in Egypt in 130.10 Now Ceionius’s promotion led to the deaths of Fuscus and his grandfather (among others). For in 134 Hadrian had at last allowed his brother-in-law Servianus his third consulship, perhaps as a reward for his services in handling the Senate during Hadrian’s absence in the provinces. And Fuscus stood in the same relationship to Hadrian as Hadrian had stood to Trajan and Augustus to Julius Caesar. In the eyes of E. Champlin, young Fuscus had been a serious contender for the position of heir to Hadrian from his earliest years (he was born in 113). Servianus had not welcomed Hadrian’s accession, but he was always treated with deference, and he might have supposed that his son-in-law Fuscus Salinator was to succeed.11 For some reason Hadrian changed his mind about Salinator’s son. The youth liked frivolous pursuits, but so did others: L. Ceionius Commodus himself and his son, the later L. Verus. That reason would be a pretext, privately communicated—or sheer contemporary speculation. Fuscus allegedly planned protest or even a coup and was killed; his aged grandfather was forced to suicide not long after, which prevented him outliving Hadrian and causing more trouble.12 The Succession to Hadrian

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Servianus himself was another person, his brother-in-law, too, whom Hadrian himself allegedly had once mentioned at a banquet as a possible ruler.13 Servianus, though, had been overtaken in the political race by another formidable, and very prudent, operator, M. Annius Verus, father of Faustina I, who reached his third consulship in 126 and who as prefect of the city had been in a key position when the emperor travelled. The two courtiers seem to have been on intimate terms, but the very material that reveals this allows us to sense acrimony in the relationship. In elegant verses inscribed on a pillar in Rome an anonymous but accomplished poet congratulates his opponent on his victory in a game of boule, played with glass balls; the writer admits multiple defeats. He is Servianus; the victor, a third-time consul and surely to be identified with M. Annius Verus.14 No doubt his age in 136 prevented Servianus himself from being taken seriously as a candidate. Another man linked with the Pedanii, C. Ummidius Quadratus, consul in 118 and uncle by marriage of the future Emperor Marcus, was at the edge of the crisis in 136–137. His son was aged about twenty-two, a dangerous age for an ambitious aristocrat close to the centre of power. He escaped, and long-term relations became smooth. When his own sister Cornificia died in 152, aged about thirty, Marcus was to give part of his maternal fortune to her son M. Ummidius Quadratus, the consul of 167. He then died in the plague, his name transmitted through the adoption of a son of Cn. Claudius Severus, Cornificia’s husband, consul 140 or 145.15 Ceionius Commodus’s family came from Bononia, where tile stamps attest their property, and they had three generations of consuls to display.16 The consul of 106 married a Plautia whose paternal ancestry went back to the Augustan aristocracy and beyond.17 After her husband’s death (male Ceionii do not seem very robust) she wed C. Avidius Nigrinus of Faventia, forty miles from Bononia.18 Other connexions, the Vettuleni, belonged to the Sabine region, like the Emperor Vespasian, and their careers were success stories of Vespasian’s regime: Two reached consulships, Sextus Vettulenus Cerialis in 73 or 74 and C. Vettulenus Civica Cerialis in about 76, and they may have been made patrician by the same emperor.19 Most of the attainments of the Ceionii were civil and hardly enough to make them stand out in Hadrian’s Senate.20 The sickly, but randy,21 Ceionius’s adoption has seemed inexplicable, except on the basis that he was really Hadrian’s son (nameless adulteries were charged to the 44

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emperor).22 Perfectly respectable kinship supplies another explanation, but it depends on prosopographical speculation.23 More plausibly Hadrian was trying to balance ‘conservative’ Italians, such as the Ceionii, Plautii, Vettuleni, and Avidii, with western provincials, comparative newcomers. The grouping and the rivalry are believable enough but not to be explained in terms of ‘conservatism’, except in the sense of dislike of ‘new’ families: it is precisely the provincial newcomers of Vespasian’s reign whom Tacitus describes as socially conservative.24 It seems, then, that Hadrian did what he could to make reparation for the execution of Nigrinus and was restoring the balance of power in favour of Italians. But another consideration will have played some part: age.25 Hadrian knew that someone must take over who was mature enough to carry the burden of empire. Hadrian chose a man who had been born at the beginning of the century and was qualified for the consulship in the very year of his adoption. He should have been able to give another two decades of stable government. And if the Caesar was sickly, he at least had a young son.

The Adoption of Antoninus Pius While Hadrian had been suffering increasingly severe nosebleeds and was becoming dropsical, his heir, Aelius Caesar, had been spewing blood, and a haemorrhage carried him off on the first day of 138.26 Hadrian had to reconstruct his scheme at a late stage, and radically. The family of the Ceionii, which evidently had no acceptable replacement for Aelius Caesar, continued in a secondary position. Its surname of Commodus would finally adorn an Augustus—the son of Marcus—only from ad 177. On 24 January 138, his sixty-second birthday, Hadrian ended fresh speculation. The new heir, T. Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus (Figure 3.1), was apparently given time to think. The ceremony of adoption took place only a month later, on 25 February.27 Hadrian may have felt that he had to justify his new dispensation to old friends and persuade them that it was the best course. Again his choice caused resentment, notably in L. Catilius Severus, prefect of the city.28 Such resentments demand more attention. The last years of Hadrian were dark, as Cornelius Fronto’s allusions to the emperor make clear.29 The Succession to Hadrian

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Figure 3.1. Bust of Antoninus Pius. Vatican Museum. © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, New York.

Rivalry was inherent in Roman politics, however close the men and women involved. It went back to the legendary Romulus and Remus and bred within factions and families.30 The resentment that ensued when the adoption of Ceionius came to nothing and Hadrian chose Pius would have been sharpened by the disappointment of men who had supported him or who depended on the Ceionii. One might wonder if such rivalry went back a number of years. Both families owed their eminence to Flavian patronage, but they could be rivals for precisely that support.31 How important the Ceionii still were in Pius’s reign and later is clear from the success of their marriage connexions. Pius and Marcus acknowledged their claims to high office and close marriage ties. It was a kinsman, the philosopher Commodus, who taught Marcus at the behest of his mother, Domitia Lucilla; Ceionia Fabia’s son M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus was regular consul in 177 with Commodus Caesar and married a daughter of Marcus (Fadilla).32 46

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When Aelius Caesar’s son as L. Verus became joint emperor with Marcus in 161 and then married Marcus and Faustina’s daughter Lucilla, the fortunes of the Ceionii, the connexions of Aelius Caesar, took an upward turn. It was not to last. Verus died in 169, and that side of the dynasty felt the loss. The scheme of two Augusti with two Caesars had been suggested by Verus three years previously—a selfless gesture for an Augustus towards the twin sons of Marcus and Faustina II. Marcus did what he could by showing honour to the women of the family, but he made it clear that L. Verus was not to be replaced as Lucilla’s husband by another potential emperor from their circle (chapter 4).33

The Career of Antoninus Pius Apart from the possibility that Hadrian was influenced by ties of kinship, the advantages of Antoninus as a prospective heir, according to R. Syme, were ‘a steady character, no feuds or enemies, no brothers or sisters, and one daughter surviving from four children’. All the same, he was ‘subtle, ironical, crafty’.34 From a family originating in Nemausus in Narbonensian Gaul, Pius, born at Lanuvium on 19 September 86, was naturally reared in Italy, at Lorium on the Aurelian Way, where he built a palace. As a child he lived first with his paternal and then with his maternal grandfather. An ample patrimony was enhanced with many legacies.35 The family had long been part of the patriciate. This distinction mutated over the ages. Patrician clans (the ‘fathers’, patres) had originally monopolized power as the only senators at Rome. Lower strata, the plebeians, plebs, had fought to share it and by the mid–second century bc formed the greater part of the Senate. The patriciate, then, conferred only social distinction and exclusive access to a few priesthoods, while it barred men from the powerful office of the plebeian tribunate; and under the later republic and empire members of this group could occupy only one of the two consulships. The primeval rank nonetheless seemed essential: Caesar, Augustus, Claudius, and Vespasian replenished it with deserving plebeian aristocrats. The last made it a reward for successful soldiers, but paradoxically their status helped to limit the military experience of young patricians, for they were now exempt from the posts between the quaestorship and the praetorship and reached the consulship earlier than their plebeian fellows, who constituted up to The Succession to Hadrian

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90 per cent of the Senate. Pius, then, was only thirty-three when he held his own regular consulship in 120 alongside the man whose names Marcus bore in his early life, L. Catilius Severus.36 Pius had passed through all the normal offices of a patrician senator before he became successor designate. It was a career that foreshadowed the character of his reign.37 No military post took Pius from Italy: instead he was given charge of one of the four regions into which Hadrian divided the peninsula—one in which he had great possessions—‘so that [Hadrian] could do honour to the man and enhance security’.38 Any landowner would be keen to thwart slave uprisings near his property and the intercity squabbles that could also lead to violence. Yet there was less of a change than might have been expected between Hadrian’s regime and that of Pius, which was exercised entirely from Italy. Hadrian did not take his second salutation as imperator until 136 at the end of the Jewish revolt, and the wars that were fought in his name won little attention in the literature; notoriously, he was a consolidator. When Pius did leave Italy in the mid-thirties, after the normal fifteen-year interval between consulship and provincial governorship, it was for cultivated Greek-speaking Asia. This office gave him experience of what it was to control a province where the proconsul was theoretically independent—but bore with him the emperor’s instructions and was under imperial control if the emperor chose to exercise it; he was always bound to pay attention to ad hoc imperial advice. We learn— later, and from those who had become his imperial subjects—that Pius ‘was responsible for many extremely important benefits, so when he assumed power the city decided to celebrate his birthday’. With or without the benefits, that decision was not surprising. One benefit is mentioned in the Digest: protection against police oppression; he is also on record, routinely enough, as giving permission for a fair to be held in a village of the province.39 At the same time, Pius asserted himself against famous sophists—political authority against cultural prestige?—and that led to controversy. The governor on his tour of the province took over the house of the celebrated sophist Antonius Polemo—who arrived home at night in his pomp and found himself excluded. The outcry was enough to force Pius out, and the incident was reported to Hadrian, who undertook to reconcile the pair.40 The Athenian millionaire rhetorician Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus was another antagonist. He was more than a cultural guru: in his 48

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senatorial career he had already reached the praetorship and had been entrusted with the delicate position of ‘curator’ of the free cities of Asia. It was when Atticus was dealing with the problems of Alexandria Troas that the two officials came face to face on a mountain and a carriage was almost forced off the road. Atticus allegedly struck the proconsul, an act of violence that is not surprising in a man who in 160 allegedly killed his aristocratic Roman wife, Appia Annia Regilla.41 It is not known if Hadrian heard of this contretemps too, but Pius had already written to him to complain that Atticus was spending the revenues of the whole province on an aqueduct for a single city. The Historia Augusta concludes that Pius’s administration of Asia was such that only he excelled his grandfather; that verdict probably comes from a well-informed, if biased, source.42 The elder Faustina accompanied Antoninus Pius on his limited experience abroad as a high-ranking Roman official.43 With her forebears and her kinship with Empress Sabina, who was herself styled, from 119 onwards, daughter of the deified Augusta Matidia, there can be no doubt of the respect in which Faustina was held in Italy and the provinces.44 Abroad she inevitably benefited from the courtesies and petitioning that a governor’s particularly high-born wife attracted. At Hierapolis, in her husband’s province of Asia, where Pius was awarded a statue by council and the people as ‘Saviour and Benefactor’, Faustina was also portrayed (Figure 3.2).45

Pius as Heir In the interval between nomination and adoption ceremony, Pius, who had no surviving sons, had to carry out adoptions of his own before Hadrian took action and while Pius was still legally independent and so capable of carrying out the act. The son of the deceased Aelius Caesar was taken in, inevitably, and so was Marcus. This arrangement, too, seemed natural: Marcus was the nephew of Pius’s wife, Faustina I; grandson of M. Annius Verus; and fiancé of Aelius Caesar’s daughter Ceionia—the two boys would be brothers-in-law.46 Pius’s status in this period is clear: Not only did he have the tribunician power that Aelius Caesar was given, he, too, was in possession of the imperium.47 A second consulship naturally followed. Moreover, in spite of the adoption, he kept his own name, and when he became emperor he allowed ‘Aelius’ to slide, to the advantage The Succession to Hadrian

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Figure 3.2. Statue of Faustina I from Herodes Atticus’s Nymphaeum at Olympia. Olympia Museum, L 155. Courtesy of Barbara McManus and the VRoma Project (www.vroma.org).

of his own ‘Aurelius’. The unloved memory of Hadrian was not to overwhelm the identity of a mature politician. How relations between the two men were perceived at the time, or near it, is shown in a papyrus letter purporting to be from Hadrian to his heir. Hadrian, fearing that through eagerness to be gone ‘I shall seem, . . . almost to wrong someone [Pius] who, visiting me when I am harried by illness, comforts me and urges me to bear it’. Pius evidently betrayed no indecent haste.48 50

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Favour to Marcus It is a long-standing theory that while formulating the first plan for the succession, Hadrian’s ultimate purpose was to secure the succession of the admirable but still juvenile Marcus Aurelius—while conciliating the influential Ceionii.49 Aelius Caesar and then Antoninus Pius were standins to hold office only until Marcus was old enough to take over or until the ailing Aelius Caesar died; and one of the merits of the second choice, Pius, was that he was already married to Marcus’s aunt Faustina I. The status of Marcus at this point is important, as it affects our view of Faustina’s importance. Existing connexions between Hadrian and the Annii can be invoked, making Marcus a relative of the emperor. The precise relationship remains disputed, the problems focusing on his paternal and maternal grandmothers, Rupilia Faustina and Domitia Lucilla.50 Further, his grandfather, City Prefect M. Annius Verus, was said to be the only person Hadrian trusted.51 Certainly, Marcus was singled out for attention at a very early age. Born on the Caelian Hill in Rome on 26 April 121, he was brought up in his grandfather’s house near a temple on the Lateran.52 His connexions were distinguished and grew more so. Annia Cornificia Faustina, his younger sister, was married to (C.) Ummidius Quadratus (cos. 144). He lost his father as a boy and was taken up by L. Catilius Severus and for a while bore his name, adding it to his birth name. Hadrian also took to young Marcus and invited him to join his household; it was only reluctantly, we are told, that he agreed to go.53 He was admitted to the equestrian order as a six-year-old and in the following year to the priesthood of the Salii, even though he did not have the qualification of two surviving parents.54 Marcus took the toga of manhood in 136 at the age of fourteen and was betrothed to Aelius Caesar’s daughter.55 Soon after that he was appointed, perhaps by his prospective father-in-law as consul in 136, to act as prefect of the city in the absence of the consuls during the summer Latin festival on the Alban Mount—a function traditionally awarded to imperial princes, beginning with C. Octavius himself, the great-nephew of Julius Caesar.56 Support for this interpretation of Hadrian’s plans has been drawn from the eclipse at this time of two of Marcus’s senior connexions, C. Ummidius Quadratus, the consul of 118, and L. Catilius Severus, who lost his post as city prefect and was severely attacked by the emperor, perhaps in the Senate: they could have seen themselves as better suited The Succession to Hadrian

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than Antoninus Pius to the role of keeping the monarchy in trust for Marcus.57 Similar views have been held about the succession plans of Augustus in 6 bc and in ad 4, and the parallel has been drawn by A. R. Birley: Augustus brought Tiberius into partnership with himself, but his adopted sons Gaius and Lucius Caesars were intended to rule; in the later scheme, it was Germanicus Caesar, his grandson by adoption. Such plans should be treated with caution. If they existed, they would have been kept close in the mind of the ruler and confided only to those most intimate with him, certainly not to the immediate heir. Besides that, the ‘stopgaps’ (anachronistically, ‘regents’; Birley prudently calls them ‘placeholders’) had to be given powers that made them indistinguishable from heirs deeply desired. Nor, unless the ruler or the holder himself chose, would those powers lapse until his death: they made him too strong for that. We should be cautious, then, about the idea that Hadrian was aiming beyond Pius at the ultimate succession of Marcus and still more chary of the notion that Aelius Caesar was sent to Pannonia (ostensibly to familiarize him with army life and the troops) to bring him to a quick end. It is implausible to hold that Hadrian was counting on his early death: it came suddenly.58 The Historia Augusta does not suggest that Hadrian was aware when he adopted him that Aelius Caesar was fatally ill: his comment that he had leant on a collapsing wall shows that he had thought that Aelius would survive.59 And any suggestion that Hadrian’s wife played a key role in setting up the eventual succession of her greatnephew Marcus is to be scouted, given her relations with her husband.60 As to Quadratus and Severus, they may have had other reasons for lamenting the adoption of Pius: his lack of military experience was enough. It has been suggested that the letter ascribed to Hadrian and copied in Egypt was circulated to justify Pius’s selection as heir. Rather, perhaps it is the concoction of an imaginative student.61 Persuasive as this view of Marcus’s prospects is, it has been challenged. T. D. Barnes rates the Life of Verus, one of the subsidiary Vitae of the Historia Augusta, higher than other scholars and uses the stress it puts on Verus to support his argument that it was not Marcus that Hadrian intended as his ultimate successor but the son of his immediate heir, Aelius Caesar: Aelius was not compelled to adopt another son.62 All that Marcus received at this stage was the promise of the hand of the Caesar’s daughter Ceionia Fabia. He took that seriously: after his betrothal to Ceionia Marcus gave up estates to his sister Cornificia.63 The 52

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ultimate problem is why the Ceionii ever came into question if Marcus was Hadrian’s long-term choice even in 136.

The Double Principate Barnes’s view has the advantage of not imposing hazardous schemes on Hadrian. But still another alternative is worth including in our calculations: that Hadrian intended to revive the scheme devised by Augustus and carried on by Tiberius—a leading partnership in power with one aspirant and then a pair of young men to take over. This scheme obtained in one form or another throughout the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Vespasian adopted a variation in which Titus, with tribunician power, was virtually a partner, while the younger son, Domitian, as ‘Leader of the Youth’, was relegated to the second generation, with his cousin Flavius Sabinus, Titus’s son-in-law, as a potential partner. Nerva had to be content himself, not long after he had taken power, with a partner, Trajan, and one forced on him at that; both were childless, and the elaborated form of the scheme seemed to be obsolete.64 Whom would Hadrian have had in mind to revive it? Clearly, the man he did adopt and associate with his own power as L. Aelius Caesar. As to the second generation, there was the son of his adoptee, the future L. Verus, and Marcus, his intended brother-in-law. When Hadrian went on to adopt Pius, who had only one surviving child, Faustina II, Pius adopted both Aelius Caesar’s son (aged seven) and the young Marcus (sixteen).65 It was a means of bringing together two leading families, the Ceionii, who had been in first position, and that of M. Annius Verus, consul for the third time in 126. Pius betrothed his daughter Faustina (II) to the younger boy, making an implicit promise for his future. Doubts about this betrothal are based on the Historia Augusta’s confusion over the nomenclature of the imperial family, especially the name ‘Verus’, and on the interpretation of a well-known but controversial relief from Ephesus.66 The relief shows two adult males facing, Pius and Hadrian. Behind Pius’s right shoulder stands a youth, and between the two men and clasped by Pius is a child with a sceptre vertical above him. Behind, at the upper right corner, can be glimpsed another head. When was the group cut, and how is it to be interpreted? Some take it to be a work of the sixties, looking back at the prominence of Emperor Verus (the child) The Succession to Hadrian

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between Antoninus’s adoption and Hadrian’s death, the sceptre indicating his future power. Others, doubting whether a grown-up would be retrospectively shown as a child, more plausibly assign the work to 138, commemorating the adoption of Marcus (the youth). It is not even uncontested, though, that it represents an adoption at all, rather than a ceremonial departure from Rome or the solemn taking of oaths for the safety of the emperor. Those questions may be obviated by taking the scene to represent not an event but a state of play, showing the dynasty as it was when Pius took over, with Hadrian as benevolent founder. For Barnes it demonstrates that the throne was to pass to Verus, with Pius and Marcus as his guardians. Preferable as the early date is, an implication of Verus’s high destiny, above that of Marcus, is not necessary. We may be at the beginning of Pius’s principate, with Marcus now backing up the new emperor and Verus a treasured survivor of Hadrian’s original scheme (Figure 3.3). Pius, who had been significant for Ephesus and Asia since his proconsulship, is the chief figure alongside Hadrian. The sceptre that belongs to the dynasty is placed as it is for compositional reasons, not to show the importance of Verus. The identity of the owner of the head, marginal as it seems to be, also needs to be considered. Barnes took it to be that of Faustina II, first Verus’s and then Marcus’s fiancée. She may, rather, be Faustina I. If the monument dates after her deification, her presence is explicable as a gracious tribute; earlier than that her political importance comes into play as the link between Pius and his new heir, her nephew Marcus.

Pius’s Revisions Hadrian’s revised scheme resembled the pattern set by Augustus in ad 4: Tiberius as partner, Germanicus and Drusus as the succeeding pair. Pius reconfigured it in the arrangements he made on his accession. For all his devotion to Hadrian’s memory, which essentially was what won him his surname—for what but dutifulness or devotion would have made him insist on the deification of an emperor hated by senators, except the advantage of bearing the title ‘Son of the Deified’?—Pius had his own agenda, put into practice after Hadrian’s death on 10 July 138.67 Early in 139 the new emperor made Marcus a Caesar; and he dissolved the engagement between him and Ceionia and gave him his own daughter 54

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Figure 3.3. Hadrian and his successors—Pius, L. Verus, and Marcus— represented on a relief from Ephesus. A sceptre seems to be poised above the head of L. Verus, and a female head emerges at the rear, to the right (?Faustina I). Kunstheistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

Faustina: Marcus was now betrothed not to the sister of the secondgeneration heir but to the daughter of the new emperor. Allegedly it was Faustina I who carried the marriage proposal to her nephew.68 How important this marriage was to the dynasty and its strategy is clear from the fact that the new couple were more disparate in years than Faustina and the future L. Verus had been and in any case could not marry until 145, when, presumably, Faustina reached sexual maturity. So Verus was demoted, eventually to become the son-in-law of Marcus. When he travelled he did not go in Pius’s vehicle but, rather, in that of the Praetorian prefect.69 The relative positions of the postulated junior pair were thus reversed in Marcus’s favour—after the death of Hadrian.70 It is no surprise to find Aelius Aristides in his Panegyric on Rome, uttered in the The Succession to Hadrian

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capital in 143 or 144, ending his speech with the prayer that the great governor and his (plural) sons would be preserved and provide good things for men, which seems to imply power for both.71 L. Verus became quaestor for 153, no undue advancement for a young man of twenty-two; but in 154 he held his first consulship—with a member of the high nobility, nine years before the legal age, and without holding any intervening offices. And one fact speaks strongly in favour of the scheme of pairs: after the death of Pius, the notoriously conscientious Marcus, in homage to Hadrian’s original plans, made L. Verus not just his partner in imperium and sharer of his tribunician power but something without precedent, another Augustus. (He is not Pontifex Maximus on official documents; the title of that supreme priesthood made it difficult to share.)

‘Adoptive’ Emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius left no sons to take over their position. They secured the succession by adopting heirs. These men were notably successful, two of them well loved, and Tacitus produced a theory, which there is no reason to believe he originated, to justify the procedure. He put it into the mouth of another childless emperor, Galba, speaking in ad 69; naturally Pliny lauded it in his Panegyric on Trajan.72 Modern scholars, accepting it and noting that the successor of Marcus Aurelius, his own son, Commodus, was unsatisfactory, have created a dynasty of ‘adoptive emperors’ (the wording does not render a Latin phrase), as if the ruler had chosen some new principle of government. It is an illusion: the best of these emperors was precisely the one who put forward his own son as his successor. Adoption was second best, as it had been for earlier emperors, and came into question in the absence of a son. If Faustina I failed Pius in this one respect, her daughter Faustina II, after prodigious efforts, succeeded.

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C ha pt e r

Four

The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

Antoninus Pius: Becoming Emperor Less than six months separated Pius’s adoption and Hadrian’s death. It was indeed the end of the age of the ‘restless emperor’. After his accession neither Pius nor Faustina I left Italy again. Pius remained rooted in Rome and especially in his own estates at Lorium, where he had lived with his grandparents and where his adoption by Hadrian was celebrated,1 and at Lanuvium, Tusculum, and Signia. He loved country pursuits, hunting, like Hadrian in this, and fishing. Those pursuits were not for women. However, his taste for conversation, banqueting, theatre, pantomime, and literature could have been something for Faustina to share.2 Before Pius’s adoption his wealth was vast, and Faustina would have brought a substantial dowry. If the due forms were used for Pius’s adoption, it should have meant that he lost his property to his new father.3 Hadrian, however, provided him with very adequate pin money and proceeded to write a will which made Pius his main heir. If her husband told Faustina at the beginning of his reign that in taking the empire on, the family had lost all they had, he did not mean it literally, simply that his own fortune came under pressure from others in need whom he was bound to help.4 He hived off a fortune for his daughter Faustina II, stipulating that the revenue be used for state purposes: but surely she, like Marcus, was allowed a substantial personal allowance.5 When Pius died he left a will; his wife’s fortune probably passed to him and to her surviving daughter, and it seems a plausible guess that his share was used to subsidize a charity, that of the ‘Faustinian Girls’.6 Vast personal wealth and unlimited imperial resources were at the disposal of the pair; there is no sign that they were extravagant in their use.

On the contrary, Pius brought down court pomp.7 He wanted to be an object of affection rather than one of awe and reverence as Hadrian had been (so it was tactfully put).8 In government, Pius displayed distinct characteristics: his replies to petitioners and governors deploy, according to W. Williams, ‘humour, ranging from harsh sarcasm, through milder irony, to a gentle comment on human weakness’. But it was combined with a severity comparable with Hadrian’s.9 (Faustina and her children may in private have experienced these characteristics.) There was another way of distancing himself from predecessors. Trajan, close to being a usurper, retained Emperor Cocceius Nerva’s surname but kept his own clan name, as did Hadrian himself. Pius on adoption dutifully became Imperator Caesar T. Aelius Hadrianus, but retaining his own name Antoninus. He earned ‘Pius’ for his (not wholly selfless) persistence in demanding that Hadrian should be deified, and the title was broadcast, especially on the base metal coinage of 140–144.10

The Partnership of Pius and Faustina I: A Trend towards Monarchy? But the new title had a deeper significance: his devotion to family and the relations between parents and children, husband and wife. This was to be shown in his extravagant honours for Faustina I when she died (Figure 4.1; chapter 6).11 The Faustinas, too, are accorded the title Pia on coins and inscriptions. It was fitting for the consort and daughter of Pius but had its own resonance, precisely in their relation to him. Faustina II was to die during her travels in the east; her devotion was particularly to be cherished. The title may not have been conferred officially by the Senate, but it is used in a monument dedicated to her cousin’s husband L. Vitrasius Pollio and was clearly ‘approved’.12 In 138, refusing the title Pater Patriae, Pius immediately granted that of Augusta to his wife and within a few years to his daughter. However, as B. Rémy concedes, they were the invaluable descendants of a diva (the elder Matidia), herself Trajan’s niece, which enhanced their claim. The evidence provided by Faustina’s titulature for any advance towards monarchy is flimsy.13 Domitian’s deification of his mother had embedded her in the state—thus enhancing his own dignity—while Trajan had supplied himself with the belt and braces of prestige by deifying not only his predecessor, Nerva, but also his biological father, a military man of 58

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Figure 4.1. Celebration of the dead Faustina I: sestertii, minted at Rome, showing Faustina’s funeral pyre and rise to divinity. (a) Obverse: ‘DIVA AVGVSTA FAVSTINA’, with a bust of Faustina I, draped, facing right, hair elaborately waved and piled in a bun on top of her head, with a band of pearls around the hair in the front; reverse: ‘CONSE CRATIO S[enatus] C[onsulto]’ (in exergue), with a pyre in four storeys, ornamented and garlanded, with a figure on top in a biga drawn by bulls(?). (b) Obverse: same as in (a); reverse: legend as in (a), with an eagle flying left, carrying on its back Faustina I, who has her mantle in a circle behind her head and carries a transverse sceptre in her left hand. H. Mattingly et al., eds. Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum III, p. 231, nos. 1429 (a), 1425 (b). © Trustees of the British Museum.

Vespasian’s reign.14 Pius declined a senatorial proposal that September and October should be renamed after himself and (the deified) Faustina, who in death could safely be put on the same honorific level as the princeps.15 Not only Faustina benefited from Pius’s ‘devotion’: statues were erected to his parents, grandfathers, and deceased brothers.16 The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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The stress on the family under Pius was wider than a move towards one man’s monarchy: it was an attempt to involve the whole dynasty in symbolic headship of the state and the offer of a reassuringly unified template to the senatorial aristocracy and lesser members of society. It is in connexion with imperial alliances with other families that F. Chausson cites the sophist Aelius Aristides’s remark that the whole empire was governed by one house—one in which women’s names were transmitted and contributed to perceptions of it.17 Faustina was presented as a model alongside Pius, but it goes too far to suggest that he wanted to associate her ‘officially’ with the imperial power. The assimilation of the deified empress into Ceres seems in no way untoward (chapter 6).18 Naturally, relations between Pius and his wife are reported to have been bad: disturbed by rumours of louche behaviour, he had to stay silent. But if it were established that the proclamation of ‘Augustan Concord’ on their coin issues allows insight into discordant relations, it would be a fine testimony to the significance of Faustina I in the machinery of the imperial court. Such a legend, related to the army, is sometimes a sign of potential or actual dissidence.19 But applied to a married couple, the slogan is conventional, not something brought out only in the face of suspected difficulty. The association of concord with the imperial couple in the tribes of Antinoopolis (chapter 2) shows the conventional notion in play, as does the presentation of the evidently deified Faustina on the famous monument from Ephesus (chapter 3), which has been taken, on the basis of her attribute, the cornucopia of coin representations, to show her as Concordia herself.20 In fact, even though the image of marital harmony had earlier models, the Antonine dynasty appears to be the first to make broad public use of it at an imperial level, and that is its significance for the historian. We cannot be sure of any sense of irony that such images and words may have stimulated in the public or in the imperial house or about the satisfaction that the parade may have given them.21 Like Queen Victoria, they may have lived their ideals and illusions; the high plane of Marcus’s Meditations must be taken seriously. A well-known letter by Pius to Cornelius Fronto has been brought as evidence of the emperor’s regard for his wife: he thanks the orator for doing honour in a speech to ‘my dear Faustina’. He ends by saying that he would rather live on the bleak exiles’ island of Gyarus with Faustina 60

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than on the Palatine without her. But when did he deliver the speech? It could belong to 138, when Faustina I became Augusta, or to the summer of 142, when Fronto thanked the emperor for his consulship. The later date would mean that it is Faustina II, Pius’s surviving daughter, who is meant, not his wife. There is no doubt of Pius’s devotion to her: he ensured her a personal fortune.22 We have already noticed the one instance of a disagreement between Pius and Faustina I that has come down to us. Faustina I did not long enjoy her new position, dying probably in late 140.23 Pius spent nearly twenty years as a mindful widower, though not as a celibate. Like Vespasian he kept the imperial line clear by taking mistresses. Fabius Cornelius Repentinus was a man who was appointed joint guard prefect but was ruined in about 158 by the tale that he had gained his post through Galeria Lysistrata, a freedwoman of Faustina I; perhaps it was her behaviour, rather than Faustina’s, that prompted Emperor Julian to write of Pius that he was self-restrained in political life, though not in sexual matters.24 Marcus’s grandfather had done the same as Pius and taken a concubine after the death of his wife, Rupilia Faustina, and even if as a child he had disapproved of the mistress’s household, Marcus was to follow suit.25

Creation of a Dynasty:The Betrothal of Faustina II The death of Faustina I was a blow to Pius for more than personal reasons. He intended to create a stable dynasty based on family inheritance. Only Faustina and the children would make that possible. The imperial government had recently passed down by a veiled coup (Trajan), a dubious last-minute adoption (Hadrian), and another late and fragile adoption scheme. Pius meant to do better. The youth he chose had every merit, not least that of devotion to himself, still expressed in Marcus’s Meditations: ‘Do everything as a student of Antoninus’.26 Having noted the qualifications of the wealthy and aristocratic Faustina I, we need add nothing about her daughter and only surviving child, even more importantly, the daughter of Pius. She was a unique prize for the heir. Right from childhood she possessed the qualifications to make her one of the most influential of empresses. Besides that, Faustina II possessed extraordinary fertility, celebrated in the coinage. It was not her beauty, however great, that caused her hairstyle to be The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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imitated by the first lady of the Severans, Julia Domna—hairstyle was a sign of character—but, rather, the position and authority that motherhood helped her to develop.27 Faustina II came to prominence, along with her future consort, as soon as the change in marital engagements was completed on Pius’s accession;28 she was eight years old at most, and her future husband, seventeen. The betrothal may be alluded to on coins of 139 celebrating ‘High Spirits’ and ‘Concord: By Decree of the Senate’. A minor difficulty was easily obviated: Marcus was Pius’s adoptive son. The same problem confronted Claudius when he betrothed his daughter Octavia to Nero. He would have emancipated his daughter and had her adopted into another family to avoid the incest.29 The wedding came in 145, at an age for Faustina that shocks modern Western sensibilities. Ordinary girls married later, but the needs of dynasties could put princesses out as soon as they were capable of motherhood. The prospect of that future state might reconcile the girl to the move. This wedding was celebrated with pomp and bounty, making it agreeable to the people. It would have taken the ancient form probably available only to two patricians and would have been presided over by the Pontifex Maximus, Pius himself.30 This form of marriage committed the bride into the power of her husband, leaving a woman with less control of her property than the usual type of marriage: Faustina’s husband now, rather than her father, should have governed her expenditure, but Marcus had learned from his friend the philosopher Sextus of Chaeronea ‘how to behave as head of a family’.31 Besides, Marcus was not yet that: as the adopted son of Pius, he and his were in his father’s legal power. Marcus is said to have spent only two nights away from Pius during the whole reign. This was a united household. No doubt Faustina II acquiesced in the harmonious will of her two masters. This marriage was a pivotal point in the age of the Antonines and in Antonine ideology (chapter 5). The year was also marked by the consulship of L. Aelius Lamia Silvanus, widower of the long-dead Aurelia Fadilla, sister of Faustina I; Pius and Marcus had held the opening posts of the year. It is not surprising that Marcus Caesar as ‘Leader of the Youth’ in 139 had secured the membership of all the great priestly positions: that was regular for the heir. Access to the quaestorship (of the emperor) in 139, at the early age of eighteen, gave another privilege normal for young princes; it meant membership in the Senate and a voice in politics. More significantly, there immediately followed the regular 62

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consulship, held alongside Pius. That had been obtained for Marcus ‘at the request of the Senate’—that is, through loyalists prompted by the emperor or by other members of the court.32 For Faustina II the marriage ensured a future ascendancy to match her imperial ancestry and soon an unprecedented distinction.33 Two years later, on 30 November 147, with the birth of their first child, a daughter, Domitia Faustina (Figure 4.2), Marcus immediately became effective co-ruler with his father-in-law: imperium in the provinces, tribunician power, and priority in presenting motions to the Senate at each meeting. Faustina II became Augusta, enjoying the unique privilege of holding that title while her husband remained a Caesar.34 Another distinction, not unique but high among those allowed to women, came to her while Pius was still alive, that of being allowed to ride in the women’s ceremonial carriage (chapter 2). Marcus’s success as a father was proved by Faustina’s safe delivery. It is possible but not compelling to see her hand in his advancement and to suppose that Pius conceded the powers at her request, when fertility was proved. But it is unlikely that Marcus’s onward career, which had been propelled forward in 138, would otherwise have been halted. (It was women who were normally blamed for infertility.) The relief that his daughter was giving his preferred heir a child would have been enough to prompt Pius to secure Marcus all the honours that were permissible before Pius’s death.

Faustina II the Mother Faustina benefited from another change in status as early as 152. From that year on she appears on coins as Faustina Augusta, without filiation. That was the year in which she gave birth to a son, identified by K. Fittschen as T. Aelius Antoninus. A potential heir may have been enough to justify this token advance: privileges had been extended to women who had three children ever since the reign of Augustus. Faustina II had earned that privilege in full; this was a particular sign of the independent status that her latest achievement earned her. Coins show the naked (so male) child on her arm or seated on her lap, with the legend ‘Fertility of Augusta’ (see fig. 4.2).35 That child did not survive. It was not until 31 August 161 that Faustina gave birth to Marcus’s eventual heir. Commodus was one of twins, The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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Figure 4.2. Portraiture of Faustina II: (a) portrait bust belonging to Fittschen’s Type 1 and ascribed by him to 147, the year of the birth of Domitia Faustina; (b) portrait bust belonging to Fittschen’s Type 7 and ascribed by him to 161, the year of the birth of the twins. See K. Fittschen, Die Bildnistypen der Faustina Minor und die Fecunditas Augustae, Abhandl. der Akad. der Wiss, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 126 (Göttingen, 1982). (a) © Capitoline Museum, 32 Inv. 2193. (b) Louvre, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

and the birth was marked on the coinage as a sign of the ‘happiness of the age’. The two boys were shown lying under a star. Five years later, when his twin, Antoninus, was dead, Commodus was designated Caesar, with a younger brother, M. Annius Verus, receiving the name—now a title—that meant that they were the emperor’s heirs. Thus, the joint rulership achieved by Marcus and Verus in 161 might continue in the next generation. Death denied that.36 64

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Figure 4.2. (continued)

The Faustinas as Advisers Scholars justly stress the importance of the role of the imperial woman as mother, occasioning Faustina’s elevation to Augusta. But the title also indicates that the possessor enjoyed extralegal power and the ability to draw on the influence that a woman was thought to wield over her menfolk and so over the commonwealth (see chapter 2). A distinction has to be drawn between influence exerted in private— the kind of ‘pillow talk’ that Livia is shown practising37—and acts that could be witnessed, even in open court. Livia’s power and Tiberius’s efforts to restrict it are features of his reign, attested by the language of the Senate in ad 19 and that of his admirer Velleius Paterculus in his obituary of Livia, written the year after her death.38 But an emperor might have women in attendance even as he carried out his official duties, as Claudius did when he heard the case of two dissident Alexandrian politicians. The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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Agrippina the Younger approached a dais on which Nero and his advisers were waiting for Parthian ambassadors, and her son had to be prompted to step down and waylay her. We even hear of Princess Berenice of Judaea sitting in on proceedings at which her own property rights were being questioned. Doubts about propriety did not go away. Constantia, the daughter of Constantine the Great (306–337), is indignantly shown by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus poking her head through a curtain during trials to ensure the condemnation of prisoners.39 Small examples of influence are recorded for Faustina I, beside her failed effort to make Pius more generous in his gifts to household or kin at the beginning of his principate (chapter 2). The story was put about that it was through her mediation that Marcus was invited to abandon his engagement to Ceionia Fabia and accept the hand of Faustina II. This invites interpretation: for instance, that the mother’s assurances of her daughter’s consent backed the emperor’s invitation or that only female interference could make Marcus abandon his fiancée. But the change was only a supplement to the adoption Marcus had already gained. This insertion of an influential woman into a standard role has naturally been rejected.40 We shall also see Faustina II trying to sway Marcus, once or twice privately, in episodes that cannot be substantiated, and once publicly. She was certainly perceived as privy to state secrets and in a fabricated letter to Marcus is made to mention the conspiracy of a man called Celsus that took place in the lifetime of her mother.41 One success can be claimed, the intervention on behalf of senatorial adherents of the rebel Avidius Cassius. Earlier episodes, related below, ended in failure. One affair illustrates the limitations on an empress’s options, even when property due to her in a will was concerned: Marcus was a stickler for propriety and sensitive to public opinion. The younger Matidia, Marcus’s great-aunt, survived at least until 161. The childless old woman, who had made Faustina II her heir, was the target of fortune hunters, and she had drawn up, but finally left unsealed, we are told, codicils to her will in their favour. It was only when she was unconscious on her deathbed that the beneficiaries came and ‘validated’ the documents by sealing them. As a result more than three quarters of her estate would be disposed of outside her family, contrary to the Lex Falcidia of 40 bc , which would have to be invoked to ensure that Faustina received the statutory quarter of the estate. Were the codicils to be disallowed or upheld? Or was Faustina to refuse the inheritance altogether, causing 66

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Matidia to have died intestate, thus bringing shame on her memory? One item to be sold if upholding the codicils led to dispersal was a celebrated pearl necklace, as well as other jewellery. The suggestion was that Faustina II should buy the necklace back. That was objectionable because it would look as if imperial pressure was being applied to the legatees, while Faustina would be getting the pearls at cut price. In any case, Marcus told his master Cornelius Fronto that Faustina did not want to buy the pearls. Fronto urged Marcus to forget philosophy and disallow the codicils. After consulting advisers, Marcus referred the problem to his co-emperor, L. Verus, as an additional assessor. What Verus advised remains unknown. Faustina has only the one brief appearance in the matter.42

The Career and Betrothal of Lucius Verus Faustina II expected to play a part in choosing the spouses of her daughters. One of them, Lucilla, repeated her mother’s pattern of marriage within the dynasty: she was old enough in 164 to be married to L. Verus, now Marcus’s fellow Augustus. There is a distinction between the progress made by Marcus and that of his adoptive brother. For this Pius was responsible—a cause for resentment, but no trace of it is on record. Quaestor at twenty-two in 153, Verus did receive the consulship the following year and again, not surprisingly, in 161, his annus mirabilis. Until then, poised between a position as Pius’s heir and one of possible successor to Marcus, he might have seen his prospects diminishing with each birth in Marcus’s family. After Marcus promoted Verus in 161 to be his fellow Augustus, Verus remained a junior partner, for Marcus also made use of his daughter Lucilla as one of the binding links of dynastic politics. At the age of eleven she was betrothed to the thirty-year-old Verus—who as a child had been engaged to her mother.43 Marcus took his momentous step of promoting L. Verus when he still had no male heir but when threats from the Parthians and from invaders from over the Danube were pressing. The adoption by Pius was no guarantee of future eminence: the fate of Agrippa Postumus, Augustus’s adoptive son killed in ad 14, shows that. Marcus, too, had a stark choice in 161: Pius’s second son, if he survived, must have a position that satisfied him. It may be, if the sources are to be trusted, that Verus’s The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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personality was an obstacle: he is portrayed as pleasure-loving, even louche. Perhaps he was on probation. He was never given military training, but neither were Pius and Marcus military men. The identity and motives of possible partisans must be considered. Verus’s champions should be members and allies of the family of the Ceionii Commodi who saw now that their time was coming. Lucilla herself, in spite of the age of her roué bridegroom and any repugnance that she may have felt, may have been enthusiastic: she could make no better marriage than with the son of Hadrian’s original heir, and her children might come to full power; her ambition was revealed after Verus’s death (chapter 7). When Pius died Faustina was pregnant again, and at Lanuvium on 31 August 161, while her daughters were probably at Rome, staying with their great-great-aunt Matidia, she presented Marcus with their twin sons (chapter 6). By a dire coincidence, not to be dismissed as a later invention, ignored at the time and recalled (at least in private) when Commodus was emperor, 31 August was also the birthday in ad 12 of the infamous tyrant Emperor Gaius Caligula: for Romans dates could become contaminated by disastrous events or the birth of enemies of the state. At the time the twins were cast favourable horoscopes; it would only have been much later that the story got about that Faustina dreamt of giving birth to two snakes, one fiercer than the other. Fronto had a happier way of distinguishing the infants. One was eating white bread, and the other, black, making them the offspring of a monarch and a philosopher. Fronto does not say which was which, and when he tells Marcus that they were the image of him it is no more than conventional flattery. When the elder twin died in the second half of 165, the fierce Commodus became Marcus’s heir apparent—and an object of intense anxiety: the death of his younger brother, also made Caesar, meant that a son of Verus and Lucilla might still fill the second position.44

Marcus and L. Verus as Joint Emperors When Pius died in 161 he commended the Roman state and his daughter to Marcus, illustrating at once her importance to him and the dynasty.45 From then on Faustina II enjoyed the closest relationship with the ruler of the Roman world, Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, his power restricted only by his family obligations to Imperator 68

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Caesar Lucius Aurelius Verus Augustus, by the informal authority of friends and confidential freedmen,46 and by a sense of duty to the state. The united emperors jointly dedicated a monument to their father, the Antonine Column, part of a cenotaph complex, on the surviving base of which they presented the shared flight to heaven of Pius and his longdead wife (Figure 4.3). The side panels show identical processions of troops at the ceremony, each led by one of the emperors. These two are the dominant players in the monument; Pius and Faustina I are two thirds the size of other figures in the apotheosis relief itself, and Faustina II would have had no place on the column itself.47 Marcus’s merits as emperor were universally celebrated, like his devotion to the memory of Pius. Other personality traits are revealed in Marcus’s legal decisions, as W. Williams has shown: painstaking thoroughness, even fussiness; a tendency to stress the obvious; linguistic

Figure 4.3. Apotheosis of Pius and Faustina I: relief from the front of the basis of the column constructed by Marcus and Verus for Antoninus Pius. Faustina I had gone before, as her posthumous coinage shows, but here the models of marital harmony are raised to heaven together on the wings of Aion (Eternity) and led by eagles; Pius holds a sceptre that likens him to Jupiter; below, (l.) the Genius of the Campus Martius reclines, holding an obelisk, and (r.) Roma is seated. Cortile delle Corazze, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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purism; and ‘an earnestness which produces an attitude to the pretensions of the Greeks far more serious-minded than Pius’s; the moral tone is one that stresses humanity and respect for tradition’.48 There were gains as well as a sacrifice for Marcus in promoting Verus. Comparative youth and apparent strength made him suitable for the military side of the emperor’s duties.49 Dio claims that Marcus himself spent practically his whole life fighting; actually it was forced on him and still to come.50 In 161 the Parthians were already troubling the dying Pius. They invaded Armenia Major, the site of ancient struggles, and annihilated the governor of Cappadocia, who led a legion against them. Reinforcements were sent, three legions and detachments. Once again, as in Trajan’s time, in 113, the presence of an emperor was required. Verus left Rome early in 162.51

The Marriage of Lucilla and L. Verus On 7 March 164, Faustina’s eldest surviving daughter, Lucilla, celebrated her fourteenth birthday, coming in Roman eyes to marriageable age. It was evidently time for L. Verus to marry, too. He had a mistress in Syria over whom the satirist Lucian of Samosata drooled enthusiastically, an affair known to Marcus. In honour of the union of Verus and Lucilla the emperors ordered additional boys and girls to be assigned to the grain distribution.52 Marcus sent Lucilla to her bridegroom at Ephesus in Asia. He entrusted her to a ‘sister’ (the Historia Augusta mistakenly says his own, but Cornificia was dead, and Lucius’s sister Ceionia is probably meant). It seems that Marcus himself, having told the Senate that he would join the party, found it impossible to leave Italy. He accompanied the party only to Brundisium. Also in the party was Verus’s uncle M. Vettulenus Civica Barbarus, consul in 157. Lucilla’s escort has been elucidated in this sense by A. R. Birley, who offers a simple solution for the absence of Faustina II: she had the younger children to look after, including the precious twins and the youngest child, Annius Verus.53 Lucilla was bereft of both her parents and was in the hands of her future in-laws; the prospect of marriage to the younger emperor (at thirtythree, not young to the fourteen-year-old) may have mitigated what could have been a dispiriting, even frightening, journey. Women shared family pride and ambition; they had to make up for the lack of personal freedom. 70

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Civility to governors of public provinces dictated that Marcus write to the proconsul of Asia and others, telling them not to travel to meet Lucilla, another sacrifice of his daughter’s dignity.54 Verus met the bride at Ephesus, where the marriage was celebrated, and Lucilla, in glorious compensation for the provincial ceremony, was made Augusta. So Lucilla surpassed her mother, becoming an Augusta before the birth of any child.55 However, when Commodus and his younger brother, M. Annius Verus, became Caesars on 12 October 166, her position in the family was less important, and her coinage ceased in the following year. She no longer carried weight in the succession. Another instance of Marcus’s civility was the courtesy he showed his brother, as in the case of Matidia’s necklace. However, Verus’s favour towards the freedman Agaclytus later caused bad blood. Lucius had been accompanied east by his cousin, and Marcus’s, M. Annius Libo, governor of Syria, with whom he quarrelled; Libo would report only to Marcus. Such disputes had taken place before in this region; that between Germanicus Caesar and Cn. Piso in 19 was the most notorious, ending in the death of Germanicus.56 Now the inferior, Libo, died suddenly, and Lucius was suspected of poisoning him. In about 163 Verus gave the widow to Agaclytus, against the wishes of his fellow emperor.57 The hint of poisoning shows that Libo was seen in some circles as a nuisance to L. Verus, perhaps even a threat, while the fate of his wife reveals the fear that highly placed women in second marriages of distinction might produce threatening offspring, as manifested in the fate of Verus’s own widow six years later.

The Death of L. Verus In 165, when Faustina lost one of her twins, Lucilla was pregnant, but probably with a daughter, since we later hear of Lucilla’s son-in-law.58 By the time Verus and his wife returned to Rome in the late summer of 166 she was evidently pregnant again. A. R. Birley notes Fortunatus, cashier to a corps of porters, dedicating Juno Lucina, the goddess who presided over childbirth, an altar on a base on the Capitol for the safety of Marcus and his Faustina, Lucius Verus and his Lucilla, and their children. The dedication was made on 23 August 166.59 Faustina’s fecundity might eventually diminish his power, but L. Verus showed a generous spirit at the triumph he celebrated on his The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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return: he had little Commodus and his younger brother, Annius Verus, riding in his triumphal procession and asked, presumably in the Senate itself, for the title of Caesar to be conferred on them.60 Lucius’s trumpeted military successes and his arrival at a third consulship in 167 brought him closer to equality with Marcus and so raised the prospects of any offspring he might have. However, any hopes that Lucilla entertained of viable male offspring and of her own future as empress ended when, after a year on the northern frontier, L. Verus died at Altinum early in 169 from a stroke he suffered on the journey back to Rome with Marcus. Strains and tensions within the imperial house, or speculative envy outside it, are reflected in stories discussed below that purport to account for Verus’s death. They lend support to the idea of a group committed to the advancement of Lucius and his family, rather than one generally antipathetic to the rulers. All such stories were fed by disbelief in the natural death of a ruler in the prime of life.61

The Reputation of L. Verus Unfavourable contrasts were drawn in the Historia Augusta between Verus’s extravagant behaviour and the hard-working sobriety of Marcus: he was a libertine and (consequently) not energetic in executing his duties.62 When Verus travelled east to the Parthian war he was dilatory, it was said. The accusers were evidently unfamiliar with the stately eastward progress of Germanicus Caesar in 17–18. In both cases a newly elevated prince needed to make himself known to his subjects.63 Illness had already struck Verus down en route, at Canusium in 162—no luxurious Baiae but, rather, a town that needed help.64 Even illness (perhaps a minor stroke) was attributable to personal failings. L. Verus has modern defenders, but they have not made headway; indeed the earlier unfavourable constructions have been reinforced with material from Fronto.65 Nothing strongly positive in favour of Verus can be put forward to counter the detraction—except Marcus’s own suspect references to him. Like his father, Verus was buried in Hadrian’s tomb.66 In his honour Marcus (or the Senate, inspired by him) instituted a priesthood of Sodales Antoniniani Veriani, who had previously, under the shorter name, attended to the cult of Pius, naturally in the Temple of Pius and Faustina I. The priesthood emphasized the unity of the family.67 72

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After Verus’s death, Marcus had to turn to the tribes on the Danube, notably the Marcomanni and Quadi. They invaded Italy, burnt Opitergium, and laid siege to Aquileia. He met these setbacks with campaigns beyond the Danube, conducted in person, becoming imperator for the sixth time in 171.68 In 172 he mounted an offensive against the Marcomanni and in 173 against the Quadi. On 15 October 172 he and his son Commodus were styled Germanicus.69 The gods were on the side of the Romans: two marvels of these years showed it, both represented on the Antonine Column in the Piazza Colonna. The lightning and rain miracles that confounded the enemy were signs of favour, but it was only ephemeral.

After Verus After her first marriage, Verus’s widow might have expected another noble husband; instead, in a humiliating surprise, Lucilla was allocated to a man whom she allegedly despised. When M. Agrippa died in 12 bc , Augustus’s daughter Julia was apparently thought of as the possible bride of a mere knight; the children of that equestrian marriage could hardly have claimed supreme power.70 In 169 all fear of future splits was removed without delay.71 Not even the statutory ten months of mourning was allowed: Marcus was due to go north to the German war. Lucilla was married in September or October, before Marcus left. From now on he was campaigning or encamped in the north. He spent the winter of 169–170 in Pannonia or northern Italy; between 170 and 173 his headquarters were at Carnuntum, and from then until 175, at Sirmium in the northeast.72 He needed the future settled and secure. Lucilla’s new husband was Ti. Claudius Pompeianus, a senator and serving general. Pompeianus was not only an able commander, featured on the Antonine Column, who had governed Lower Pannonia in 167, but a significant and enduring politician. He was an easterner, from Antioch on the Orontes, and the son of a knight, and while merit made his claims for recognition pressing, his origins might rule him out, not perhaps as the stepfather of an emperor but as the potential father of one, certainly as an emperor himself. A. R. Birley has him down as the only senator from Syria at the time besides the future rebel C. Avidius Cassius of Cyrrhus (both consuls in the sixties) and lacking the glamour of Cassius’s royal ancestry. Indeed Pompeianus may even have lacked The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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ambition for supremacy, as his behaviour in 193 suggests (chapter 7), his origins an obstacle even in his own eyes.73 Faustina resisted the marriage, so it is alleged in the Historia Augusta, though not in Dio or Herodian; if so, it says more for her concern for Lucilla’s happiness and her prestige than for her authority as an adviser. In the eyes of a twenty-year-old Lucilla, Pompeianus’s age will have been an additional objection: he was at least fifty, a widower with sons. Even M. Agrippa had been only forty-two when Augustus gave him the eighteen-year-old Julia. L. Verus himself had already been about eighteen years Lucilla’s senior. But her degradation as an Augusta may have outweighed other considerations, and Faustina’s original support may have strengthened her when she defended her position under Commodus (chapter 7).

Faustina II and Herodes Atticus at Sirmium A nice example of Faustina attempting to exercise influence in a formal hearing before the emperor comes from one of the travails of the famous Athenian senator and sophist Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus. While the imperial party was at Sirmium in 174 Herodes brought charges of conspiracy against the allies of two consuls of 151, brothers called Sex. Quintilius Maximus and Condianus, who came from Alexandria Troas: governing the province of Achaea, they had tried to set the Athenian people against him.74 Supporters of the Quintilii appealed to Marcus, who is reported to have favoured them with his attention to their comfort when they were at Sirmium. Faustina and her little daughter Vibia Aurelia Sabina, who at three had hardly learnt to speak, also urged their case. Herodes was a strong character who aroused strong feelings; he had had a tussle with Faustina’s father, and perhaps she bore resentment (chapter 3). Then in 160 there had been the trial of Herodes after his pregnant wife, Regilla, died in suspicious circumstances. Faustina did what she could to help his opponents, but what of the child, who fell at her father’s knees imploring him to help the Athenians? Vibia must have been drilled. But the two females are presented as suppliants. The outcome, related by Philostratus, was bizarre. Marcus is said to have favoured the Quintilii because Herodes had been an associate of L. Verus and allegedly involved in intriguing against Marcus. Besides, as A. R. Birley points out, close interest in the health of the younger 74

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Quintilius, Condianus, was displayed by Commodus’s tutor Pitholaus, who brought in the physician Galen, and by Marcus’s son-in-law Cn. Claudius Severus; that shows the favour enjoyed by the family.75 But Marcus had not yet come to a decision when the two little daughters of Herodes’s freedman agent Alcimedon, who had been brought to Sirmium, were killed by lightning. Herodes, too grief-stricken to plead his case (and probably feeling that he was going to lose), began to abuse the emperor: this was all he got in return for his hospitality to L. Verus— when it was Marcus himself who had sent his co-emperor to Athens. He was being sacrificed to the whim of a woman and a three-year-old. With that he threw up his case. Marcus was moved to tears and restricted himself to punishing Herodes’s freedmen, who were implicated in the alleged oppression of the Athenians. Alcimedon himself was pardoned: the loss of his daughters was punishment enough. Herodes withdrew to Oricum in Epirus on Marcus’s suggestion. The emperor was dealing with a feud in which Herodes evidently had allowed himself to be put in the wrong; Marcus was concerned to restore quiet to Athens rather than to dispense strict justice. His wife was a partisan, and her influence was limited—or she did not possess the personality to make the most of it. Marcus in his Meditations thanked the gods that so obedient, loving, straightforward, and frugal a wife as Faustina had fallen to his lot.76 In ad 178 a decree of the Senate, named Orfitianum after one of the consuls of the year but promoted or approved by the emperor, who spoke on the subject, gave preference to an intestate woman’s children as her heirs, as opposed to her siblings and other agnates. This followed the Hadrianic Tertullianum, which allowed a mother who enjoyed the status of one who had given birth to three children to inherit an intestate child’s estate as if she were a sister. The nuclear family was benefiting against the agnatic, and a woman, free or freed, was to be recognized as an individual in her own right.77 Had the decree been passed two years earlier, it would have been tempting to ask if Faustina II had been an advocate, striking a blow for her sex against restrictions designed to prevent the dispersal of property. After her death she and her exemplary brood will surely have figured in debates on the measure, which reflects changing attitudes towards women. Empresses were outstanding among the powerful and wealthy aristocrats such as Ummidia Quadratilla whose wills were of prime interest in society (chapter 2). Faustina herself would not have died intestate: she had no surviving siblings, and the The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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claims of her children (chapter 5) were strong. Only indirectly, then, as an ideal, could she have been an influence on the passing of the decree.

Disposal of the Children of Faustina II Each successive birth in Faustina’s marriage, even if the offspring did not survive, gave hope for the permanence of the dynasty. Eleven years after the first child was born, in the winter of 157/158, the leaders of the synod of Dionysiac artists at the god’s temple in Smyrna—actors, that is— wrote to Marcus to congratulate him on the birth of a son—who had died before the message was received and acknowledged. The Caesar’s courteous reply of 28 March 158 was engraved along with one from Pius.78 It will not have been the only such letter that Marcus received. But Faustina II had daughters whose five husbands (one married twice) could serve as props to Commodus, the only surviving son, or, as Marcus may have thought of it, as possible partners. They might, on the other hand, prove to be threats. We hear nothing of input from Faustina until we reach the second marriage of Lucilla in 169. Within the imperial household Faustina might expect a dominant role. But in the disposal of his children Marcus’s voice was supreme. The sons-in-law were examined by H.-G. Pflaum, who finds Herodian’s claim that Marcus married his daughters to deserving rather than merely high-born or wealthy men justified. One of them possessed inherited patrician rank before his wedding; two others probably received it as part of the deal.79 However, these men are not a group: The marriages took place over a long period, and different considerations were in play on each occasion; the existence of one son-in-law might have an effect on the choice of another. No controversy seems to have arisen over Lucilla’s surviving sisters’ marriages. Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina, born in 150 or 151, was married to Cn. Claudius Severus, son of a philosopher friend of Marcus, in about 163.80 Severus, from Pompeiopolis in Paphlagonia, belonged to a distinguished family: His grandfather had been the first governor of the newly annexed Arabia in 111–115, holding his consulship of 113 in absence; and that man was uncle of the prodigiously wealthy C. Julius Severus of Ancyra in Galatia, consul towards the end of Hadrian’s reign. The son, named Arabianus, after his father’s new province, was evidently born in 113. His consulship of 146 was held as soon as he was eligible. Such origins need have caused her parents no qualms: Greek speakers from Asia 76

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Minor, with its wealth and cultural polish, were thoroughly at home in the Senate.81 Severus’s quaestorship was the best available at that level: that of quaestor to the emperor. Besides, he had been married before, and his son was adopted by M. Ummidius Quadratus, consul in 167, the nephew of Marcus through his sister, Cornificia. The avoidance of merely aristocratic alliances should not be overplayed: Marcus’s next daughter, Fadilla, knitted two branches of the family together, for her husband was M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, the son of Plautius Quintillus, consul of 159, and of Ceionia Fabia, as well as a nephew of L. Verus. He himself was to be consul in 177, as the colleague of Commodus. Marriage and consulship show Marcus’s wish to remain on good terms with the family of L. Verus.82 But then came Cornificia, whose husband preserved the link with Cornelius Fronto and a guard prefect of Pius, recalling old ties: M. Petronius Sura Mamertinus. The nomenclature suggests a high lineage, but he was of equestrian stock, probably from Africa. His father was a consul of 150, and he and his half-brother Septimianus also held office in 182 and 190. H.-G. Pflaum puts the marriage in 176, after the end of Avidius’s revolt and the return of Marcus to Rome; only if it was planned before the crisis, which is likely enough, could Faustina have been involved in the choice. In 176 Cornificia was a mature sixteen-year-old, and the marriage may have been delayed.83 The interplay between two prominent sons-in-law was also noticed. Cn. Claudius Severus was consul for the second time in 173, as the colleague of Pompeianus and preceding him on the list. This phenomenon Pflaum attributes to female pressure. That is mere speculation, but there does seem to have been an effort to keep the two men on a par and perhaps also to give satisfaction and hope to other eminent senators from the east. This was only two years before the revolt of Avidius Cassius. Attention paid to Greek speakers was flattering to all. When Marcus left for the north in late 169 his new son-in-law Pompeianus was with him, and Lucilla probably was as well. The pregnant Faustina remained in Rome with Commodus, who was now doubly precious. A. R. Birley suggests that Marcus was anxious about his son’s health. Galen also remained behind, and Marcus ordered Commodus’s attendant Pitholaus to summon him if the boy became ill. Tonsillitis ensued, causing panic and dissension between a cousin, Annia Faustina, who had her own team of doctors, and Galen, who prevailed. Later both Faustina II and Commodus were with Marcus, which makes it more The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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plausible for Commodus in 172 to have been awarded the title Germanicus alongside his father. He could have contributed nothing to the campaign, but there was a precedent for a ‘triumphal’ name to be conferred on a child: Claudius’s infant son Britannicus. Lucilla and Annia Faustina were probably also with the emperor. So full a court near the scene of operations prefigures the mobile palace of Septimius Severus and the later empire.84 A magistrate of Lilybaeum offered vows for his safety and that of his ‘offspring’, with whom the future lay: there was no mention of Faustina.

Public Honours: Mater Castrorum Grandiose titles lacking substance were devised for second-century emperors. Marcus and, naturally, Commodus were ‘lord [or master] of land and sea’ or ‘of the inhabited world’; so were their political heirs Severus and Domna, eventually showing the place for women in this particular table of honours, vague and informal as it was. Caracalla, going one better, was ‘Ruler of the Universe’.85 Traditional Roman titles were associated with public office, often in the military: the title ‘Imperator’ is a temporary designation, seized as a permanent forename by Octavian and resumed as such by the Flavians.86 There was a sharp break from convention when Faustina II, the first woman in a century and a half to inhabit army headquarters in a theatre of war, was granted the specific title ‘Mother of the Camps’, something that has been regarded as ‘un-Roman’. It came late, associated with Marcus’s seventh salutation as ‘Imperator’ halfway through 174.87 Campaigning was then against the Quadi, and the two grants may be connected with a success against them. But the overall situation was threatening, and troop morale could have been a concern; the slogan ‘Concord of the Soldiers’ on the coinage of 175 suggests just this.88 It is surprising that for Faustina’s title the limited word camp(s) was preferred. But it was at headquarters that Faustina would have been seen, not when troops were on active service in enemy territory. Faustina’s role recalls that of the elder Agrippina, granddaughter of Augustus, who was present in the camp at Cologne during her husband Germanicus Caesar’s command, ad 12–16. There was a vivid memory of her receiving the battered legionaries in 15 on the Rhine bridge and providing food, drink, and medical treatment. When Agrippina went 78

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east with Germanicus in 17 she played a prominent part at headquarters, along with her rival Munatia Plancina, wife of Cn. Piso, the governor of Syria. It was something that Tiberius complained about in the Senate when he introduced the trial of Piso on capital charges.89 It was no coincidence that Piso had been dubbed ‘Parent of the Legions’ by his troops during the feud.90 This suggests an informal origin for Faustina’s title: during one of her stays the troops saluted her, with or without prompting, as their ‘mother’, and the salutation was seized upon by her husband, who needed everything that tied his troops to him. Again, when Claudius received the captured British chieftain Caratacus in the Campus Martius in 51, Agrippina’s daughter occupied a second tribunal, wearing her military cloak to acknowledge the salute of troops and captives. Here we see components of Faustina’s position: her gracious presence at bases and her care for the troops in their hardships, where miracles might have to turn the day. Desertion was a problem, not new, but perhaps intensifying with unending and unprofitable campaigns. Now Faustina II had her statue in the shrines of military units. Portraits of imperial women from Livia onwards, and of imperial children, were also to be seen on military equipment.91 No doubt Faustina appeared in that context. The troops were under her protection, perhaps receiving gifts or treats from her, and she could expect their protection in return; more generally, the title expressed the symbiotic relationship between dynasty and army, which was enhanced under the Severi.

Public Scandal? The Problem and the Sources Public honours awarded to the Faustinas were matched by scandals equally public. Faustina I did not live three calendar years after she became empress, but it was long enough for scandal to gather, if only about her past behaviour when Pius was governor of Asia: she intrigued and was too free and easy.92 The Historia Augusta provides no details; whether the author could have substantiated misbehaviour from any source may be doubted. It may be that some scandals and the grief caused her husband were attached to her in confusion with her daughter, who is well supplied with Historia Augusta sailors and gladiators, as we shall see directly; any empress was significant enough to deserve her own.93 The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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How much faith can be placed in such stories? Clearly those who propagated them intended us to entertain them—if only for their entertainment value. It was routine, indeed essential, for failings of all kinds to be imputed to women, but especially misuse of power (treachery, corruption, greed) and infringement of convention (adultery, luxury). Envy and boredom guaranteed the circulation of such stories amongst peers, the lower classes at Rome, and the informationhungry cities of Italy and the provinces. The emperor and his family were under scrutiny, and their body language could be studied in Senate and Forum, at the theatre and the games (chapter 5). They provided a rich soil into which events and elaborated versions put out by upper-class informants (or attendant slaves) could be sown, with dinner parties, baths, and forum coteries providing the first audiences. The next stage was for stories to be written down; historians and biographers could titillate and moralize all at once. Variants appear in our sources, most plentifully and sometimes uniquely in the Historia Augusta, with Marius Maximus occasionally credited as the originator. In modern times misogynist scholars accepted and exploited them uncritically for the same motives as their predecessors. That has changed. E. Wallinger and S. Priwitzer in particular have scrutinized these depictions. In principle that does not help in assessing the trustworthiness of any individual writer; he may have been taken in by his source, and some stories were plausible, as their very prevalence and stereotypical character show.

Adulteries Faustina II has a tally of sexual intrigues much longer and more detailed than her mother’s; Wallinger points out how sharply reports of her in the Historia Augusta are divided: official laudation and scurrility.94 Marius Maximus is the probable literary source of much of the scandal (poisoning as well as adultery), about Plotina and Julia Domna as well. But the stories were part of oral tradition before being written down and accepted: Emperor Julian records Faustina’s infidelity as fact, as does Ausonius.95 Roman ladies, in common report and most notably in the works of the satirist Juvenal, had a taste for rough trade, ballet dancers, and gladiators. A. R. Birley brings the stories of Faustina’s affairs with gladiators 80

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into the history of public life by associating them with her removal to the northern frontier (and her transformation into the mother of the troops). In his military difficulties Marcus called up gladiators, an unpopular act that caused a steep rise in the fees that impresarios charged for their services. The price increase ‘perhaps had tragic effects—as a by-product—a few years later. Her only opportunity for indulging such fancies must have been at the beginning of the 170s, and it may have been to put a stop to the gossip that Marcus summoned her to the front with their youngest child’.96 This construction is not quite persuasive: The dearth of gladiators did not put them beyond an empress’s purse, and a husband did not have to be at the front to allow an opportunity for dalliance; Claudius discovered Messalina’s offences when he was at Ostia. There is a further explanation for the propagation of adultery stories: Faustina’s son Commodus the gladiator (chapter 7). The tale of Commodus’s gladiator father has been well explained as a product of his own ill-repute and rough tastes. In other words, as S. Priwitzer argues, the failings of Commodus were not to be blamed on the impeccable Marcus.97 That he was simply the son of a gladiator was a ‘fact’ in some accounts, no doubt discovered after he became the emperor familiar to us. It was ‘well known’ that at Caieta, a port restored by Pius, where she and her husband had a villa, Faustina II took lovers from amongst its sailors and gladiators. She was ‘of ill repute’, a technical term used for prostitutes and actresses.98 In elaboration, the fact that Commodus was a surviving twin, allegedly the fiercer of two boys, gave scope for the notion of the secondary impregnation of a woman already pregnant. But that was not always invoked: Germanicus’s sister Livilla had given birth to twins in ad 19 and died as a penalty for her association with Sejanus; the notion of secondary impregnation was never voiced, nor was the legitimacy of her surviving son publicly challenged. A lurid variant of the secondary impregnation scenario has Faustina confessing to her husband during a long illness that she was attracted to a gladiator. Marcus, on the instruction of astrologers, executed the man and had Faustina drenched in his blood before he had sex with her; the blood was almost as effective as sperm: although Commodus was Marcus’s child, he had the gladiatorial temperament.99 A. H. Krappe suggested that such tales originated with palace slaves. He attributed the more lurid story to the people; it was hardly to be credited among the upper class. In elucidating The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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the first story, of the gladiator father, he cited numerous parallels, not only from Greek legend, for the notion that it was adultery that led to the birth of disparate twins and found stories related to that of Faustina’s blood bath.100 Was it true that divorce was impossible because Marcus would have had to return Faustina’s dowry—the empire?101 Divorce would have shaken his position, as the execution of Messalina shook that of Claudius, and would have discredited his children, but Marcus was in too firm a possession of his imperial powers and the loyalty of his subjects to lose the empire with Faustina. Whatever Marcus wrote for public and private consumption about his wife’s merits (and he is alleged to have exonerated her in his letters from the charges of infidelity—at least with pantomimes), she was haunted by such allegations. Indeed, Marcus was blamed for advancing his wife’s named (evidently ‘known’) lovers. Anyone he particularly favoured could be taken for her lover.102 It is a pendant to the stories about Commodus that his sister Cornificia seems in her death scene under Caracalla to rebut a belief that she was not Marcus’s daughter. Her words, as A. R. Birley remarks, bring Marcus’s Meditations (and Hadrian’s verses) to mind: ‘Poor little soul, mewed up in a wretched body, go forth, be freed; show them that you are Marcus’ daughter, even if they won’t have it’.103 Scholars, then, have a choice: first, to take all the stories seriously— this was the line taken by those who shared the Roman suspicion of ‘powerful’ women; secondly, to accept some of the charges104—but on what basis?; lastly, to repudiate the stories one and all as part of a single genre—the inventions of court or plebeian rumourmongers, taken up by gullible or sensationalist historians. The claim of the Historia Augusta that Marcus rebutted scandal in his letters is not to be invoked: it is a patent fiction of the author in ‘scholarly’ mode.105 Both Faustinas came to pre-eminence, the elder through her husband’s invidious adoption by Hadrian, the younger because she took the place of Ceionia as Marcus’s betrothed. Members of families pushed into secondary positions as a result of these dispositions had reason to vilify them: a woman’s disgrace disgraced her husband (the taste for rough trade also implied his lack of virility). Once the stories were set in motion in court circles, they spread among the people, who had every reason to denigrate their rulers. A succeeding motive was the desire to explain the failings of Commodus, giving access to the folkloric element. 82

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Poisoning It was not only adultery: the other notorious female predilection, poisoning, was also credited to Faustina II and to Lucilla. That misogynistic charge went back into the republic, with cases ending in capital penalties.106 Poison was available in a household’s store cupboards, and its use need involve no violence; being treacherous, poisoning suited the weaker sex, enabling them to act at a distance, when men were away on official duties as L. Verus was. Relating the story of L. Verus’s poisoning saga to Faustina’s main failing is the detail that she had previously bedded him. According to the Historia Augusta, Faustina poisoned his oysters because he was going to betray to Lucilla the amour he had had with her mother. (A variant involves a sow’s udder and a knife poisoned on one side.) In another version Lucilla herself did the deed because she was jealous of the influence of Ceionia Fabia, Verus’s sister. But Lucilla needed her husband, as well as a son. Why not poison Fabia? Another trajectory has Verus and Ceionia conspiring against Marcus, to whom the plot was revealed; presumably Faustina found Marcus’s forbearance out of order. These variants have the advantage of incriminating more than one person and so of being acceptable to wider audiences.107 To take the saga to its culmination, in Dio’s story Verus was done away with by Marcus himself for the same plot. What Marcus felt about his adoptive brother’s death we cannot tell, but it was no sign of guilt that he helped Verus’s sisters, aunts, and freedmen, with pensions, special posts, and distinctions. If there is anything in standard accounts of L. Verus, Marcus may have felt some relief when Verus suffered his fatal stroke. He would not have given that away. It is even less likely that the acutely self-critical and fastidious philosopher would have had anything to do with his brother’s death.108 Something may be gleaned from these stories: in the public mind the unity with the Ceionii that Marcus sought in 161 was not achieved.

The Revolt of Avidius Cassius A few years after her failures with Lucilla’s second marriage and the hearing at Sirmium, Faustina aspired, we are told, to play the same role of kingmaker as the younger Agrippina and Plotina. Towards the end of the reign of Marcus, when he had been ill in 175, came the revolt of C. Avidius Cassius. The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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It was in April, when Marcus and Faustina were on the Danube, without their son, that Avidius, governor of Syria, declared himself emperor.109 His father, Heliodorus, had been an equestrian functionary, rising to one of the peaks: he was Hadrian’s Greek secretary and prefect of Egypt at the end of the reign. Avidius Cassius was born there, potentially an advantage, and as a senator would have been known to the imperial family.110 Avidius distinguished himself as a legionary legate in Verus’s war against the Parthians and when governor of Syria had at some point been granted overall imperium in the east such as L. Verus had: certainly he entered Egypt to deal with the uprising of the ‘Herdsmen’.111 The story in the Historia Augusta, hardly credible, is that he had once planned an attempt to oust Pius himself and had been saved only by the intervention of his respected father.112 Avidius was technically a new man in the Senate, and his family came from Cyrrhus in Syria, so he was not a promising candidate for the supreme office, even though he claimed descent from monarchs of the region. His rising lasted three months, until July, and ended with his death as Marcus was still preparing his attack.113 Successful bids for power had come from the east—those of Sulla in 82 bc and Vespasian in ad 69—at times of existing turbulence. More ended in defeat. What prompted Avidius’s rebellion and how he thought he would succeed are puzzling, though Marcus may not have been as popular as one might suppose from our prosenatorial historians. Avidius did win the support of some unnamed senators—perhaps also easterners.114 One fairly clear answer is provided by both the main sources, Dio and the Historia Augusta, with differing emphases: The state of Marcus’s health alarmed Faustina II, and she was afraid for the future.115 A curious sidelight on Faustina’s fears is shed by a cameo that bears the words in Greek lettering ‘With Commodus safe, Faustina is fortunate’,116 which has been taken to be a work of the empress, conceived during the plague that began in 166, bringing fear for decades. Commodus was only thirteen when the revolt began. No wonder Faustina had fears for the dynasty and herself if Marcus died prematurely. Commodus is prominent in accounts of the year 175: on 20 January he had been co-opted into the priestly colleges and is shown distributing bounty to the people of Rome before his departure for the Danube. Such honours were not decisive for a proclaimed successor. He would soon be old enough to take the toga of manhood, but it was when the revolt of Avidius became known that Marcus had him brought to his side in the 84

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north. Commodus left Rome on 19 May and assumed the toga at Sirmium on 7 July, taking the title Leader of the Youth.117 We cannot evaluate the relative weight in Faustina’s thinking, in the early months of 175, of Commodus’s future and her own if Marcus died. In any case they were intertwined. The story in Dio implies that Faustina was less concerned with the dynasty than with her own position: frightened by Marcus’s ill health, she saw herself sinking into private life on his death, given that Commodus was young and rather naive. So she used loyal messengers to get in touch with Avidius and call on him to take both her and the empire. Dio also has it that Avidius was misled by a false report that Marcus had actually died. In the aftermath, he considers, Faustina committed suicide.118 In the Historia Augusta we apparently have the account given at length in the second book of Marius Maximus’s Marcus.119 Avidius was merely tipped off by Faustina to be prepared for the emperor’s death, in which case she would marry him. When he heard that Marcus had died, he piously consecrated him. Faustina encouraged the revolt in despair at her husband’s state of health and for the safety of her children and her own position if he should die, a slightly different motivation from Dio’s picture of a woman who feared for her own position if her young son were pushed aside.120 To be sure, the author of the Historia Augusta goes on to repudiate the allegation because it conflicts with the correspondence on the revolt between Marcus and Faustina that he quotes at length, but that correspondence is itself an invention. The story about Faustina was an obvious way of explaining the inexplicable. In particular it helped to explain how Avidius could have hoped to deal with the Danubian legions which stood in his way. They had been reinforced from the east, Avidius’s base, although among his troops he was known as a disciplinarian.121 It was good for Avidius, too, tending to minimize his guilt. The story gains credence from another fact: Marcus’s death and the accession of Commodus could have put the senior statesman and military man T. Claudius Pompeianus, Faustina’s unwelcome son-in-law, in de facto power as a regent—no doubt one ultimately invested with imperial status.122 More remotely, with Lucilla pregnant by Pompeianus, there might be a danger of his son sharing the imperial inheritance of Commodus, if not depriving him of it.123 Lucilla’s son was one of the regular consuls of 209, and it may have been with his interests in mind that Lucilla eventually laid herself open to charges of conspiracy against Commodus (chapter 7).124 To Faustina, Avidius would have seemed a The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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counterweight against a son-in-law she had scorned and, in R. Syme’s formulation, against Lucilla.125 Faustina’s relationship with Pompeianus at the time is unknown; if she were still against him, it would have been reasonable for her to look elsewhere for herself and her children.126 But if she did envisage a joint rule of herself and her coeval Avidius, with Commodus the eventual ruler, Faustina had to shut her eyes to the fact that Avidius had two sons older than Commodus: Heliodorus and Maecianus.127 Whatever the alliance did for her position, that of Commodus would be endangered. But fear of the generals, mature, proven, and, in the case of Pompeianus, on the spot, would have weighed most with Faustina. The Historia Augusta provides further evidence for the importance of Commodus in political thinking during the rebellion. Marcus’s mercy to Avidius’s relatives was greeted in the Senate by acclamations and a demand for ‘regular imperium for Commodus’ (specifically through the rank of Augustus, granted in 177); Marcus should strengthen his offspring.128 Without the convenient story of Faustina’s involvement and the supporting tale of a false report of Marcus’s death, it becomes hard to account for the revolt of a highly placed official under Marcus Aurelius.129 An alternative interpretation is that Avidius was already in trouble, probably from rivals in the Senate. Even Marcus, who had a reputation for clemency, could not have saved him: his removal was imminent, perhaps at the insistence of Pompeianus.130 Egypt was a dangerously important province, recently troubled by the revolt of the ‘Herdsmen’; other governors had become involved with local politics and been removed for punishment: C. Cornelius Gallus was the victim of Augustan fear and envy at court, and A. Avillius Flaccus fell under Gaius Caligula. As to those who followed Avidius, the successful general, Priwitzer convincingly sees their participation as an expression of unrest in the east, whose taxes were financing Marcus’s costly Danubian campaigns. Economic decline and oppression, associated with the effects of the plague, fuelled the revolt. Whether Avidius proposed something more along the lines of Hadrian’s unaggressive foreign policy is a question.131 After Avidius was murdered by a centurion, his papers were burnt by the loyal governor of Cappadocia, P. Martius Verus (cos. 166 and 179). The gesture was common: a victor could confine the problem, claim clemency, and if it was convenient, discover copies at a later stage. Allegedly it was made at Faustina’s request—and thus confirmed her guilt.132 If Marcus himself did mention her publicly as an intercessor, it would only have been to present her in the traditional woman’s role as a merciful intermediary. 86

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There could be a reference to Faustina’s implication in Marcus’s Meditations. He is writing of ‘traitors’: ‘It is your own fault, if you trusted such a one to keep loyal’, which follows ‘If he [or ‘she’: the gender is not specified] did wrong, the evil is on that side, but perhaps he did no wrong’.133 Yet there is little to support this interpretation: the reference may be to Avidius himself, if Marcus believed that he acted in the belief that the emperor was dead. The Faustina question remains open. Much depends on how acutely ill Marcus was. The slowness of communication between the Balkans and the Levant would have prevented informed tactical shifts. Faustina can have made only one proposal, generalized at that; and it could have taken any one of a number of forms, more or less treasonable. Whatever she could have promised about her support and a welcome from the Senate, the Danubian armies that stood between Avidius and Italy, with the sterling westerner M. Macrinius Avitus commanding in Lower Moesia, would have outweighed it.134 The whole scenario could have played out without her intervention, and resentment against her seems to have been strong enough for her to be cast without adequate justification as a person who would undermine and betray the admirable emperor. On balance, the hypothesis of a governor already under suspicion and acting on his own may be preferred.

The Death of Faustina II Hearing of Avidius’s death Marcus made peace with the enemy on the Danube and set off for Asia in July with Faustina and Commodus.135 Two prominent members of his suite were consuls of the year, P. Helvius Pertinax and M. Didius Julianus—both ephemeral emperors of 193. The court went down the Danube and overland to Byzantium, through Asia Minor to Ancyra, by the Cilician Gates, and into Syria and Alexandria, where reconciliation had to be achieved. There Marcus may have spent the winter of 175–176, and he is said to have left his daughter in the city, presumably the wife of the general Pompeianus.136 Faustina II died suddenly during the expedition, on the homeward route, the account of the Historia Augusta suggests; but that does not fit Marcus’s correspondence with the Senate, which links the themes of his grief and his vengeance against the rebels (chapter 6). She died at a village called Halala, thirtyfive kilometres south of Tyana in the Cappadocian Taurus (Figure 4.4). The Faustinas as Empresses, 138–175

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Figure 4.4. View of Halala (Faustinopolis), site of the settlement in Cappadocia, on the main route between Tyana and the Cilician Gates, at which Faustina II died. Photo: M. Ballance, Anatolian Studies 14 (1964): pl. XXVIIIa.

Dio reports the cause of Faustina’s death as gout (perhaps the official explanation) or suicide in the wake of Avidius’s rebellion. The second is to be dismissed at once as scandalmongering. Pangs of guilt, or the reproaches of her husband, should have taken effect before the party reached the middle of Anatolia, even on the journey out. Faustina had nothing new to fear; she was needed at the core of the unified dynasty. Suicide is not necessarily a sign of guilt; it was considered an appropriate way out for those suffering from incurable illness. Hadrian wanted to take it, and Julia Domna probably had recourse to it, when she was afflicted with a breast tumour, although on Caracalla’s death in 217 she had compelling political reasons to die. As to Faustina’s illness, gout is an inadequate explanation: it is not a fatal disease, although, as the fate of Hadrian illustrates, the feet and lower legs can be affected by heart conditions, involving painful dropsical swelling. That does not deny contributory causes for her physical decline: the humiliation of being connected with the failed revolt, even in public tittle-tattle.137 The most persuasive scenario is that of A. R. Birley, for circumstantial reasons. Faustina was a woman of forty-five or a little less, about the same age as her mother, Faustina I, when she died, which may be medically significant. She had endured multiple pregnancies—and she could even have been pregnant yet again, the last child having been born in 170. But there will have been an immediate cause for the sudden death, perhaps the aggravation of a heart condition, due to all her recent anxieties. Marcus allegedly wrote to Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus lamenting the recent death of his wife and saying something about his own bodily weakness. She was accorded full honours—despite her lewdness, gibes the Historia Augusta—and that is borne out by the lavish commemorative coinage and sculpture (chapter 6) and by the renaming of Halala as 88

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Faustinopolis. Faustina’s very death on this expedition could have encouraged the rumours that linked her with Avidius, providing his friends with some means of exculpating him at her expense.138 The contents of Faustina’s will are unknown. Legacies to friends can be assumed, as well as the division of her property among her surviving children. Marcus had no need of her wealth, but the ‘Faustinian Girls’ may have benefited. It is touching to find her remembered in Rome, not only by the attendant of a quaestor in charge of the State Treasury on a small marble pedestal designed for a statuette but also on the tombstone of a six-year-old enrolled in her grain scheme.139

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C ha pt e r

Fi ve

Public and Private in the Dynasty

Theatricality The empire as theatre is a constant theme of study, and film screen cliché keeps it before the mind: the imperial family in its box at the games, gladiators below, Roman people in ordered ranks behind them. Reinforcing it we have the figure of young Claudius, the future emperor, disqualified from the succession by Augustus and banned from the box in case people noticed his disabilities—and made fun of the ruling family.1 This stress on theatricality has made it difficult to distinguish public from private aspects of the lives of the imperial family. The public has taken over, to such an extent that B. Severy, writing of the time of Augustus and in connexion with their residence on the Palatine, writes of a ‘performance of privacy’. Even before that N. B. Kampen had undermined the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in imperial art, notably that involving Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus, where private conduct takes on public significance.2 The experience of birth, sickness, and death, however, remains essentially private; it will be dealt with in the second part of this chapter. It is a thesis of this book that the imperial women of the Antonine age, in particular the empresses, were significant not only as marital links and the producers of valid heirs but as components of that theatricality, a vital part of the imperial family’s public face and its construction as a durable dynasty. The women were presented as ideals and models for society, which was regulated by men as judges of women’s mores. That was a difficult role because the status of the imperial women was

contingent on their husband’s power, and beyond the title Augusta they had no formal grant to carry them above their peers. Envy was thereby allowed free play in onslaughts on their morality, as it had been on that of public men under the republic. Hence the striking vilification of empresses from Livia onwards, although her ironclad chastity gave no scope for attacks of that kind, except the paradoxical one that she supplied her husband with girls. The more power the women were perceived as wielding, the more the accusations intensified. It was the younger Agrippina, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, whose public persona prompted Ginsburg’s study and the perception that attacks on the failings of women stood for attacks on the regime itself.3 It would be hard to be sure whether the intense focus on Faustina I and II in the coinage provoked or was itself a response to hostile talk, or both, except that the idea of so heavy-handed an official response seems far-fetched.

Public Representation Representations of empresses are themselves frozen solo performances, showing (as far as the artist’s skill permitted) how the performers wished to see themselves and to be seen. Dignity, apparently immortal beauty, and moral perfection are presented, from portraits of Livia onwards. With the younger Agrippina J. Ginsburg was able to confront both literature and artwork with what she called ‘resisting’ readings, and she herself resisted any temptation to use the second to ‘correct’ the first: each has its own agenda. We are less well off with literature dealing with the Faustinas but can exercise the same caution.4 It is an important question, what the incidence of statuary may tell, and M. T. Boatwright has offered a concise answer, to go with her list of statues of the Flavio-Trajanic empresses and other members of the imperial family.5 There are signs that approved perceptions are reflected in the monuments: Boatwright compares the grouping of a dedication of Ancona, for example, where Trajan is flanked by Plotina and Marciana, with the words of Pliny’s Panegyric devoted to the harmony within the family; Hadrian, too, praised Matidia I for her comradeship with Sabina—and by association with himself. More than half of Boatwright’s eighty-seven or so examples come from shrines, most from the eastern provinces. Above all, provincial statues and honorific dedications to the

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emperor and his family exemplify the converging values and interests of the ruler and his elite subjects in the High Empire.6 A startlingly large number of coins and inscriptions celebrate Faustina I and II. Individual initiative and enterprise, along with favourable occasions, were responsible, and leading citizens could take their communities with them. Boatwright and T. Mikocki assembled much of this material (Mikocki’s is restricted to items associated with deities, and there is overlap between the two lists). Outside Italy the greatest attention is paid to the two women at Alexandria and in grand and ambitious cities of Asia Minor (above all Ephesus; Pergamum, Sardis, and Miletus are poorly represented). Elsewhere representations and inscriptions are patchily found, though even comparatively obscure cities such as Lystra in Lycaonia could put out a coin in their honour, and the district of Uchi Maius in Africa first erected statues to Marcus, Verus, and Faustina II (161–163) and then duly added the imperial couple’s daughter Lucilla. That was not the end of their attested devotion to Marcus and Commodus, although Lucilla’s name was later erased.7 Very often the women are found in groups with their kin. Monuments in the provinces show intense devotion to the imperial family, given the cost of large groups, for instance, the set in the Capitol of Sabratha in Africa erected in the first nine months of 166.8 It includes the children Commodus—not yet Caesar—and his twin, Lucilla Augusta, Annia Faustina, Fadilla, and Cornificia. Then there is the group of statue bases from Messene that two brothers, Ti. Claudius Saethida Caelianus and Frontinus Niceratus, dedicated in 164 to Marcus, Verus, and Faustina II, the only Latin inscriptions known from the city and set up by senators. It was an auspicious year; other bases may remain to be recovered, notably one dedicated to Lucilla.9 Isolated occurrences are difficult to interpret, but Boatwright can reject two facile explanations. The first is the increasing influence of women, since there is an increase of male representations as well during this prosperous period. The second is that monuments were set up in places visited by the women: the find-spots are not correlated with their travels or with their known estates. Rather, she finds the dedications connected with the supposed influence of the women on the emperor. The presentation of family members as docile tools of an emperor such as Trajan does not mean that they exercised no power behind the scenes. The public continued to pay them attention.10

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Public Recognition Whatever her influence, even Faustina II has a low public profile in the sources. Nor is either Faustina known as a builder. The impulse, which might have been started by Livia, for imperial women to finance public building had dissipated, and by the mid–second century both Rome and the Italian and provincial cities were well provided for. At Miletus what had been taken for a gymnasium and baths constructed by the younger Faustina turned out to be a rebuilding named after her or her mother.11 Evidence for the bathhouse that Faustina is alleged to have had built at Agros Thermon in Phrygia after Lucilla’s devils were driven out by the holy Abercius (chapter 2) is also open to question. The story is more valuable as a reminder of the anxiety that the health of their children presented to Marcus and Faustina II, especially after the plague struck in 166.12 The public presentation of members of the dynasty passed beyond literary encomia and physical images. We have seen (chapter 2) Hadrian’s Antinoopolis in Egypt, with imperial names imposed on its constituent parts. If an established city were involved in a reorganization, new tribes or demes could be added, presumably at the request of the citizens themselves in council or assembly. The choice would represent what local opinion deemed acceptable to the rulers and was eventually approved. At Prusias ad Hypium there were originally three Doric tribes, with Prusias, the second founder, added as fourth and with another broadening under Tiberius and then again under Antoninus Pius. Faustina’s tribe is strongly attested. She was not the first member of the imperial family to be so honoured: there were also Sebastene, Juliane, Tiberiane, Germanice, Hadriane, Sabiniane, and Antoniane (contracted from Antoniniane).13

Coinage In his coinage as much as anywhere else the emperor presented himself to the public. Coin issues above all have been regarded as a means of propaganda. However, as with the choice of tribal and deme names in provincial cities, input from outside, in this case from mint officials, is likely, again with the additional twist that suggestions would come along lines thought to be acceptable to the emperor.14 The supposed influence of the women on the emperor brings us immediately to the issue of the 94

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strikingly large coinage put out not only representing Faustina I and II but carrying their names on the obverses, in their lifetimes and afterwards (chapter 2). For Faustina I the basic ordering of the coin legends is firmly established.15 ‘Faustina Augusta, Wife of Antoninus Augustus’ of the earliest coinage gave way almost at once to a legend mentioning the emperor’s title of Father of the Fatherland, which he received in 139. The coinage of Faustina hardly began before that year, but it is no accident that her title exactly replicates the latest title of Sabina, ‘Sabina Augusta, Wife of Hadrian Augustus Father of the Fatherland’. Pius’s own first titulature succeeded Hadrian’s posthumous ‘Hadrian Augustus, Father of the Fatherland’ in 139. The full coinage for Pius and Faustina I began only after the consecration of Hadrian. Then came a second issue with a simple ‘Faustina Augusta’ that went to the end, 139–140. As to Faustina II, only in the reign of Septimius Severus were more portrait types designed.16 This fertility contrasts with the conservatism of Marcus’s own coin portraits. How is it to be interpreted? K. Fittschen’s hypothesis is that it is to be connected with Faustina’s incomparable fecundity as a mother: each time she gave birth a new portrait type was adopted.17 This is an implausible hypothesis: some births, such as that of Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina in 151, had no impact on the coinage. And it can never be proven while there are other grounds for the changes; the accompanying reverses and legends are ambiguous. Even the sequence and dating of the children’s births themselves remain uncertain (see the appendix). There are various occasions for change in portraiture: annual or one-off celebrations. The more modest scheme of W. Szaivert, put forward in his numismatic study of the last three Antonine emperors, carries conviction.18 There are four styles of coiffure on Faustina’s coins, divided among four phases of Faustina’s reign: the first phase, hairstyle a (a tight bun high on the back of the head and the hair wavy), lasted until ad 161; phase 2, style ab (a bun low on the head), until 164; phase 3, style b, until an uncertain date in the sixties or seventies; and phase 4, style c (a large loose bun; hair crimped), from then until Faustina’s death and on her commemorative coinage (she is sometimes veiled). The solidity of imperial government was translated into the immutability of the emperor’s portrait, while its humanity was embodied in the changing styles of the empress. The premature death of Faustina I prevented her making much impression on court or the public as an individual in her new role. But by Public and Private in the Dynasty

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now any empress had a known position which she fitted well or ill. Faustina’s funerary honours were those of a man of censorial rank. More tributes were to follow, and it might be said that Faustina I entered public life in the fullest sense only on her death. A ‘vast series’ of commemoratives was struck, which went on from the summer of 141 until the death of her husband. It was the most varied of all posthumous issues, although the obverse types bear only the two simple legends ‘For Diva Augusta Faustina’ and ‘Diva Faustina’. Some types, presumably those earliest struck, referred to the funeral honours, showing the pyre, an elephantdrawn carriage, and the mule-drawn ceremonial wagon. Others have the temple built in her honour in the Forum; there were personifications and representations of female deities, Juno, Ceres, and Vesta the most frequently depicted, and unidentified female figures labelled Augusta and ‘Eternity’, which is spectacularly commemorated in Alexandrian Greek coinage as ‘Aeon’: This may be taken as the keynote of the reign, and it is guaranteed by Concord and by the deities associated with it. Dies were shared between different issues, enabling M. Beckmann to establish a series for the coinage: first came those without legends or mentioning ‘Consecration’, ‘Eternity’, or ‘Devotion’. Soon the ‘Augusta’ legend was transferred from obverse to reverse, becoming the only legend used on gold and dominant on silver and bronze until about ad 150. Suddenly it was replaced with the old ‘Eternity’, and finally, in the late 150s, ‘Consecration’ reappeared, with the names of the deities spelled out.19 A strange and touching issue of base metal coins was struck at Rome, inscribed in Greek in the name of Thea Faustina. They bear on the reverse the small bust and title of her deceased son M. Galerius Antoninus, ‘Son of Imperator Antoninus’. P. Weiss interprets these coins as intended to display the imperial couple as being once parents of a living son, which incidentally would distance them from Hadrian. The coins were meant for distribution in Bithynia, the province in which Hadrian’s paramour Antinous had been born.20 In neighbouring Asia Pius had served as proconsul, his fecund wife accompanying him.

Public Activities and Travel There was another way by which the empress was integrated into the life of the Roman people. Not only might a consul devote space to Faustina II in his pleasing speech of thanks to the emperor.21 The women were 96

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involved in public acts. The gifts made to qualified male inhabitants of Rome were occasioned by important events on the imperial and state calendar, notably an emperor’s accession, which also created a useful feeling of well-being and gratitude among the populace. What was good for the dynasty was good for Rome. Events involving the imperial women were included in these festive occasions:22 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Pius’s accession, ad 139; The commemoration of Pius’s adoption, in 140; An unknown occasion, perhaps in 142; The celebration of the marriage of Faustina to Marcus, 145, when gladiatorial games were also held; The celebration of the ninth centenary of Rome, 148; An unknown occasion, 151; Perhaps the birth of Faustina’s first son, 152; An unknown occasion, 158; The joint consulship of Marcus and Verus, 161.

Public appearances on such occasions brought the empress to the centre of power, though her role remained passive. A performance that was neither prepared nor passive was also available, most notably to that characterful woman Livia, and in her old age. After a fire broke out near the Temple of Vesta at Rome (admittedly a building of particular interest to the empress), she went to the scene and urged on the firefighters. Tiberius did not approve: it was an act unsuitable for a woman—and, some might think, usurped his own prerogatives, which he was not present to exercise. In other words, it was a rebuke. Disasters of one kind or another—fire, flood, the collapse of undermined or jerry-built housing—were common at Rome. The younger Agrippina at least accompanied Claudius to a fire and gave assistance. But we never hear of successors, certainly not Faustina I and II, following suit.23 That may be due to the defects of our sources or to such behaviour becoming commonplace; neither seems likely. Rather, convention and protocol prevailed, and a possible avenue for enterprise and courage was closed. One form of theatre in which the empress was prominent, perhaps more so than when she was in Rome, was the progress abroad. She was seen in the flesh by people, some of whom cultivated female deities to whom the First Lady could be assimilated (chapter 6). When Sabina was given a statue by the council and people at Ephesus, the proconsul Public and Private in the Dynasty

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Antoninus Pius (135/136) was named on the base as the eponymous governor, thus linking him with the honour. But this was an Ephesian initiative: The Ephesians remembered Sabina’s visit, and they remembered that Sabina was the daughter of Matidia Augusta, another potent woman in the dynasty. As a globetrotter Sabina did better than either Faustina: Hadrian was restless, but Pius was a stay-at-home, as Aelius Aristides pointed out in his Panegyric on Rome, making a merit of it; Faustina naturally stayed with him. Faustina II eventually left Rome for the northern frontier to be with her husband and son. R. Syme’s view was that the empress could not be left behind in the emperor’s absence—exposed to gossip.24 At the end of our time span, Faustina II, in the east in 175 with Marcus and Commodus, may have been at Magnesia on Maeander to witness new games as an honoured spectator, the first ‘Sacred Isopythic Leukophryena’. Possibly they visited Ephesus as well, though visits are attested only for Smyrna and Miletus. The victories of the pantomime Ti. Julius Apolaustus principally commemorate the Magnesian victory. The programme may have included new competitions for mime and pantomime, attuned to the taste of Romans. The artist could have travelled east with the imperial family in 175, going on to Syria and winning the Epheseia and Lycophryena in 176 or later (too late for Faustina to witness it). The Epheseia may have been the first festival to include pantomime contests: it was the occasion for the gathering of the artists of Dionysus, who were attentive to the imperial family in the 150s and who were probably involved in the introduction of these games.25 Monuments set up to members of the imperial family, or coins struck in their honour, did not mean a visit: the city of Hermione in the Argolid honoured Faustina and Lucilla, the daughters of M. Aurelius Caesar, granddaughters of Antoninus, circa 148.26 Sometimes they are attested in cities where they are known to have resided, but that has more to do with the self-regard and self-presentation of the communities concerned than with the current physical presence of the imperial family. Ephesus is a striking case: Pius’s ‘capital’ when he governed Asia and host to the marriage of Lucilla. The city cherished such connexions. The enigmatic Ephesian group of uncertain date (chapter 3) attests this. But the Ephesian magnate P. Vedius Antoninus III honoured the family with a statue group in the Council House that he and his wife, Flavia Papiane, built; it included Pius, Marcus and Faustina II, their daughter Domitia Faustina, and L. Verus. The bases that belong to the statues of Pius and Faustina II are lost, but to judge from the constellation of 98

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personalities, the group belongs to 148–150. Vedius enjoyed the support of Pius in his building programme; such schemes often gave rise to controversy because of the kudos they conferred on one prominent citizen and the opportunities for graft among his associates. Other cities had parallel constructions: it was in the Council House of Nysa on Maeander, a city that boasted a magnate called Sex. Julius Antoninus Pythodoris, that an identical assemblage was set up.27 Most famous of all is the group that belongs to the Nymphaeum of Ti. Claudius Herodes Atticus at Olympia.28 There Herodes, his wife, and their parents and children are shown—in the upper storey—with the imperial family on the lower register, facing the spectators. In any case, the honorand could be present in the virtual sense, beyond the inert image of statuary. An inscription from Byzantium records the dedication made by a sacred band when an Augusta was holding a sacred office at the turn of the first and second centuries.29 This post was held on an honorary basis by emperors (Domitian, Hadrian) and their family members, for example, Commodus’s wife, Bruttia Crispina, in her lifetime and the deified Faustinas I and II. Here we have an imperial woman from an earlier generation.

Creating a Dynasty Paradoxically the very loss of Faustina I enabled her to contribute to Pius’s determination to create a stable dynasty. P. Weiss has brought out the implications of a monument constructed at Ostia in response to a senatorial decree of 140 passed three weeks at most after her death; this may have been combined with the abortive attempt to rename October and November in honour of the imperial couple, or it may be a separate decree. At Ostia the emperor and his late wife were represented on bases erected by the city council at which, in accordance with the decree, young brides and their grooms (at Rome, the original decree meant, but Ostia was not going to be left out) were to offer petitions to the gods, usually made on happy occasions such as military victories, in a ritual prescribed in the enactment. At weddings during the reign of Pius couples went to make an offering before statues of their imperial models. The decree celebrated the extraordinary unity of the emperor and his late wife, which seems to have been celebrated a year or two later by the erection of further statues. Numismatic and other evidence supports the idea that a Public and Private in the Dynasty

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decree based on the model of the first was passed in 176 after Faustina II died. At Rome statues of more than life size, with the altar between them and the accompanying inscriptions, were set up for the use of bridal pairs. Very appropriately, given the traditional association of empresses with Venus, that was in Hadrian’s Temple of Venus and Rome on Velian Hill.30 Relations between the elder and younger pairs of spouses were paradigmatic, also making purposeful use of the old slogan of ‘Concord’. Perhaps the elder Faustina’s untimely death made couples in the higher ranks of society the more willing to go through the ceremony, out of respect; their example would stimulate ambitious couples on lower social levels. The loyal Senate was responsible for compelling advice. In autocratic societies, once the ruler had been invoked, officious local authorities would have brought him in of their own accord, and the city council of Ostia duly issued its celebratory decree, enjoining the ceremony on bridal pairs. This custom was further recognized when it was displayed on coins struck at Rome that showed Pius holding a statuette and Faustina I holding a sceptre with the newlyweds before them (Figure 5.1). The original recommendation probably came from higher up, even from Pius himself, certainly with his approval. Naturally the custom did not die out under the Antonines: Dio remarks on the silver statues of Marcus and Faustina II set up in the Roman Temple of Venus, at which bride and groom could leave offerings.31 The ceremony that aristocrats were expected to perform was naturally compulsory for an imperial bridal pair. Weiss adds that it is highly likely that the marriage of Marcus and Faustina II was solemnized at the original monument. The wedding’s importance is also shown by the attention it received in the imperial coinage. Study of die links has enabled M. Beckmann to suggest that a specific quantity of gold with the legend ‘Public Vows’ was produced for the purpose of displaying proper feeling for ‘vows undertaken on behalf of the people’, first in the name of Marcus and then in that of the deified Faustina I.32 Beckmann is able to go on to link the marriage with a change in the titulature of the late empress on her commemorative coinage. Her title of Augusta moves from the obverse to the reverse of the coins, leaving simply ‘The Deified Faustina’; the idea was to stress the divinity of the deceased mother of the bride, and it is paired with types showing different divinities. Likewise the appearance of a young peacock (rather than a dove) on the reverses of both empresses, with the ‘Concord’ legend, perhaps in 150–151 and associated with the birth of Lucilla, may again be intended to stress the divine parentage of Faustina II. 100

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Figure 5.1. Concordia of Pius and Faustina I: sestertius, struck at Rome, ad 140–144, showing Roman marriage celebrated under the auspices of the imperial couple. Reverse: ‘CON COR DIAE S[enatus] C[onsulto]’ in exergue, with (l.) Antoninus Pius, draped, standing facing right, holding a statuette of Concordia on his left hand, and (r.) Faustina I, draped, standing facing left, holding a vertical sceptre in her left hand. They are clasping right hands over two small figures, (l.) a man and (r.) a woman, standing facing right and left and clasping right hands over an altar; the man is togate and holds a roll in his left hand, and the woman is draped and rests her left hand on her side. H. Mattingly et al., eds. Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum IV, 198, no. 1237. © Trustees of the British Museum.

The significance of the marriage of Marcus and Faustina II is apparent from the advancement it brought them, continued as soon as their first child was born. It took place when Pius was consul for the fourth time and Marcus, for the second. It was celebrated not only with pomp, including the vows, but with distributions of grain and money to the people, games opening on 13 May, and an all-important donative to the soldiery.33 Replacement consuls were in office on 1 March; each of the pair, anomalously, was patrician, but one was L. Lamia Silvanus, Pius’s son-in-law, the widower of Fadilla; he served until 30 April. On 21 April, the Parilia, the birthday of Rome, when Hadrian had inaugurated his temple to her, supplications were offered. This marriage was indeed Public and Private in the Dynasty

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a crucial point in the consolidation of the dynasty and the concord that it embodied, emancipating the family from the burden of carrying a legacy from Hadrian. The children that the union of Marcus and Faustina produced offered security to dynasty and empire.34 A much wider perspective could soon be taken when Rome’s nine hundredth birthday was celebrated with the Secular Games, an opportunity for Romans to take stock of their success; more modestly, Pius’s own tenth anniversary was a milestone for an established reign.35 Marcus, with his reverence for Pius, later chose the site on the Velian for his monument to his own union. The marriage of his son in all probability also took place there; its commemoration was the familiar coin type of clasped hands, with Concord standing between the couple.36 The keyword in the entire constellation of ideas, prominent in the coinage, was indeed Concord, personified as a deity; and the imperial figures on the coins were shown with hands clasped.37 Subordinate as an empress might be in the constellation, she was logically a vital figure in it, a person of critical importance. That should not be given overmuch weight. It was important to appear in performances (rather than being like a passive plebian spectator), but who was directing and producing them? It was Pius’s need that gave rise to them. The succession from Nerva to Trajan and from Trajan to Hadrian had hung by a thread, with threats of civil war in the first case; the fate of Aelius Caesar brought back unease. Pius was set on consolidation, and his plan was fulfilled both in the double principate that formally came into being in 161 and in the welding together of what looked like an unshakeable dynasty, Concord ensuring permanence. The message took, just as the personal virtues displayed by the emperor and his family celebrated desirable social conditions and the feelgood factor that resulted from them. Similar scenes of married couples figure on the sarcophagi of well-to-do Romans from about ad 160 to the turn of the century. They presented the elite with a set of conventional and approved merits, including, for women, motherhood. Two designs show couples either with clasped hands or sacrificing on a small altar, with Concord behind them. The imperial family was to be followed by its peers and (since no restrictions of rank were imposed, and the population of Ostia was as heterogeneous as that of Rome) by aspiring lower ranks, and its achievement was something to admire and be grateful for without qualification. (Indeed, C. F. Noreña has proposed a movement in the opposite direction, such as took place in nineteenth-century Europe, through society to its highest level, Emperor Hadrian first.)38 102

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This theme has been treated by N. B. Kampen, along with the ideals of the regime as they emerged in art, surviving into the Severan age: Its goals were ‘to re-establish traditional values and customs and to legitimize a family created through adoptions and cemented by the marriage of a daughter with an adopted son’, and the handclasp was conflated with the gesture of marital concord. To take this idea forward into a less sunny age, under Septimius Severus ‘marital and familial concord and reproduction became necessary underpinnings of an imperialism verging on crisis’. The concord of the Severan dynasty was a pious hope, on display at the marriage of Caracalla and his hated bride, Plautilla, shattered by Caracalla’s murder of his brother Geta in 211; it recurred under Carus (282–283) and Constantine (308–337).39 A subordinate but harmonious and indeed indispensable theme was the necessary fertility of the Faustinas. Both Concord and Fecundity figure on coins more under the reign of Pius than during any other principate. There was a contrast with the regime of Hadrian, whose advertised concord with his wife had to run parallel with his public devotion to Antinous and in any case was a mockery of the truth, like the ‘loyalty of the armies’ advertised under the insecure Emperor Nerva in 96–97. Sabina had no fertility to celebrate; on the contrary (and perhaps in response to the official line), she allegedly boasted that she had thwarted Hadrian’s attempts at procreation: she would not inflict his offspring on the human race.40 There was another dimension to this ideology, going back almost two centuries before the decree of 140: a shortage of recruits to the legions, associated in the minds of senators with a drift of peasants from the land and general reluctance to marry and reproduce. It was first noticed during the wars in distant Spain, when P. Scipio Aemilianus was reduced in 134 bc to hiring a private army. The causes once offered have been challenged, but in ad 23 Emperor Tiberius was complaining that he could find no respectable recruits in Italy; he was going to the provinces to continue the levy. The legions were increasingly replenished from outside Italy.41 The manpower problem was mirrored amongst the upper classes, whose reluctance to marry was censured in 131 bc . Augustus, reading out the speech that the censor had made on the subject, offered incentives to those who married and produced children— disadvantaging those who refused to comply. Inheritances were affected, and for senators, advancement in their career. These initiatives, effective or not, were intended to show that political leaders cared for the welfare Public and Private in the Dynasty

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and the future of the Roman people. Augustus’s unpopular legislation of 18–17 bc remained on the statute book, despite attempts to modify it and mitigate its effects.42 Insistence on ‘family’ continues in British politics as a means of showing concern for social cohesion and, as at Rome, reassuring the public that the nation will survive, but British politicians have never claimed to be aiming, as Continental and Soviet legislators once did, at increasing the labour force or the pool of recruits. The fertility of the Antonine imperial family is remarkable: both Marcus and Cornelius Fronto had strong incentives to have large families—to secure male heirs. Whether other aristocrats of the second century were so prolific is a question; perceived prosperity, rather than injunctions from above, may have raised the birth rate among all classes. What Pius and Marcus and their Senate did was in full accord both with concern for these problems and with imperial dynastic ambitions. And Pius’s new restrictions on auxiliary soldiers’ rights to the privilege of legitimate Roman marriage (only women taken when the men were veterans and Roman citizens were to be eligible43), like his celebration of marriage, earned him a claim to be the ‘Enhancer of the Citizens’ who appears on a bronze of 140–144. He was a true heir of Augustus, who had striven to encourage marriage and increase the birth rate among worthy citizens, recorded the increase in census figures, and brought the commonwealth, it was claimed in 16 bc , to a more comfortable situation than he had found. Restoring the Temple of Augustus—and Livia—was a matter of celebration to Pius in 158–159.44

‘Faustinian Girls’ Significantly, the measure for which Faustina I is best remembered is another taken immediately after her death, the institution of the ‘Faustinian Girls’.45 The scheme was akin to but not identical with the existing alimentary scheme, of monetary grants for children, in which about fifty Italian cities participated. Augustus gave 1,000 sestertii to worthy plebeian parents, apparently in the Italian regions.46 Permanent schemes had been practised privately since the middle of the first century ad and were taken up by Nerva or Trajan. Landowners from Italian towns (though four large and well-documented towns seem unlikely to have participated) took out permanent loans from the state on which they paid interest of 5 per cent. Alms were distributed to local children, not 104

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necessarily on a basis of need. Pliny the Younger discusses the institution in his Panegyric on Trajan, delivered in 100, and envisages the future of the children in army or forum (boys, obviously), and coins show children receiving their grants. Clearly this scheme was not intended to benefit landowners, unless they wanted immediate capital investment, for they found their properties burdened with a debt from which they could not escape and so, diminished in value. Rather, it was intended as a contribution to increasing the population of Italy by increasing the number of children being brought up; or at least it was intended to show that the ruler was concerned with the subject. There were problems with the funding under Commodus, but it continued until the age of the Severi, perhaps into the late third century.47 What Antoninus Pius now did in memory of his late wife was not an extension of the alimentary scheme:48 Pius gave particular assistance to girls, probably up to the age of twelve or fourteen at the highest, when they might expect to marry (Figure 5.2).49 They had done less well than potential soldiers among the original beneficiaries: there were fewer and smaller grants to them. No burden was now placed on landowners, and the grants seem to have been restricted to Rome itself: there is no evidence from elsewhere (unless the ‘Faustinian School’ mentioned in chapter 6 is related to the scheme).50 When Marcus and Faustina II betrothed their daughter to L. Verus, fresh provision was made for child support.51 On the death of Faustina II the scheme was extended to include more beneficiaries, whether by imperial generosity or, less plausibly, as the result of further loans.52 Why was the measure introduced only after the death of Faustina I? If it was something dear to her heart, why did she not take the initiative herself, as her kinswoman Matidia II was to do in her foundation of 162? Perhaps it was not after all something that she cared for but, rather, an innocuous and even beneficial way of disposing of some of the late empress’s personal wealth, one that would appeal to the people at large. In the view of G. Woolf the empresses were being made to perform a piece of imperial theatre that assigned value to a significant section of society: recipients of alimentary grants were eligible by virtue of their status as citizens, inhabitants of Italy, or members of a privileged group within the Italian communities.53 The foundation for girls was backed by the fertility of the empresses and motivated again by the desire to demonstrate imperial concern for the birth rate and the supply of manpower. The placing of women like patron deities at the symbolic forefront of a Public and Private in the Dynasty

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Figure 5.2. Faustina I and the Puellae Faustinianae: aureus, struck at Rome between ad 140 and 161, showing ‘Faustinian Girls’ and their mothers receiving their benefactions from the princeps, who is assisted by financial officials. Obverse: ‘DIVA AVG. FAVSTINA’, with a bust of Faustina I, facing right, draped, with hair waved and coiled on top of her head; reverse: ‘PVELLAE [in exergue] FAVSTINIANAE’ with a round edge, with a building in two storeys: on the first floor (l.) Antoninus is standing facing right and holding a roll; (r.) in front of him a man is seated at a table, facing left, with a second man leaning over his shoulder; on the ground floor, there are five women holding children and one young girl. Mattingly, Roman Imperial Coinage III, 74–75, no. 397. © Trustees of the British Museum.

scheme (rather than their initiating it) is characteristic of the place they were assigned in Roman politics and society.

Private Life: Emperors as Husbands The leisure interests of Pius and Marcus were divergent, conscientious as both of them were in performing their public duties. Faustina I was married to an unintellectual country gentleman, one who ‘frequented the palaestra, baited a hook, and laughed at comics’.54 Faustina II found herself the betrothed of a young man who was indeed athletic and fond of hunting but already drawn far more to philosophy than to literature and rhetoric. He accepted life at court for what it was—sometimes dirty, though it was possible still to live well there—but regarded it as a stepmother; philosophy was the real mother. He sometimes longed to escape 106

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to a retreat in the country, by the seaside, or in the mountains. Even the prospect of death was mitigated by the idea that he would be free of people whose principles were different from his own. Marcus’s intellectual activities were serious and grounded in his Stoic beliefs. He was taught by Q. Junius Rusticus, consul in 133, whose forebear the celebrated Arulenus Rusticus had died for his political beliefs under Domitian, to be assigned his place in the pantheon of Stoic martyrs by the younger Pliny. But Marcus himself admitted that he lacked sharpness. His writings were unpretentious: Memoranda (perhaps identical with the Meditations), Acts of the Greeks and Romans of Old, and Extracts. His Meditations present earnest variations on three predictable themes: living as a man should, not yielding to fear of death, and not hankering for ephemeral fame.55 Faustina evidently did not follow Marcus’s pursuits, nor was he interested in educating her. There is something of the theatre about her; at least, like her mother she patronised theatricals. From Lanuvium comes a marble statue base dedicated to Agilius Septentrio, freedman of Marcus and Commodus, leading pantomime of his age, and an actual foster child (alumnus) of Faustina, who was put on stage by Commodus, honoured with the insignia of a councillor by decree of the council at the request of the people, and adlected into the Youth Association.56 A slave born in the imperial household, Septentrio, perhaps motherless, was fostered by his mistress, possibly as a companion to her children, and (apparently of precocious talent) learnt his art in the palace; that was evidently a factor in his success and high standing amongst his colleagues and worth mentioning in the Lanuvium tribute. It does not figure again on the Severan statue basis of at least a decade later. I have already noted Faustina’s involvement in the career of another actor, honoured at Magnesia on Maeander. A tantalizing hint comes from a rockcut inscription from Mutina, where a female dancer, with possible connexions to Tibur, seems to make a dedication to the departed spirit of an Empress Faustina; but which one?57 Marcus knew of course how households should be governed: patriarchally. His tutor Sextus had taught him that.58 Marcus shared GraecoRoman assumptions about the inferiority of women. A conventional set of categories is deployed in the Meditations when he differentiates kinds of souls: that of a child, a youth, a woman, a tyrant, a domestic animal, or a wild beast.59 But he was a humane, constitutional monarch and learned from another teacher, Fronto, that the highest stratum of Roman Public and Private in the Dynasty

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society, the patriciate, tended to be rather unloving. It is strange to find a whole class accused, but Marcus, who enjoyed the simple and unaffected, may have been thinking of the manners of the old aristocracy. Both he and Fronto were of provincial stock, though Marcus’s family had long been of patrician rank; families of longer lineage looked down on the Antonines and on some of their friends, such as Fronto. Stiff manners may have gone with their social pretensions.60 Marcus was generous, as his treatment of his sister, Cornificia, and her husband shows. Such stories, scattered as they are through the biography and elsewhere, show how high the esteem was that Marcus enjoyed, and they contain nuggets of hard fact that make them authentic. Also, despite the conventional stern authority of the Roman paterfamilias, Marcus, like Pius, retains the reputation of being a complaisant husband, willing to forgive the peccadillos of the woman whose dowry was the empire—a forgiveness that depended on the reality of those peccadillos (chapter 4). Emperors were also sons. Marcus’s attitude to his wife would have been conditioned by his relations with his mother, Domitia Lucilla, whose charge of him marked one of the stages of life that he distinguished: with grandfather, mother, and Antoninus Pius. Domitia may have farmed out the breastfeeding (see below), but she cared for her son, and when he showed a dangerous enthusiasm for sleeping on the ground she induced him at least to strew some skins on a truckle bed. Manifestly her influence over him was for the good: he writes of her devotion to religion, generosity, self-control, frugality, and avoidance of the habits of the rich. Marcus himself had a dislike, which he claims to have from Rusticus, of potentates who went about at home wearing their finery in private. What he stresses are qualities of character, but Domitia, as we have seen (chapter 2), was a cultivated woman, too. He was glad, he says, to have had her with him during her latter years. His devotion to his mother is still striking in his Meditations, as is his respect for her—he learnt from her—and he complains that she died young (at about fifty), whereas he is an old man (about fifty-nine).61 Marcus had already shown his affection for Domitia in his correspondence with Fronto. A. R. Birley quotes: ‘Last year at this very time and place I was consumed with longing for my mother. This year it is you that inflames my longing. My Lady greets you’; and Birley notes the passage in which his ‘little mother’, seated on her son’s bed, debates with him which of them is more fond of Fronto and of his wife and daughter, 108

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both called Cratia.62 Conversely, Fronto wrote to Marcus, ‘My Lady your mother often says jokingly that she envies me for being so much loved by you’. And Marcus continued: ‘I chatted for a long time with my dear little mother as she sat on my bed. My theme was “What do you think my dear Fronto is doing now?”, followed by her, “And what do you think my dear Cratia is doing?” Then I asked “What do you think our little sparrow, tiny Cratia, is doing?” While we were making up stories about this and arguing about which of us loved each of you two more, the gong sounded, signifying that my father [Pius] had gone to his bath’. Not only that, but he and Fronto repeatedly bring Domitia into their correspondence as someone who sends or is to be given greetings, and, as we saw in chapter 2, Fronto was lavish in his praise of her.63 Fronto’s relations with Domitia were echoed by those between her and Fronto’s wife, Cratia.64 In this cocoon of warm relationships, Marcus’s long-standing and easy affection for his mother will readily have been transferred to his female cousin Faustina II, though she was not kin to Domitia. In spite of his solemnity Marcus had remained easy-going and approachable.65 Even more remarkable for a Roman youth, it seems at first sight from his own account in the Meditations as if he had saved himself, sexually, for Faustina. This interpretation has not been universally accepted in modern times; he may simply have delayed sexual activity beyond the accepted age for it.66 Marcus, who rejoices that he had not been brought up entirely in his grandfather’s house under the supervision of his grandfather’s mistress, also claims to have learned from Pius to check passions that involved young men, which one editor was inclined to refer to as the passions of his subjects; but the context is personal morality rather than social control. In a later section Marcus congratulates himself on not having touched ‘Benedicta’ or ‘Theodotus’—servants, presumably. Given the notorious reputation that Hadrian enjoyed, it is no surprise that Pius and his heir should be careful to repress anything of the kind in themselves.67 What is astounding is what seems to be his frank attitude to his adoptive brother and son-in-law Verus’s beautiful mistress Panthea. In a passage on the futility of mourning he casually asks in the Meditations if she and Pergamus, presumably another favoured servant, were still watching over the funerary urn of their master.68 Moral strength did not go with physical robustness: in the introduction I have already noted repeated complaints of ill health and dependence, in later years at any rate, on medical advice and potions prescribed by Galen. Whether the dosage Public and Private in the Dynasty

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of opiate was great enough to make the insomniac emperor become addicted is uncertain. Marcus and Faustina’s sexual relations seem thoroughly normal, to judge by the number of their progeny (at least three of them had a resemblance to both parents remarked on by Fronto69). The emotional side of the relationship, in the context of Marcus’s other relationships, has a lower profile. Congratulating himself on Faustina’s ‘compliance’, ‘affectionate nature’, and ‘lack of affectation’, he might be commenting on the qualities of a horse.70 The letters between Marcus and his tutor Fronto, who was about a quarter of a century older, have an almost amatory quality, and Marcus says in 142, when Fronto was consul, that he will find Fronto’s wife, Cratia, a competitor in his love for Fronto—though he will not be able to surpass her.71 A comparison immediately follows between Fronto’s letter to Marcus and those written by Marcus’s own mother, Domitia Lucilla, who bore and nursed him, which were never so delightful and honeyed. Other transports are to come, and the rest of the correspondence is generally fulsome. We are not in the realm of the erotic, or of the artificially erotic, that belongs to the world of Elizabeth I and the courtiers who did court her but, rather, in that of loving affection, where the Roman in expressing warmth of feeling, especially between men, is openly passionate and emotional. In another letter of the same year, Fronto writes to Marcus that he has ‘sent’ his wife, Cratia, to help Domitia celebrate her birthday and had ‘enjoined’ her to stay with her until he could arrive; she will live content on Domitia’s kisses alone. And on another occasion, when Marcus says that he will ask Domitia to bring Cratia to him, it will be as if she were bringing (in the words of a Greek poet) ‘the smoke of his native land’.72 The women were threads that helped to strengthen the bond between the men.73

Faustina II: Marriage and Fertility The Faustinas were model mothers, outdoing any member of an imperial dynasty since Agrippina the Elder, granddaughter of Augustus, who bore Germanicus Caesar nine children. Faustina I exceeded the number of children (three) required to bring her special privileges. But Faustina II was incomparable among imperial women—the coinage proclaimed it. She bore a living child almost every year except between 152 and 156, and that included at least one set of twins. The birth of twins in 161 was 110

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loudly celebrated on coins that trumpeted the ‘Good Fortune of the Age’, ‘Rejoicing of the People’, and ‘Lightness of Heart’ (Figure 5.3). We hear more of her longer-lived daughters than of the sons, except for Commodus, although she bore, but could not keep, more boys than girls: on 28 March 158, Marcus wrote from Lorium to the Synod of the Guild of Dionysus Briseus at Smyrna thanking them for their congratulations on the birth of a son—even though the event turned out ill. There is no sign that the birth of girls was unwelcome—even the first, in 147. One child successfully delivered gave promise of more, and the mother was only in her late teens. Marcus’s children took part in at least one triumphal procession (of 166), boys and girls alike.74 It is symptomatic that the first notice after the marriage of Faustina II to Marcus is of her being unwell: she was suffering from fever. Nothing is said of pregnancy, and there were enough infections prevalent in Rome to account for her indisposition, which lasted several days; she bore it as a good patient should. Imminent lying-in is a cause of anxiety in a later letter, but Marcus became so well accustomed to being an

Figure 5.3. The fertility of Faustina II: bronze sestertius, struck in Rome, showing Faustina II with six children. Obverse: ‘FAVSTINA AVGVSTA’, with a bust, facing right, draped, wearing a diadem; reverse: ‘TEMPOR[um] FELIC[icitas] [Good Fortune of the Epoch] S[enatus] C[onsulto]’, with a woman standing facing left between four daughters, holding two infants in her arms. The temptation to identify the figure with Faustina II is strong—and especially to identify the infants with the twins born in 161, both surviving until 165, but note the legend: Mattingly (CREBM 4, 536 no. 949) has her as Felicitas (or Fecunditas?). H. Mattingly et al., eds. Coins of the Roman Empire IV, 536 no. 953. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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expectant father that in the Meditations he was able to use the situation as an admonition to calmness in the face of approaching death. In any case, Marcus also had occasion to mention other failings in health: His sister (he tells Fronto, with surprising candour) had such pain in her ‘private parts’ that her face was distorted, and his mother, inattentive in her worry (evidently this was no mere period pain), had collided with the corner of a wall and caused everyone pain as well as herself. As to Marcus, he had only found a scorpion in his bed. Amid other letters between him and Fronto reporting complaints, the health of Marcus’s wife is a recurring theme. Whether it was a sign of genuine concern for her, and whether it was fear for any unborn offspring, we cannot tell: we do not see Marcus and Faustina II together. It was no impediment to fertility that Faustina II married her first cousin. That merely increases the chance of recessive genes to come to the front, sometimes with undesirable consequences that have caught the attention of modern health authorities.75 Marcus in fact congratulates himself that his children were not deformed or unintelligent, and he does not complain that his losses were greater than might be expected, merely slipping into the Meditations the injunction on himself that he should pray not that the gods should save his child but that they should make him able not to dread the loss. The mortality rate among all children, especially in malaria-infested Rome, was appallingly high.76 The tenderness of members of the dynasty towards its coming generation is remarkably plain. I have noted the concern of Marcus and Faustina II above. Faustina is pictured in a Christian tale summoning the healer Abercius to Rome to expel devils from her daughter Lucilla (c. 165); the story of his kinswoman rushing to the side of the sick Commodus has an element in common with the tale of Faustina and Abercius, which adds to its tension and stresses the depth of feeling: the healer’s skill is doubted, for all his efforts.77 The anguish of the empresses (not dulled by repetition) whenever medicine failed can be imagined. Motherhood for Faustina II was a bittersweet experience.

The Children of Marcus and Faustina II The empress’s family, unlike some that belonged to the oldest aristocracy, could afford large broods without endangering its fortunes. The number and order of the births are disputed (see the appendix), but 112

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only one son and five daughters survived childhood; several children did not live beyond infancy. The survival of Commodus must always have been a deep concern for Faustina II, especially after the death of his twin. It is from Marcus that we hear of illness and apprehension, and scholars have noted his devotion; he hardly needed to claim that he had learnt the lesson of being genuinely fond of his children from the Stoic Cinna Catulus.78 The diplomatic Fronto called the child Faustina ‘a calm light, a festal day, an intimate hope, a vow fulfilled, an unalloyed joy, a lofty and invulnerable hope’. It was only natural, however, that her danger meant less to him than that of Marcus himself. Marcus and Faustina do not seem to have been exceptionally unlucky in the fate of their children. But these losses were afflicting the family at Rome that was best able to find the most skilled medical help. They were not alone: G. Alföldy notes that Marcus’s friend Fronto complains that he had lost five of his six daughters at a very early age, one after the other, each when she had been the only survivor. Herodes Atticus and his wife, Regilla, were luckier than Fronto. They had five children, not counting the foetus that Regilla was carrying when she met her end: two daughters who lived long enough to marry and three sons of whom one survived infancy.79 Perhaps there was another factor besides consanguinity in the mortality of the imperial children. Were they breastfed by their mother or by wet nurses? A. R. Birley noticed Marcus’s phraseology when he wrote of the earth from which his mother drew her blood and his nurse, her milk. Marcus is said to have been in the care of nurses, and we have the name of one who looked after Faustina, mother or daughter. Putting children out to nurse was something that Tacitus had deplored long before in his Dialogus de Oratoribus. Favorinus, the Gallic sophist, was also provoked to rail against it on one occasion when he was confronted with it (‘Are nipples beauty-spots?’) because the evil qualities of the wet nurse could be transferred to the child through her milk. Birley suggests that this occasion occurred during Marcus’s rearing by Domitia Lucilla, an attractive idea. But Favorinus was wrong: there is no evidence that the use of wet nurses, conscientious ones at least, damages children’s physical health—and none even that Faustina did not feed her infants herself, except for the startling frequency of her pregnancies.80 The children had more than a biological and a dynastic role. Marcus, who had schooled himself, or had learnt to allow himself, to love children, was worried by the ill health of his daughter, and the family was preoccupied with her: ‘Caesar to Fronto: If the gods are willing we Public and Private in the Dynasty

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seem to have hope of recovery: the diarrhoea has stopped, the little attacks of fever have been driven away. But the emaciation is still extreme and there is still quite a bit of coughing’. Fronto’s admission that he had been more alarmed because the beginning of the letter made him think that the baby’s father had been in danger leads him to ask Marcus not to tell his daughter that he is preferred, in case she would not allow Fronto to kiss her little hands and feet. The conceit about the child opens the way to further intimacy and to a mode of address in which the courtly, the playful, and the familiar are neatly combined. As Marcus demanded of Fronto, ‘Love me as you love those little ones of ours’.81 The children of no previous dynasty, even that of Augustus with his grandsons, by personal appearance or representation, had so opened up the rulers to the affections of their subjects.

Family Names It is worth considering how Marcus and Faustina deployed optional elements of family nomenclature in naming their children, as well as their order.82 The first child, Domitia Faustina, was called after her maternal and paternal grandmothers.83 The common first name of supposed male twins, T. Aurelius Antoninus and T. Aelius Aurelius, in 149 (see the appendix), dying the same year,84 would belong to their grandfather Pius; so did the ‘Aelius’ that he inherited from his adoptive father, Hadrian, while ‘Aurelius’ recalled Pius’s paternal ancestry and his progeny, all but Faustina II dead before he came to power. And 7 March, probably in 148, 149, or 150, brought Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla, with nomenclature from both sides of the family and supplementing her father’s original family name with the surname of Marcus’s beloved mother. If ‘Galeria’ was directly inherited from the short-lived empress of 69, it was especially resonant for female members of the family, and two of Faustina’s daughters bore it, like her mother and brother. There was no hesitation about the mother’s contribution: Fronto feels that in Lucilla he can see Marcus and Faustina II: ‘[S]o much that is good in both your faces is blended in hers’.85 Lucilla and her elder sister throve, even in the summer heat, but Domitia Faustina died before another daughter was born, at the beginning of the fifties, Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina, the name a replica of her mother’s with Marcus’s incorporated. His mother lived to see these granddaughters, though her health caused anxiety near the 114

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end of one of Faustina’s pregnancies. She probably died soon after 155.86 A much desired boy was born in 152 and named T. Aelius Antoninus; but A. R. Birley has the sisters alone again in 156.87 The name of the boy who was such an ephemeral cause of rejoicing at Smyrna is uncertain (hardly T. Aelius Hadrianus). Faustina’s next children, born in the following years, 159 and 160, were both daughters, who by now could be named after aunts. ‘Fadilla’ had been the name of Faustina’s sister and of her paternal grandmother, a grande dame who also transmitted the names of her parents to Antoninus Pius; ‘Cornificia’, an antiquarian confection, belonged to Marcus’s sister. The surname of one of the twin sons, born in 161, L. Aurelius Commodus, revived that of Hadrian’s first heir—surviving family members would appreciate the gesture—while T. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus bore one regular in the family of Pius. It was a beautiful closure for the traumas of ad 138. Faustina II was soon pregnant again, and the son she gave birth to in 162 was given the names that had originally been Marcus’s own, M. Annius Verus.88 Marcus and Faustina endured further losses. Beside the death of Hadrianus, Annius Verus, aged seven, was found to be suffering from a tumour under his ear. After an operation the child died in September 169, before the games held on 13 September and just before Marcus set out for the Danube.89 The following year, Faustina’s last known pregnancy produced another daughter, Vibia Aurelia Sabina. Both she and Hadrianus, whenever he was born, recalled rulers of the pre-Antonine generation. Closer forebears had received full justice, and Hadrian was far enough in the past for his name to be acceptable; Sabina, too, was a diva.

Appendix: The Children of Marcus and Faustina The number, order, and dates of birth of the children have been variously estimated, beginning with Mommsen 1874, 205–206. Here the schemes of Ameling 1992, 161, and Birley 1993, 247–247, which had taken account of previous arguments, especially those of Fittschen 1982 and Bol 1984, are followed, with the numbering in Birley (but see also PIR2; Pflaum 1961; FOS; Kienast 1990). The main difference between Birley and Ameling is that Birley accepts the birth of twins (#2–3) in c. 149 and Ameling rejects it, convincingly. Public and Private in the Dynasty

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#1. (Birley; Ameling) Domitia Faustina (PIR2 D 177; FOS 323), the first child, born 30 November 147. On the following day Marcus assumed his tribunician power, and Faustina II was designated Augusta: Vidman, FO Fr. 14f.v. (occasion for Fittschen’s Type 1 portrait). In FOS she is attributed to 149 or 156–157, but Bol 1984 argues on the basis of the statues in Herodes Atticus’s Nymphaeum that she, not Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina, was the oldest child. (Kalinowski and Taeuber 2001, 355 n. 17, says ‘youngest’.) Domitia was dead by 161 (gravestone: ILS 385; Birley places her death in 151; Bol 1984, 41, tentatively in 150); L. Verus was betrothed to the second/next daughter of his adoptive father, Lucilla. #2–3. (Birley) ?Twins T. Aelius Aurelius and T. Aurelius Antoninus, born in 149 according to Fittschen 1982, 23 (his Type 2), and died the same year. The birth of male twins is said to be indicated by Pius’s reverse ‘Good Fortune of the Age’ with a double cornucopia holding busts: CREBM 4, Pius 678–697, of 149; Fittschen 1982, 24–25 with n. 16. Hahn 1994, 183, comments on the coins showing cornucopias carrying busts of Emperor Claudius’s children, comparing them (n. 22) with those of ad 149; cf. the Tiberius type: RIC 12, 97 no. 42. Birley 1993, 106, constructs an attractive sequence for the coins showing Devotion holding and protecting a female child surviving after the twins’ successive deaths. Ameling 1992, 152–159, argues against that scenario. There is no sign of the twins on their father Marcus’s coinage, and no full portrait type of Faustina II can be associated with these births, nor are the busts on Pius’s coin wearing the bulla of childhood. Accompanying issues suggest that the type represents the gods’ gift of plenty and security. Ameling 1992, 157, concludes that the child born in 149 was Lucilla and assigns T. Aelius Aurelius to 157/158, suggesting too that he might be identical with Hadrianus. #4. (Birley; #2. Ameling) Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla (PIR2 A 707; FOS 54), born 7 March, c. 148 (IGR 1.1509; cf. Mommsen 1874, 205), 149, or 150 (Birley; Fittschen Type 3; Bol 1984, 40, has 150). But see above, #2–3. #5. (Birley; #3. Ameling) Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina (PIR2 A 714; FOS 61), born 150/151 (Fittschen Type 4), though still taken in FOS to be the eldest daughter, born 30 November 147 (FO Fr. Pb). She shares a basis (ILS 8803) with T. Aelius Antoninus in the exedra of Herodes Atticus at Olympia (planned 149): hence the later birth assigned to her in Bol 1984, 41 (151 or 153). She survived until the beginning of Commodus’s reign (180/181). #6. (Birley; #4. Ameling) T. Aelius Antoninus, born in 152 (Fittschen Type 5). See Vidman’s commentary, FO 131–132 on Qa 11, attesting 116

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the birth of a son in that year. He shares the Olympia basis with Annia Galeria Faustina. Ameling, like Vidman, is inclined to identify this son with T. Aurelius Antoninus and perhaps with Hadrianus; cf. the funerary inscriptions of CIL 6, 993–994. #7. (Birley; #5. Ameling) Son dead in infancy, late 157 or early 158. He is referred to in Marcus’s letter to Smyrna (IGR 4.1399) acknowledging congratulations on the birth. Ameling is inclined to identify him with the T. Aelius Aurelius of CIL 6, 994. #8. (Birley; #6. Ameling) Fadilla (PIR2 F 96; FOS 356), born 159 (Birley and Ameling; Fittschen Type 6). She is absent from the group commemorated at Eleusis (IG 22, 3397–3402; ad 180–182); but so is Cornificia. She survived Commodus. #9. (Birley; #7. Ameling) Cornificia (PIR2 C 1505; FOS 294), born August 160. She survived until 212. #10–11. (Birley; #8–9. Ameling) Twins L. Aurelius Commodus and T. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus (PIR2 A 1482, 1512), born 31 August 161 (HA Com. 10.2; Suet. Cal. 8.1, with Chausson 2003, 106 n. 11; Fittschen Type 7). Commodus’s twin died at four or five: in 166 it was a younger brother (#12) who became Caesar with Commodus: HA Mar. 12.8–9; HA Com. 11.13. #12. (Birley; #10. Ameling) M. Annius Verus (PIR2 A 698), born towards the end of 162. He was still living after Lucilla’s marriage (IRT 33, no. 25; Fittschen Type 8). #13. (Birley; not assigned a separate listing by Ameling; see #6–7) Hadrianus, known from CIG 2968b and 3709 (I.Eph. 288), ‘son of Emperor Marcus’, so alive 161–180: after 162 according to Fittschen (Type 9) and, since Lucilla is shown no special honour, before her marriage to L. Verus (so Ameling 1992, 160, dates Hadrianus’s birth to some time before 159 and his death before the birth of the twins). Mommsen 1874, 206, made Hadrianus the eleventh and final birth, but the inference that he was born after 166, drawn from the fact that, unlike Commodus and another elder brother, he is not called Caesar, is not legitimate: the title was now conferred on chosen persons. It is the name Hadrianus itself that suggests a late date in the sequence, like that of Vibia below. #14. (Birley; #11. Ameling) Vibia Aurelia Sabina (PIR V 211; FOS 800; Fittschen Type 9), born after Marcus’s accession. Pflaum, following Mommsen 1874, 206, remarks that she would have been the three-year-old at Sirmium when Herodes Atticus was there in 174 (Phil. Vit. Soph. 2.1.11, with J. H. Oliver, Hesperia Suppl. 13 [1970]: 83); hence Birley dates her Public and Private in the Dynasty

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birth to c. 170. The year 166 had been proposed in Fittschen 1982, 31–32, from the coinage postulating a daughter, whom Birley takes for another child, otherwise unknown; a dedication to Juno Lucina of that year prompted Fittschen to suggest that the two imperial couples were commemorating the births of two female children to Faustina and Lucilla. The year 172 is given in Ameling 1992, 161.

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C ha pt e r

S i x

The Deified Faustinas Association, Assimilation, and Consecration

Forms of Homage At Rome itself one had to be dead to be deified in the official sense—that is, to be honoured as divus or diva—a male or female deity—with a cult and priesthood, perhaps a temple, financed by the state.1 The deification of Julius Caesar (42 bc ) and that of Augustus (ad 14) are the paradigms.2 At Rome in ad 218 the Arval Brethren had a roster of twenty to honour, including six imperial women from Marciana to Faustina II (earlier women had dropped out).3 From the Euphrates a list of festal days prescribed for the troops that belongs to the reign of Alexander Severus (222–235) also attests to official cults of the divi surviving over the centuries. Consecration, then, is something straightforward, decreed by the Senate. Marcus himself did not attach significance to the ceremonies that emperors allowed their predecessors and expected themselves.4 Elsewhere in Italy or the provinces a local authority might follow a similar procedure, establishing priesthoods even for honorands still among the living. Private individuals, too, could devise their own ceremonies or follow local religious practice. It was a matter of tradition, taste, affection, and opportunism on the part of the devotees, who might make whatever ceremonies they devised known to the honorand or to the imperial family and so win favour—or be thought by their neighbours to be doing so.5 Women were included throughout and at the highest level. O. Hekster maintains that it was less problematic to make comparisons with the divine world when women and children were involved: they were unable to participate in the functions of the state. At Rome Antonia, mother of

Emperor Claudius, and Livia, his grandmother, were formally recognized as deities, respectively, four and twelve years after their deaths; the Flaviae Domitillae, mother and sister of Titus and Domitian, both dead before Vespasian became emperor in 69, attained divinity under the Flavians. In the east, starting from Livia, consort of the founder of the empire, a mention of an empress as thea, a goddess, might well belong to her lifetime. Eminent Romans in power there had long been treated as superhuman.6 Deification should imply a structure, a temple or at least an altar at which rites could be carried out. Financial stringency often worked against it, and the temple, if not the separate priesthood that carried out ceremonies in honour of the deceased, might be omitted or fudged by inclusion in an existing cult. There were also cheaper honours, not reserved for deities: for example, the conferment of a vehicle that could be paraded on ceremonial occasions. The ceremonial wagon that was commemorated on coins dedicated to the memory of Titus’s mother, Domitilla, was granted to Faustina II and others during their lifetimes (chapter 2). Less clear-cut was the association of an honorand with a deity, implying an unspecified relationship such as was created when the living Julius Caesar’s statue was placed in the Temple of Quirinus.7 Going further, there was assimilation: the merging of a human with a deity in such a way that it was unclear which of the two was the primary recipient of the tribute. On coinage humans could be represented with the attributes of divinities or be shown with hairstyles and features that were familiar from the way in which divinities were shown. Such assimilation to preexisting deities was not excluded in Rome: quite the contrary. Already from the time of Livia images on coins are ambiguous. Is it the empress herself who is portrayed or a regular deity—or a figure who might represent either of them or both at once? This phenomenon was more explicit when familiar attributes were shown on coins with figures that indubitably show the empress: Fortune’s cornucopia, for example. This could be quite inexpensive, especially if the representation was not made on a monumental scale. It was very common in the eastern provinces on coins and statuary; linking the two names was enough: a city council could set up an inscription that named a woman as the ‘New Hera’ or the ‘New Aphrodite’ and could get away with a mere statue to go with it.8 So at Marcianopolis two identical inscriptions bear the legend ‘.  .  . of Faustina Augusta, Fortuna and Victoria’. The imperial pair Pius and Faustina I together shared an altar with Hecate the Favourable Saviour in Lydia, privately funded by another couple, both priests.9 120

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Imperial women—the mediators of chapter 2—received much attention in the provinces: even when they were not assimilated to deities, statues and simple dedications gave them honour. Livia was given widespread homage, especially in the Greek-speaking world, where her Claudian family exercised patronage over many generations and where she had travelled, both in a troubled youth and as Augustus’s wife. She was honoured by association with local deities, Hera, Ceres, and the like.10 The younger Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus Caesar, who had been Tiberius’s vicegerent in the east, also received this kind of attention, and her assimilation to Ceres in the provinces is especially striking. But Agrippina fell from grace, and she was never consecrated at Rome, rather, suffering obliteration from the public record.11

Faustina I and Her Predecessors Given the generally smooth passage from assimilation abroad and at Rome to outright consecration, it is reasonable, after looking at some of their immediate predecessors, to consider Faustina I and II in succession, dealing with their progress from assimilation at Rome and abroad to formal deification. The act of deification itself was often commemorated on the coinage with the legend ‘Consecration’: such types were struck from Marciana to Julia Maesa; only Plotina’s elevation was passed over.12 The divine status of female members of the dynasty of Trajan and Hadrian was widely recognized in the Greek east: Domitian’s Domitia Longina was the first to achieve it, after the modest tributes paid to the earlier Flavian women; then Ulpia Marciana, Plotina, Matidia I and II, and above all Vibia Sabina were honorands, as was Domitia Paulina, Hadrian’s sister.13 We should not neglect attention from private individuals: Anyone might cherish a gem representing Faustina I such as that from the excavations of Patara in Lycia; and the little terracotta bust of her daughter now in Erlangen, 15.7 centimetres in height, dating from the early years of Marcus’s reign, was probably part of a private shrine.14 Altogether, the list of places that issued coins in the empresses’ name, or where they were celebrated in inscriptions or represented in sculpture, shows the wide range of communities in which they received honours. Again, individuals and groups who cultivated the empresses might have a pre-existing connexion with the imperial family or its service. For instance, Apollonius, a slave of the emperor, made a tomb and grave The Deified Faustinas

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monument to his wife and himself at Ephesus, where he was a financial official. The work was undertaken by guilds of imperial freedmen and slaves, the Great Guild, the Minervian Guild of couriers, and the Faustinian Guild of accountants, decurions (foremen or section managers), and couriers. This last, the Faustinian Guild, seems to embrace three sets of officials, certainly of similar status, and it would have claimed through its leading members, or less likely would have conferred on them, the name of a deceased empress, probably Faustina I, in emulation of those, like the Minervian, that were under the protection of an Olympian deity. The new deity did not have the seniority of Minerva, but she would attract the attention of the widowed emperor, the members of the guild will have hoped, and bring them closer to him. At Puteoli Faustina I was honoured precisely in the year 140, during her lifetime, by a humble guild, that of the clapper-players who kept time for dancers in the theatre. What act of patronage, past or hoped-for, earned her that?15 At Rome the funeral and consecration of Matidia Augusta, Hadrian’s mother-in-law, who died in December 119, were followed by the construction of a substantial temple in the Campus Martius near the Saepta Julia. This was the first built exclusively for a female, a notable enhancement of honours to deceased women. Previously there had been smaller shrines, or the deity shared one with her husband.16 On each side of the temple’s cella was a basilica named after Matidia herself and her mother, Marciana, for her family connexions had also been exceptional: she was Trajan’s niece and had lived at court and become ‘Augusta’ when Marciana had been deified. But there was nothing mechanical about this elevation: it must be attributed to genuine feeling that Hadrian had for her. A remarkable speech of his was perpetuated in an inscription at Tibur, and commemorative coin obverses show her as ‘Deified Augusta Matidia’, with ‘Consecration’ and the eagle that ferried her to heaven on the reverses. The gladiatorial games in her honour were accompanied by a noted distribution of spices.17 Hadrian was wintering at Tarraco when Plotina died (tiles from her brickworks are still ascribed to her in 12318). She was honoured with a basilica at Nemausus, her ancestral home, but that may have been during her lifetime; a basilica is not necessarily designed for worship. On her death she was formally deified, but perhaps not until Hadrian returned to Rome three years later. Dio says that Hadrian wore black for nine days and built her a temple: Whether this is the basilica is uncertain; at first sight it seems more likely that Dio is referring to a building put up 122

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at Rome. On the other hand, we hear of a lesser honour: that to his Temple of Trajan, between Trajan’s column and the Via Lata, Hadrian added the name of Plotina and dedicated it to his parents.19 However he felt about Sabina, Hadrian could not deny her what were now traditional rights at her death, fourteen years after Plotina’s. Monuments erected in her honour may include items later built into the fifth-century Arco di Portogallo on the Via Flaminia, which B. Stucchi regards as Hadrianic or early Antonine. Hadrian is shown standing on a platform with three persons behind.20 In front is a youth, the Genius of the Roman People, and there is a child in the foreground. The monument has been taken for a memorial to L. Aelius Caesar, the child representing his son L. Verus. However, another linked section shows Sabina’s apotheosis, and that may have been the main theme.

Consecration of Faustina I On her death in the third year of Pius’s reign, towards the end of October 140, Faustina I joined three of her children, dead before the accession of Pius, in Hadrian’s Mausoleum.21 Even in death she was helping to affirm the ties that bound Pius to his predecessors in the line that sprang from Nerva through Trajan and Hadrian, tenuous and even artificial as it was until Pius took over. She was duly deified by the Senate, which ordered circus games, a temple, priestesses, and precious metal statues; her effigy was to be put on show at the circus games. In particular, the Senate voted on a gold statue, which Pius offered to erect (and so to pay for) himself. Other honours they voted for, such as the two-horsed chariot and the wagon, may have come later than the first consecration issue; the actual dedication of Faustina’s fine temple in the Forum certainly did. But no time was lost. Beckmann has exploited die links in the Antonine coinage with the legend ‘Devotion’ (some bearing the imperial titulature and so providing a date) to demonstrate that the temple was ready for consecration in 144 at the latest: ‘The Dedication of the Shrine’. Such was the speed of construction that it prompted Beckmann to wonder if the building had not been begun as an offering to another deity. If so, it was to a considerable one: H. Temporini puts the comparative grandeur of it down to Faustina’s pivotal position in the dynasty, and it is tempting to connect both its grandeur and the speed of construction with ideological developments (chapter 5).22 The Deified Faustinas

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Later on in the coinage, the old type of the two-horsed chariot reappears, with ‘Eternity’, alongside those of a female figure holding a globe and rudder and of a female flanked by two torches and the original temple type. But the temple now has a fence in front of the steps, flanked by statues, which are interpreted as additions to the structure made in the intervening years. A die link to coins of Faustina II suggests that they belong to 150–151, making a change to the content and message of the commemorative coinage on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the mother’s death. The change, and the legend, may be taken as further evidence for the strengthening of the dynastic theme in Antonine policy, made at an opportune moment.23 Faustina’s temple stands on the eastern part of the Forum at the edge of the Sacred Way. In the seventh or eighth century it was converted into the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. It counts among the few constructions attributed to Pius, and presumably he paid for it as well as for the gold statues: the funds theoretically controlled by the Senate and kept in the State Treasury were exiguous. Grand as it was for its purpose, it was of modest size on the Roman scale of public buildings, six columns from front to back and with columns fronting it. A fresh dedication was to take place in 161, when it economically became the joint shrine of the deified Antoninus and Faustina; the original inscription ‘To the Deified Faustina by Decree of the Senate’ was modified by the addition (on a superior line) of a dedication to the deified Antoninus. The two were commemorated also on the Antonine Column in the Campus Martius. There is a close relationship between that representation and the relief depicting the apotheosis of Sabina. She is borne upwards and to the right by a winged female figure, Aeternitas, and watched left and right by a semidraped male figure, the Campus Martius, and two reworked male figures, one evidently Hadrian, who gestures towards his wife, and the second his heir, Pius. On the Antonine Column the impassive deified couple are carried aloft and to the right by a winged male genius—perhaps of the Golden Age—watched by Campus Martius and Roma: the Golden Age of Pius and Faustina is to be presided over by the new deities, who bear attributes of Jupiter and Juno. This public monument has an echo in busts of the couple supported by eagles and peacocks on a capital from Lorium, where Pius and Marcus lived with their wives. But the change from the apotheosis of Sabina, not due only to its different architectural context, is stressed by L. Vogel: the narrative of the Antonine scene is secondary to the presentation of an 124

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ideological message proclaiming the stability of the Golden Age and the devotion of the dedicators.24 Faustina’s cult was celebrated outside Rome. Deification was not merely a formality involving honorific references on inscriptions and coins: consequences should follow, the creation of a cult and priestesses. At Falerio, a priestess of the deified Faustina is known, Antonia Picentina, the wife of a municipal magistrate.25 On the plus side, the devotion of an Italian city was manifested to the ruling dynasty; on the other side was the cost and upkeep of the building and the maintenance of the cult— attendants, sacrificial animals, and the like. If that was too much for the municipality, a well-off individual, a municipal magistrate, might be willing to defray the expenditure him- or herself in return for the credit to be won from fellow citizens (sacrifices meant the distribution of meat26), even from the emperor. Overall, there was gain for all parties involved. Coins struck in the names of the imperial couple, joint founders of the dynasty, and in that of the deified Faustina alone were very numerous. Pius benefited from this further example of ‘devotion’ on his part, this time to his late wife, which was abundantly advertised on the coins through the use of that slogan, which recalled her own possession of that characteristic so desirable in a wife.27 Her survival, or at least that of her memory, helped his own status and that of his offspring—and so the future of the dynasty; indirectly, too, it reassuringly indicated the long survival of the empire as a whole: their ‘eternity’, also abundantly affirmed on coin reverses that display the phoenix.28 There have been close analyses of this coinage.29 After the first outburst came two profuse series, which may be considered successive: that with ‘Eternity’ and that with ‘Augusta’, each accompanied by symbols and deities. Whether the female figures are distinct expressions of one divine conception, Eternity, or, rather, Faustina is represented under the guise of goddesses and virtues in her new home in the eternal sphere is unclear. The difference in the two interpretations is slight, but the first has two advantages: It allows the same role for both series—Faustina is ‘Augusta in Eternity’ in both; and it is closer to Roman religious belief and consecration practice. The ‘Eternity’ series was carried on until 147, when the new Augusta, Faustina II, took over and the divinity of her mother was stressed once again: Pius would not allow her cult to sink. The scale of this coinage was abnormally massive. The issues that commemorated the deification of Faustina II were on a more modest scale, although they covered the remainder of Marcus’s reign from 176 The Deified Faustinas

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onwards. H. Mattingly accounts for the phenomenon by appealing to the emperor’s affection for his wife, ‘tenderer and more personal’, which recalls the distraught Republican statesman Cicero’s plan of divinizing his lost daughter, Tullia.30 Moreover, he remarks with insight that this display provoked gossips into reacting with what they thought of as justifiable exasperation. This is in line with much recent interpretation of the literary sources. Yet the overall view seems sentimental. There was more of politics than of emotion in the phenomenon; it must be brought into connexion with the protocol devised for wedding ceremonies (chapter 5), and it shows the importance of the imperial ‘Divine House’ in the life of Rome. These two series of coins draw attention to the dynasty’s conception of itself as unified by Faustina I, legitimated by the descent of Faustina II, and justified in expecting power unlimited by time through its own self-perpetuation. Pius is said to have refused a proposal of the Senate’s that the months of September and October should bear the names of Antoninus and Faustina (chapter 4). He was born on 19 September, and she seems to have died in October (if that was indeed the basis of the proposal: a birthday would have been more apposite). The honour would have been unprecedented for a woman. Julius Caesar and Augustus had given their names to the months preceding those, and Domitian had allowed September to take his name. That place had been vacant since his assassination, but honouring a woman in this way, even a deceased woman, was unheard of, and it is a strong indication of the esteem in which Faustina I was held— or of the influence that senators believed she had wielded in her lifetime and continued to enjoy as a symbol of the dynasty. Metropolitan attention continued until the end of Pius’s reign: ‘Eternity’, with Mercury’s herald’s staff and the phoenix, suggests the renewal of her honours in 161.31

Assimilation More complex, and not in conflict with outright consecration, is the assimilation of a human being to an existing deity, such as had been common in the east since the days of the Triumviral period and the epiphanies of Augustus and Livia. Association in a temple, the linking of names, and the attribution of a deity’s proper symbols all might occur in different contexts throughout the empire and in whatever form suited each community.32 Faustina I became a new Ceres, represented as such 126

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on coin issues of Rome, an identification confirmed in the Greek poem dedicated to the high-born but deceased (c. 157) wife of the Athenian magnate Herodes Atticus, Appia Annia Regilla, by Marcellus of Side. Atticus put up a temple to Demeter (Ceres) ‘old and new’—the latter being identical with Faustina I—on the Via Latina near Rome, now the church of St. Urban, which contained a statue of his late wife as a priestess of the Old Demeter.33 High on the inner north wall are reliefs that include two women holding birds; one with two ducks has been taken for Faustina I, but the view that they represent seasons is more persuasive: Faustina had a loftier role in the building.34 There was nothing new in this divinization of members of the imperial family, notably in the Greek-speaking east, where divine honours for rulers had long been commonplace. For women divine status was virtually the only form of honour available, apart from certain Greek civic offices of a religious bent, such as the stephanephorate, that were open to them. B. Rémy, while rightly rebutting any claim that Pius was on the way to an imperial theocracy,35 still regards Pius’s numismatic exploitation of the figures of Ariadne and Dionysus as evidence for his own monarchical view of the principate and of the association of the Augusta with Pius on the throne (chapter 4). Since 139, Pius had taken up a triumph of Dionysus and Apollo that Hadrian had used on medallions and then struck another type: the deity with Ariadne in a chariot. Truly such a type stresses the exotic and numinous aspect of the principate, but at this stage of the unquestioned imperial supremacy it made no practical difference. Rather, the emperor was carried along by a fashionable interest in Dionysus evinced in city coinages. In 145, on the occasion of Marcus’s marriage to Faustina II, a medallion of Marcus as Caesar shows the deity seated in a chariot drawn by two centaurs, in the company of Amor and a Bacchic procession. Four years later the motif of the married pair in the chariot was repeated, with Marcus and Faustina II taking the place of the older couple. Ariadne with Dionysus (Bacchus) seated on a rock are shown on another medallion of Marcus dated to 157.36 In the following year, Pius and Marcus responded to a letter of congratulations from the artists at Smyrna; Pius was patron of the society of Dionysiac artists and was honoured by them, as Hadrian had been, as a ‘New Dionysus’. Emperors of sense knew better than to refuse such honours, but even in sanctioning the Bacchic medallions for circulation among his entourage, Pius was hardly encouraging a new development of the imperial cult. If he had been, he would have allowed these images The Deified Faustinas

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on the regular coinage as well.37 Two centuries earlier Mark Antony, lord of the eastern provinces of the empire and master of Cleopatra’s Egypt, had also been Neos Dionysus—in his realm and to the scandal of the west.38 Sometimes the identification is tentative in the extreme—as when Faustina II is represented on the obverse of a coin of Hieropolis Castabala in Cilicia merely with a crescent moon on her brow.39 Rather, and especially in connexion with this profuse coinage, it is worth noting the limited and conservative choice of deities with whom Faustina I and II were associated or to whom they were assimilated. The material must be handled with caution. In a list of fifty-one monuments depicting both empresses, and taking account of sculpture as well as coinage,40 the question arises of the material available to an author and of the necessarily subjective judgments that he or she has to make, even occasionally as to which empress is depicted and often which of two or three deities was intended by the artist. Hence few conclusions can be drawn about the attention paid to a Faustina in one city or province or another: too much depends on the local practice of erecting inscriptions or of issuing coinage and the financial ability of a community to erect statues or of an individual to pay for miniature representations. In any case about half of the listed monuments are assigned to Rome and its mint and to Italy; twenty-seven, to the provinces; and eighteen of those, to Faustina II.41 After Alexandria and its prolific mint, the communities of Asia Minor figure, unsurprisingly: Ephesus, Pergamum, Cyzicus, Phrygian Apamea, Amastris, Hieropolis Castabala, even the tiny Roman colony of Lystra in Lycaonia. Olympia (the monument of Herodes Atticus), Eleia, and Thera represent old Greece; Timgad in Numidia (the two figures of the empresses in a group), Gaul (specifically Bagacum), and Spain (Hispalis) each have one exhibit on show. Whole statue groups in public buildings, especially in the Antonine and Severan ages, did honour to the imperial family. A striking instance is the colossal head of Carrara marble and metropolitan workmanship, 1.60 metres high, of Faustina II or her daughter Lucilla that came from the basilica of Carthage. The coiffure (wavy or ‘melon’ hairstyle) takes it to the early sixties, to Marcus’s accession or the marriage of Lucilla. Its counterpart, the head of Marcus or L. Verus, has not been found. Associating the statues, which must have dominated the vast hall (it covered 3,600 square metres) with the nearby victory frieze, P. Gros compares the ensemble with the arrangement in the Augustan basilica at Ephesus, connects it precisely with the victory of L. Verus in the war against 128

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Parthia, and, like K. Fittschen, who bases his arguments on stylistic grounds, prefers the identification with Lucilla. The head wears a diadem, and that gives a strong hint that the empress is assimilated to a deity: in particular to Juno, who had been the tutelary deity of the city and, as Caelestis, still had a strong association with the imperial regime under the Severans. The proportions alone suggest divinity: Gros compares other groups in which the figures are little more than life size, notably one from Markouna (Verecunda) near Lambaesis, of six figures including Faustina II and Caracalla, in which only Commodus is shown larger than life (twice as large). Here he claims that the empress occupies a position analogous to that of Faustina I in the Temple of Artemis at Sardis: that of a human allowed a seat by that of the titular deity.42

Individual Deities It is worth identifying the deities and abstract qualities selected at Rome and in the provinces for association or assimilation with the two empresses: Ceres or her Greek equivalent Demeter, Venus, Juno, Diana (Lucifera), Cybele, Isis, the Kore Soteira (Saviour Maiden), Pietas (Eusebeia), Fortuna (Tyche), Selene, Hygieia, Aeternitas, Concordia, Victoria (Nike), and Abundantia. There is a strong overlap between the two women, but Faustina II has a longer list: Victoria, Selene, the Kore, and Hygieia are listed only for her—three of them abstract qualities. The Kore belonged to Cyzicus and was celebrated on its coins and on alliance coins with Ephesus and Smyrna struck in the years immediately after the death of Faustina II or in the reign of Commodus; Faustina is not named, but the bust is said to be hers.43 This apparently greater venturesomeness may simply be a function of the longer period of time that Faustina II had as Augusta. The deities associated with both are naturally the first four, those long familiar from the coinage of other empresses. In themselves they say nothing of any change in the way the women were viewed throughout the empire. Ceres/Demeter, with her responsibility for the vital grain supply, was a focus of attention in Rome and elsewhere. Grain ears are shown in hand in other representations, as on the type from Lystra, which bears a bust of Faustina on the obverse and a seated Isis or Tyche/ Fortuna on the reverse.44 Isis had a clear connexion with the transmission of grain from Alexandria across the Mediterranean; Tyche/Fortuna The Deified Faustinas

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was recognized as every community’s guiding star, and Faustina II is sometimes shown as Tyche wearing a turreted crown, demonstrating her role (or other deities associated with her wear it).45 Juno owed her place to being the consort of the divine equivalent of the emperor, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, just as Selene was the female counterpart of Helios; as Juno Lucina she was the patron of women in labour. Here we find Faustina II assimilated to her patron, as she holds an infant in her arms or protects her children as they stand at her side.46 Venus was the originator of the Roman race and possessor of the beauty that was conventionally ascribed to the empress; but she was also the counterpart of another quintessentially Roman deity, her constant companion, Mars, and the two are commonly associated on works of art connected with Faustina I and II.47 By identifying them with these figures the imperial dynasty assumed tighter control over the destiny of the empire, all the more so if the empress(es) were exercising influence from the heavens.

Ceres and the Sanctuary at Eleusis But the connexion with Ceres has a wider significance, if the arguments of A. Alföldi can be accepted.48 In his view, the conventional interpretation of Pius’s relationship with Ceres, that it is an expression of concern over the grain supply or was connected with his wife’s own devotion to the deity and her assimilation to her after her death, is not adequate: it is more personal, the evidence being Pius’s dealings with the sanctuary at Eleusis. Many Roman emperors and other notables, but allegedly not Pius, who had the opportunity on his journeys to and from Asia in the thirties, were initiated into the cult. But an inscription reveals Pius’s attention to the shrine, and so do medallions of the reign. One, from Trier (Augusta Treverorum), has Pius’s head on the obverse and depicts the god Triptolemus flying in his dragon chariot and watched by a grateful Tellus (Earth) holding corn ears. Alföldi boldly identified Triptolemus with Pius himself; the reverse of the second medallion shows the presentation of the first corn ears to Triptolemus—the emperor, inappropriately young in 145 or even later. The presenter is a female figure to be identified with Faustina I, who had a temple at Eleusis in which she was worshipped, as Sabina had been in hers, as the New Demeter.49 On a third medallion Faustina is shown as a goddess at the dispatch of the young deity: her husband is to benefit humanity through the cultivation of wheat.50 For 130

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Alföldi the association of Pius with Triptolemus is tied to a turning point, the Secular Games of 147. In this connexion he also introduced the concept of the ‘era’, which is conspicuous on the coinage of Pius: it is a reference to the Golden Age to come.51 Marcus held to this set of ideas, and there is no doubt that he and Commodus were initiated into the Mysteries in 176, as L. Verus had already been; they are not so heavily stressed under Commodus, in spite of his insistence on the Good Fortune of the World.52 There was a Temple of Faustina II at Eleusis, presumably erected after her death; that would fit the initiation being dated to 176.53 Antonine relations with Eleusis remain a controverted subject. The literary evidence is scanty; archaeology, ambiguous; inscriptions, fragmentary. Alföldi’s valuable analysis adds depth to our understanding of religion under Pius, but I should prefer an interpretation less dependent on personal devotion and so return to the idea of inspiring confidence in the grain supplies by way of the imperial family’s connexion with Ceres (inherently, in Italy, a being with overseas connexions, especially with Alexandrian Isis).54 Emperors such as Trajan and Hadrian occupied themselves with military matters and won credit through successful and profitable wars or through ensuring the readiness of the empire to meet any challenge. After that the welfare and confidence of Rome and Italy became a preoccupation. They were to be ensured, the first by the guarantee of grain supplies, through divine help as well as human effort, and the second also by stable government and so the unity of the imperial family. The empress now became more than a mere link in the succession: she was a leading figure in her own right, associated with a leading deity, and focusing the continuity of the regime through three generations. That development is mirrored in the different emphases on divinely assisted welfare noticed by Alföldi: a high point with Pius and diminution under Marcus, who had large-scale warfare to deal with, though he still carried out restorations after a sack of the shrine at Eleusis that was due to the failure of Roman forces—his forces—to defend the sanctuary.

Cybele There was another religious development under Antoninus Pius which is relevant to the status of his wife and daughter, that of the cult of Phrygian Cybele, who also figures in the list of deities associated with the empresses.55 Brought to Rome in 204 bc at the bidding of the The Deified Faustinas

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Sibylline Oracles to help the descendants of Trojan Aeneas in the second Punic War, the Great Mother of the Gods of Mount Ida still remained an ambiguous figure three and a half centuries later. Her eunuch priests could not be Roman citizens, but celebration of her cult and that of her son and lover, Attis, found a place on the festival calendar in Claudius’s time. Under Hadrian and Pius there was further recognition: medallions were issued, including the representation of the original arrival in Rome of the black stone and the goddess driving her chariot drawn by four lions. Medallions showing the apotheosis of Faustina I make her a guarantor of safety; and an association functioning near Bovillae in 147 used the same epithet of itself. Medallions of Marcus’s reign continue to link his empress and his daughter Lucilla with Cybele, and after the death of Faustina I the image of the deity began to appear on the regular coinage, without her consort. One legend presents her as ‘Mother of the Gods Who Comes to Our Aid’. The deified Faustina, with her family, is a link between the saviour goddess and the Roman people. Attis himself appears on medallions of both Faustinae. It was also under the rule of Pius (9 December 160) that the sacrifice of the Taurobolion was recognized as a public rite: The bull’s blood drenched and saved the celebrants below, and the ceremony ‘was carried out on the order of the Mother of the Gods for the safety of the Emperor and his children’. This was at Lugdunum—home to a considerable Phrygian community. But there is evidence of a new shrine, perhaps from Pius’s reign, in the Vatican. To the same period belongs the appearance of the new high priest, the Archigallus, who was not castrated and who could be a Roman citizen. (The evisceration of the bull replaced that sacrifice.) Pius’s benevolent interest in the cult is also suggested by the honours paid him by an Ostian college of ‘Tree-Bearers’ in 139 and four years later by his restoration of a shrine of Cybele, along with one of Bacchus, on the Sacred Way.56

Ambiguity: Faustina I or II? Some commemorations of a ‘Faustina’ are ambiguous: it is unclear which is intended—or possibly both. A bilingual inscription from Praeneste built into a church records an enigmatic form of commemoration: ‘C. Valerius Hermaiscus made the Serapeion to Zeus Helios Megalos Serapis and the gods who share his temple. The House of C. Valerius 132

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Hermaiscus, the Temple of Serapis, the school of Faustina made it; C. Valerius Hermaiscus dedicated it on the Ides of December in the consulships of Barbarus and Regulus (ad 157)’. Is the ‘school’ a centre for the instruction of the ‘Faustinian Girls’ of the deceased Faustina I and of her living daughter or, more simply and more probably, a social club that enjoyed the patronage of Faustina II?57 There is no doubt that the Faustinian gymnasium was established in Miletus (Branchidae) in honour of Faustina I; a local dignitary is honoured for ornamenting its third set of premises (chapter 5).

Cult of the Living Faustina II Faustina II had a good start on the road to divinization. In particular, she was the daughter of a diva, and it is worth noting that she is occasionally referred to, as on the obverses of Amastris and in an Alexandrian inscription, as ‘Faustina the New Augusta’; the reverse type is a head of Isis, with a sistrum, similar in profile and hairstyle to the obverse bust. Here, theoretically, the adjective could be attached to her proper name: ‘The New [Younger] Faustina Augusta’, as it also appears on coins from Philippopolis, Nicaea and Nicomedia, Germe, and Maeonia. But on the analogy of its use on honorific monuments, as at Hieropolis-Castabala in Cilicia Campestris, where she is the ‘New Hera’, it should modify Augusta, and those analogies suggest that the title Augusta is being treated as if it were the name of a deity. On the inscription the alternative is not possible, because New is separated from the proper name by two other epithets.58 Under Pius Faustina II in Egypt not only had her own priest at Oxyrrhynchus; she was already honoured at Alexandria as Pharia and ‘Saviour of the Fleet’. These two epithets properly belonged to Isis and not only link the emperor’s daughter with the great city but present her as a deity who is the patron of the lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pharos, which Pius restored, and as the patron of the fleet: she will help to ensure the safe arrival in Italy of grain from Alexandria. The importance of that was demonstrated when, during a grain shortage, Pius was pelted with stones by a mob—as Claudius had once been pelted, but only with crusts. Furthermore, the association that tended the imperial images and the empress honoured a member who had been an imperial procurator. That would not be coincidental if his office was connected The Deified Faustinas

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with the transport of grain. Isis had been ‘Pharia’ since the end of the first century bc and was to bear the epithet until the fourth century; Tertullian, at the end of the second, evokes Isis as ‘Ceres Pharia’. Isis was to become particularly prominent at Ostia after the completion of Trajan’s harbour works, in one statue bearing a cornucopia and a steering oar, like the figures of other deities (Athena, Tyche) shown on the rich reverses of Alexandrian coins.59 All this proclaims the intense concern that rulers, and their perceptive subjects, felt for their responsibilities. It also provokes reflections on the exploitation, or manipulation, of imperial women as they played such roles. There is no sign that they were played reluctantly: there were high rewards—respect, even adulation, flattering ceremonies, gorgeous attire. All that was lacking was the chance to take the initiative, the fate of deities everywhere, unless they have help. Other deities with whom Faustina II is associated or to whom she is assimilated are traditional, Roman or universal: Ceres, Diana, Venus, and Vesta, as W. Szaivert’s convenient list shows, postulating four numismatic phases in her reign, with a gap between the third and fourth.60 For his first phase, up till 161, he names Ceres, Diana, Fertility, Juno Lucina, and Venus; the second, from 161 to 164, is the most prolific: Ceres, Concord, Fertility (Szaivert notes this type, showing six children and a ceremonial couch with two infants playing, as a reference to the twins born in summer 161), Light-Heartedness, Juno, Happiness, Venus (most prolific—she is a deity closely associated with the empress, as coin reverses attest), Good Fortune, Safety (both continuing there until 164). Fertility, showing one child, is a reference to the birth of M. Annius Verus in 162; so too, probably, are Happiness and Light-Heartedness. Phase 3 (from 165 onwards to an uncertain date) shows only Juno, Safety, Venus, and Vesta and so is short; Szaivert connects the last two deities with the marriage of Lucilla. Phase 4 seems to belong to the 170s: it contains few novelties beyond the presentation of the empress herself as Mother of the Camps: Ceres, Diana, Fortuna, Cybele, Venus, Vesta, Safety. The death of M. Annius Verus in 169 brought the question of the succession to a crucial point, and Szaivert considers the revival of minting activity under the name of Faustina to be connected with that. As ever, caution is warranted when so many uncertainties beset the dating of the coins and the many factors that may have affected striking were so various. A last, fifth phase, from 176 to 180, is marked by the new title of Diva, and the head is veiled. 134

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Consecration of Faustina II On the death of Faustina II in 175 Marcus had plenty of time to order, from Halala/Faustinopolis and on his march through Asia Minor, all suitable honours. Marcus’s consecration of his wife was considered, along with his appointing Commodus his heir, one of his only acts of folly, according to the well-read Emperor Julian. There were precedents that neither he nor the Senate could ignore, the closest being that of her mother. Nonetheless, according to Dio, Marcus was grief-stricken at the death of his wife, and it was this that induced him to write to the Senate to ask that none of those who had collaborated with Avidius should be put to death (see chapter 4).61 This sounds implausible; her death and the orders for her commemoration coinciding with instructions issued in the wake of Avidius’s death may have suggested it. Only if we regard the formulation of these letters as artificially combined by Marcus in order to bring pressure to bear on the Senate can any sense be made of it. His starting point would be that the Senate was indignant on his behalf and vengeful against Avidius’s associates. Then he would plead for them (enhancing his own reputation at the expense of the Senate), and to add force to those pleas he would ask them to be granted to a man who was in deep mourning for the loss of his compassionate wife. It was, as Dio and John Malalas say, purporting to quote him, the one consolation for her death, and if it were not granted, it would hasten his own. It was in these circumstances that Faustina was taken into heaven, amongst the stars, as a Roman medallion and coins have it.62 So Faustina II received a temple. According to the Historia Augusta, in a passage elucidated by C. Cecamore, it was abolished by Caracalla, who may well have thought that he had a better use for it.63 Whether that shrine was at Rome or at Faustinopolis is a question, for the text of the Historia may suggest that Marcus constructed one at the latter. Perhaps he did, though the text is uncertain.64 Certainly a temple at Faustinopolis, in an imperial province, is on the face of it unlikely to have been decreed by the Senate. Marcus himself would have been the likeliest builder. However, where the real initiative lies behind such claims is often unclear. The Senate would do what imperial advisers prompted. Some support for a Faustinopolis temple comes from the Historia Augusta’s account of Elagabalus’s appropriation of the cult, which is placed in the Taurus Mountains. That account is rightly dismissed as fiction by Cecamore; Elagabalus would have been making two simultaneous takeovers.65 The Deified Faustinas

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For there can be little doubt of a temple erected in Rome, perhaps with the altar shown on coin reverses as a preliminary measure.66 The temple is named on two fragments of the Severan marble plan of Rome (ad 203–211), united by Cecamore, thus restoring the name. It was erected on the Palatine, and we have its plan, standing in a colonnaded enclosure, and its orientation: it is the temple in the Vigna Barberini. Caracalla was not the last emperor to entertain designs on it. After the fall of Elagabalus, Severus Alexander reclaimed the whole area from his Emesene deity for Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and that area included the shrine that had once been dedicated to Faustina.67 There may be more to uncover. Faustina II’s connexion with the Moon, and Pius’s with the Sun, on the coinage of Alexandria (ad 141–142, 151–152) is distinct but not emphatic and in any case is another cliché from the east: the children of Antony and Cleopatra had long since been given the names of Helios and Selene.68 On the reverses commemorating her reception among the stars Faustina is shown with a crescent behind her head, and a great head at Carthage also establishes her connexion with the Moon. Cecamore exploits this association to account for Caracalla’s takeover of Faustina’s temple.69 There had been a Temple of Noctiluca on the Palatine. Caracalla was devoted to the same deity and was assassinated on a journey to Carrhae he was making in 217 to visit the shrine of the lunar deity, ‘Lunus’ in the Historia Augusta; seizing Faustina’s shrine, the emperor transferred it to his deity, and it is in this light that the notice in the Historia Augusta must be understood. When Elagabalus intervened it was to restore Faustina in the form of Luna; not only did he summon the Dea Caelestis from Carthage, but he also married Faustina’s descendant, Annia Faustina. Later, it was to the advantage of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Ultor—the Avenger—that Severus Alexander took his revenge. This particular, ‘Lunar’, aspect of Cecamore’s scenario, though alluring, is rather an assemblage and must be regarded as more speculative than her establishment of the temple site and its successive occupations. There was full commemoration of Faustina II on the coinage, and she was recalled in 176 by bridegrooms and young brides in the significant and durable ceremony performed in Rome and mirrored in Ostia (chapter 5). In addition the Senate decreed that silver images of Marcus and Faustina be set up in the Temple of Venus and Roma, while a golden statue of Faustina was to be carried in a chair into the theatre whenever the emperor was present and put in the place she had used, 136

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and influential women should be seated round it.70 Pius’s daughter was still an indispensable companion to the emperor in his fully public aspect—before the Roman people, that is. Whatever the fate of the Temple of Faustina II, the military calendar from Dura honours the birthday of a Faustina as a deity. The birthday is probably eleven days before the kalends of October, possibly ten or nine. On that day a public prayer was to be offered to the divinity. We are spared the task of deciding between the two empresses: the birthday of Faustina I was celebrated on 16 February. The document may have mentioned it in a lost portion.71 The sudden extinction of the dynasty ensured that the children of Faustina II were not deified—with the paradoxical exception of Commodus. Indeed, he suffered an attempt by the Senate to wipe out any trace of a hated ruler, of which the most obvious form was the erasing of his name from all monuments and the destruction of his statues.72 It was only when Septimius Severus took power that Commodus was rehabilitated to serve the new dynasty and even consecrated in its cause (chapter 7). There is one other possible exception: the ‘God [Aurelius] Fulvus’ was endowed with a priesthood and responsibility for the production of the games that belonged to the collective youth of Thessalonica. Whether he was a deceased son of Pius, honoured when his body was interred in Hadrian’s Mausoleum in 138–139, or, as seems more likely, Commodus’s twin, dead in 165, the institution was still functioning between the years 206 and 269/270.73 In communities of the empire the length of time that cults endured depended on the posthumous fate of the personage commemorated but also on the interests of the community and of the dominant groups and individuals who participated.

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C ha pt e r

S e ve n

Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

The Advancement of Commodus When in July 175 Commodus became ‘Leader of the Youth’ (chapter 4), it meant that he would ultimately be ‘Leader of the Seniors’, emperor.1 Marcus and Commodus, after presenting themselves to cities in western Asia Minor and at Eleusis for the Mysteries, returned to Rome to triumph on 23 December 176,2 after which Marcus moved on to his estate at Lanuvium; at this time he may have been suffering from a serious illness of his own.3 The emperor offered the people a handsome cash distribution; obtained imperium for Commodus (27 November), perhaps at the level that Claudius had used for Nero, ‘outside the city’; and requested that Commodus be exempted from the law that prescribed the ages at which men could hold magistracies and the intervals that must separate them. This was a prerequisite for his election to the consulship of 177, in his sixteenth year, younger than Nero would have been at the time of his intended first consulship. Marcus was in a hurry: he had long been aware of his own mortality. Commodus must be in firm control when the time came. The imperium helped to ensure that, and the consulship gave him the authority of one who had held the supreme magistracy. Support from the unified family was put on show. The husband of Commodus’s sister Fadilla, who was also the nephew of L. Verus, M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, was Commodus’s colleague as consul.4 On the same day as he entered office, Commodus received tribunician power, not waiting, as had been customary, until the consulship

came to its end. Later in the year he was given the title Augustus, on the precedent of L. Verus, and all the other titles and powers, ‘everything customary for emperors’, as Tacitus had once described them, including that of Pater Patriae, but with the exception of the supreme pontificate, which had also been denied to Verus.5 Officially he was as fully Marcus’s partner in power as Verus had been. Commodus, a failure as an emperor, may already have been unsatisfactory as a son, though writers working soon after his death, notably the senator Dio, had every reason to blacken him, were well placed to do it, and possessed models to enrich their compositions.6 A breakdown in relations with the Senate alone may justify an emperor’s ill reputation, but Commodus, who relinquished personal command in the northeast seven months after his father’s death,7 eventually exasperated even the urban populace. A. R. Birley suggests that there are references to Commodus in Marcus’s Meditations and quotes: ‘If you can, convert him by teaching; if not, remember that kindness was given to you for this very thing’; ‘if he makes a mistake, teach him with kindliness and point out what is being overlooked; if you fail, blame yourself, or not even yourself ’; ‘kindness is invincible, . . . what can the most insolent do if you continue to be gentle with him and quietly show him a better way at the very moment when he tries to do you harm?—“No, child, we were born for other things, I shall not be harmed, you are harming yourself, child”’.8 On the other hand, Commodus would not have been alone in earning rebuke: at the opening of book 2, Marcus admonishes himself: ‘At dawn say to yourself first: “I shall meet the interfering, ungrateful, insolent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable”’. The first and last adjectives are not suitable for an unsatisfactory son; and it is questionable whether Marcus would have exposed his heir to these criticisms, when he was intent on securing his succession. When he says that he cannot be angry with a kinsman, he may include the whole human race.9 What hand Faustina II had in the education of Commodus, and so in the way he turned out, beyond the earliest years, when boys not born into the purple were under the care of their mother,10 is unknown. If she recognized the dangers to princelings, she could have done little to avert them. There was a plethora of attendants and tutors, each with his own agenda, and a twin to provoke rivalry. Then the twin died, bequeathing a legacy of guilt and fear. Mother and nursemaids fussed over and cosseted Commodus; eminent physicians whispered over him. The delicate boy, too young for Stoic philosophy, would have been terrified of death 140

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from the age of five. Confronting it in the arena, he ensured beforehand that dangers were neutralized.11 Elsewhere he could protect himself by striking first. The claim that Marcus ‘avoided’ remarrying after the death of Faustina may be right. Perhaps in an attempt to improve the status of her son, who might hope for more than collegiality in a mere consulship, Quintillus’s mother, Ceionia, who had once been betrothed to Marcus, is said now to have made a bid for the widower. Marcus evaded it: he did not wish to put a stepmother (for ancients worse than a mother-in-law) over his children. Instead, like Pius, he took a concubine, the daughter of a procurator of his wife’s. (One wonders if the alliances began before the deaths of the empresses.12) By running a maîtresse en titre he sealed his refusal. The proposal may be mere palace tittle-tattle: it was against Roman custom for a woman, even a widow, to propose. Yet we do not know if Ceionia had male relations in a position to make the offer on her behalf, and the stakes were high.13 A. R. Birley makes light of such negotiations. All the other surviving children were married; only Vibia Sabina and the all-important Commodus were left to wed. Perhaps Ceionia aimed at influencing Commodus’s choice of bride. Further offspring, should there be any, could not cause any disturbance to the succession. Any such hope was lost when Commodus married Bruttia Crispina in mid-August 178, before Marcus set out north once more, against the Marcomanni.14 Crispina was the granddaughter of a friend of both Hadrian and Pius and daughter of the consul of 153, C. Bruttius Praesens, who received a second consulship in 180, the year after Commodus’s own. The family possessed estates widespread in Italy. Marcus could hope for the speedy birth of a grandson to consolidate the dynasty still further.15 The advancement of Commodus was also, but less urgently, required because his sister Lucilla had produced a son with Ti. Claudius Pompeianus; as grandson of the emperor he would develop his own claims. It is surprising that he did not perish during the reign of his cousin, in spite of old Pompeianus’s apparent loyalty to Commodus, or during that second ‘Year of the Four Emperors’, 193. But L. or M. Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus lived on to become consul in 209, falling only in the aftermath of Caracalla’s assassination of Geta.16 Perhaps mildness of manner or lack of ambition combined with his father’s indisputably low origin to act as a preservative. The Severans were keen to stress their invented connexions with the Antonines: Commodus Pompeianus was Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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their kinsman. Old Pompeianus raised his stock by another method: one of Lucilla’s daughters by L. Verus was betrothed to his son by an earlier union. Descendants of this family are found in the reigns of Severus Alexander and Gordian III: ad 231, Claudius Pompeianus, leading consul; 235, Cn. Claudius Severus, with L. Ti. Claudius Aurelius Quintianus, perhaps a grandson of Lucilla and Pompeianus, who enjoyed an exclusively and safely civil career; and 241, (Clodius) Pompeianus with Gordian III.17 Even Marcus’s educator was remembered: Fronto’s two grandsons won leading consulships in 199 and 200.

The Death of Marcus and the Reign of Commodus Marcus did not long survive his wife. Another German expedition occupied the time that remained, based at Viminacium and Sirmium (178–180). He died perhaps at Bononia near Sirmium, just short of fiftynine years of age, on 17 March at the beginning of the campaigning season of 180, before he could begin his attack on the Sarmatians. Commodus was present, but in fear of infection, he is said, characteristically, whether of himself or of his historians, to have tried to leave. Worse rumours associate him with the death of the emperor (the doctors were corrupted). But Marcus had already been suffering from abdominal and chest pains, perhaps cancer, and Commodus’s fears, if rational, imply that the plague was still prevalent. Other possibilities are that Marcus’s death was due to the effects of long-term use of opium, to ulcers, or to pure exhaustion.18 The characteristics that for Dio distinguish the reigns of Commodus and Marcus are easily tabulated. Their styles alone were polar opposites:19 Marcus sober and industrious, Commodus extravagant and showy; Marcus dignified and serious, Commodus performing as a gladiator; Marcus humble before the gods, Commodus assuming the trappings of Hercules; Marcus moderate and forbearing, Commodus ruthless in cutting down suspect relatives and servants; Marcus courteous to his peers, Commodus terrifying them; Marcus indefatigable on the frontier, Commodus returning to Rome as soon as he decently could, against the advice of Pompeianus, and never visiting his troops again.20 Ancient writers ascribe these differences to simple depravity; a string of vices and debaucheries with both sexes, as well as acts of brutality, enlivens political history.21 Notable for us is the story purveyed, along with 142

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that of incest with his sisters, that he gave one of his concubines the name of Faustina. Here rise the delusory shades of Caligula with his sisters and Nero with his mother, the younger Agrippina. Modern scholars accounting for Commodus’s behaviour make a more sympathetic picture, assembling favourable ancient judgments and statesmanlike conduct towards the provinces; each source, though, has its own point to make.22 Commodus faced serious problems: in imperial policy, that of coping with people beyond Roman control on the far side of the Danube, a problem comparable with Hadrian’s in dealing with the east when Trajan died; at home, the pressure of conflicting counsellors within the court and in his own family; in himself, youth and inexperience as well as fear, well- or ill-founded, of rivals. The confidential advisers he listened to (men who could not become emperor) alienated the Senate, and his response, like that of all who found themselves in that position, was to appeal to the people. All emperors offered grain and spectacles; Commodus offered contests in which he was the protagonist, and he presented himself as divine, the Hercules with whom he had been associated even during Marcus’s reign. Given his evident fears of assassination, he probably did find refuge in illusions about his own divinity.23 Commodus was not the first aristocratic Roman to appear in gladiatorial performances; legislation had discouraged the craze since the reign of Augustus.24 Back from the front, the new emperor had only this means of setting himself apart from his peers for courage. In addition the performances presented him as a symbolic champion of order against chaos and put him alongside his people in that struggle. The focus on Rome is understandable: that was where immediate support lay. There Commodus could present himself as the populist ruler his father had not been.25 And the loyalties that had focused on the imperial couple for two generations were now demanded for their surviving son alone. Possible rivals were to be found at Rome, notably in the Senate and in the imperial family, which had branched out from the small close-knit unit it had been under Pius. And Marcus’s apparently declared ambition to annex further territory and provincialize it may indeed not have been practicable with the resources of money and manpower available after the plague. Commodus could look back at Hadrian’s retrenchment after the conquests of Trajan and consider them justified. The view that Marcus was contemplating annexations has itself met with criticism; the war itself may have been unpopular (chapter 4). Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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Not surprisingly, by August 191 Commodus, who as Caesar had been L. Aurelius Commodus, had altered his imperial titulature from Imp. Caes. M. Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus to Imp. Caes. L. Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus.26 That was not a complete elimination of Marcus, but it sidelined him and revived the heritage that came from Hadrian, perhaps recalling Hadrian’s original choice of heir (chapter 2). But the emperor seems to have celebrated his repression of conspiracies by assuming or accepting new titles. ‘Pius’ goes back to the beginning of 183, 7 January, as the records of the Arval Brothers show, and ‘Felix’, to after the fall of Perennis in 185. Consulships also look as if they were linked with the discovery of conspiracies, the fourth in 183 and the fifth in 186.27 Commodus’s nonsenatorial advisers and officials, besides proving inefficient, were naturally indifferent to senatorial concerns. The most notorious were the freedman chamberlain Saoterus, the guard prefect Sex. Tigidius Perennis, and finally the chamberlain, concurrently in charge of some of the household troops, M. Aurelius Cleander. (It is unlikely that the fact that it was Marcus who appointed Perennis in the first place brought him down, and it is uncertain whether Cleander was a freedman of Marcus or of Commodus himself—he had been Commodus’s childhood nanny.) Such power recalled the regimes of Claudius, Nero, and Domitian. Freedmen were dependent on their master and not in a position to take his place, but a wise ruler did not flaunt their power: Augustus did not allow them at his dinner table; Commodus caused offence by being seen kissing them.28 The most blatant departure from Marcus’s style lay in Commodus’s association, his assimilation of himself, and even his self-identification with Hercules. O. Hekster takes the last three years, 190–192, as the period in which the association went beyond what all but the most extravagant emperors had attempted. Association would have been irreproachable; when it came to identification and the activities that it justified, Commodus gave unforgivable offence.29 But Commodus’s ultimate failures as emperor are shown by his death in a palace conspiracy. The literature makes that conspiracy a doublet with one that had made away with Domitian a century earlier; Herodian exploited Dio’s account of that assassination for his own of Commodus.30 His difficulties and consequent deviation from conventional norms made Commodus into the frightening and unpredictable ‘tyrant’ that the Acts of the Alexandrian Martyrs depicts.31 He was feared 144

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by Senate and courtiers alike and by some provincials, whatever the city populace and army felt.

A False Mother With the immersion of empresses in their public role as consorts, mothers, and tokens of marriage and familial solidarity, there may have come a diminution of what they could achieve as individuals; there was also a dark side of that same role, to be exploited after the failure of Commodus’s reign and his assassination. Women who were so important could be important for ill. S. Priwitzer’s scrutiny of the sources that assail Commodus finally offers what can be said for him: he is comparable with Ludwig II of Bavaria. The fault was his mother’s (chapter 4), who was fitted with a part already taken by Livia, the elder and younger Agrippinas, and even Plotina: that of a mother, or at least fosterer, of an emperor hated by the Senate.32 Commodus’s dubious birth provides an explanation for the divergencies between the Historia Augusta and other accounts of the reign, notably Herodian’s. Sometimes he is naturally bad; sometimes he is made bad by his surroundings. Dio makes him fully responsible for everything that happened after his accession; Herodian has him still not independent. The author of the Historia Augusta knew these writers but regarded Commodus’s bad blood as the root cause of his failure, and this author used another source as a point of reference: Suetonius’s biography of Gaius Caligula.33

Possible Successors Far from providing for the future, Commodus seems to have been preoccupied by his own position and security: on his coinage the theme of the succession and continuity no longer played any part.34 The collective aspect of the dynasty had come to an end. Everything culminated in the incumbent emperor. In 193 worthy potential emperors came before the Senate and declined its flattering offers.35 One was obvious, despite his age and origin: Ti. Claudius Pompeianus, the second husband of Lucilla. He had been in retirement due to his poor eyesight but appeared promptly in the Temple of Concord to take part in negotiations—with Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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his sight apparently restored, Dio tartly remarks. Moreover, he was the father of Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus, Commodus’s nephew. In the end a humbly born placeholder, P. Helvius Pertinax, took over, perhaps to keep the seat warm for young Pompeianus. When Pertinax fell in April, the father was to receive another invitation—to be co-emperor with M. Didius Julianus, providing a desirable link with the Antonine dynasty.36 These were not the only relatives of Marcus and Faustina II. There was the aristocrat with a Republican pedigree, M’. Acilius Glabrio, consul for the second time in 186. His father was M’. Acilius Glabrio Cn. Cornelius Severus, consul in 152.37 That man’s wife was another Faustina, and so, too, was one of his daughters, while the younger Glabrio’s brother was M’. Acilius Vibius Faustinus, leading consul in 210: whose significant surname displaced the Republican ‘Glabrio’.38 They were evidently connected to the imperial family, which contained ten descendants of Rupilia Faustina, wife of M. Annius Verus, all called Faustina. It seems that Antoninus Pius had chosen Glabrio for the niece of his heir apparent. Now in 193 a member of the family, which had shown extraordinary stamina through the centuries, was proposed for emperor by Pertinax. Like old Pompeianus, M’. Acilius Glabrio had been quiescent; when he reappeared, he refused the position. At the beginning of 193, Q. Sosius Falco and C. Erucius Clarus were taking up their consulships;39 Champlin links these men, too, with the dynasty, concluding that two branches of it were in contention. Even the successful contender, the ‘African Emperor’ L. Septimius Severus, may have been a remote connexion, if he was a cousin of M. Petronius Mamertinus, son-in-law of Marcus Aurelius.

The Faustinas as Exempla Whatever her reputation at large or among the political and dining classes, the posthumous attitude of Faustina’s widowed husband made it clear that, like her mother, she was to be an exemplum. When it came to the Severans, they claimed to be not only political heirs of the Antonines but kinsmen as well, trumping the claims of all their immediate predecessors and rivals. It was not as if Faustina’s son had been an exemplary emperor, and the new claim gave Septimius Severus’s peers in the Senate no guarantee of good behaviour. The whole Antonine achievement was 146

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what Severus was grasping at, and Commodus played his part as a link between the two dynasties. The hostile decrees that followed his death, in which the Senate pronounced Commodus ‘more savage than Domitian, more debauched than Nero’,40 had to be revoked, and Severus became his ‘brother’ by styling himself ‘son of the deified Marcus’.41 As Herodian noted, it was emperors with sons who were deified; but a brother was better than nothing.42 Severus certainly deified Commodus, making his intention clear on his final victory in 197. O. Hekster notices the resurgence of Herculean imagery in Severus’s visual programme. Evidently Commodus was not universally detested.43 When the emperor’s consort Julia Domna was to be brought in, so was her predecessor. The significance of Faustina II was deep in the public consciousness, especially in that of ambitious senators. When the notoriously superstitious Septimius Severus as governor of Gallia Lugdunensis was about to marry Domna in 187, he dreamt that Faustina prepared the nuptial chamber in the Temple of Venus. It is likely enough that the story came from him—first perhaps to please Commodus, seeing that away from Rome he could not take part in the customary marriage ceremony (chapter 5), perhaps after he became emperor.44 Domna had been born at Emesa in Syria, and her familiarity with the territory and its peoples made her more than an ornament on Severus’s expedition to the east against the rival contender Pescennius Niger, which earned Severus his fifth to seventh salutations as Imperator. The morale-raising factor of the empress’s presence among the troops was recognized on 14 April 195, a score of years after the award to Faustina II, celebrated annually by them: on a motion accepted in the Senate she, too, became ‘Mother of the Camps’.45 Faustina’s novel title was not only taken on by her ‘successors’, the Severan Augustae: they elaborated it. In a bitter irony because the title was certainly sanctioned, if not devised, by the House, Domna was ‘Mother of the Senate’. Her sister Maesa was ‘Mother of the Camps and of the Senate and Grandmother of Our Augustus’ (Elagabalus).46 Hairstyles, too, were handed down. It was not until 211 that Domna acquired the enveloping wig that makes her portraits so distinctive; before that there was deliberate copying of Faustina’s style, with only the depth of the chignon as a novelty. S. Lusnia also stresses links between Domna and the Faustinas in the first and second phases of her coinage, down to 202, and lists other qualities shared with Antonine women from Faustina to Crispina: light-heartedness, happiness, modesty, and Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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devotion.47 The influence of Faustina may already be seen in a portrait bust of Manlia Scantilla, wife of the ephemeral emperor of 193, Didius Julianus. The particular type taken over by the sculptor is said to be from ad 161, when Marcus became emperor.48 Didius was allegedly reared by Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, but that may be coincidental. Political considerations governed portraiture—and perhaps this story of Didius’s upbringing.

Faustina’s Daughters and Their Fates: Lucilla, Fadilla, Cornificia, and Vibia It was a fine thing to be the daughters and sisters of emperors, but it could bring disappointment. Lucilla had been an empress, an Augusta, since her first marriage. In 182 she allegedly backed an attempted coup against Commodus.49 According to Dio, Lucilla engineered it out of hatred for her husband Pompeianus, presumably with the idea that the attempt, made by his kinsman, would destroy him. That does not seem plausible, and Pompeianus’s innocence was evidently accepted; the influential easterner was someone to keep on the side. He lived on, quietly. Herodian’s motive for the conspiracy is Lucilla’s envy of the new empress, Crispina, who as wife of a living Augustus outranked her as his sister, diminishing her influence and opportunities for its public recognition.50 No portraits of Lucilla later than 169 have been found.51 But the conspiracy hardly began and ended with an individual’s vanity: a whole clique at court felt itself losing influence. Other personages were involved (or conveniently implicated), and their exposure was dragged out into several phases. The dominance of Saoterus was a plausible shared source of resentment. The conspirators in the first phase included Lucilla’s family connexions: an Ummidius Quadratus.52 Her main ally was Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus, who was assigned the actual assassination. He lost his nerve, shouting out his mandate from the Senate and striking an ineffectual blow as Commodus entered the arena. Probably a nephew of her husband, he was the man Lucilla intended as husband for her daughter by L. Verus. He was also said to be her lover: women in politics, especially in covert schemes, are often assigned sexual as well as political relations with their allies. Lucilla’s own fate is also paradigmatic: a woman and a former empress, she was only exiled, and to Capri at that. 148

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She was killed when a later scare prompted Commodus into action or when her image had dimmed. In the second phase, Praetorian Prefect P. Taruttienus Paternus, a long-standing servant of Marcus and prefect since about 177, was a victim, along with his associate the imperial secretary, Vitruvius Secundus. Paternus took on the investigation into the original attempt and, significantly, was responsible, with his colleague Sex. Tigidius Perennis, who had been appointed in 179 or 180, for the summary execution of Saoterus, achieving what may have been the conspirators’ original plan. However, Paternus was then ‘promoted’ into the Senate and fell a few days later, for trying to push his daughter’s fiancé, the distinguished soldier P. Salvius Julianus (regular consul in 175), into real power. That left Perennis in sole control of the Praetorians.53 The roll of men who suffered significantly carries distinguished senators, including the later emperors Pertinax and Severus, who lost their posts. Beside the wealthy Quintilii brothers (chapter 4),54 a Norbanus and a Norbana were executed, as well as knights. It looks as if Lucilla became involved with a group dissatisfied with Commodus’s performance, especially perhaps in the field, and he took the opportunity to pick off military men and others he mistrusted, while rival courtiers pursued their own vendettas.55 After this Commodus’s reign is the story of an emperor apparently dominated by two favourites, Perennis and Cleander—who themselves succumbed to rival politicians, to the fear that they generated in their master, or to his opportunistic ridding himself of outworn servants; it is reasonable to think of combinations of factors.56 In 185 failures in the handling of the military led to Perennis’s lynching; he was also said to be planning to make his own son emperor.57 That left the way open for M. Aurelius Cleander, who made himself master as ‘holder of the dagger’ even of his quasi-colleagues the equestrian Praetorian prefects. That was a blow to the equestrian order, whether or not the grain shortage and rioting that heralded Cleander’s end were engineered by the equestrian prefect of the grain supply.58 In 190, the year noted for twenty-five evidently loyalist consuls, it was Commodus’s next oldest sister, Fadilla, who, according to Herodian, was instrumental in bringing down Cleander. Herodian has Fadilla running to Commodus and telling how Cleander’s grip on the grain supply was antagonizing the populace. Fadilla was successful for the moment; her husband, M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, fell only in 205. Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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It was another weakness of the regime that Commodus and Crispina remained childless. He had no heir, only his Antonine connexions. That may have been a factor in the death, towards the end of Cleander’s dominance, of L. Antistius Burrus, the husband of Vibia Aurelia Sabina, youngest of Faustina’s daughters. He was a native of Thibilis, a community associated with Cirta. The marriage came long after the death of Cornelius Fronto in about 166, but there may have been a connexion between the two families. H.-G. Pflaum puts the marriage in 178, associating it with Burrus’s coming regular consulship of 181, held with the new emperor. Burrus made himself useful to his brother-in-law as an informer, too useful for Cleander: in 187 Burrus was himself denounced and executed.59 Commodus then played the same card against Vibia as his father had used with Lucilla and Verus had used against the widow of M. Annius Libo: marrying her down. Admittedly the bridegroom was a knight, but his name reveals that Agaclytus was the son of the very freedman of L. Verus who had married Libo’s widow. Another ‘distinction’ awaited Vibia: when Septimius Severus rehabilitated Commodus and annexed the Antonines as kin, Vibia became his ‘sister’ and remained so after his death, on inscriptions from North Africa, homeland of her late husband and of Severus himself. That did not prevent the erasure of her name when she fell in Caracalla’s reign. Under Elagabalus the Antistii Burri disappear from history, as do the Plautii Quintilii.60 Dangerous kinship surely proved fatal to the resonantly named proconsul of Asia, C. Arrius Antoninus. Annia Fundania Faustina, daughter of Marcus’s cousin M. Annius Libo, consul in 128, and wife of T. Pomponius Proculus Vitrasius Pollio, was another victim of Commodus’s last purge in 192.61 A little earlier Faustina’s daughter Cornificia lost her husband M. Petronius Sura Mamertinus, regular consul in 182. With him fell his younger brother, M. Petronius Sura Septimianus, who had shared the consulship in 190 with the emperor himself, and his son, another Antoninus.62 Cornificia was not involved: she survived, and Septimius Severus, her new ‘brother’, allowed her to remarry. The groom, L. Didius Marinus, was only an equestrian official, and so comparatively innocuous, but he was eventually to be allowed honorary senatorial rank.63 Whatever Cornificia’s second marriage did for her status, it did not save her in the end. It is unclear in whose interests she would have intrigued, unless she believed that any son-in-law of Marcus, even Marinus, was a serious candidate for power; but she was forced to suicide by Caracalla 150

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in 213, most likely as part of his clear-out of possible opponents and rivals after he had disposed of his real rival, his brother, Geta, in 211: the charge was of mourning the traitor.64 Another highly significant victim in the senatorial purge that followed his brother’s murder would be Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus, the consul of 209, if his identity were certain.65 The question remains how much Commodus’s servants manipulated him and how much he was a puppetmaster intent on centralizing his own power through them. Their points of view differed: the relationship was mutually parasitic.66 Certainly, Commodus’s theocratic and despotic tendencies, well interpreted by O. Hekster, suggest a ruler intent on centralizing his control of Rome and the empire—but dependent on men to do his will and liable to be duped. With the Senate sidelined and demeaned as well by the admission of numbers of new men, Commodus needed to outbid everything that his predecessors had shown themselves to the people to be: a present warrior, a deity, and above all an effective provider. The results proved fatal to the leading participants, who were not operating in a vacuum but, rather, among senators, knights, people, and the military, each group with its own agenda. Bruttia Crispina herself eventually suffered from closeness to the autocrat—and probably from failure to produce an heir; she survived at least until 187.67 When Commodus’s end came he was unmarried but had a permanent mistress, Marcia. The story was put about that she was on Commodus’s death list. On the last day of 192 she and the courtiers were as well placed, using Commodus’s physical trainer Narcissus, to do away with the emperor as Domitian’s household had been nearly a century before. Politically, too, Q. Aemilius Laetus, sole prefect of the guard, and Helvius Pertinax, prefect of the city, along with Marcia, were in a good position to make the arrangements to end a dangerous tyranny before Commodus’s ‘Golden Age’ could be taken further.68 The tyrant was without an heir to avenge him.

Posterity: TheValue of Imperial Ancestry The son of the union of Cn. Claudius Severus and Annia Galeria Faustina, Ti. Claudius Severus Proculus, was regular consul in 200 and so perhaps born in 167. He married within the dynasty: his bride was Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

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another Annia Faustina, the daughter of Ummidia Cornificia Faustina, a great-niece of Marcus. Bride and groom shared the same ancestor—M. Annius Verus, the potentate of Hadrian’s reign. Among the children of this couple were Annia Aurelia Faustina, third wife of Emperor Elagabalus,69 and Cn. Claudius Severus, regular consul of 235. Severus’s colleague was Ti. Claudius Aurelius Quintianus, another great-grandson of Marcus. One reason for the survival of this family through the years of Commodus and the Severans is to be found in their avoidance of compromising political involvements, but there was also (less significantly) their Greek origin and probably their retirement to family properties in Asia Minor, where the Claudii Severi were magnates.70 In later generations a woman’s descent from an emperor still gave her high social value. Annia Aurelia Faustina, before being carried off by Elagabalus, had been the wife of Pomponius Bassus, who was condemned by the Senate in 218 on a charge of being displeased at what the emperor was doing. The real reason, says the Historia Augusta, was that he had a wife both fair and noble, the descendant of Claudius Severus and Marcus Aurelius. Whether that made Bassus a real threat or whether Elagabalus did not want to be outdone is unclear. Annia Faustina Augusta was a splendid advertisement for the claims of the emperor to his own link with the Antonines. However, her birth was not enough to withstand pressure from another camp; Aquilia Severa, her predecessor, was forced back on Elagabalus: she wished to give him a son.71 Collateral lines of the family survived to emerge in the sources for decades after that: in 270 a Flavius Antiochianus was consul for the third time; his wife, a Pomponia Ummidia.72

Survival of the Name ‘Faustus/a’ goes back in legend beyond the origins of Rome. Such a felicitous name was bound to survive, and so it did, especially in Africa, and into Christian times.73 There may have been a self-conscious pretentiousness in the name of M. Aurelius Faustus, a mid-third-century grandee of Ephesus, a city known and favoured by the Antonines; he bore the imperial name, and his family may have obtained citizenship from Marcus. ‘Faustinus/a’ is more significant and more likely to carry references to our heroines. The enduring success of the Fabii Faustiniani is demonstrated in a series of Ephesian inscriptions. Their name shows that they 152

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did not owe Roman citizenship to Pius or Marcus; it probably went back to an Augustan governor. If a Faustina intervened with personal favours, that conferred additional prestige.74 As A. S. L. Farquharson put it, writing before 1951, ‘The name [Faustina] has passed into a byword and is quoted (or was in a more learned age) as a pattern of feminine frailty’. It is surprising, then, that the name recurs in the Constantinian dynasty as that of a wife of Constantius II, mother of Emperor Gratian’s wife, and that it had an afterlife beyond the classical period, like its masculine counterpart.75 The same is not true of the names of other empresses, with the exception of Theodora—whose theophoric name was common in any case. Some, like Plotina, made little impression, but Sabina has proved more memorable, notably in German-speaking countries. Others made an impression too strong and too unfavourable: Messalina and Agrippina. Livia has had an understandably fragile life. But there are other factors. Messalina was only a feminine version of a masculine surname; and Livia, a gentile name, the feminine of Livius. But Faustina had in its favour those obvious connotations of felicity, like Theodora, that won it and its cognates favour as surnames in the first place. So ‘Faustinus’ survived. It may owe something to a series of holy men (second to fourth century), especially one of a pair of noble brothers of Brixia who allegedly suffered martyrdom under Hadrian. But all such male names took a body blow in the sixteenth century from the career of Dr. Faustus. ‘Faustina’, on the other hand, in due course became the name of another diva, George Frederick Handel’s Italian star of the London stage, the mezzo-soprano Bordoni or Boldoni.76 This Faustina was virtuosic, exciting, an innovator in style. In her feuds with other singers she lived up to the reputation of the opera diva—or, rather, was one of its founders. In Germany and France the name still occurs, though rarely;77 in Spain and Poland it took on the odour of sanctity, but it was not until John Paul II that St. Faustina of Glogowiecz near Lodz (b. 1905), who devoted herself to the poor, was canonized. In a mainly non-Catholic Britain ‘Faustina’ has not found favour, certainly not in the twenty-first century—and Swinburne’s 1862 poem Faustine did not help; it is in the character of a middle-class cat that a Faustina makes her appearance in a novel from 1963 by Barbara Pym, with arch reference to her ancient namesake.78 We must turn to Turkey for a direct contemporary reference: she has given her name to a hotel in Kuşadası, gateway to the site of Ephesus. Faustina’s Children and the End of the Antonines

153

Conclusion The Antonine dynasty is justifiably referred to as a monarchy. It is not that the powers of the emperor were greater than those of his predecessors and still less that Pius and Marcus were more concerned with trappings. Rather, they were still seeking to solve the problem of smooth succession in an autocracy that claimed continuity with a republic bent on restricting individual pre-eminence. Ethical superiority was a title to their pre-eminence until the Severi finally ushered in an age of absolutism and military prowess.79 Their solution lay in the family itself and its interconnexions, to be deployed through descendants. The part played by women in such a cohesive unit through marriage and childbirth was essential and was already adumbrated in Livy’s first book, written early in Augustus’s regime.80 Under Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors and during their struggles, its development was pressurized and distorted. In an intermediate period of reaction, Trajan and Hadrian cloaked it. Under the Antonines women could hold a more prominent place in public life, though without new powers. Publicity and exploitation were facilitated because two successive empresses were mother and daughter: the second, like the younger Agrippina, inherited her mother’s prestige (see the introduction). That cleared a special place for the younger woman in the hierarchy. It was resented; perhaps the supremacy of Pius and Marcus themselves, who had not reached it without exciting rivalry, roused suspicion or plain dislike, which could most safely be vented in criticism of their wives. Scurrilous stories about Faustina I and II were more elaborate than any since the tales about Messalina that had circulated under Claudius. In truth the women worked hard at the basic elements: the production and rearing of imperial offspring and the ceremonial presentation of the female element in marriage, as an example to peers and subjects. The scheme foundered on the isolation of Commodus and on his panic and inability in ever-increasing military and economic difficulties to fight down either them or Rome’s external enemies. That did not prevent the survival of the developed concept of the Antonine empress into the dynastic exploitation of the Severan women, Julia Domna, Maesa, Sohaemias, and Mamaea.

154

Faustina I and II

Who’s Who

Abercius

Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, saw the imperial family in Rome c. 165

Acilius Glabrio, M’.

Consul (II) 186, refused empire in 193

Acilius Vibius Faustinus, M’.

Connexion of the imperial family, consul 210

Aelius Antoninus, T.

Son of Marcus, d. by 156

Aelius Aristides

Orator from Hadriani, Asia, d. 181

Aelius Caesar, L. (L. Ceionius Commodus)

Hadrian’s chosen heir, father of L. Verus

Aelius Hadrianus, T.

Son of Marcus, dates uncertain, d. as infant

Aelius Lamia Silvanus, L.

Widower of Aurelia Fadilla, consul 145

Aemilius Laetus, Q.

Praetorian prefect 192, involved in Commodus’s assassination

Agaclytus

Imperial freedman, married widow of Annius Libo

Agilius Septentrio

Freedman of Marcus, pantomime of Lanuvium, d. after 180

Agrippina I

Wife of Germanicus Caesar, d. 33

Agrippina II

Daughter of Agrippina I, wife of Claudius, d. 59

Annia Aurelia Faustina

Daughter of Ti. Claudius Severus Proculus, third wife of Elagabalus, d. after 222

Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla

Eldest surviving daughter of Marcus, d. c. 182

Annia Cornificia Faustina

Sister of Marcus, wife of Quadratus (consul of 146), d. 152

Annia Fundania Faustina

Cousin of Marcus, wife of T. Vitrasius Pollio, d. 192

Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina

Daughter of Marcus, d. c. 180

Annius Libo, M.

Legate of Syria, grandson of M. Annius Verus, reportedly poisoned by L. Verus, c. 163

Annius Verus, M.

City prefect, consul (III) 126, father of Faustina I

Annius Verus Caesar, M.

Younger brother of Commodus, d. 169

Antinous

Lover of Hadrian, drowned 130

Antistius Burrus, L.

Consul 181, husband of Vibia Sabina, d. 187

Antonia Picentina

Priestess of deified Faustina at Falerio

Antonia the Younger

Daughter of Mark Antony, mother of Claudius, d. 37

Antoninus Pius

Emperor 138–161

Antonius Polemo, M.

Sophist of Laodiceia, Syria, and Smyrna, Asia; d. before 161

Apollonius

Imperial slave at Ephesus, d. after 140

Appia Annia Regilla

Wife of Herodes Atticus, d. 160

Arrius Antoninus, C.

Consul c. 170, d. 187

Augustus

Emperor 27 bc–ad 14

Aurelia Fadilla

Daughter of Pius, sister of Faustina II, d. by 135

Aurelius Cleander, M.

Chamberlain and ‘dagger-holder’ of Commodus, d. 190

Aurelius Commodus, L.

Son of Marcus, emperor 180–192

Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, T.

Twin brother of Commodus, d. 166

Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus

Son of Lucilla and Ti. Claudius Pompeianus, consul 209, d. 212

Avidius Cassius

Roman general from Cyrrhus, usurper, d. 275

Avidius Nigrinus, C.

Consul 110, executed 118

Britannicus

Son of Claudius, d. 55

Bruttia Crispina

Wife of Commodus, d. ?191

Calpurnius Piso, Cn.

Consul 7 bc , legate of Syria, accused of treason, d. 20

Caracalla

Emperor 211–217

Catilius Severus, L.

Consul 120, city prefect 138

Ceionia Fabia

Elder daughter of Aelius Caesar, mother-inlaw of Fadilla, d. after 175

Ceionia Plautia

Younger sister of Ceionia Fabia

Cicero (M. Tullius)

Republican orator and statesman, 106–43 bc

Cinna Catulus

Stoic philosopher, taught Marcus

156

Who’s Who

Claudius

Emperor 41–54

Claudius Frontinus Niceratus, Ti.

Of Messene, dedicated statues to imperial family in 164

Claudius Herodes Atticus, Ti.

Athenian orator and politician, d. 177

Claudius Pompeianus, T.

Consul (II) 173, second husband of Lucilla, d. 193?

Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus, Ti.

Failed assassin of Commodus, 182

Claudius Saethida Caelianus, Ti.

Of Messene, dedicated statues to imperial family in 164

Claudius Severus, Cn.

Philosopher and consul (II) 173, married Annia Aurelia Galeria Faustina c. 163

Claudius Severus Proculus, Ti.

Consul 200, married daughter of Ummidia Cornificia Faustina, father of Elagabalus’s third wife

Constantia

Daughter of Constantine, d. 354

Cornelius Fronto

Orator and tutor of Marcus, consul 142

Cornificia

Daughter of Marcus, d. 212

Cratia

Daughter of Fronto

Cratia

Wife of Fronto, from Ephesus

Didius Julianus, M.

Consul 175, emperor 193

Didius Marinus, L.

Equestrian second husband of Cornificia (daughter of Marcus)

Domitia Faustina

Eldest daughter of Marcus, d. by c. 150

Domitia Longina

Wife of Domitian

Domitia Lucilla

Mother of Marcus, d. c. 155

Domitian

Emperor 81–96

Elagabalus (‘Heliogabalus’)

Emperor 218–222

Erucius Clarus, C.

Consul 193, involved in the struggle for succession to Commodus

Fadilla

Daughter of Marcus, d. after 192

Faustina I

Wife of Pius, d. c. 140

Faustina II

Wife of Marcus, d. 175 or 176

Flavia Domitilla

Sister of Titus and Domitian, d. before 69

Flavia Domitilla

Wife of Vespasian, mother of Titus and Domitian, d. before 69

Flavia Julia

Daughter of Titus, d. 91

Flavia Papiane

Ephesian, wife of Vedius Antoninus

Fulvia Plautilla

Wife of Caracalla, d. 112

Who’s Who

157

Gaius Caligula

Emperor 37–41

Galeria Lysistrata

Freedwoman of Faustina I, mistress of Pius

Galerius Antoninus, M.

Son of Pius, d. before 135

(Galerius) Galen

From Pergamum, physician to the imperial family, d. c. 200

Geta

Emperor 211

Hadrian

Emperor 117–138

Helvius Pertinax, P.

Consul 175, city prefect 192, emperor 193

Julia Balbilla

Poet and friend of Sabina

Julia Domna

Wife of Septimius Severus, d. 217

Julia Maesa

Sister of Domna, d. 226

Julia Mamaea

Mother of Alexander Severus, d. 235

Julia Paulina

Sister of Hadrian, d. before 130

Julia Sohaemias

Mother of Elagabalus, d. 222

Julius Antoninus Pythodoris, Sex.

Magnate of Nysa in Asia

Julius Apolaustus, Ti.

Pantomime travelling with the imperial family in 175

Julius Servianus, L.

Consul (III) 134, brother-in-law of Hadrian, d. 136

Junius Rusticus, Q.

Consul 133, tutor of Marcus, d. c. 170

Junius Rusticus, Q.

Philosopher and tutor of Marcus, d. c. 170

Justinian

Emperor 527–565

Licinius Sura, L.

Consul (III) 107, d. c. 108

Livia (Drusilla)

Wife of Augustus, d. 29

Macrinius Avitus, M.

Consul c. 175, loyalist legate of Lower Moesia

Manlia Scantilla

Wife of Didius Julianus

Marcia

Mistress of Commodus involved in his assassination in 192

Marcus Aurelius

Emperor 161–180

Mark Antony (M. Antonius)

Consul 44 bc , triumvir 43–30 bc

Martius Verus, P.

Legate of Cappadocia, consul (II) 179

Mindia Matidia II

Daughter of Matidia I, half-sister of Sabina

Narcissus

Physical trainer to Commodus involved in his assassination

Nero

Emperor 54–68, son of Agrippina II

Nerva

Emperor 96–98

Panthea

Courtesan, mistress of L. Verus

Pedanius Fuscus, Cn.

Son of Salinator, involved in plot, d. 136

158

Who’s Who

Pedanius Fuscus Salinator, Cn.

Consul 118, husband of Hadrian’s niece, d. before 136

Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, M.

Consul 177, husband of Fadilla, d. 205

Petronius Sura Mamertinus, M.

Husband of Cornificia (daughter of Marcus), consul 182, d. c. 190

Petronius Sura Septimianus, M.

Consul 190, d. c. 190

Platorius Nepos, A.

Consul 119, governor of Britain 122–125

Pliny the Younger (C. Plinius Secundus)

Politician and writer, consul 100, d. c. 112

Pompeia Plotina

Wife of Trajan, d. 121/122

Pulcheria Augusta

Empress, d. 453

Quintilius Maximus and Condianus, Sex.

Brothers from Alexandria Troas, consuls 151, attacked in 174 by Herodes Atticus

Rupilia Faustina

Wife of M. Annius Verus, d. before 138

Salonia Matidia I

Niece of Trajan, d. 119

Salvius Julianus, P.

Consul 175, military man involved in plot against Commodus, d. 182

Saoterus

Bithynian freedman and chamberlain of Commodus, d. 182

Septimius Severus

Emperor 193–211

Severus Alexander

Emperor 222–235

Sextus

Stoic philosopher of Chaeronea, kin to Plutarch, tutor of Marcus

Sosius Falco, Q.

Consul 193, involved in the struggle for succession

Taruttienus Paternus, P.

Jurist and Praetorian prefect of Marcus and Commodus, d. 182

Terentius Gentianus, D.

Consul 116, fell out with Hadrian

Theodora

Wife of Justinian, d. 548

Tiberius

Emperor 14–37

Tigidius Perennis, Sex.

Praetorian prefect of Commodus, d. 185

Titus

Emperor 79–81

Trajan

Emperor 98–117

Ulpia Marciana

Sister of Trajan, d. 112

Ummidius Quadratus, M.

Consul 118, uncle of Marcus by marriage

Ummidius Quadratus, M.

Consul 146, d. 182

Ummidius Quadratus, M.

Consul 167, son of Marcus’s sister, Cornificia

Valeria Messalina

Wife of Claudius, d. 48

Who’s Who

159

Valerius Hermaiscus, C.

Dedicator of a Serapeion in 157

Vedius Antoninus, P.

Mid-second-century Ephesian magnate

Verus, L.

Adoptive brother of Marcus, emperor 161–169

Vettulenus Civica Barbarus, M.

Consul 157, uncle of L. Verus

Vibia Aurelia Sabina

Youngest surviving child of Marcus, d. before 217

Vibia Sabina

Wife of Hadrian, d. 136/137

Vitellius

Emperor 69

Vitruvius Secundus

Imperial secretary, d. 182

160

Who’s Who

STEMMATA 1. HADRIAN [Aelius]

[Ulpius]

Aelius Hadrianus

[Aelius]

Domitia Paulina

M. Ulpius Traianus

[Ulpia]

P. Aelius Hadrianus Afer

Ulpia MARCIANA

C. Salonius Matidius Patruinus

Salonia MATIDIA

Domitia Paulina

L. Julius Servianus (III ord. 134) Julia Paulina

HADRIAN

[Marcia]

Pompeia PLOTINA

TRAJAN

L. Vibius Sabinus

[L. Mindius]

Vibia SABINA

Cn. Pedanius Fuscus Salinator Pedanius Fuscus

(After Birley, Hadrian, 308, and Birley 1993, 235–236, 238; cf. Rémy 2005, 430, and Chausson 2003, 153–157). Augusti, Augustae, and designated heirs in capitals; inferred names in square brackets. Conjectural relationships discussed in the text are not included.

Mindia Matidia

2. ANTONINUS PIUS T. Aurelius Fulvus (II ord. 85)

L. Annius Verus (III ord. 126)

Rupilia Faustina

T. Aurelius Fulvus (ord. 89)

Cn. Arrius Antoninus

1. Arria 2 Fadilla

Boionia Procilla

P. Julius Lupus

162 FAUSTINA I

Aurelia Fadilla

Plautius Lamia Silvanus

ANTONINUS PIUS

Julia Fadilla

Arria Lupula

FAUSTINA II

MARCUS AURELIUS

M. Galerius Aurelius Antoninus

M. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus

3. ANNII AND UMMIDII QUADRATI Annius Verus (Ucubi)

Rupilius Libo Frugi

M. Annius Verus (III ord. 126)

163

M. Annius Libo

M. Anniius Libo

[Fundania]

Annia Fundania Faustina

FAUSTINA I

T. Vitrasius Pollio

PIUS

FAUSTINA II

Matidia I

Rupilia Faustina

M. Annius Verus

MARCUS

Domitia Lucilla

Cornificia

M. Ummidius Quadratus

[Annia]

C. Ummidius Quadratus Annianus Verus (ord. 146)

Ummidia Cornificia Quadrata

C. Ummidius Quadratus Sertorius Severus (suff. 118).

4. CEIONII AND L. VERUS L. Ceionius Commodus (ord. 78)

L. Ceionius Commodus (ord. 106)

164

[Ceionius] ?

L. Aelius Lamia Plautius Aelianus (ord. 80)

Plautia

L. AELIUS CAESAR

C. Avidius Nigrinus (suff. 110)

[Avidia]

L. Fundanius Lamia Plautius Aelianus (ord. 116)

ignota

Fundanius Silvanus

Aurelia Fadilla

M. Ceonius Silvanus (ord. 156) Plautius Quintillus (ord. 159)

M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus (ord. 177)

Ceionia Fabia

Fadilla

L. VERUS

Lucilla

Ceionia Plautia

(Fundania)

M. Libo (ord. 128)

Abbreviations Ancient Works Amm. Marc. Cic. Ad Att.; Ad Fam.; Pro Cael. Dio [Epit. Caes.] Eutrop. Fronto, Ad am.; Fer. Als.; Ad M. Imp.; Ad M. Caes.; Ad Pium; Ad Verum Imp.; De nepote am. Galen, De Libris propr.; Progn. Gell. HA Had., Ael., Pius, Mar., Ver., Avid., Com., Pert., Jul., Sev., Car., Sev. Alex. Her. Jul. Caes. Luc. Alex. Mal. Mar. Med. Phil. Vit. Soph. Pliny, Ep.; Pan. Pliny, NH Plut. Caes.; Mor. Suet. Caes., Aug., Tib., Cal., Claud., Nero, Dom. Tac. Ann.; Hist.; Agr.; Dial. Vell. Pat. Vict. Caes. Xiph.

Ammianus Marcellinus, History of Events Cicero, Letters to Atticus; Letters to His Friends; On behalf of Caelius Cassius Dio, Roman History Anonymous, Epitome of Aurelius Victor, Monograph on the Caesars Eutropius, Breviarium ab urbe condita M. Cornelius Fronto, Letters to His Friends; Feriae Alsinienses (Holiday at Alsium); Letters to Marcus Imperator; Letters to Marcus Caesar; Letters to Pius; Letters to Verus Imperator; Letters on the loss of his grandson Galen, De Libris propriis; Prognoses Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights Historia Augusta. Lives of Hadrian, Aelius Caesar, Antoninus Pius, M. Aurelius, Verus, Avidius Cassius, Commodus, Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Severus Alexander Herodian, History of the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius Julian, Caesares Lucian, Alexander John Malalas, Chronicle Marcus, Meditations Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists Pliny the Younger, Letters; Panegyric on Trajan Pliny the Elder, Natural History Plutarch, Lives (Caesar); Moralia Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Domitian Tacitus, Annals; Histories; Agricola; Dialogus Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome Sextus Aurelius Victor, Monograph on the Caesars Xiphilinus, Epitome of Cassius Dio

Modern Works and Collections (see also L’ Année Philologique and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed.) AE AJP Ath. BHAC BMC CAH CIG CIL Cod. Iust. CP CQ CREBM Dig. EJ2

Fer. Dur.

FGrH FO FOS

FRHist. G&R Gnecchi, Med. HAC Hist. I.Byz.

166

Abbreviations

L’ Année épigraphique (Paris, 1893–) American Journal of Philology Athenaeum Bonner Historia Augusta Colloquium R. S. Poole et al., eds., Catalogue of Greek Coins in the British Museum (London, 1873–) Cambridge Ancient History, 13 vols. (1st ed., Cambridge, 1936–1954; 2d ed., 1961–) A. Boeckh et al., eds., Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1828–1877) Th. Mommsen et al., eds., Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1863–) P. Krüger and Th. Mommsen, eds., Corpus Iuris Civilis, 2: Codex Iustinianus (Berlin, 1877; 15th ed., 1970) Classical Philology Classical Quarterly H. Mattingly et al., eds., Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, 1st and 2d eds. (London, 1923–) P. Krüger and Th. Mommsen, eds., Corpus Iuris Civilis 1 (Berlin, 1877; 22d ed., Berlin, 1973) V. Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, eds., Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, 2d rev. ed., ed. D. L. Stockton (Oxford, 1976) R. O. Fink, A. S. Hoey, and W. F. Snyder, eds., The Feriale Duranum, repr. from Yale Classical Studies 7 (Yale, 1940) F. Jacoby, ed., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 4 pts. (Leiden 1923–63) Fasti Ostienses M.-T. Raepsaet-Charlier, Prosopographie des femmes de l’ordre sénatorial (Ier et IIe siècles), 2 vols., Acad. roy. de Belg., Cl. des Lettres, Fonds R. Draguet 4 (Brussels, 1987) T. J. Cornell, et al., eds. The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2013) Greece and Rome F. Gnecchi, ed., I Medaglioni romani, descritti ed illustrati, 3 vols. (Milan, 1912) Historia Augusta Colloquium Historia A. Lajtar, ed., Die Inschriften von Byzantion 1 (= IK 58) (Bonn, 2000)

I.Eph. IG IGR

IGVR IK ILAlg. ILS Inschr. v. Magnesia Inscr. Ital. I.Prusias IRT JHS JÖAI JRA JRS JS Lat. LTUR MDAI(A)(I)(R) MÉFRA Mommsen, Ges. Schr. Mommsen, St. OCD4 Oliver, Gk. Const.

PCPS P. Fayum

H. Wankel et al., eds., Die Inschriften von Ephesos (= IK 11–17.4) (Bonn, 1979-) A. Kirchhoff et al., eds., Inscriptiones Graecae, Deutsche Akad. der Wiss. zu Berlin (Berlin, 1873–) R. Cagnat et al., eds., Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, vols. 1, 3–4 (Paris, 1906–1927; repr., Chicago, 1975) L. Moretti, ed., Inscriptiones Graecae Vrbis Romae, 4 vols., Stud. dall’ Ist. Ital. per la stor. ant. 28 (Rome, 1968–1979) Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien (Bonn, 1972–) S. Gsell et al., eds., Inscriptions latines de l’Algérie, 2 vols. (Paris and Algiers, 1922–2003) H. Dessau, ed., Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1892–1916; repr., 1954–1955) O. Kern, ed., Die Inschriften von Magnesia am Maeander (Berlin, 1900) Inscriptiones Italiae W. Ameling, ed., Die Inschriften von Prusias ad Hypium (= IK 27) (Bonn, 1985) J. M. Reynolds and J. B. Ward Perkins, eds., The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (Rome, 1952) Journal of Hellenic Studies Jahreshefte des Österreichisches archäologischen Institutes in Wien Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Studies Journal des savants Latomus E. M. Steinby, ed., Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, 6 vols. (Rome 1993–2000) Mitteilungen des Deutsches Archäologischen Instituts (Abteilung Athen/Istanbul/Rom) Mélanges de l’École française de Rome (Antiquité) Th. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (1905–1913) Th. Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, 3 vols. (Berlin, 13th ed., 1887; 23d ed., 1886; 33d ed., 1887; repr., Basel, 1952) S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth and E. Eidinow, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford, 2012) J. H. Oliver, Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri, Mem. of the American Phil. Society 178 (Philadelphia, 1989) Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society B. P. Grenfell, A. S. Hunt, and D. G. Hogarth, Fayûm Towns and Their Papyri (London, 1900) Abbreviations

167

Pflaum, Carrières PIR(2)

P.Oxy. PP RE REA RFIC Rhein. Mus. RIA RIC RMD

Rotondi, Leges RP SB Scheid, Comm.

SDHI SEG Sel. Pap. SIG3 Smallwood, G-N Smallwood, N-H Strack, Reichspr. Vidman, FO ZPE 168

Abbreviations

H.-G. Pflaum, Les Carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain, 4 vols. (Paris, 1960–61) E. Klebs et al., eds., Prosopographia Imperii Romani, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1897–1898); 2d ed., E. Groag et al. (Berlin, 1933–) B. P. Grenfell et al., eds., The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (London, 1898–) La Parola del Passato G. Wissowa et al., eds., Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1894–1980) Revue des Etudes Anciennes Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione classica Rheinisches Museum für Philologie Rivista dell’Istituto nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte H. Mattingly et al., eds., Roman Imperial Coinage (London, 1923–) M. Roxan and P. Holder, eds., Roman Military Diplomas, 5 vols., Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London (London, 1978–) G. Rotondi, Leges publicae Populi Romani (Milan, 1912; repr., Hildesheim 1962) R. Syme, Roman Papers, 7 vols., ed. E. Badian (vols. 1–2) and A. R. Birley (vols. 3–7) (Oxford, 1979–1991) F. Preisigke et al., eds., Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Ägypten (Strasburg, 1913–1993) J. Scheid, Commentarii fratrum arvalium qui supersunt. Les copies épigraphiques des protocols annuels de la confrérie arvale (21 av.–304 ap. J. C.), Roma Antica 4 (Rome, 1998) Studia et Documenta Historiae et Iuris J. J. E. Hondius et al., eds., Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden, 1923–) A. S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar, eds., Select Papyri: 2. Non-literary Papyri (Cambridge, Mass., 1934) W. Dittenberger, ed., Sylloge Inscriptionum graecarum, 3d ed. (Hildesheim, repr. New York, G. Olms, 1982) E. M. Smallwood, Documents Illustrating the Principates of Gaius Claudius and Nero (Cambridge, 1967) E. M. Smallwood, Documents Illustrating the Principates of Nerva Trajan and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1966) P. L. Strack, Untersuchungen zur römischen Reichsprägung des zweiten Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1931–1937) L. Vidman, Fasti Ostienses edendos illustrandos restituendos curavit, 2d ed. (Prague, 1982) Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Chronology

27 bc–ad 14 Reign of Augustus ad 14–68 Julio-Claudian dynasty (Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero) 14–37 Reign of Tiberius 37–41 Reign of Gaius Caligula 41–54 Reign of Claudius 54–68 Reign of Nero 69 Year of the Four Emperors: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian 69–96 Flavian dynasty (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian) 69–79 Reign of Vespasian 76, 24 January Birth of Hadrian 79–81 Reign of Titus 81–96 Reign of Domitian between c. 83 and 86 Birth of Vibia Sabina 86, 19 September Birth of Antoninus Pius at Lanuvium c. 95 Birth of M. Cornelius Fronto 96–98 Reign of Nerva 98–117 Reign of Trajan c. 97, 16 February Birth of Faustina I (c. 105 in Kienast 1990) c. 100 Marriage of Hadrian and Vibia Sabina 100 or 101 or later, 13 January Birth of L. Aelius Caesar (L. Ceionius Commodus) 108 Hadrian cos. I suffect c. 110, 27 November Birth of Antinous in Bithynium-Claudiopolis ?110 Marriage of Faustina I and Antoninus Pius between 112 and 117, 9 August Hadrian’s alleged adoption between 112 and 117, 11 August Death of Trajan; accession of Hadrian ?119 Sabina entitled Augusta 120 Antoninus Pius cos. I 121, 26 April Birth of M. Aurelius in Rome 121, August–?125, summer Hadrian on his travels 122 Birth of Annia Cornificia, sister of Marcus

128, first half Hadrian takes Pater Patriae title 128, summer–132 Hadrian on his travels 130 Drowning of Antinous in the Nile 130 or 131, 15 December Birth of L. Verus 130–132, late September Birth of Faustina II 131 Hadrian in Rome 132–136 Revolt of Bar-Kochba in Judaea 134 L. Julius Servianus third-time consul 135/136 Pius proconsul of Asia; previously, death of Aurelia Fadilla 136, ?17 March Marcus takes toga of manhood and is betrothed to Ceionia Commoda 136, summer Adoption of L. Aelius Caesar 136 or 137 Death of Sabina 137 L. Aelius Caesar with imperium in Pannonia 138, 1 January Death of L. Aelius Caesar in Rome 138, 25 February and following days Adoption of Pius by Hadrian and ?of Marcus and L. Verus by Pius; Faustina II betrothed to L. Verus; Pius granted tribunician power 138, 10 July Death of Hadrian at Baiae; accession of Pius 138, after 10 July Marcus betrothed to Faustina II; L. Verus betrothed to Annia Galeria Lucilla 138, ?August Faustina I becomes Augusta 138, 10 December Pius enters second year of tribunician power 139 Pius’s second consulship 139, 1 or 7 January Pius takes Pater Patriae title 139, early Marcus as quaestor and Caesar 140 Pius consul for third time, with Marcus as colleague ?140, end of October or beginning of November Death of Faustina I 142, July–August Cornelius Fronto consul 144 or 146 L. Verus takes toga of manhood 144–150 War with Moors 145 Pius consul for fourth time, with Marcus (II) as colleague 145, ?13 May Marriage of Marcus and Faustina II 147, 30 November Birth of Annia Aurelia Galeria Domitia Faustina 147, 1 December Marcus made Caesar, given tribunician power and proconsular imperium; Faustina II entitled Augusta 147, 10 December Marcus’s tribunician power renewed 149 ?Birth of twin sons to Faustina 149 (or 150), 7 March Birth of Lucilla ?150– Births of T. Aelii Antoninus and Aurelius 152 Death of Annia Cornificia, Marcus’s sister ?152 Birth of Hadrianus 153 L. Verus quaestor 154 L. Verus consul

170

Chronology

between 155 and 161 Death of Domitia Lucilla ?156 or 157 Birth of Domitia Faustina ?159 Birth of Fadilla 160 Birth of Cornificia before 161 Deaths of T. Aelii Antoninus and Aurelius and of Domitia Faustina 161 Consulships of Marcus (III) and L. Verus (II); betrothal of L. Verus and Lucilla; earthquakes in Asia Minor 161, 7 March Death of Pius; ‘accession’ of Marcus; L. Verus as Augustus 161, 31 August Birth of Commodus and his older twin, T. Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, at Lanuvium ?161, end Death of Annia Aurelia Galeria Faustina 162, summer L. Verus sets out for the east 162 Birth of M. Annius Verus 162, end, or 163–166, summer L. Verus based in Syria 164 Marriage of L. Verus and Lucilla in Ephesus; Lucilla as Augusta 165, autumn or winter Death of Commodus’s twin, Antoninus 165, c. December Sack of Seleucia 166 Daughter born to L. Verus and Lucilla 166, 12 October Marcus and L. Verus triumph over the Parthians; Marcus takes Pater Patriae title; Commodus and M. Annius Verus made Caesars by 167 Death of M. Cornelius Fronto 168, early Marcus and L. Verus journey to the Danubian provinces 168/169 Winter at Aquileia 169, January Death of L. Verus at Altinum 169, c. 10 September Death of M. Annius Verus Caesar 169, after 13 September Marcus’s first German expedition 169, ?September/October Lucilla married to Ti. Claudius Pompeianus 169/170 ?Winter in Pannonia c. 170 Birth of Vibia Aurelia Sabina 170 Costoboci invade Greece 170– Son born to Lucilla 170–173 Imperial headquarters at Carnuntum 171 Invasions of Italy by Marcomanni and of Spain by Moors 172 Uprising of Boucoli in Egypt 172, 15 October Marcus and Commodus given title Germanicus 173–175 Imperial headquarters at Sirmium; Marcus at Sirmium with Faustina and Sabina ?174 Rain miracle; ?peace with Marcomanni 174 Marcus hailed Imperator for the seventh time; Faustina II called Mater Castrorum 175, March or beginning of April Rising of Avidius Cassius; truce with Iazyges 175, 3 May Avidius recognized in Egypt 175, 19 May Commodus departs for Sirmium 175, 7 July Commodus takes toga of manhood

Chronology

171

175, before 28 July Death of Cassius 175, winter (or 176, spring) Death of Faustina II at Halala 175/176 Winter in Alexandria 176, 17 November Commodus hailed Imperator 176, end of November Marcus back in Rome 176, 23 December Triumph over Germans and Sarmatians 177 Commodus cos. I with Quintillus; Christian martyrdoms at Lyons 177, middle, before 17 June Commodus as Augustus; Vibia Sabina as Augusti Soror 178, middle, before 3 August Marriage of Commodus and Bruttia Crispina; Bruttia Crispina made Augusta 178, 3 August Marcus and Commodus go on second German expedition ?178/179 Winter at Viminacium 179–180 Winter at Sirmium 180, 17 March Death of Marcus at Bononia near Sirmium or at Vindobona 180, ?22 October Triumph over Germans 181, second half Exile of Lucilla to Capri and subsequent execution 190, end–191, beginning Cornificia’s husband and son executed 192, autumn Bruttia Crispina exiled to Capri and subsequently executed 192, 21 December Assassination of Commodus after 192, 31 December Death of Fadilla 193 Reigns of Helvius Pertinax and Didius Julianus 193–235 Severan dynasty (Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus, Alexander Severus) 193–211 Reign of Septimius Severus 195, spring Commodus deified; Vibia as sister of Septimius Severus 211–217 Reign of Caracalla after 211, 4 February Cornificia forced to suicide 217–218 Reign of Macrinus 217, April–218, June Renewed obliteration of Commodus’s memory 218–222 Reign of Elagabalus 222–235 Reign of Alexander Severus 235–238 Reign of Maximinus Thrax 238–244 Reigns of Gordian I and II, Pupienus and Balbinus, and Gordian III 244–249 Reign of Philip the Arabian

172

Chronology

Notes

Introduction 1. See Syme, ‘Spaniards’, 95. Proportions of provincial senators: Hammond 1957 (data necessarily enlarged and modified). Difficulty of distinguishing provincial from Italian: Alföldy 1976, 281–285, concluding that Italians constituted less than 40 per cent of the Senate under Marcus and that provincials gained the majority in the leading group in the sixties and seventies. Alföldy takes 166 for a turning point. 2. Beauty of Faustina I: Rémy 2005, 74, with pl. 1. 3. Memoirs of Agrippina II: Tac. Ann. 4.53.2. 4. Vigorous rebuttal of these views: Lendon 2009. 5. Love between Marcus and Fronto: e.g., Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.5.1–2 (Haines 1.113; ad 139–161); Marcus’s mother, Domitia Lucilla, envied Fronto: 1.3.2 (Haines 1.85; ad 144–145). 6. Livia: Barrett 2002. Claudius’s wives—Messalina: Ehrhardt 1978; Agrippina II: Barrett 1996; Ginsburg 2006. 7. ‘Dissident history’: O’Gorman 2000, 122–126, 134. Agrippina’s memoirs: Tac. Ann. 4.53. 8. Cicero’s women: Treggiari 2007. 9. Hairstyles from Plotina to Faustina II: Balsdon 1962, 257. 10. Augustus’s recommendations: Dio 54.16.3–5. 11. Faustina I and Faustina II: PIR2 A 715–716; FOS 62–63; Wallinger 1990, 30–35, 44–62. 12. Herodes Atticus’s wife: Pomeroy 2007. 13. Pompeianus: PIR2 C 973; Avidius Cassius: A 1402. Domna and Severus: Levick 2007. 14. Literary and documentary material: see Arrizabalaga y Prado 2010. Character and coin portraits: Priwitzer 2009, 2, noting quantity of material. 15. Golden Age: Gibbon 1776, bk. 1, chap. 3, ed. J. B. Bury (London, 1900, 78). Cf. Noreña 2011, 321. 16. Work and culture: Champlin 1980, 44; archaism: 59. In religion: Farquharson 1951, 2–6. 17. Syme, ‘Rights’, 187, 192. ‘Optimus’ vs. ‘Dominus’: Noreña 2011, 284–286. 18. Eighteenth century: Birley 1993, 23.

19. Marcia (PIR2 M 265): Suet. Tib. 4.2, with Birley, Hadrian, 13. Attacks on the ‘dynastic principle’ have been rebutted in Hekster 2002, 16–17, 20. 20. Marcus’s intentions: HA Mar. 27.10. 21. Felicitas: Noreña 2011, 165; connotations: 165–171. 22. Plague: see Birley 1993, 149–150, on Galen, 19, De Libris propr. 15, 18 Kühn; HA Mar. 13.5–6, 17.2, 21.6; HA Ver. 8.1–4; Luc. Alex. 36; Aelius Aristides 48.38–44; Mar. Med. 9.2.2; Orosius, Âdversus Paganos 7.15.5–6; Jerome, Chronicle 205–206. Helm (ad 168 and 172); Eutrop. 8.12.2; with Littmann and Littmann 1973 for Galen’s evidence (smallpox). Effects: Boak 1959; Gilliam 1961; Millar 1964, 13; Littmann and Littmann, estimating a 7–10 per cent mortality rate over twenty-three years (higher in cities and armies) and 3.5 million–5 million dead in the first outbreak; Jongman 2007 for physical decline; and Greenberg 2003, against Duncan-Jones 1996, holding that the downturn began in the decades before plague broke out and attributing postulated results (psychological and all) to barbarian invasions. See, too, Bruun 2003 (critical of Duncan-Jones’s methodology), 2007 (rejecting contribution to ‘Third Century Crisis’). Gloucester: Current Archaeology 221 (August 2008): 12–19. Housesteads: ILS 3230, with Jones 2005. 23. Boatwright 2010 acknowledges that topographical distinctions in the Campus Martius are unclear. 24. Population growth: Duncan-Jones 1980 is pessimistic but sees no sharp downturn; B. W. Frier, in CAH 11, 2d ed. (2000), 787–816. 25. Immobilisme of Pius: Pflaum, ‘Tendances’; cf. Rémy 2005. ‘Good Fortune’: Tac. Agr. 3.1. An optimistic estimate of what Marcus might have achieved: HA Mar. 27.10. Further literature: Priwitzer 2009, 197 n. 156. 26. Hypochondria: Dailly and van Effenterre 1954; Champlin 1980, 141. The genuineness of Fronto’s illnesses (e.g., Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 3.9.1 [Haines 1.19; ad 139], 3.10 [Haines 1.51; ad 139–145], 5.59–62 [Haines 1.247–249; ad 147–156]) and their relevance to the year of his death: Champlin 1974, 138. Whitehorne 1977, acquitting Marcus, implausibly notes that he was playing up to the neurotic Fronto. 27. Chronology of Fronto’s work: Champlin 1974; 1980, 131–136; M. P. J. Van den Hout, 292–294, with bibliography. References here are to his dates. 28. Marcus on his own health: in Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.6–7 (Haines 1.181; ad 147–148): catarrh; 4.8 (Haines 1.185): chest pain, something wrong with the windpipe; 5.5–8 index (Haines 1.191; ?ad 145–147): ‘I arrived in full vigour . . . I have taken food’; 5.28 (Haines 1.199; ad 145–147): getting through the night without fever and taking food without repugnance; then 5.31–32 (Haines 1.201): bathing, eating, and drinking wine; later, 5.62 (Haines 1.249; ?ad 154–156): the state of his ‘wretched body’ demands that he walk about. As emperor Marcus wrote to Fronto (Ad M. Imp. 1.6. index 2 [Haines 2.127; ad 161–167]) that he was unwell and again to Fronto (De nepote am. 1 [Haines 2.221–222; ad 165]), who had given him bad news, that he could not write with his own hand because even that was so shaky after his bath. At the end of his life he wrote of being provided through dreams with antidotes to the spitting of blood and vertigo: Mar. Med. 1.17.8. 29. Marcus’s health: Dio 71(72).6.3–4, 36.2–3 (physique generally weak). Medication: Dio 71(72).6.4, with Dailly and van Effenterre 1954 (gastric ulcer); Witke 1965; Birley

174

Notes to Pages 9–11

1993, 179, with Galen, 14, De antidotis 1.1.3–4 Kühn (‘theriac’); Lucian, Adversus Indoctum 23; Lucian, Timon 2 (‘mandragora’). On Galen, see Birley 1993, 228. 30. Aelius Aristides: see Birley 1993, 227–228. Lucian: Jones 1986. Both lived through the reigns of Hadrian, Pius, and Marcus. 31. Adherents of Glycon: Luc. Alex. 4, 27, 30–35. Rutilianus: PIR2 M 711 (of Spanish origin); Severianus: S 306. 32. Syme, ‘Government’, 683. 33. Failure of system: Alföldy 1976, 266; importance of consulship: 273; irregularities: 285. 34. Marcus’s superstitious behaviour: HA Mar. 13.1; cf. Dio 71(72).9.2; Luc. Alex. 48, with Syme, ‘Government’, 688. 35. Várhelyi 2010, 153–185, sketches a model of Roman religion, especially one involving the senatorial order, in which ‘knowledge’ and ‘theology’ play a part: both senators and ruler shared in the developments, which began in the first century with the moral Emperor Vespasian on the basis of the teachings of the younger Seneca. Poetry gave way to philosophy: The rule of a good emperor must be based on philosophical teaching; astrology, too, played its part. Both emperor and senators aspired to immortality, and the aspiration was expressed in common ways, notably in funerary commemorations and the use of the terms devoted and pure. 36. Pius: Weiss 2008, 2 n. 2.

Chapter 1 1. Sources: Rémy 2005, 392–416, with notes on translations and commentaries. 2. Vital data: PIR2 A 715–716; FOS 62–63. 3. Birth of Faustina II: Birley 1993, 34; so FOS 63 (‘vers 130’). Kienast 1990, 141, from Polem. Silvius; Wallinger 1990, 47, has 129–130. 4. Succinct discussions of literature: Chausson 2003, 104–114; Priwitzer 2009, 7–14. 5. Fronto’s dates of birth and death: Champlin 1974, 136–139; 1980, 137–142, arguing for a date as early as c. 90 for his birth and 167 for his death, against the c. 176 proposed in Bowersock 1969, 124–126. Consulship: Eck 1998. Dates of letters: Champlin 1974; 1980, 131–136, with evaluations of Fronto: 2–3. Chronology and editions: Birley 1993, 226–227. Fronto’s letters are cited here according to the Teubner edition of M. P. J. Van den Hout (2d ed. [Leipzig, 1988]), with an additional reference, by page, to the Loeb edition of R. Haines (London, 1919–1920). 6. Meditations: Birley 1993, 211–223, 227 (editions); Brunt 1974 (candour: 8–10; dating to seventies: 18–19). 7. Dio, History of Rome, bks. 71–80, ed. and trans. H. B. Foster, rev. E. Cary, Loeb ed., vol. 9 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927). See Millar 1964; Bowersock 1965; Birley 1993, 228–229; and, briefly, Levick 2007, 216–217. Dio’s times of researching and writing are highly contested: see, e.g., Barnes 1984 for a very late dating (research: 211–220; writing: 220–231). 8. See Brunt 1980, 488–489. In order we have Peter the Patrician, a court official under Justinian (527–565), writing a history of Rome; the Suda, once attributed to a tenth-century

Notes to Pages 11–14

175

encyclopaedia, Suidas; the Excerpta Valesiana, a seventeenth-century publication by H. Valois of excerpts on virtues and vices found in a tenth-century manuscript; Johannes Xiphilinus, a monk of Trapezus, who in 1071–1078 compiled abridged excerpts of Dio’s history; and Johannes Zonaras, a twelfth-century commander of the guard, author of a universal history from the Creation to 1118, excerpting Dio and Xiphilinus. 9. Age of iron and rust: Dio 71(72).36.4. 10. Herodian: see Priwitzer 2009, 10–13, for final date. Birley 1993, 229, is unfavourable; C. R. Whittaker, in his Loeb edition (2 vols. [Cambridge, Mass., 1969–1970]), less so. His origins: Alföldy 1971, 223–227. 11. Sextus Aurelius Victor, On the Caesars, trans. with introduction and commentary by H. Bird, Translated Texts for Historians 17 (Liverpool, 1994); see Bird 1984. 12. Epitome, so-called: ed. with intro., nn., and French trans. by M. Festy, PseudoAurélius Victor, Abrégé des Césars, Budé (Paris, 2002). 13. Historia Augusta: the title was given by I. Casaubon in 1603 to a work also but misleadingly called Scriptores Historiae Augustae; ed. and trans. D. M. Magie, Loeb ed., 3 vols. (1921–1932); trans. with intro. in Birley 1976; trans. into French with intro. including the history of the controversy over authorship in Chastagnol 1994; see also Syme, Ammianus and Emperors and Biography. 14. For the HA, see now FRHist. 1.76–80. Diminishing value of the HA: Barnes 1978, 38: ‘In the lives of the nine Augusti from Hadrian to Caracalla, the Historia Augusta . . . generally shows a wide knowledge of the period’. Failings of HA Ver.: Pflaum 1976, evaluating the comparatively favourable view of Barnes 1967 (against Mommsen, Ges. Schr. 7, 319; cf. A. Cameron, in JRS 61 [1971]: 265–266) and arguing that it is drawn from a double biography (Marcus and Verus) of Marius Maximus. Mishandling of Verus’s nomenclature: Pflaum, ‘Vita Veri’, 173. 15. Sources of HA: Wallinger 1990, 13–16; influence of Dio: 14. The more reliable biographies depend partly on Eutropius and Aurelius Victor; for use of Marius Maximus, Dio, and Latin epitomators, see also Chastagnol 1994, xli, lix–lxxiii. 16. Senator (L.) Marius Maximus (Perpetuus Aurelianus): PIR2 M 308. Fragments, full discussion, and bibliography: FRHist. no. 101. HA Avid. 9.9 credits him with scandalous allegations against Faustina. See Birley 1999, 206. ‘Mythistoricus’: Syme, ‘Fictional History’, 181; Syme, Ammianus, 91; HA Papers, 38–40. Marius a good-quality source: Rémy 2005, 14. 17. Marius or ‘Ignotus’: Barnes 1978, 99–107, with ‘Ignotus’ as the main source up to Caracalla and Marius continuing to Elagabalus. See FRHist. 1.77–78, 607. 18. Kaisergeschichte: Enmann 1884. Use of Marius: Barnes 1978, 104; Chausson 2003, 112–113. Terminal date 337: Syme, ‘Jurists’, 792. 19. The Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. E. Jeffreys et al., 18 bks., Byzantina Austral. 4 (Melbourne, 1986). 20. Zosimus: Paschoud 1975. 21. Eutropius, Breviarium ab urbe condita (ed. and trans. H. W. Bird [Liverpool, 1993]) (with the KG as a source). Orosius, Âdversus Paganos, ed. and trans. as Histoires contre les Païens by M.-P. Arnaud-Lindet (Paris, 1990–1991).

176

Notes to Pages 14–17

22. St. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus): R. Helm, ed., Die Chronik des Hieronymus (Leipzig, 1913–1926; 3d ed., Berlin, 1984). 23. Legal sources: Birley 1993, 227; Rémy 2005, 406–409. Gaius, Institutes, ed. J. Reinach (Paris, 1950). Digest and Codex: P. Krüger and Th. Mommsen, eds., Corpus Iuris Civilis 1–2, 15th and 22d eds. (Berlin, 1970, 1973); translation: A. Watson, ed., The Digest of Justinian, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, c. 1998). 24. Coinage, papyri, and inscriptions: Birley 1993, 228. Coins: RIC 3; CREBM 3–4; Strack, Reichspr. Medallions: Gnecchi, Med. Papyri: Rémy 2005, 414–416, referring to Sel. Pap. Convergent interests of emperors and magnates: Noreña 2011. 25. ‘Will of Dasumius’: Matthews 2010, with previous scholarship. 26. Sculpture: Inan and Rosenbaum 1966, nos. 41–47. Portrait sequences: Strack, Reichspr.; Fittschen 1982 (intending to supersede the scheme put forward in Strack, Reichspr.) (birth of children: 22–33; nine types of coin portrait [with correlation with the schemes of Strack and Wegner 1956, which deals with Faustina I at 153–156 and Faustina II at 210–225]: 34–37; chronology of coin portraits: 38–43; sculptured portraits: 44–65); Szaivert 1986; Ameling 1992. The latter two point out weaknesses in Fittschen’s scheme for establishing the children’s birthdates.

Chapter 2 1. Women’s education: Hemelrijk 1999, 17–86. 2. Musonius (PIR2 M 753) and women’s place: Levick 2002. 3. Exclusion of women: Ulpian in Dig. 50.17.2 (Various regulations of the ancient law). 4. Boatwright, ‘Women’, 521–523, provides a list of property owned by the FlavioTrajanic women (Matidia II [PIR2 M 368; FOS 533] outdoes the rest; cf. Boatwright 1992, 24) and one of statues erected in their honour (526–527). 5. Lex Voconia of 169 bc: Rotondi, Leges, 283–284. 6. Women donors: Boatwright, ‘Plancia’, 271 n. 69. 7. ‘Magnum Collegium’: CIL 6, 33940. 8. Intimidation (violence is mentioned): Dig. 40.9.9. 9. Compliance: Treggiari 1991, 238–240. Pliny used this word for Plotina’s relationship to Trajan, who had trained her: Pliny, Pan. 83.8, with Roche 2002, 48–49. Marcus congratulating himself: Mar. Med. 1.17.7. 10. Women’s influence: the anonymous Dialogue on political science 5.78 (ed. and trans. P. N. Bell, Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian [Liverpool, 2009], 162). 11. Female descent: Corbier 1991, 190. M. Aufidius Fronto (PIR2 A 1385): ILS 1129; Victorinus: 1393. Quadratus (PIR V 603; FOS 829): Pliny, Ep. 7.24.2 (frivolity). 12. Vespasian’s wife: Levick 1999, 12–13. Domitian’s wife: Levick 2001. 13. Plotina: PIR2 P 679; FOS 631. Pompeia Marullina: PIR2 P 676; FOS 629. Connexion with Hadrian: von Domaszewski 1918, 47–48. 14. Trajan’s accession: Eck 2002.

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15. Syme, notably in ‘Ummidii’, uncovers persons neglected by others, although he remarks how thin the documentation of the Ummidii themselves is. 16. Vibia Sabina: PIR V 414; FOS 802; Wallinger 1990, 17–21. Salonia Matidia: PIR2 M 367; FOS 681. Ulpia Marciana: PIR V 584; FOS 825. Domitia Paulina II: PIR2 D 186; FOS 12. Julia Paulina: FOS 452. See Birley, Hadrian, 308, stemma. 17. Faustina I: PIR2 A 715. Marriage: FOS 62–63. Birthday: Inscr. Ital. 13.2, p. 411, where the phrase makes it impossible to determine whether mother or daughter is meant. 18. History of the family: Birley 1993, 28–32. 19. Matidia I as Rupilia Faustina’s mother: ‘incertum’, PIR2 M 367; so Rémy 2005, 74. A connexion with the daughter of Emperor Vitellius (69), Galeria Fundana, was proposed in Birley 1993, 243–244; cf. PIR2 R 215 and Priwitzer 2009, 57–59, on Her. 1.7.4. 20. Brick stamps: Helen 1976. Faustinian factory in Italy: CIL 15, 714 (before accession, cf. 725), 725–730 (‘August’); 5, 8110 173, 174 (Histria). Cf. the pottery punch from Apulum: AE 1993, 1292. 21. ‘Great Guild’: CIL 6, 33940. 22. Rupilia and her wealth: PIR2 R 218; FOS 674. Praedia Quintanensia: CIL 15, 456–457, of c. ad 125. 23. Marcus’s aunt Annia: FOS 52. Quadratilla’s grandson and great-grandson: Sick 1999, 345–346; Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 664, 670–671. Cornificia’s husband: see FOS 57 for the problem of identification. 24. Domitia Lucilla: see Priwitzer 2009, 28 n. 100, for the factory (mortars from Pompeii); CIL 10, 8048.4–18; 15, 979–989. 25. Domitia’s request: HA Mar. 4.7; cf. 7.4. 26. Domitia Lucilla’s birthday and her virtues: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 2.13–15 (Haines 1.145–151; ad 143), with Birley 1993, 274 n. 33. 27. Qualifications: Syme, ‘Princesses’, 1365, 1372, noting Tac. Ann. 13.45.2, 14.1.2, on Poppaea Sabina and Pliny, NH 9.117, and Tac. Ann. 12.22.2 on the wealth of Lollia Paullina, once the wife of Gaius Caligula. Infertility a ground for divorce: EJ2 345, ll. 40–49; cf. Suet. Cal. 25.3. 28. Pliny’s encomium of Minicia Marcella: Pliny, Ep. 5.16.1–7; cf. ILS 1030. 29. Livia’s beauty: Vell. Pat. 2.2.75.3; Tac. Ann. 5.2.1; Dio 54.19.3, with Barrett 2002, 104. 30. Julio-Claudian alliances: H. Temporini and W. Eck, in Temporini 2002, 21–164. 31. Marriage contract: Sogno 2010, 59, citing Pliny, Ep. 1.14.8, and Theodosian Code 9.42.1 = CJ 5.15.24. 32. Augustus and spinning: Suet. Aug. 73. 33. Prayers vs. threats: O’Gorman 2000, 136 n. 27. 34. Hemelrijk 1999, esp. 210–219. 35. Marcus’s tutors: Champlin 1980, 118–119. Q. Iunius Rusticus: PIR2 A 814; Herodes Atticus: C 802. 36. Calpurnia educated by Pliny the Younger: Pliny, Ep. 4.19, 6.7. Seneca and Helvia: Seneca, Consolatio ad Helviam 17.4. As Pomeroy 2007, 69, notes, Plutarch recommended this: Advice to Bride and Groom 48 (Plut. Mor. 145 A–D). 37. Rusticus’s letter to Domitia Lucilla (PIR2 D 183; FOS 329): Mar. Med. 1.7.

178

Notes to Pages 21–26

38. Livia promoting men’s careers: Vell. Pat. 2.130.5; cf. Eck et al. 1996, 46–47, ll. 115–120. Danger of flatterers: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 2.15.3 (Haines 1.149; ad 143). 39. Aelius Caesar’s amours: HA Ael. 5.7, 5.11. 40. Rome and the emperor: Her. 1.6.5. 41. Emperors and the law: Ulpian on the Lex Julia and Papia, Dig. 1.3.31. 42. Fallible power of women: Tac. Ann. 13.19.1; Dio 57.12.6, 60(61).31.2. 43. Fall of Suetonius and possibility of divorcing Sabina: HA Had. 11.3. Sabina in Rome: Carandini 1969, 65 n. 1. 44. Augustus cornered on immorality and relations with Livia: Dio 54.16.3–5 (18 bc), with Levick 2010, 168. 45. Pius on Faustina I: HA Pius 4.8. 46. Sexuality of Hadrian: HA Had. 11.7, 14.5–7, with Vout 2007, 52–135. 47. Pliny, Pan. 7.4. Value of childless women: this point was made by an anonymous reader for Oxford University Press. 48. Agaclytus and Geminas and their ilk: Champlin 1980, 111, on Epictetus 3.7.29–31; Pliny, Pan. 88.1–3 (Trajan immune); HA Pius 6.4 (Pius resistant); HA Ver. 9.3 (Verus succumbing); HA Mar. 15.2 (their power). 49. Domitia Longina (PIR2 D 181; FOS 327): Levick 2001, 2003. 50. Plotina’s management: Dio 69.1.2–4 (events attested by Dio’s father, governor of Cilicia in the mid–second century), 10.31; HA Had. 2.10, 4.1, 4.4, 4.8–10, with Trajan’s other possible options, 5.9 (funeral cortège); Vict. Caes. 13.11, 13 (Hadrian’s preparations, story of forgery). See Syme, ‘Fictional History’, 168, on elaborations of M. Yourcenar. Thorough examination: Temporini 1978, 120–159 (bibl.); Birley, Hadrian, 77; Priwitzer 2009, 31–32, noting that Hadrian referred to Trajan and Plotina both as his parentes. 51. Murderous mothers: Priwitzer 2009, 31–40; reflections on poisonings: 41–44. 52. Mourning for Plotina: Dio 69.10.31, honouring her ‘exceptionally’; Hadrian’s pronouncement: 10.3a. 53. Requests to Hadrian: Dio 69.10.3a; cf. Smallwood, N-H 114, with Temporini 2002, 21–213. Text, translation, and discussion: Jones 2004, dating the speech to the consecration on 1 January 120 and noting her long residence with Trajan. 54. Plotina and Matidia: Priwitzer 2009, 55–57, suggesting that M. Ulpius Phaedimus (ILS 1792) was not killed but, rather, died of the same disease as Trajan. 55. Poisoning rumoured: HA Had. 8.4, 23.9, with Birley, Hadrian, 294. Wallinger 1990, 19, observes that the author’s introduction of ‘rumour’, acknowledging that he did not know, is a stylistic trick of HA. 56. Philopappus and Balbilla: PIR2 I 151, 650. Balbilla and Sabina: Smallwood, N-H 75, with Boatwright, ‘Women’, 532. Balbilla the answer to Antinous: Birley, Hadrian, 251, with n. 38, citing E. Bowie, in Russell 1990, 62. Sabina taking steps not to become pregnant by Hadrian: [Epit. Caes.] 14.8, offspring of his would harm the human race. 57. Engagement of Tullia: Treggiari 2007, 83–99. 58. HA Mar. 6.2; chap. 3 below. Plotina and Hadrian’s marriage: HA Had. 2.10. 59. Son of Julia: Tac. Ann. 1.14.1 (Tiberius); CIL 8, 9035 (Geta); 8, 11323 (Annius Verus: cited by Bleck, in Temporini 2002, 271).

Notes to Pages 26–30

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60. Agrippina II on Nero: Tac. Ann. 14.9.3. 61. Domitia Lucilla at prayer: HA Mar. 6.9, with Rémy 2005, 111, on the identity of the speaker. 62. ‘Empresses’: Temporini 2002, 9. Imperatrix: Cic. Pro Cael. 67. 63. Lucilla’s honours: Her. 1.8.4. C. R. Whittaker there notes the standards of 2.3.2 and 8.6 and the laurelled fasces of 7.6.2. Torch: see Whittaker’s note on 2.3.2, citing Mommsen, St. 13, 423–424; Alföldi 1934, 111–118, citing CREBM 1, pl. 33.21–22 (Antonia), and deriving the honour from a privilege of magistrates. 64. Finery of imperial brides: Claudian, Epithalamium for Honorius 12–13; cf. Suet. Nero 28. See CIL 6, 8895, for Basileus and Parthenopaeus, the slave of a Faustina in charge of regalia. 65. Alföldi 1935, 27, with n. 1, discusses women’s ceremonial garb as a parallel to their husbands’. Agrippina’s cloak: cf. M. Clauss, in Temporini 2002, 370–374, with fig. 51 (Aelia Flacilla); and H. Leppin, in Temporini 2002, 476. 66. Marcus’s auction: HA Mar. 17.4, 21.9. 67. S. Abercii Vita, with Suppl., Die Grabschrift (Lüdtke and Nissen 1910), 2.38, at l. 8. The Church: Wischmeyer 1980; but see Merkelbach and Stauber 2001, 182–185: Abercius was sent to ‘scrutinize (athresai) the Empress and see the Princess’ in her gold attire. Their reading of the stone was reaffirmed by W. Ramsay, in JHS 38 (1918): 190–191, but the verb is unsuitable when applied to an empress, and the two words Basileia and Basilissa do not make any clear distinction of rank. 68. Cornificia: Dio 77(78).16.6a. 69. Auction: HA Mar. 17.4–5, 21.9. 70. Jewellery resented: Just 1989, 207–212. 71. Livy 34.1–8 (esp. 34.7.9). 72. Wagon: Livy 5.25.9, 50.7, with R. M. Ogilvie’s Commentary on Livy Books 1–5 (Oxford, 1965). See also Alföldi 1934, 107. Annia Faustina, kin to the emperor, sought out Commodus during an illness in a wheeled vehicle: Galen, Progn. 12 (14.662–664 Kühn); Faustina II, according to PIR2 ad 713. Alföldi also cites the case of Agrippina II, granted the right to enter the capital in a carriage (Tac. Ann. 12.42.2). Hahn 1994, 231 n. 23, gives a list; she regards it as doubtful for Sabina and Faustina II, but that may be due to gaps in the evidence: it is hard to see why they should have been excluded. 73. Obeisance: Alföldi 1934, 45–62. Theodora: Procopius, Secret History 30.23, with Levick 2007, 57 n. 3. 74. Vespasian’s power: ILS 212. 75. Palatium: E. Papi, in LTUR 4, 28–38. 76. Livia’s levées: Dio 57.12.2, with Barrett 2002, 165. 77. Power corrupting: Tac. Ann. 6.48.2. Plotina’s saying: Dio 68.5.5. Palatium, as divine residence: Royo 1999, 376–377. 78. Life of prime minister’s spouse: Blair and Haste 2004, esp. 263–281; cf. Levick 2007, 39. 79. The palace: Birley 1993, 57, citing HA Mar. 6.4; Mar. Med. 1.17.3, 5.16, 8.9; Lucan, Pharsalia 8.493–494.

180

Notes to Pages 31–34

80. Development of ‘Augusta’: Temporini 1978, 27–35; Kuhoff 1993, putting the transition from name to title with the grants to Trajan’s women (248). The Senate’s role is denied in Flory 1988, 121, in contrast to its attempt to vote on Tiberius’s ‘Augustus’: a senatorial vote would have made the name a title. Livia received it at Augustus’s wish, and Tiberius wanted to be Augustus on the same basis. Flory holds that the designation was first conferred on the mother of an emperor in power and branched out from that, but it is safest to think of ad hoc evolution. 81. Gaius’s offer to Antonia: Suet. Cal. 15.2; Suet. Claud. 11.2; Flory 1988, 124. 82. Claudius’s denial to Messalina: Dio 60.12.5, with Flory 1988, 125, whose explanation allows too little (e.g.) to the coin legend ‘The Augustan Hope’. 83. Nero’s conferment of ‘Augusta’: W. Eck, in Temporini 2002, 163. Poppaea’s successor, Statilia Messalina (PIR S 625; FOS 730): Flory 1988, 126. ‘Augusta’ and political effectiveness: Kuhoff 1993, 256. Whether the child was intended to transmit the imperial power ‘in her own right’, as Flory 1988, 126–127, suggests, is another matter. 84. Vitellius: Flory 1988, 128–129 (Tac. Hist. 2.89.2). 85. Domitilla Diva Augusta: CREBM 2, Titus 136–138; Domitian 68. 86. Julia Augusta: PIR2 F 426; FOS 371. 87. Plotina’s (and Marciana’s) protests: Pliny, Pan. 84.6. 88. Sparse distinctions for Sabina: Birley, Hadrian, 107. What divinity means: Haynes 2003, 119. Augusta: Eck 1982; followed by Wallinger 1990, 18–19, repudiating Jerome’s dating (128) and using epigraphic evidence to make the grant simultaneous with Hadrian’s of ‘Pater Patriae’. It could have been after the death of her mother, Matidia I; cf. Smallwood, N-H 22. A date before Hadrian was emperor is implausible; 123, after the death of Plotina, is likely. Matidia II: Bruun, ‘Matidia’, modifying Boatwright 1992. 89. Faustina I as Augusta: HA Pius 5.2. Advance towards monarchy: Rémy 2005, 129–130, comparing (330 n. 28) the number of coin issues made in the name of Sabina Augusta, sixty-two, and Faustina I, forty-three. Rémy rightly rejects extravagant claims made for Faustina I in Martin 1982, 313, but writes (2005, 262) of her ‘association . . . au trône’. Plotina Augusta: Kienast 1990, 126 (‘Autumn 102?’). Sabina: Kienast 1990, 132 (‘128 on?’ but citing Eck 1982, 227). Another instance of parallelism between husband and wife would be a vote for the renaming of September and October: HA Pius 10.1. There is no evidence of the date. 90. Relegation of Agrippina II: Tac. Ann. 13.18.3 (ad 55). 91. Pius on his deathbed: HA Pius 12.5; HA Mar. 7.3. 92. Date of birth of Faustina’s first child: Inscr. Ital. 13.1.207, with Birley 1993, 103. Augusta: Kienast 1990, 141. 93. ‘Dominus’: Rémy 2005, 128–129, with references. Domitian: Suet. Dom. 13.2. Plotina to Hadrian: Oliver, Gk. Const. 73. 94. ‘Right to coin’, ‘Münzrecht’: M. Clauss, in Temporini 2002, 459. ‘Sharing fully in mint privileges and even in the giving of donatives’, RIC 4.1, p. 89, based on Julia Domna 383B (‘Moneta’, the Mint); cf. CREBM 52, clxix, on ‘Fair dealing by the State’, of Julia Domna. Sabina’s coinage began in 128, after she became Augusta. Agrippina’s obverse: RIC 12, Nero 1; with jugate busts: nos. 6–7. Significance of nominative: Eck, in Temporini 2002, 151, with fig. 15. Coinage of Faustina I: H. Mattingly, in CREBM 4, li–lii; Faustina II: cxliii–cxlv.

Notes to Pages 34–37

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95. Levick 2007, 67, cites Lusnia 1995, 137, which questions whether Domna had any say in the types representing her or would have had the power to organize the programme. See Kaczanowicz 2001, 34–35, on third-century coinage. Theodora was excluded. 96. Keltanen 2002, 145; Duncan-Jones 2006, 223; quotients of ‘female’ coinage: 224. I am much indebted to Professor C. J. Howgego for advice. 97. Coinage of Sabina: Wallinger 1990, 21, points out that this showed more regard for Sabina than Hadrian’s conventional mourning. He was associated with her, as was Trajan, on the coinage: RIC 2, Hadrian 32, 32A, 33. 98. Heliodorus: Dio 69.3.5; HA Had. 15.5, 16.10; cf. HA Avid. 1.1 (Severus) (PIR2 A 1405). 99. Plotina the Epicurean: Oliver, Gk. Const. 73, with comment (pp. 178–180); Syme, ‘Fictional History’, 176–177. Correspondence with the Garden (CIL 3, Suppl. 12283’ 1420315; Smallwood, N-H 442): Temporini 1978, 162–167; Hemelrijk 1999, 117–118; van Bremen 2005 (texts and translations). Plotina’s style: Birley, Hadrian, 109. Van Bremen 2005, 515–522, adds the oath ‘by Zeus’ and examines her philosophical points. 100. Acts of Hermaiscus: Smallwood, N-H 516, ll. 32–33 = Musurillo 1954, 44–48, with Boatwright, ‘Women’, 532. 101. Plotina and the procurators: [Epit. Caes.] 42.20–21. 102. Invitation: Birley, Hadrian, 109–110; Syme, ‘Spaniards’. The Faustinas, too, must have known Tibur, though it was not a Spanish clique that frequented it. 103. Antinoopolis: the divisions here are as interpreted in Birley, Hadrian, 254–255, from papyrological evidence.

Chapter 3 1. Hadrian’s career: HA Had. 1.3–4.5, with Birley, Hadrian, 10–76. His irresistible rise: Carcopino 1949, 280–284. Trajan’s delay: see Priwitzer 2009, 55–56, arguing for a desire to preserve the theory of elective leadership. 2. Nigrinus (PIR2 A 308) as Hadrian’s heir: HA Had. 7.1. 3. Terentius (PIR2 T 71): HA Had. 23.5; Nepos (PIR2 P 449): 4.2, 15.2, 23.4; both with Birley, Hadrian, 281. 4. Licinianus: PIR2 L 170; Martial 1.49.40. Prediction of Sura (PIR2 L 253): HA Had. 3.10. 5. Salinator: PIR2 P 200; Pliny, Ep. 6.26. Barcino for the Pedanii: Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 672. L. Pedanius Secundus (PIR2 P 202) as Praefectus Urbi: Tac. Ann. 14.42.1. Champlin 1976, 84–85, also draws attention to Bowersock 1969, 118–119, and to other connexions suggested in AE 1972, 578; cf. CIL 3, 13826. L. Julius Servianus: PIR2 I 569 = 631. Pedanii and Sura: Birley, Hadrian 146, with n. 14 for Martial 1.49 and epigraphical evidence for Sura. Engagement of Julia: Pliny, Ep. 6.26.1. Possible pre-existing links between Pedanii and Julius Servianus or Ummidii: Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 672; disappearance: 674. Son (PIR2 P 198): Dio 69.17.1. 6. Augustus and the climacteric: Gell. 15.7.3. 7. Disease and adoption: Dio 69.17.1. Tuberculosis: Opper 2008, 217. Ceionius Commodus: PIR2 C 605, with Chausson 2003, 116 n. 58, claiming that the dating of c. 101 for 182

Notes to Pages 37–43

the heir’s birth in Kienast 1990, 131, is arbitrary. Nomenclature: Hadrian’s adopted sons took his name Aelius; nothing comparable followed when Trajan and Hadrian were adopted. Carcopino 1949 regards this as significant for the view that Aelius Caesar was Hadrian’s natural son; it tells more about the relative strengths of adoptive parent and heir: Nerva powerless, Trajan dying if not dead. 8. Note how Vell. Pat. 2.99.1 treats the grant of tribunician power to Tiberius in 6 bc: he was ‘made practically equal to Augustus’. 9. Avidius’s daughter: PIR2 A 1412; FOS 130, on ILS 8217; Chausson 2003, 145 n. 135. 10. M. Annius Verus: PIR2 A 695. Fuscus in the east: Birley, Hadrian, 215, 262. Julia Paulina: FOS 452. 11. Deference to Servianus: HA Had. 8.11. 12. Unpopularity of adoption: HA Had. 10.1–2, 23.11. In Birley’s words (Hadrian, 291), Fuscus ‘made a move’ in 137 (whether before or after the promotion was made public is an uncertain detail: see Birley 1993, 233; Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 681, puts the deaths after the adoption). See also Syme, ‘Astrology’, 85–86; PIR2 P 198 on F. Cumont, Catalogus Codocum Astrologorum Graecorum (Brussels: Lamertin, 1898–1953), 6.97–98, 8.2.85–86. 13. Servianus capable of ruling: Dio 69.17.3; HA Had. 23.8. 14. Verses: ILS 5173, with Champlin 1985. The ball represents the world; Ursus is Servianus, who had once played in Nero’s baths. See also Birley, Hadrian, 195–196. 15. Ummidius Quadratus and his son: PIR V 603–604. Dangers: Syme, ‘Ummidius’, 1175, elucidating the connexions of the Ummidii. A suffect consul of 146 is C. Ummidius Q. Annianus Verus (PIR V 601), husband of Cornificia. Their son is a Marcus, a forename of the Annii (PIR V 804; cf. PIR2 M 708). The wife of the suffect of 118 is argued to be an Annia, daughter of Annius Verus, three-time consul (Syme is followed in FOS 52, with hesitation). Quadratus, consul 118, and the future Pius are parallel as brothers-in-law and allies or perhaps rivals. Cornificia’s death: Inscr. Ital. 13.2.207. Cn. Claudius Severus: PIR2 C 1024. 16. Ceionii down to Hadrian’s heir: PIR2 C 603–605; Chausson 2003, 114–123; and see below. 17. Plautii from Augustus to Vespasian: PIR2 P 457, 478, 480. 18. Avidii of Faventia: Syme, ‘People’, 697. 19. C. Civica Cerialis (PIR2 V 352): Suet. Dom. 10.2. 20. Ceionii, marking the modern search for ‘rational’ explanations: Priwitzer 2009, 15–16, referring (n. 5) to Chausson 2003. See also Syme, ‘Antonine Relatives’; Hekster 2001, 42–44. Priwitzer 2009, 18–19, with n. 19, points out that the marriage between Nigrinus’s stepson and his daughter took place after Nigrinus’s death and suggests a concession to Italian feeling as a motive for Hadrian’s choice: Appian, Civil Wars 1.38.172; HA Had. 22.13; HA Pius 2.11; HA Mar. 11.6. This seems far-fetched. 21. Ceionus’s amores: HA Ael. 5.7. Tuberculosis: Birley, Hadrian, 289–290. 22. Ceionius Hadrian’s son: Carcopino 1949, 285–290 (Hadrian’s love for Aelius Caesar was that of a father for his son: 290). The idea is also entertained in Champlin 1976, 89. Hadrian as adulterer as well as homosexual: HA Had. 11.7. 23. Hadrian’s ‘personal’ choice: Chausson 2003, 122–123; summary of the rise of the Ceionii: 144–145 (stemma 154–155, figs. 4–6). The widowed C. Ceionius Commodus, Notes to Pages 43–45

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consul 78, married a Narbonese Appia Severa. His elder son by his first wife was consul in 106 and married a putative ‘Fabia Barbara’, perhaps kin to Hadrian. Their son was the future Aelius Caesar. When the consul of 106 died, Fabia Barbara married Sex. Vettulenus Civica Cerialis, also consul in 106. He, too, already had a son, Sex. Civica Pompeianus (PIR V 353). This new marriage produced daughters and a son born in about 120: M. Civica Barbarus, consul 157 (PIR2 C 602). Commodus, philosopher and teacher of Marcus, was the son of the second marriage of the consul of 78 and married an unknown Plautia or Avidia Plautia, daughter of C. Avidius Nigrinus (cos. 110) and of a Plautia of the Silvani. In about 120 they produced M. Ceionius Silvanus (cos. 156; PIR2 C 610). The future Aelius Caesar married in the later twenties: another daughter of Nigrinus. Their three children were Ceionia Fabia, Ceionia Plautia, and L. Verus, born at Rome, 15 December 130 (HA Ael. 2.8; HA Ver. 1.6–2.4). 24. Italians vs. provincials: Pflaum, ‘Tendances’; followed by Carandini 1969, 47, which regards Vibia Sabina as closer to the Senate than to Hadrian. Provincials ‘conservative’: Tac. Ann. 3.55.3. 25. Age factor: Syme, ‘Ummidius’, 1178. Pius’s age: Dio 69.20.4. 26. Death of Aelius Caesar: Dio 69.20.1. 27. Pius’s full name: PIR2 A 1513; Rémy 2005, 302 n. 3. It preserved the gentile names of his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. See Brancato 1999, 103, for variable upperclass nomenclature; 111, for the maternal name. 28. Antoninus Pius as heir: Dio 69.20; HA Had. 26.6; HA Pius 4.6 (date). Resentment: HA Had. 24.6–7. Catilius Severus: Birley 1993, 48, seeing him as a potential ‘placeholder’ for Marcus and linking in Ummidius, father-in-law of Marcus’s sister. 29. Hadrian portrayed by Fronto: Champlin 1980, 96. 30. Julio-Claudian dynastic rivalries: Levick 1976, 47–67. 31. Priwitzer 2009, 63, notes a possible Ceionian faction, noting Hadrian’s keenness for Aelius Caesar’s son to wed Pius’s daughter: HA Ael. 6.9; HA Mar. 6.2; HA Ver. 2.2–3. 32. Chausson 2003, 116–117, cites M. Ceionius Silvanus, PIR2 C 610, and Plautius Quintillus, PIR2 P 474; at 146–152 he teases out relations of Aelii Lamiae Silvani with Nigrinus, the Ceionii, the Fundanii (attested by the regular consul of 116), L. Fundanius Lamia Aelianus, and Fundania Faustina Ti. f.; high positions under the later Antonines: 135–139. Marcus’s tutor Commodus: HA Mar. 2.7. 33. Verus’s proposal for Marcus’s sons: HA Mar. 12.8. 34. Pius’s kinship with Hadrian?: di Vita-Evrard 1987, discussed in Raepsaet-Charlier 1993, 263–264. Advantages: Dio 69.20.4; HA Pius 2, with Syme, ‘Ummidius’, 1178. Irony: Dig. 27.1.6, 2 and 7–8, with Williams 1976, 75. Loss of children: Hüttl 1933, 27 n. 39. 35. Pius’s childhood: HA Pius 1.8–9. 36. Consulship (II) of Catilius Severus: HA Pius 2.9; CIL 6, 2080. 37. Pius’s career: Rémy 2005, 77–85. 38. Pius’s Italian commission: HA Pius 2.11, with Rémy 2005, 78–79. 39. Pius in Asia, police oppression: Dig. 48.3.6.1. Fair: AE 1994, 1645; 1996, 1454 (bibl.). Praise: I.Eph. 1A, 21.16–27. 40. Quarrel with Polemo: Phil. Vit. Soph. 534–535; Polemo’s elaborate train: 532.

184

Notes to Pages 45–48

41. Quarrel with Atticus: Phil. Vit. Soph. 555, with Birley 1993, 63–64. Murder of Regilla: Pomeroy 2007. For Vout 2009, 24, it is part of the constructing of Herodes Atticus as tyrant; Regilla’s relatives ardently participated in that construction. 42. Pius’s excellent administration: HA Pius 3.2, 4.3. 43. Women abroad: discussion in ad 21 (Tac. Ann. 3.33–34) shows dislike; see Boatwright’s survey: 2003, 259–264. Widow of a governor commended for carrying his ashes home: Martial 9.30 (PIR2 A 765, M 714; FOS 558). Imperial women regularly abroad: Syme, ‘Suetonius’, 1341–1342. Julia Domna as example: Levick 2007. See Raepsaet-Charlier 1982, with catalogue (64–69) and mentioning (57 n. 8) Annia Fundania Faustina (PIR2 A 713; FOS 60) and Galeria Fundana (PIR2 G 33; FOS 399), along with Matidia II, Vibia Aurelia Faustina, and (?)Lucilla. She offers allegations and charges of abuse, noting that Ulpian discourages a governor (Dig. 1.16.4.2). It is a merit for the wife of a prefect of Egypt never to allow a subject to enter her house or ask anything, any more than she asked anything from her husband (Seneca, Consolatio ad Helviam 19.6). Governors (hence their wives) as go-betweens of elite provincials and emperors: Noreña 2011, 266. 44. Faustina I: Wallinger 1990, 30–35. Faustina and Vibia Sabina: Carandini 1969, 47; Vibia as daughter of the deified Matidia: 58. 45. Hierapolis: Rémy 2005, 81, on AE 1999, 1578; 2000, 1434. 46. Adoptions: Birley, Hadrian, 294. Ceionia Fabia: PIR2 C 612; FOS 204; Wallinger 1990, 41–42. Date of betrothal of Marcus and Ceionia (136 rather than 135): Birley 1993, 40. HA Ael. 7.2 mangles the nomenclature. Carcopino (1949, 313), pursuing his theory of Aelius Caesar’s relationship to Hadrian, points out that Dio 69.21.1 has the order Verus– Marcus, contrary to that of HA Pius 4.3, Mar. 5.1, and Ael. 6.9. 47. Pius’s powers: Birley, Hadrian, 294–295. 48. P. Fayum 19; Smallwood, N-H 123 (bibl.); Bollansée 1994, 279–280 (improvements and bibl.), arguing for it as the genuine preamble to a memoir; republished in FRHist. no. 97. 49. Favour to Marcus: Priwitzer 2009, 19–22, with bibl. n. 30; 2010; a ‘rational’ answer is not to be sought: 2009, 92. Hadrian would have chosen Marcus as his heir, but he was too young; hence he chose him as his heir’s son-in-law: HA Mar. 16.6–7, with Birley, Hadrian, 289–290. L. Aelius Caesar as stopgap: Pflaum, ‘Règlement’. Syme, ‘Ummidius’, 1172, has Hadrian ‘buttressing’ L. Caesar with Marcus. 50. Marcus’s relationship to Hadrian: Syme, Tacitus, 791; Birley 1966, 249–250; Priwitzer 2009, 89–91, on Dio 69.21.2, mentioning ‘kinship’. Close relations were argued for in di Vita-Evrard 1999 (summarized in Rémy 2005, 313 n. 145); collapsing a pair of Domitiae, she finds Marcus the half-nephew of Hadrian and Pius Hadrian’s brother-in-law. Priwitzer 2009, 29–31, examines this possible identity of Marcus’s maternal grandmother, Domitia Lucilla I, and Domitia Paulina, mother of Hadrian (PIR2 D 182 and 185, respectively; FOS 328 and 330, respectively). She went on to marry P. Calvisius Ruso, consul 109 (PIR2 C 357), and gave birth to Domitia Lucilla II, Hadrian’s uterine sister. Nothing supports the identity in the sources. As the unidentified mother of Rupilia Faustina, mother of Faustina I, and grandmother of Marcus (PIR2 R 218), Matidia I, niece of Trajan and mother-in-law of Hadrian, may be conjectured. Then Rupilia would

Notes to Pages 49–51

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be the half-sister of Sabina; with Annius Verus, three times consul, sharing a mother-inlaw with Hadrian, Marcus was the great-grandson of Matidia I and great-nephew of Hadrian, and Pius had a niece of Hadrian’s to wife. 51. Position of Annius Verus: Birley, Hadrian, 104–105. Baebius (PIR2 B 20): HA Had. 5.5. 52. Birth and upbringing of Marcus: HA Mar. 1.5–10; Farquharson 1951, 13–32; Birley 1993, 28–88. 53. Marcus’s move: HA Mar. 5.3. Wallinger 1990, 47, is unduly sceptical of Marcus’s reluctance. 54. A four-year-old granted the ‘public horse’ by Pius: CIL 10, 3924. Marcus’s priesthood: Birley 1993, 36, suggests hesitatingly that adoption by his grandfather qualified him. For the rule, see Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.71.4. 55. Betrothal: HA Mar. 4.5. 56. Marcus as prefect of the city: HA Mar. 4.6. Priwitzer 2009, 91 n. 605, lists imperial heirs holding the post. 57. Marcus preferred: Dio 69.21.2, for (Baetican) kinship and personal qualities; cf. Dio 71(72).35.2–3; Eutrop. 8.11; HA Mar. 16.6–7. Modern supporters: Barnes 1967, 75 nn. 40–41, 48; also Birley, Hadrian, 296–297 (‘placeholders’), citing the Tiberian precedent and adducing the fall of Catilius Severus and Ummidius Quadratus (HA Had. 15.7, 24.6– 7); so also Rémy 2005, 13, 88–89. Pius the uncle of Marcus: Syme, ‘Government’, 671. Catilius as maternal great-grandfather of Marcus: HA Mar. 1.4, 9, with PIR2 C 357, 558. 58. Priwitzer 2009, 20–21, with n. 36, rejects any idea that Hadrian hoped for Aelius Caesar’s early death. 59. Collapsing wall: HA Had. 23.14; cf. HA Ael. 3.7. 60. Sabina working for Marcus: hinted at in Rémy 2005, 881. Relations with her husband: Carandini 1969, 65–68. 61. P. Fayum 19 distributed by Pius to support his claims: Harker 2008, 54, fancifully. 62. Barnes 1967. Circularity is avoided by citing additional evidence to support HA Verus (Barnes 1967, 75). Lambrechts 1934, rehabilitating Verus, was critical of the Vita: it had no separate sources independent of those for the Marcus; the last six chapters were freely composed; and its purpose was to compare Verus unfavourably with Marcus. The arguments of Barnes were supported in Brunt 1974, 10, arguing from the poor treatment that L. Verus received from Pius and the loyalty of Marcus to Hadrian. 63. Marcus’s cession of property to Cornificia: HA Mar. 4.7. Cf. her and her husband’s brickworks: CIL 15, 731. 64. ‘Double principate’: Kornemann 1930, and, with modifications, accepted (e.g.) in Sutherland 1951 and Levick 1976. Wallinger 1990, 42, rightly rejects the position for empresses proposed in Kornemann 1930, 35–62. Antonine perspective: Birley 1993, 117. 65. Birley 1993, 49, remarks that Pius ‘adopted in his turn’ Marcus and Lucius. This would mean abandoning the rule that the adoption of an independent male entailed the adoptee falling under the power of the adopter and becoming unable to adopt another: cf. Suet. Tib. 15. HA Mar. 5.6 suggests that Marcus was adopted before his eighteenth birthday, 26 April 139.

186

Notes to Pages 51–53

66. Faustina’s betrothal to L. Verus: HA Ver. 2.3. Doubted: Priwitzer 2009, 72, 82–83, 89–92, 209; already questioned in Wallinger 1990, 47. Relief from Ephesus: Barnes 1967, 77–78 with n. 84 (bibl.; MDAI[R] 48 [1933]: pl. 50; cf. Toynbee 1965, 65–66, with pl. 42; Oberleitner 1978, 66–90, with pl. 58; Hannestad 1988, 201–204, with n. 225), interprets it as demonstrating the prominence of Verus between Antoninus’s adoption and Hadrian’s death (the sceptre’s position); contra Liverani 1996–1997, bibl. 154 n. 1. Chausson 2003, 145 n. 134, identifies the divi (Helios and Selene) elsewhere on the monument as Hadrian and Sabina; the relief would be outmoded in the reign of the grown Verus. Rémy 2005, 91–93 with pl. 2, takes the scene to represent the adoption of Marcus in the last months of 138. Landskron 2006, 165, is persuasive for the early date. Priwitzer 2009, 83–85 (speculations in n. 540), rebuts Barnes’s view of the relief as evidence of Hadrian’s preference for Ceionius and criticises other interpretations, e.g., that of Landskron 2006, 165. Priwitzer 2009, 84–85, asks how the work was achieved before Hadrian died and prefers a date after 169, as did Wegner 1956, 38, rebutting Eichler 1939, 488 (n.v.), which argued for 161–165. Battle scenes and apotheosis appear elsewhere on the monument, and L. Verus is its object. Pius the chief figure: Liverani 1996–1997, bibl. 154 n. 1. The battle scenes could be allegorical or represent Trajanic warfare (so Toynbee 1965), in which Hadrian took part. (Hannestad 1988 notes their lack of realism.) Priwitzer 2009, 87, examines the idea that the monument displays a profectio, while Liverani, believing that the adoptions of Marcus and L. Verus came two months after the adrogatio of Pius and should not be shown as a single performance (1996–1997, 157), suggests a nuncupatio votorum (taking of vows for the emperor) after Pius’s accession (Faustina I as a diva). Kampen 1991, 226–227, cuts the link to actual events; dating it 169–176, she has it representing Hadrian’s adoption of Pius, who in turn adopts Marcus and Verus: a scene that never was. At that late date the prominence of Hadrian is hard to justify. Liverani’s insistence (1996–1997, 168) on the importance of Pius’s relations with Asia and Ephesus is also persuasive for an earlier date. 67. How Antoninus became ‘Pius’: Dio 70.2.1; HA Had. 24.3–5, cf. 27.2–4; HA Pius 2.3–7; HA Avid. 11.6; Eutrop. 8.8.4 (for clemency). Birley 1993, 55, offers supporting considerations. Pietas: Noreña 2011, 233–234. Hadrian’s immediate repute and later presentation: Jones 1972, 151–152. Deification to the advantage of the successor, with discreditable examples: Pliny, Pan. 11.1. Hadrian’s death: HA Had. 25.7. 68. Marcus’s betrothal to Pius’s daughter: HA Mar. 6.2. Pflaum 1983, 248, implausibly attributes the change to the greater suitability in age of Marcus and Faustina II (nine years’ difference). Married in 145: HA Mar. 6.6. 69. Verus’s position: HA Ver. 3.4–5. 70. Barnes 1967, 78, interprets Dio 69.21.2 as showing that Marcus was favoured not by Hadrian but by Pius (his wealthy and influential relatives secured his advancement). 71. Pius’s ‘sons’: Aelius Aristides, On Rome (Or. 26 Keil) 106–107. 72. ‘Adoptive emperors’: Tac. Hist. 1.16.2; Pliny, Pan. 7.5–6. The term briefly demolished: Syme, ‘Government’, 669; cf. Hekster 2002, 16–30; Rémy 2005, 85–88. Carcopino 1949 had also been devoted to the same purpose. It is still in use.

Notes to Pages 53–56

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Chapter 4 1. Pius at Lorium: Priwitzer 2009, 26 n. 87, on CIL 12, p. 310 (circus games). Alexander, agent of a Faustina, dedicated a monument to Silvanus at Lorium (CIL 11, 3732). 2. Pius’s country tastes: Rémy 2005, 106–107, citing HA Pius 7.10–11, 11.2; Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 3.6 (Haines 1.72; ad 140–142); Fronto, Fer. Als. 3.5 (Haines 2.9; ad 161). Intellectual pursuits: HA Pius 2.1, 11.2. 3. Consequences of adoption: Suet. Tib. 15. 4. Loss of Pius’s estate: HA Pius 4.8. Pflaum 1983, 247, comments on the story of Faustina I urging him to look after his own interests as showing ‘un caractère décidé et vif ’. 5. ‘[The younger] Faustina’s only dowry was the private fortune of her father and that was entailed upon the Public Exchequer’ (i.e., the Aerarium, according to Farquharson 1951, 34; too restrictive a view of its scope and its public status and availability for state use). 6. Succession between spouses: Gardner 1986, 178. Faustina II was chief private beneficiary; Pius’s private wealth was probably not much less on his death than it had been when he became emperor: Birley 1993, 118–119. 7. Civility: Farquharson 1951, 76–77, citing Mar. Med. 1.17.3 and HA Pius 6.4. 8. Contrast of Hadrian and Pius: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 2.4.1 (Haines 1.111; ad 143). 9. Humour and severity: Williams 1976, 74–78. 10. Imperial nomenclature Trajan–Pius: Kienast 1990, 122, 128, 134; Noreña 2011, 74 n. 129. 11. Devotion: Weiss 2008, 37–39. 12. Pia of Faustina I: CIL 9, 1113 (Aeclanum); Miranda 1988 (Naples, not named). Faustina II: AE 1974, 348 (Mediolanum: Diva); ILS 384 (Rome); MDAI(R) 2 (1887): 205, of 25 July 227 (Diva, distinguishing her from her mother, Mater); CIL 6, 1540 (Rome, Diva, dedication to her cousin by marriage); IGR 4.1562 (Teos, superlative; name mangled). Strongly represented on issues of Diva Faustina II: RIC 3, Marcus 741–753, 1691–1706, 1710–1718; Gnecchi, Med. 2.38 no. 1, 39 no. 4. 13. Faustina and monarchy: Rémy 2005, 150; see chap. 2. 14. Deification of Domitian’s mother: Kienast 1989; cf. Levick 1999, 199. Deification of Trajan’s father: Pliny, Pan. 89.2. 15. Proposed renaming of months: HA Pius 10.1, with Wallinger 1990, 33, on precedents. 16. Statues to Pius’s family members: HA Pius 5.2. 17. Government by one household: Chausson 2003, 152 n. 154, on Aelius Aristides 23.62 Behr. 18. Official association adumbrated in Rémy 2005, 130; Ceres: 132; reservations: 133. 19. ‘Concord of the Armies’: e.g., RIC 2, p. 221 (Nerva). 20. Marital concord at Ephesus: Liverani 1996–1997, 155 n. 10. But the attribute is not decisive. 21. Publicity for concord: Fantham et al. 1994, 357; Noreña 2011, 233–234. 22. Faustina and Gyarus: Fronto, Ad Pium 2 (Haines 1.128; ad 143), with Rémy 2005, 108–109. Mommsen 1874, 204, argued for Faustina II; followed by Haines 1.128 and Champlin 1980, 86. Financial arrangements: HA Pius 7.9, 12.8, with Rémy 2005, 117 (unsatisfying). 188

Notes to Pages 57–61

23. The date inferred from Vidman, FO 49–50, is after 20 October and before a day in the week of 6–12 November; Weiss 2008, 8, reviews the text. Kienast 1990, 136, assigns Faustina’s death to the first half of 141. 24. Pius’s mistress: HA Pius 8.9; ILS 1836. Pius’s restraint: Jul. Caes. 312A. 25. Annius Verus’s mistress: Birley 1993, 35, on Mar. Med. 1.17.2, comparing HA Mar. 2.1. Marcus’s conduct: see chap. 7. 26. Marcus’s expressed devotion to Pius: Mar. Med. 6.30.2; reported: Fronto, Ad M. Imp. I.5.3 (Haines 1.127; ad 162); Dio 71(72).35.2; HA Mar. 5.8, 7.2. 27. Fertility of Faustina II: Birley 1993, 247–248. Domna’s hairstyle: Baharal 1992. Lusnia 1995 stresses ideological links with Faustina in the first two phases of her coinage (down to 202), listing other qualities shared with Antonine women from Faustina to Crispina; Centlivres-Challet and Bähler Baudois 2003, 274, fig. 5. For the evolving hairstyle of Faustina II and her predecessors, notably the austere and Livia-like Plotina, see Baharal 2000, following Fittschen 1982, esp. 333–334, 341–342, 344. Sign of character: Bartman 1999, 43 n. 29. Fittschen 1982, 43, summarizes his scheme of portraiture as follows: Type 1, ad 147; 2, 149; 3, 150; 4, 151; 5, 152; 6, 159; 7, 161; 8, 162; 9, 162–?. 28. Betrothal of Faustina II: HA Mar. 6.2. Baharal 2000, 334, draws attention to CREBM 4, Pius 1236–1239 (ad 140–143/144). 29. Claudius’s daughter: Levick 1990, 72, on Dio 61.33.22. Wallinger 1990, 47–48, proposes the emancipation of the adoptee: Dig. 23.2.55.1; Gaius, Institutes 1.61. 30. Wedding: HA Pius 10.2. Baharal 2000, 334, notes CREBM 4, Pius 1786–1787, 1801– 1802 (ad 145–160). Bounty: Wallinger 1990, 47–48, draws attention to coins bearing the legend ‘Liberality’, though mentioning the possibility that they refer to the grant of the toga of manhood to L. Verus: RIC 3, Pius 142, 774-6A, 790–791, with P. v. Rohden, in RE 2 (1896), 2503. Form of marriage: Treggiari 1991, 21–24. 31. Sextus’s teaching: Mar. Med. 1.9. 32. Tiberius quaestor: Vell. Pat. 94.3. Marcus consul: HA Pius 6.9. Further honours: Kienast 1990, 137. Pius’s civility in asking for favours from the Senate: HA Pius 6.5, 11.6. 33. Silvanus’s consulship: Priwitzer 2009, 95–96, citing RMD 3 (1994), 286–287, no. 165. 34. The child of 147 (Domitia Faustina), the first: Ameling 1992, 151–152. Marcus coruler: HA Mar. 6.6. Strack, Reichspr. 17–18, puts the change in Faustina’s obverse numismatic titulature to Faustina Augusta in 156/157. 35. Birth of a son in 152: Inscr. Ital. 13.1.207, with 238; Vidman, FO 131–132; Fittschen 1982, 27, with n. 36, for the coinage. 36. Birth of twins: see Hekster 2002, 90–91, on CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 136–140, 155–158 (six children; ‘Good Fortune of the Times’), 936–941 (‘Good Fortune of the Age’); Faustina’s ‘Fertility’: 89–95, 902–910, 980–981 (four, two, and one child, respectively); noted in Baharal 2000, 335–336. 37. Livia’s pillow talk: Dio 55.14–22.1; cf. Seneca, De Clementia 1.9. 38. Livia’s scheming: Tac. Ann. 1.3–6; Tiberius’s views: 1.14.2, with Purcell 1986. Senators: Vell. Pat. 2.130.5; Eck et al. 1996, 46–47, ll. 115–118. 39. Claudius’s ladies: Smallwood, G-N 436, l. 9. Ambassadors: Tac. Ann. 13.5.2; cf. Dio 60(61).33.7, 61.3.4. Berenice: Quintilian 4.1.19. Constantia at trials: Amm. Marc. 14.9.3, cited by M. Clauss, in Temporini 2002, 360. Notes to Pages 61–66

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40. Fictional role of Faustina I: Priwitzer 2009, 82–83, on HA Mar. 6.2. 41. Conspiracy of Celsus: HA Avid. 10.1. 42. Matidia’s inheritance: Champlin 1980, 71–72; Birley 1993, 132, citing Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 2–3 and Ad am. 1.14.1 (Haines 2.94–99; ad 162–163); Boatwright 1992, 29–30. Lex Falcidia: Rotondi, Leges, 438. 43. Betrothal of Lucilla and L. Verus: Birley 1993, 118. Why was this betrothal left so late? Birley proposes two solutions: that Lucius was married and only now became a widower or that a long-standing plan was only now put into effect. Unduly early betrothals were frowned on at Rome in case they were contracted to avoid the financial penalties of celibacy. But Verus’s previous engagement had been undertaken when he was eight at most, and there could be no suspicion of fraud in the imperial family. Lucilla: Wallinger 1990, 62–69, discussing at 64 Herodian’s claim (1.8.3) that Verus married the oldest daughter. 44. Birth of twins: HA Com. 1.1–5; Faustina’s dream: 1.3 (Birley 1993, 278 n. 9, compares Suet. Cal. 8.1); CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 155–158, 949–955. Anxiety: Galen, 14, Progn. 12.663–664 Kühn. Daughters in Rome: Birley 1993, 120, suggests that Faustina was being given a rest as her confinement approached. 45. Faustina commended to Marcus: HA Pius 11.2. 46. Powerful freedmen: HA Mar. 15.2. 47. Joint dedication: CIL 6, 1004. Continued concordia: ILS 368. Column: Vogel 1973, noting comparative sizes of figures 49–50 (on Sabina’s apotheosis relief Hadrian was nearly twice the size of Sabina). Boatwright 2010, 189, unconvincingly infers an inward turn of Roman attention. 48. Marcus’s personality: Williams 1976, 77–82; quotations from 78. 49. Verus the military man: Dio 71(72).1.3–2.4. 50. Marcus fighting: Dio 71(72).3.12. 51. L. Verus sent east, with derogatory reasons: Birley 1993, 121–124, citing Dio 71.1.3; HA Mar. 8.9; HA Ver. 5.8. 52. Marriage: HA Mar. 7.7, 9.4. It took place in 164, as argued in Birley 1993, 131 n. 41, 280 n. 41; cf. Barnes 1967, 72 (?163). Panthea: Lucian, Portraits. 53. Lucilla’s entourage: HA Mar. 9.4–6, reading ‘to his sister’; Wallinger 1990, 63–64; Birley 1993, 131, mentioning another possibility in n. 41 (‘the son of his sister’, i.e., M. Ummidius Quadratus, son of Cornificia). A simple solution is that the author of the HA has abbreviated his account of Lucilla’s upbringing and attributed the journey as well as the upbringing to Cornificia. Civica: Chausson 2003, 123, citing AE 1958, 15 (M. Vettulenus Civica Barbarus = M. [Ceionius] . . . Barbarus [PIR2 C 602], cos. 157, brother of Aelius Caesar, and uncle of Verus), and noting that Barbarus had been with Verus in the Parthian war. 54. Cf. the result of a mishap for Augustus’s daughter Julia: Nicolaus of Damascus, in FGrH 2 A no. 90, Fr. 134. 55. Lucilla Augusta as wife of Verus: HA Mar. 20.7; CIL 3, 1307; CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 303–356 (164–? [final date uncertain]). 56. Germanicus and Piso (cos. 7 bc; PIR2 C 287): Tac. Ann. 2.43–3.18; Eck et al. 1996.

190

Notes to Pages 66–71

57. Death of M. Annius Libo (PIR2 A 668): HA Ver. 9.2. 58. Death of twin: HA Com. 1.4; Fronto, Ad Verum Imp. 1.3 (Haines 2.237; ad 166, before Verus returned). He sends greetings to another member of the family and to ‘your [plural] offspring’. Haines reads ‘mother-in-law’, i.e., Faustina II, and argues that she had travelled to Asia or at least to northern Italy, though he notes the possibility of ‘wife’, Lucilla. Van den Hout reads ‘father-in-law’, i.e., Marcus, and sees Verus in Italy, the children being those of Marcus and Verus. Lucilla’s daughter: Birley 1993, 145, citing Lucilla’s later son-in-law and Fronto, Ad Verum Imp. 1.3. 59. Dedication to Lucina: Birley 1993, 146, citing ILS 366; Fittschen 1982, 32. 60. Commodus as Caesar: HA Mar. 12.8; HA Com. 11.13 (12 October 166). 61. L. Verus’s death and stories about it: Dio 71.3.11; HA Mar. 14.7–8, 15.5–6; HA Ver. 9.11, 10.1–5, 11.2–4, with Barnes 1967, 73; Birley 1993, 158; Galen (naturally unsuspicious), 14, Progn. 9.650 Kühn; Galen, 19, De Libris propr. 2.17–18. Galen mentions only the bitter winter and plague invading Aquileia. 62. Lucius’s relaxation: Birley 1993, 151–152, citing HA Ver. 8.6–11, with Pflaum, ‘Vita Veri’, 182–183. 63. Germanicus’s journey: Tac. Ann. 2.53–55. 64. Illness of Verus: Fronto, Ad Verum Imp. 2.6.1 (Haines 2.85; ad 164)—fasting and bleeding relieved it; cf. HA Ver. 6.7. Antonine Canusium: Pomeroy 2007, 40. 65. Rehabilitation of L. Verus: Lambrechts 1934; cf. Champlin 1980, 110–117, noting tensions in the relationship engendered by Verus’s dissipation. 66. Burial of L. Verus: HA Ver. 11.1. 67. Sodales Antoniniani Veriani: Pflaum 1966 (list: 85–86); Birley 1993, 159. Consecration of Verus: HA Mar. 15.3–4, 20.1–5; CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 502–505, 1359–1370. 68. Marcus’s campaign: Sage 1987 (brief but lucid); Birley 1993, 249–255. ‘Germany Subdued’ provides one reverse legend: CREBM 4, Marcus 1413–1440 (ad 171–173). Lightning and rain miracles: Sage 1987, with references 153 nn. 13–14, assigning the Lightning Miracle of HA Mar. 24.4 to the Marcomanni (ad 172), Antonine Column Section 11, and the Rain Miracle (Section 16) to the campaign against the Quadi (ad 173). See also Birley 1993, 171–173, and Priwitzer 2009, 180 n. 33, reviewing previous discussions: Jobst 1978; Knibbe 1983; Salomies 1990, showing that the dating of the inscriptions is dubious (the consul referred to is Quintillus, ad 159); Hekster 2002, 33. 69. Commodus as Germanicus: HA Com. 11.14; ILS 389; CIL 8, Suppl. 11928 of 175/176, with Hekster 2002, 32–33, 90–91. 70. Julia’s marriage: Tac. Ann. 4.40.6. 71. Lucilla’s remarriage: Dio 72(73).4.5 (Pompeianus’s sons under Commodus: 72[73].20.1); Her. 1.6.4, 1.8.3; HA Mar. 20.6–7, 30.6; HA Car. 3.8, with Birley 1993, 161–162. Wallinger 1990, 66, mentions an elite source as a possible origin for the story of Lucilla’s distaste. 72. Marcus in the north: Halfmann 1979, 212–213. 73. Pompeianus (PIR2 C 973) on the Column: Birley 1993, 178, citing Hamberg 1945, 146. Ambition: HA Jul. 8.3.

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74. The trial at Sirmium (Phil. Vit. Soph. 561–562) was selected by F. Millar to open his interpretation of the emperor’s role (1991, 3–12); it is expounded in Ameling 1983, 1.136–151; and its roots are thoroughly exposed in Kuhn 2012. See Birley 1993, 180–182, on Marcus’s son-in-law Cn. Claudius Severus (second consulship in 173; PIR2 C 1024) and the Quintiliii Condianus and Valerius Maximus (PIR2 Q 22 and 27; Alföldy 1977, 260–262; chap. 7). Death of Regilla: Pomeroy 2007. 75. Chausson 2003, 127–128, elucidates a nexus of intellectuals glimpsed in Galen, 14, Progn. 5.629, 10.653 Kühn, linked with Herodes. M. (Ceionius Vettulenus) Civica Barbarus, consul in 157 and half-brother of Aelius Caesar (PIR2 C 602; AE 1939, 109; Chausson 2003, 154, fig. 3), was a learned friend of Herodes Atticus, along with Flavius Boethus, consul in the sixties (PIR2 F 229); L. Sergius Paullus, consul for the second time in 168 (PIR2 S 530); and the father of Marcus’s son-in-law Cn. Claudius Severus, who taught Marcus of the Stoic heroes (Mar. Med. 1.14). Chausson points out that, like Barbarus, Claudius Severus got a dedication from Herodes, who was not without friends at court: IG 2/32, 3.1.4780. 76. Marcus’s wife: Mar. Med. 1.7. 77. SCC Tertullianum and Orfitianum: Talbert 1984, 445 no. 82, 449 no. 128; Gardner 1986, 196–200. 78. Letter to Dionysiac artists: IGR 4.1399; Oliver, Gk. Const. 325–327, nos. 157–158; Petzl 1983 (date). 79. Marcus’s avoidance of mere aristocrats: Her. 1.2.2, with Keil 1938; Pflaum 1961, 39; but see Whittaker (Herodian was misled by criticisms of Pompeianus’s birth). Quintillus: PIR2 P 474; Pompeianus: C 973. Severus: PIR2 C 1024; Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 690. Secondcentury patriciate: Lambrechts 1936, 207–213. 80. Annia Faustina’s marriage: Birley 1993, 155 (with bibl.). For the family, see Champlin 1980, 30. 81. Greek-speaking senators: Halfmann 1979. 82. Fadilla’s husband: PIR2 P 474; Pflaum 1961, 34–36, questioning whether it was to members of this family (father and two sons) that the Pseudo-Lucian dedicated his Macrobioi in 212/213. 83. Petronii: Champlin 1980, 10, with nn. 33–34, following A. R. Birley, in Bonner Jahrbücher 169 (1969: 259–260), in suggesting another connexion: with the family of Septimius Severus. PIR2 ad P 310 provides a stemma. Cornificia’s husband: PIR2 P 311. Date of marriage: Pflaum 1961, 36. 84. Court in the north: Birley 1993, 162, 174, citing AE 1964, 181. Galen told to be in attendance on Commodus: Galen, 14, Progn. 9.650; Galen, 19, De Libris propr. 2.18–19 Kühn. 85. M. Aurelius ‘master’: IGR 4.579; Severus and his family: 3, 1533–1534; 4, 878, with Ghedini 1984, 144. Severus’s attempts to acquire authority: Moran 1999. Procopius, Secret History 30.26, claims that Justinian required that address. ‘Ruler of the Universe’: SB 4275. 86. See Syme, ‘Imperator’. 87. ‘Mother of the Camps’: Dio 71(72).10.5; HA Mar. 26.8, erroneously making it posthumous; CIL 14, 40 (Ostian sacrifice for the safety of Marcus, Commodus Caesar, and Faustina). See Kettenhofen 1979, 230 n. 43; Boatwright 2003, emphasizing (253) the

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‘maternal’ aspect of the title. Coins: CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 929–931, p. 541†; RIC 3, Marcus 1659–1662 (title in the exergue); Foss 1990, 141, nos. 63, 66a, 72b. Date: the Dio excerpt (71[72].10.5) implies 174; RIC 3, p. 206, suggests June 174, with the seventh salutation as Imperator; Boatwright 2003, 257–259, settling on 174–175, rebuts the early date (172) proposed in Knibbe 1983, 138–140, on the basis of a damaged inscription from Carnuntum: AE 1982, 781. ‘Un-Roman’ title: von Domaszewski 1895, 72; contra Instinsky 1942, 200–203, following Alföldi 1934, 69. Military context: Boatwright 2003; her suggestion that it improved Commodus’s prospects of succession is acceptable, but it is unlikely that mixed feelings about it are shown by its tentative dissemination (265–266). Faustina did not enjoy it long, even on the earliest dating. 88. Threatening situation: Kuhoff 1993, 251–252. Domna took the title in 195, when Septimius Severus claimed kinship with the Antonines; it was extended to ‘Senate’ and ‘Fatherland’ in 205 on the fall of Plautianus. ‘Concord of the Armies’: CREBM 4, Marcus 1496–1497. 89. Agrippina I with the army: Tac. Ann. 1.69, 2.55–71; Agrippina II on the tribunal: 12.37.4. 90. Piso’s title: Tac. Ann. 2.55.5, 80.2; 3.13.2. 91. Women on military equipment: Severy 2003, 86–87. 92. Faustina I’s intrigues criticised: HA Pius 3.7. 93. Faustina I and II confused: Wallinger 1990, 32, rejecting the view of Paratore 1945, 20. 94. Divided reports in the HA: Wallinger 1990, 61–62. 95. Scandals accepted: Barnes 1967, 73, citing Jul. Caes. 312B and Ausonius, Caesares 14.18 (Commodus revealed the adultery). 96. Faustina’s summons north: Birley 1993, 181–182, based on HA Mar. 23.4–7. 97. Faustina responsible for Commodus’s failings: Priwitzer 2009, 4; 2010. Balsdon 1962, 147–148, already argued that the story of Commodus’s birth (HA Mar. 19.1) was put about to save Marcus’s reputation; Dio 71(72).34.3 is less specific. 98. Dream at birth of Commodus: HA Com. 1.3. Commodus’s parentage: HA Mar. 19.1– 9; cf. 19.7, 23.7, 29.1–3. A lover made consul by Commodus: HA Com. 8.1; but cf. Mar. Med. 1.17.7. Rejection as a bastard preferable: Hartke 1951, 111. For careful examination of Faustina and her gladiators (HA Mar. 19.1–7; Vict. Caes. 16.2 [in Campania]), see Priwitzer 2009, 99–100. Baharal 2000, 237–238, offers a fragile chronological analysis: ad 160 for gladiators (accounting for Commodus’s birth), 165–166 for pantomimes and sailors in the east, 169–174 for gladiators. Caieta, harbour and villa: Pöschl 1953, 180. ‘Ill repute’: Levick 1983. 99. Gladiator’s blood and secondary impregnation: Priwitzer 2009, 170–171, with bibl. n. 687, citing Aristotle, Historia Animalium 585A, the source of Pliny, NH 7.48–49; Vict. Caes. 17.1. 100. Krappe 1936 recalls a bloodthirsty foetus from a medieval Icelandic story who, having drunk from his father’s foot, emerged from the womb as the murderous Björn (Bear). Krappe then related such appetites to the cravings of pregnant women, which occur in medieval stories involving parricidal boys. 101. Dowry: HA Mar. 19.9.

Notes to Pages 78–82

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102. Pantomimes: HA Mar. 23.7; Marcus blamed: 29.1–3. Lovers’ identity: Pflaum 1983. Tutilius is known (HA Com. 8.1): he is L. Tutilius Pontianus Gentianus, consul in 183 (ILS 5047), and could have been thirteen years younger than Faustina. 103. Cornificia’s dying words: Birley 1993, 212, with n. 2, on the introduction to Haines’s translation of the Meditations (xiv) and Dio 77(78).16.6a. 104. Morality of Faustina II: summed up in Birley 1993, 224–225, with n. 3, citing the literary evidence. Pflaum 1983, 251, seems more damning of Faustina II than of her mother: one of those Roman women of dubious morals, haughty and arrogant, vain and ambitious, convinced that the world should be at their feet because it belongs to them; her daughter Lucilla is similar. Baharal 2000, 339–340, taking the second course, insists that Marius Maximus and Dio were of an age to find the truth and writes of ‘flirtations’, rejecting the argument in Fantham et al. 1994 that the stories were intended to destroy Marcus’s reputation. Faustina II ‘simply went too far’ but was forgiven because of her fertility (Baharal 2000, 344); evidently Marcus correlated his children’s dates of birth with those of his marital intercourse. 105. Stories of pantomimes rebutted by letter: HA Mar. 23.7, without any indication of the recipients (possibly the Senate). 106. Republican poisoning cases: Balsdon 1962, 30–31. 107. Poisoning of Verus: HA Ver. 9.2, 10.3–5; cf. HA Pert. 10.2, where there is uncertainty in the text: a slave passed himself off as the son of Fabia and Plautius Quintillus. Oysters: HA Ver. 10.1; udder: 10.2; cf. HA Mar. 15.5; HA Ver. 11.2. Verus too complaisant to his sister: HA Ver. 3; plot betrayed to Marcus by Agaclytus: 4–5. Verus’s plot thwarted by his poisoning: Dio 71(72).3.1; Phil. Vit. Soph. 560 (Herodes Atticus involved). See Wallinger 1990, 43; Priwitzer 2009, 43. 108. Reaction to Verus’s death: HA Mar. 20.4. Help to relatives: HA Ver. 15.3. 109. Revolt of Cassius: Dio 71(72).17, 22.2. Date: Bowman 1970, 25: 23 April at the latest. Avidius is probably the man who was ‘elected emperor by most noble soldiers’ (SB 10295). The revolt lasted three months and six days: Dio 71(72).27.32. See Hekster 2002, 34–39. Faustina’s role: Dio 71(72).22.2–3; HA Mar. 24.6 (the account goes on to 25.12); cf. HA Avid. 7.1. (Worthlessness of HA Avid.: Pflaum, ‘Vitae Aelii’, 199.) 110. C. Avidius Heliodorus and his positions: PIR2 A 1405, citing the papyri; Dio 69.3.5. Avidius’s birth: Dio 71(72).22.2; HA Avid. 1.1. 111. ‘Herdsmen’: Dio 71(72).4–5, variously dated 169 and 171/172, with Winkler 1980, 175–181, arguing that although ‘something happened in 171/2 and Cassius did something to restore . . . order’, the body of Dio’s account is fictional; it is a ‘xenophobic narrative’. Avidius’s imperium: Dio 71(72).3.12; Phil. Vit. Soph. 563 (‘in charge of the East’); Baldini 1978, 641, noting that an extension may have been necessary for the operations in Egypt; Asterita 1983, 56–59 (ad 166–175, governor of Syria with consular rank; 169–175, imperium maius over the entire Orient); Priwitzer 2009, 175–176, with n. 5, for limits of his imperium and a survey of previous literature. 112. Revolt planned under Pius: HA Avid. 1.5–6; rightly dismissed in Priwitzer 2009, 275 n. 7. 113. For Marcus’s route to and from the east, see Halfmann 1979, 212–213.

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114. Possible Syrian clique: Priwitzer 2009, 202. Marcus unpopular: HA Mar. 22.5–6. 115. Marcus’s health: Dio 71(72).22.3, 24.4, 36.2–3. Birley 1993, 285 n. 3, also cites Mar. Med. 2.2, 2.11, 2.17; see also Priwitzer 2009, 197 n. 156, at 200 suggesting a different origin for the rumours about Marcus’s health—a prophet he exiled: Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio 15.2.5. But leaks would come from the whole court. 116. Commodus’s safety and Faustina’s happiness: CIG 3.5882; Revue Archéologique 39 (1901): 121. 117. Commodus’s progress tabulated: HA Com. 11.13–12.7; priesthoods: 1.10, 12.1. Bounty: ANNONA AVG., of 175: CREBM 4, Marcus 1493; RIC 3, Marcus 1122; CREBM 4, Marcus and Commodus 1517–1522 (ad 175/176). Summons to Pannonia and toga of manhood: Dio 71(72).22.2; cf. HA Mar. 22.12; HA Com. 2.2, 12.3. 118. Involvement of Faustina: Dio 71(72).22.2–3; cf. Dio 71(72).29.1 (her death), with Syme, ‘Avidius’, 700–701, noting the duty of those close to power to secure the future. The new governor of Syria was said to have destroyed incriminating papers: Dio 71(72).29.2. Barbieri 1954, 54 n. 1, holds that the story was due to contemporary malice. The empresses naturally had tabellarii of their own: CIL 6, 9062. 119. Fresh examination of HA account: FRHist. 101 Marius Maximus. Marius is alluded to at HA Avid. 9.5. Birley, ‘Marius’, 2736, concludes that his two-volume Vita Marci was the source of HA Mar., Ver., and Avid. The complicity of Faustina is stated at HA Avid. 7.1 and at HA Mar. 24.6 with almost identical wording (note especially the phrase ‘at Faustina’s wish’); both passages are qualified with ‘as some say’. Pflaum 1983, 249, is inclined to accept the story that Faustina offered herself in marriage; if she was involved at all, it is plausible. Objections to Faustina’s involvement are stated in Balsdon 1962, 145–146, mainly the damage to Commodus, for whom W. Weber had suggested she acted (CAH 11.361). 120. The ‘correspondence’ between Faustina and Marcus about Avidius (HA Avid. 9.7, 11; 10; 11.2–8) does nothing to exonerate her, as Asterita 1983, 107–108, with n. 69, points out. Avidius consecrating Marcus: HA Mar. 24.7; HA Avid. 7.3, with Priwitzer 2009, 201. 121. Avidius the disciplinarian: Fronto, Ad am. 1.6.1 (Haines 1.193; ad 166); HA Avid. 3.8, 5. 122. Pompeianus as ‘regent’: Birley 1993, 185. 123. Deprivation of Britannicus: PIR2 C 820. 124. Younger Pompeianus: PIR2 C 971, 974. 125. Asterita 1983, 107–118, noting (111) how Marcus divided the roles of L. Verus (husband of Lucilla, commander in the east), sees Faustina allying herself with Avidius against Pompeianus; but see Priwitzer 2009, 191–192. Lucilla: Syme 1971, 129, scouted in Wallinger 1990, 66. 126. Pompeianus and Avidius: Hekster 2002, 31. He suggests that Marcus himself saw Pompeianus and Avidius as mutual counterweights, though he acknowledges that Pompeianus’s influence in Antioch did not count for much when the revolt broke out. 127. Avidius’s sons: Dio 71(72).27.32; HA Mar. 26.11–12, with Priwitzer 2009, 188–189. 128. The Senate for Commodus: HA Avid. 13.3. 129. See Priwitzer 2009, 205, comparing the case of Cn. Domitius Corbulo, Nero’s general in the east, forced to suicide in 66.

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130. A similar explanation, with evidence for imminent disgrace, accounts for the rising of Julius Vindex, governor of Lugdunensis, against Nero in 68: B. Levick, in Rhein. Mus. 128 (1985): 318–346. He certainly won support from Gauls suffering excessive taxation. 131. Unrest in the east: Baldini 1978, esp. 635–636, linking the revolt with that of the ‘Herdsmen’ and noting the effects of the plague (see esp. Boak 1959); Priwitzer 2009, 205–206. 132. P. Martius Verus: PIR2 M 348. Burning of papers: Dio 71(72).28.4; cf. 71(72).29.2, with Priwitzer 2009, 203–204. Punishment of Avidius’s followers: Baldini 1978, 667. 133. Faustina’s complicity in Mar. Med. 9.38?: Brunt 1974, 13 n. 80; followed by Birley 1993, 217–218. 134. M. Macrinius Avitus: PIR2 M 22; Alföldy 1977, 371–374. 135. Marcus in the east: Asterita 1983, 153–162. 136. Daughter in Alexandria: HA Mar. 26.3. 137. Death of Faustina: Dio 71(72).29.1; HA Mar. 26.4–9. See Asterita 1983, 137–138, which bases the date on Phil. Vit. Soph. 562: Marcus is writing from winter quarters and has just lost his wife (how long might he write in those terms?). See Birley 1993, 191, also opting for the outward journey; Boatwright 2003, 249, preferring 176; and Priwitzer 2009, 195, with further bibl. n. 142. Hadrian: HA Had. 24.8. An admirable alternative death: Pliny, Ep. 1.12, with Sherwin-White, comparing Mar. Med. 11.3. For the possibility that Marcus himself committed suicide, see Dailly and van Effenterre 1954, 353–354. Hekster 2002, 36, rebuts Asterita’s impeachment of Faustina (1983, 107–118). 138. Honours: HA Mar. 26.5–9. Faustinopolis: Ballance 1964 on topography; Asterita 1983, 114, with n. 91. 139. Attendant: ILS 382 = CIL 6, 1019, as Diva Pia. ‘Faustinian Girl’, as Diva Faustina Iunior: ILS 6065 = 10222.

Chapter 5 1. See, e.g., Levick 2010, 311–313. Claudius: Suet. Claud. 4. Development of the concept of the ‘theatre state’: Hekster 2002, 139–145. 2. Public and private: Kampen 1991. 3. Attacks on morality: Edwards 1993 and Ginsburg 2006 are seminal. 4. Literature and art: Ginsburg 2006, esp. 55–96. 5. Statuary and dedications, Trajan–Hadrian: Boatwright, ‘Women’, 526–528. 6. Matidia I praised: Boatwright, ‘Women’, 533, citing CIL 14, 3579, ll. 5–7, 26–30; cf. Pliny, Pan. 83–84. Among Antonine dedicators more than one generation of a family may sometimes be involved: as at Nysa, in SEG 4 (1930), 404. Convergent interests: Noreña 2011. 7. Pergamum and Ephesus: Mikocki 1995, 199–206. Lystra: BMC Lycaonia, 10 nos. 2–3. Uchi: Mastino 1997. 8. Sabratha dedications: IRT 33 nos. 25–26. 9. Messene bases: CIL 3, 495; AE 2003, 1616; 2008, 1256. 10. Ostensible and real power: Roche 2002, 60. 196

Notes to Pages 86–93

11. Buildings: Boatwright 2003, 252, n. 20, on Miletus, citing CIG 2881 (= Th. Wiegand, ed., Milet, Ergebnisse der Ausgrabung seit dem Jahre 1899 [Berlin, 1906–1936], 1.9.164–186). 12. Agros Thermon: Tabula Imperii Byzantini 7; Belke and Mersich 1990, 172–173. A bath inscription mentioning Faustina could have been visible in the fourth century. 13. Tribe Faustiniane at Prusias ad Hypium: I.Prusias 1 I.26, 2 I.27, 4 I.27, 6 I.34, 7 I.33, 8 I.38, 10 I.31, 11 I.36, 14 I.32 (see pp. 23–26). 14. Imperial input into coin issues: Levick 1982. 15. Coin legend ordering: H. Mattingly and Sydenham, in RIC 3, 2–3. 16. Copious portraiture of Faustina II: Ameling 1992, 147; only two portrait types for Pius, four for Marcus: 17. The prize for portrait sculpture is claimed by Livia (Bartman 1999, 3). Exact numbers would depend on assembling figures for types and objects collected for varied purposes in limited studies and catalogues; for sculptures there are often problems of identification. 17. Births occasioning new types: Fittschen 1982. Rebuttal: Ameling 1992, noting acceptance of the hypothesis (149 n. 13). Trunk 1999 announces a third variant (the earliest) of Type I, belonging to the time of Faustina’s marriage; it is based on the girlish features, the number of ridges in the hair, and loops on the forehead. 18. Portrait scheme: Szaivert 1986, 229–233, following Fittschen’s series but repudiating his dating scheme. 19. Numismatic honours for Faustina I: Strack, Reichspr. 3, 88–107; Beckmann 2009, citing Duncan-Jones 2006 for the estimate of their constituting one-third of coins struck at Rome any year during the period. Vogel 1973, 34–35, rejects Aion as the male figure carrying Pius and Faustina aloft on the Antonine Column. 20. Thea Faustina and her son Galerius: Overbeck 1971, with catalogue; Weiss 2008, 22. 21. Faustina II praised by Fronto: Fronto, Ad Pium 2 (Haines 1.128). 22. Pius’s distributions: Rémy 2005, 209; he points out (n. 2) the replacement of distributions with the more personal and monarchical ‘liberality’. Marriage and games: Vidman, FO 50, Fr. Pa, ll. 3, 5–6; RIC 3, Pius 140–141, 774–775, 118–121A. The amount rose here from 65 to 100 denarii. For the birth of the son (Vidman, FO 51, Fr. Qa, l. 11) Rémy 2005 cites RIC 3, Pius 207–208, 228–229, 234–237, 905 (covering ad 152–154). 23. Livia and firefighters: Suet. Tib. 50.3. Agrippina: Dio 60.33.12, with Keitel 2010, 334. 24. Reason for empress to travel: Syme, ‘Fictional History’, 171. 25. The pantomime Ti. Julius Apolaustus: Slater 1995, 1996, on Inschr. v. Magnesia 192. Artists of Dionysus: I.Eph. 22 = SEG 41.945. 26. Hermione dedication: IG 4, 703. 27. Controversial building: Pliny, Ep. 10.37–38; Dio of Prusa, Oration 48. Ephesus group: Kalinowski and Taeuber 2001, citing, for the support of Pius, I.Eph. 1491–1493; they cite for Nysa (Pius, Marcus, L. Verus, and Faustina II) Kourouniotis 1921–1922. 28. Tobin 1997, 314–323. 29. Byzantine dedication: I.Byz. 1, 36. 30. Interpretation of the Ostian monument: CIL 14, 5326 (2.65 metres broad, c. 90 high), with Dio 72.31.1–2. Weiss 2008, 8–9, reinterprets Vidman, FO 49–50. For the association with Venus he cites Strack, Reichspr. 3, 46. Commemoration of 141 or 142: Vidman, FO Fr. S, with Eck and Weiss 2001 and Weiss 2008, 8. Notes to Pages 94–100

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31. Importance of marriage and Concord: Rémy 2005, 131, following, for the model, Beaujeu 1955, 290–291 (contra Martin 1982, 313), and citing RIC 3, Pius 381ab, 1129 and 1129A (‘Concord’), 398 a and b, 399, 1149 (‘Faustinian Girls’). Rémy notes that ‘Augustan Concord’, figuring on coins of Sabina, is extremely rare on those of Hadrian: RIC 2, 390–393, 1017, 1021, 1025–1027; cf. 799. Scene on coins: RIC 3, Pius 601 (Faustina still living?), 1129, 1129A. There the editors take the small figures before them to be Marcus and Faustina II, as does Gnecchi, Med. 3, 26 no. 124; but see Weiss 2008, 6–7. CREBM 4, lx, is correct. Rémy 2005, 330 n. 36, notes that the scene could represent only the engagement of the imperial couple, not yet their marriage. 32. Donative on Marcus’s marriage: HA Pius 8.1, 10.1, with Beckmann 2009, 208–210. 33. Marriage of Marcus and Faustina: HA Pius 10.2; HA Mar. 6.6; FO, in Inscr. Ital. 13.1.205. Pius’s fourth distribution: Van Berchem 1939, 155. 34. Security: Ameling 1992, 147 (bibl. n. 1); Priwitzer 2009, 2. 35. Significant consulships: Weiss 2008, 20; advancement: 39; shadow of Hadrian: 40. Nine hundreth birthday: see Boatwright 2010, 182, on ‘self-definition’. Pius’s ten-year celebration covered twelve months starting from 25 February 148 (Rachet 1980). 36. Commodus’s bride: Szaivert 1986, 173. Pius shown as if still living (i.e., without the title Divus) on coins of Faustina II, their earliest possible date the 145 marriage. Coins of 145–147 symbolize marriage, with Concordia blessing the couple: CREBM 4, lxxxvii. 37. Concordia: Weiss 2008, 13–14; associated fertility: 21; role of handclasp and Concord on coinage of the 160s: 29. 38. ‘Senatorial’ sarcophagi: Weiss 2008, 24–29 (illustrations). Feel-good factor and imperial virtues: Noreña 2011, 111. Hadrian: Noreña 2007. 39. Kampen 1991, 243. Severan ‘concord’: Weiss 2008, 43–44. 40. ‘Concord of the Soldiers’: RIC 2, pp. 223–225. Sabina’s birth control: [Epit. Caes.] 14.8, with Weiss 2008, 40. 41. Shortage of recruits—Aemilianus: Appian, Iberica 84. Tiberius: Tac. Ann. 4.4.2. 42. Augustus’s deployment of the censor’s speech: Levick 2010, 130 nn. 57–58, 133. 43. Marriage rules for auxiliaries: Phang 2001, 57–60, 75–80, 333–335, discussing motives. 44. ‘Enhancer of Citizens’: CREBM 4, Pius 1302*, 1615† (‘He restored the Temple of the Deified Augustus, Consul for the fourth time’), 549, etc., with Weiss 2008, 41–42, and Boatwright 2010, 180. Cf. denarii of 16 bc: RIC 12, pp. 67–68 no. 58. 45. ‘Faustinian Girls’: HA Pius 8.1; HA Mar. 26.6; HA Sev. Alex. (a particularly suspect life) 57.7. Scenes of girls receiving their grants: RIC 3, Pius 397–399. Relief at the Villa Albani: B. Rawson, in Rawson and Weaver 1997, 224–225, fig. 9.11. Date: Weiss 2008, 8. Scope: Duncan-Jones 1982, 319; Segenni 2001, 368; Rémy 2005, 207–208, noting the ‘school’ at Praeneste (CIL 14, 2901). 46. Augustus’s gift: Suet. Aug. 46, with J. M. Carter. 47. Alimentary scheme: Pliny, Pan. 26.4–7; Smallwood, N-H 235–238, including gold coinage of Trajan; Woolf 1990, with distribution map (198), bibl. to date (197 n. 2); Rémy 2005, 217–218 (‘Toute l’Italie’), with n. 103 for date, 107 for bibl., including Segenni 2001, 368–369. Manpower shortage: Appian, Civil Wars 1.9. Hadrian’s increase: Dio 68.5.4;

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HA Had. 7.8, with Duncan-Jones 1982, 288–319, 333–341. Trouble under Commodus: HA Pert. 9.3; Magioncalda 1995, 356 nn. 143–144. End in last third of the third century and late survival of concern: Carrié 2003, 85–86. 48. Duncan-Jones 1982, 319 n. 1, regards the girls as mere additions to the regular recipients of the corn dole at Rome. 49. Age of recipients: Magioncalda 1995, 357 n. 149, citing Gagé 1964, 149 n. 12. 50. Girls helped only at Rome: Eck 1979, 151–152, with references to the geographical scope of the alimentary scheme under the Antonines; Segenni 2001, 369, noting dedications from boys and girls of the alimentary scheme and from Cupramontana (a modern site thirty-five kilometres southwest of Ancona), Pitinum Mergens, and Sentinum. Segenni 2001, 383 n. 151, goes on to note private creations, such as that of an Agrippina, kin to the consul of 148, who willed a foundation in favour of one hundred little girls. Interest on the one million sesterii went to games that honoured her ?mother: CIL 14, 350 = 4450 (Ostia). 51. Betrothal commemorated: Birley 1993, 118, citing Eck 1979, 146–151. 52. Extension of fosterage scheme: HA Mar. 26.6. ‘New girls’: ILS 6065. 53. Woolf 1990, 227–228. Matidia’s foundation for ‘Varian alumni’ of either sex: Fronto, Ad am. 1.14 (Haines 2.99), with Duncan-Jones 1982, 31, noting that it came second only to Pliny’s in generosity. 54. Tastes of Pius: Fronto, Fer. Als. 3.5 (Haines 2.9). 55. Marcus’s character: Her. 1.2.3–5, with C. R. Whittaker. Living well at court: Mar. Med. 5.16; court as stepmother: 6.12; retreats: 4.3.1; escape from uncongenial characters: 3.2. Rusticus: Pliny, Ep. 1.5.2, 1.14.1, 2.18.2, claiming to have been close to him during his youth. Marcus’s lack of sharpness: Mar. Med. 5.5; writings: 3.14; fame ephemeral: 4.19. 56. Lanuvium and Praeneste bases: ILS 5193–5194 (187 and after 197); cf. Ephemeris Epigraphica 8.373 (Puteoli). Honour to Faustina I from clapper-players at Puteoli: chap. 6. 57. Mutina inscription: CIL 11, 870. 58. Sextus’s example: Mar. Med. 1.9. 59. Souls ordered: Mar. Med. 5.11. 60. Patriciate comparatively unloving: Mar. Med. 1.11; cf. Fronto, Ad Verum Imp. 1.6.7 (Haines 2.155; ad 164–167). 61. Marcus’s personality: HA Mar. 4.10. Esteem for him: e.g., Dio 71(72).34.22–25; Her. 1.2; HA Mar. 18.5. Stages of life: Mar. Med. 9.21; what Domitia taught him: 1.3. Truckle bed: HA Mar. 2.6. Religion: Brunt 1974, 14–17. Finery: Mar. Med. 1.7; Domitia with Marcus in her latter years: 1.17.6. 62. For the name Cratia, Krateia in Greek, see Champlin 1980, 24–27 with n. 37 (not the previously accepted ‘Gratia’; so in FOS 300 and Van den Hout’s Fronto); she probably came from a family of Ephesus with literary connexions. 63. Marcus, his mother, and Fronto: see Birley 1993, 35, 38, 72, 76, 80. It is not always clear whether the woman referred to by the correspondents as ‘Domina’ or ‘Domina mea’ is Domitia Lucilla, Faustina I, or Faustina II: see Mommsen 1874, 208 n. 1. ‘Domina’ alone refers to Domitia. 64. On the relations of Fronto and Domitia Lucilla, see Champlin 1980, 108–109, noting Marcus’s praise in Mar. Med. 1.3, 17.7; 1.7.2; 8.25; 9.21. Relations between Domitia

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and Cratia: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.6.2 (Haines 1.183; ad ?184–185), 5.20 (Haines 1.193; ad ?145–147), 5.25 (Haines 1.195), 2.15.1 (Haines 1.147; ad 143), 2.13 (Haines 1.145; Cratia will live only on Domitia’s kisses). Cratia died soon after Verus’s return from the east (166–169): Fronto, Ad Verum Imp. 1.8.1, 9.1; Fronto, De nepote am. 4 (Haines 2.233–234; ad 165). Her daughter married Victorinus in about 159: cf. Fronto, Ad am. 2.11 (Haines 1.293). 65. Personality of the youthful Marcus: Birley 1993, 49, based on Dio 71(72).35–36; HA Mar. 4.5–10, 5.2–4, 7.1–3. 66. Marcus’s sexual experience and life in his grandfather’s house: Mar. Med. 1.17.2, 7. See Dailly and van Effenterre 1954, 364 n. 8; Birley 1993, 271 n. 2. 67. Love of young men: Mar. Med. 1.16, ed. Haines; ‘Benedicta’ (a name with Christian connotations): 17.6. 68. Panthea’s vigil: Mar. Med. 8.37. Beauty: Lucian, Portraits 10, 22. 69. Resemblance of a daughter to her parents: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.67–68 (Haines 1.251; ad 147–156). Resemblance of the twins to Marcus: Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 1.3.1 (Haines 2.119; ad 162). 70. Comment on Faustina II: Mar. Med. 1.17.7. Haines compares Fronto, Ad Pium 2.2 (Haines 1.127–129; ad 143), for Pius’s opinion of her. 71. Cratia vs. Marcus: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 3.12.1 (Haines 1.13; ?ad 139), 2.5.1 (Haines 1.113). Eroticism: Richlin 2006. 72. Domitia’s birthday: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 2.13 (Haines 1.145–147); Fronto’s letter to Domitia: 2.15 (Haines 147–151; ad 143), with (2) his list of women fit to take part in the festivities; Cratia as ‘smoke’: 5.20, where Van den Hout identifies the reference to Odyssey 1.58 (Haines 1.193; ad 145–156). 73. The women as links: see Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.6.2 (Haines 183; ad 147–48); in general Levick 1994. 74. Fertility of Faustina II: Fittschen 1982; Ameling 1992, 147–148. Rejoicing over twins in 161: Syme, ‘Government’, 684. Guild of Dionysus: IGR 4.1399. Triumphal procession: HA Mar. 12.10. Faustina unwell: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.21, 25–26 (Haines 1.193–195; ad 147–156); illness of Marcus’s sister, scorpion, etc.: 5.23 (Haines 1.197); Faustina’s imminent parturition, with the health of Domitia Lucilla a concern: 5.60 (Haines 1.247; ?ad 154–156). Cf. Mar. Med. 9.1.3. She was convalescent (after childbirth?) in 162 (Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 1.1.3 [Haines 2.33]). 75. Fertility of marriages between cousins: I owe this information to the kindness of Dr. J. H. Mellanby. Dangers of cousin marriage: F. Gibb, The Times, 20 March 2010, 8–9. 76. Dreading the loss of a child: Mar. Med. 9.40; cf. 10.35 with Haines’s n. Ameling 1992, 147 n. 7, regards the mortality as typical. Rates: Parkin 1992, 92–98. Bruun, ‘Pliny’, 763, also reports model tables as showing one-third of children dead in their first year and half dead by the age of five, after which the average life expectancy would be thirtyseven more years. 77. The story in the Acta of Bishop Abercius of Hierapolis curing the sixteen-year-old Lucilla of possession, with a spurious letter from Marcus commending him (J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca 115, p. 1211; Vita S. Abercii, ed. T. K. J. Nissen [Leipzig, 1912], 44–66; cf. Haines 2.298 n. 3), is Christian propaganda, and no evidence of any adolescent wildness

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on her part, besides the epitaph associated with him (Lüdtke and Nissen 1910, at ll. 7–8; Wischmeyer 1980), confirms that he visited Rome and met the emperor and empress. 78. Teaching of Cinna: Mar. Med. 1.13. 79. Fronto on little Faustina: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.11–12 (Haines 2.203–205; ad 148). His losses: Fronto, De nepote am. 2.1 (Haines 2.223), with Alföldy 1977, 86. Herodes Atticus’s children: Pomeroy 2007, xii. 80. Marcus’s rearing: HA Mar. 2.1; Mar. Med. 5.4. Faustina’s (deceased) nurse: CIL 6, 8941, gravestone of Alce and of her husband Ampelus. Tacitus’s disapproval: Tac. Dial. 28–29. Favorinus: Gell. 12.1; discussed in Birley 1993, 32–33. 81. Marcus’s eldest daughter Faustina (diarrhoea, feverish attacks, emaciated, and coughing): Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.11–12 (Haines 1.203–205; ad 148); cf. 5.39–40 (Haines 1.213; ad 147–151). It is worth telling Fronto in the summer heat that his girls are quite well: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.34 (Haines 1.225; ad 149–155). In the winter of 161–162 Marcus has them lodging with his great-aunt Matidia in town (Minturnum is suggested by Haines); they cannot be brought to him in the evening because the air is too sharp. His older daughters were with L. Verus and their mother: Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 4.1.1–2 (Haines 1.301). He had found his ‘little lady’ slightly feverish (Fronto, Fer. Als. 1 [Haines 2.3]). His little chick, Commodus’s twin, had a cough that was easing (Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 1.1.3; cf. 1.2.6, 1.3 [Haines 2.33; ad 43]). Marcus’s devotion: Haines ad Mar. Med. 1.13 with n. Fronto’s preference: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 4.12.5 (Haines 1.205; ad 148). Marcus’s demand: Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 1.4.1 (Haines 2.121; ad 162). 82. Children: Birley 1993, 105–108, app. 2. 83. Mommsen 1874, 205, pointed out the significance of the child’s names. 84. Birley 1993, 106, shows Marcus schooling himself against the grief of losing children: Mar. Med. 1.8, 8.49, 9.40, 10.34, 11.34. Rejoicing over twins in 161: Syme, ‘Government’, 684. 85. Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.67 (Haines 1.251; ad 147–156). 86. Fronto and Faustina’s daughters—a kiss for Lucilla: Fronto, Ad M. Caes. 5.48.2 (Haines 1.233; ad 147); for more than one daughter: 5.57.2 (Haines 1.245; ad 149–152); 5.67 (Haines 1.251; ad 147–156). Domitia Lucilla’s life span: CIL 15, 1090 = 8, 22632.15 (pottery of 155). 87. T. Aelius Antoninus: see Birley 1993, 247. 88. M. Annius Verus: Fronto, Ad M. Imp. 1.1.3 (Haines 2.33; ad 161). 89. Loss of Annius Verus just before departure for German war, c. 15 October: HA Mar. 21.3–5; Birley 1993, 162.

Chapter 6 1. Deification of the dead: Tac. Ann. 15.74.3. The relation among association, assimilation, and identification is discussed in Hekster 2002, 11. 2. Caesar deified: Suet. Caes. 88; Plut. Caes. 67.3; Dio 47.18.4. Augustus: Tac. Ann. 1.10.8. 3. Divi: Scheid, Comm. 300, with Duncan-Jones 2006, 223 n. 2. Origins of the deification of women at Rome: Flory 1995. The consecrations of Marciana, Plotina, Matidia I, Marcus, and Septimus Severus are dealt with in Temporini 1978, 167–475, ll. 94–258.

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4. Marcus and deification: Brunt 1974, 17. 5. We cannot use the (?false or misread) inscription from Nursia (CIL 9, 4538) dedicated to ‘Jupiter Stator [or Feretrius] and Faustina’. 6. Women deified: Hekster 2002, 11. Livia, 21–19 bc: Price 1984, 42–43; Hahn 1994, 38. 7. Julius Caesar’s statue: Dio 43.45.3. On the ambiguity of statues, see Hekster 2002, 112–114, neatly citing Tac. Ann. 15.29.1, for image and emperor. 8. List of deities invoked up till Sabina: Hahn 1994, 312; the form ‘New Aphrodite’ etc., including ‘New Faustina’: 313, with n. 8. 9. Inscriptions from Marcianopolis: Mikocki 1995, 370–371, citing SEG 28.598–599 (ad 161–163); cf. 372, a portico from Thera (AE 1896, 107). SEG 49 (1999), 1554, presents a marble altar dedicated to Hecate (cf. Paz De Hoz 1999, 68–69) and the imperial couple by Apphias, daughter of Asclepides, with her husband, Asclepides. 10. Deification of Antonia: Levick 1990, 45. Domitillae: H. Castritius, in Temporini 2002, 170–174. Livia and Sparta: Rawson 1991. 11. Honours to Agrippina II: Ginsburg 2006, 55–105. 12. ‘Consecration’: Hahn 1994, 254 n. 21, 293 n. 39, with a peacock for the Faustinas. 13. Honours to Trajanic and Hadrianic women: Hahn 1994, 239–302 (ending with Sabina); Sabina’s comparative prominence: 16; forms of honour: 304–311. Hahn argues that Sabina received more attention than others: After her there was a caesura, and the empresses were simply referred to conventionally as ‘divine’. But honours accorded to the Faustinas overall far exceeded Sabina’s: Hahn is concerned with the Greek east, which had particular reason to honour Hadrian’s travelled wife. 14. Patara gem: İşkan 1999. His suggestion that the portrait type, deviating from the three known (plain; with rosettes of hair on the forehead; with a headband) which centre on Rome, developed in the east may be correct, but it is unlikely to go back to Pius’s governorship of Asia. Bust: Kranz 1998–1999, pl. 9.3–4. 15. Guild of clapper-players: CIL 10, 1643; cf. 6, 33194; 9, 3188; 11, 5054. 16. Matidia’s temple: Temporini 1978, 175. 17. Speech of Hadrian from Tibur: Smallwood, N-H 7, 114. Coins: RIC 2, Hadrian 423–426. Gladiatorial games: HA Had. 9.9; spices: 19.5. The Arval Brethren deployed spices in her honour; their records for 23 December 119 mention the consecration of Matidia Augusta, costing two pounds of perfume and fifty pounds of incense (Scheid, Comm. 210 no. 69). 18. Plotina’s tiles: CIL 15, 441–442, 691–703 (ad 114–116, 123). 19. Hadrian’s temple for Plotina: Dio 69.10.31, 3a. Remarkably decorated basilica at Nemausus: HA Had. 12.2 (122–123); Trajan’s temple: 19.9. Birley, Hadrian, 144–145, 191. 20. Arco di Portogallo: Priwitzer 2009, 88, reviewing interpretations and noting that the child lacks senatorial footwear—he is a commoner. Apotheosis of Sabina: Vogel 1973, 47–48, 51–52. 21. Death of Faustina I: Vidman, FO, 49–50, 122–123, with Rémy 2005, 131. Mattingly 1948, 147, opted for 141. Faustina and children in Hadrian’s Mausoleum: ILS 349–352. 22. Speed of construction: Beckmann 2009, 210. Reason for scale: Temporini 1978, 175. 23. Tenth anniversary of Faustina’s death: Beckmann 2009, 211.

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24. Temple of Faustina I: CIL 6, 1005, 2001 (both her and Pius; cult still functioning in ad 235); HA Pius 6.7, 13.3–4. Ideological significance: Boatwright 2010. Column: Vogel 1973, 32–55, esp. 39 (Lorium) and 54 (changes); date of Sabina’s monument: 48. 25. Mentions of the diva, or with a priest: Rémy 2005, 331 n. 45; CIL 9, 1113 (Aeclanum, a priestess of Faustina Augusta, daughter of Beitius Pietas, a knight, and Neratia Procilla), and 11, 7279 (Volsinii); AE 1956, 19 (Naples); CIL 12, 4343 (Narbo), and 2, 4096 (Tarraco); IRT 20 (Sabratha) and 380 (Lepcis; possibly Faustina II). Priest of Faustina I: CIL 9, 5428 (Falerio); cf. a possible temple at Bovillae: 14, 2416. Cult at Iotape, Cilicia, from the council and people: AE 1972, 641; cf. IGR 3.833a. 26. Meat distribution after sacrifice: Pliny, Ep. 10.96.10. 27. Devotion to the deified Faustina I: Rémy 2005, 258, citing for her posthumous coinage RIC 3, Pius 392–396, 1146–1148, 1191–1195. ‘Devotion’ of empresses (and Caesars) on coins: Szaivert 1986, 65. 28. Commemoration: Rémy 2005, 132, citing HA Pius 6.7; Vidman, FO. Dio 71(72).31.2 records the order for the statue to be shown in the circus in connexion with the consecration of Faustina II, and Rémy considers the HA biography to have been interpolated. Perhaps Marcus was following the example of Pius. Coins: RIC 3, Pius 325–326, 343–410*, 1073, 1099–1205. Medallions: Gnecchi, Med. 2.24–26, 3.30–31. The RIC editors note (p. 16) that issues with ‘Consecration’ are smaller than those with ‘Eternity’ and ‘Augusta’. 29. Commemorative coinage of Faustina I: Strack, Reichspr.; Mattingly 1948. 30. Scale of coinage for deified Faustina I, shown from hoards, one (Valeni) with Faustina’s coins making up 53 per cent of the total for her and Pius, the other (Réka Dévnia) with 35 per cent, and with the respective consecration issues at nearly 50 per cent and 34 per cent; Faustina II: 53 per cent and under 3 per cent (Mattingly 1948, 148–149). Tullia and Pius’s personal devotion: Cic. Ad Att. 12.12; Cic. Ad Fam. 4.5. 31. ‘Eternity’ in 161: Trib(unicia) Pot(estate) XXIV: RIC 3, p. 13. Coins were struck for her in Alexandria in the same year. 32. Varieties of assimilation: cf. Levick 2007, 124–144. 33. Faustina I as Ceres: see Rémy 2005, 132, citing RIC 3, Pius 346, 378. Marcellus’s poem: Ameling 1983, 2.153–156, no. 146 (Pomeroy 2007, 170–177); IGVR 3, 1155 (photo); IG 14, 1389, ll. 5–6, 48–49 (Mikocki 1995, no. 337). At ll. 51–56 Faustina I is ‘the goddess, queen of women’, and Regilla, ‘a priestess for her sacrifices and an attendant in her youth’, while Domitia Lucilla is ‘the grain-giving mother of powerful Caesar, who rules over the heroines of the past’. Ginsburg 2006 is particularly effective on Agrippina the Younger as Ceres. Temple of Faustina I and Demeter: Pomeroy 2007, 158–161 (with photographs). 34. Stucco reliefs: Pomeroy 2007, 159–160, n. 50, citing for the two interpretations Gros 1969, 175–180 (photo), and Mielsch 1975, 89 n. 372. 35. Theocracy: Garzetti 1974, 468–469. 36. Ariadne and Dionysus: Rémy 2005, 261–264, citing Gnecchi, Med. 2.13 no. 37; city coinages: nos. 37–38. Marriage: Strack, Reichspr. 234–235 n. 593; Marcus and Faustina II: 236–237 n. 606. Ariadne and Dionysus on a rock: Toynbee 1944, 99 n. 28.

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37. Pius and the Dionysiac artists: Rémy 2005, 263–264, citing Gnecchi, Med. 2.21 nos. 101–104, for Hadrian’s medallion; IG 3, 1.22 (Athens), cf. AE 1997, 1459a (Pius as New Dionysus at Laodicea); CIL 12, 3232 (Hadrian at Nemausus). 38. Mark Antony as New Dionysus: CAH 10, 2d ed. (1996), 22–23, 30. 39. Hieropolis: BMC Lycaonia, 83 nos. 8–9—bronze of Hieropolis with a bust, facing right, with a crescent on the forehead. 40. List of deities associated with Faustina I and II: Mikocki 1995, 199–206. 41. Note AE 1971, 79, from the people of Formiae in Latium to Cassia Cornelia Prisca, senatorial wife of Aufidius Fronto (PIR2 A 1385; grandson of the orator), consul and proconsul of Asia, who was ‘priestess of Augusta and of her fatherland’. The Augusta is alive, and she has been taken for Faustina II (so Várhelyi 2010, 114). This would be the only priestess identified as serving a living empress. But the empress is not Faustina: the inscription was cut after the consul of 199 had reached his proconsulship (c. 114). Domna is intended. 42. Carthage bust (Louvre MA 1117): Gros 1995; style: 47, citing Fittschen 1982, 76–77, and other bibl. n. 7. Markouna group: Gros 1995, 51, from Baratte 1983, dating the superior Faustina II to c. 161 (Fittschen 1982, Type 7). Groups favoured: Gros 1995, 52–53; Faustina I at Sardis (with Pius): 53–54, citing Inan and Rosenbaum 1966, nos. 40–41, pl. 26; Price 1984, 151–152, 260 (bibl.). Significance of diadem for Juno: Gros 1995, 56. At Rome Lucilla is shown with a diadem assimilating her to Venus (Fittschen et al. 1983, 24–26). 43. The Kore Soteira (Mikocki 1995, 379): BMC Mysia, 31 nos. 175–179, 60 nos. 292–293. For Aeternitas and the Antonine Column, see Vogel 1973, 36. 44. Lystran type (Mikocki 1995, 377): BMC Lycaonia, 10 nos. 2–3. 45. Faustina II as Tyche, wearing turreted crown: BMC Pontus, 86 no. 15 (Amastris). Cf., e.g., Geissen-Weiser 1960. 46. Juno Lucina, as indicated in Fittschen 1982, 32 with n. 71, presided especially over the births of girls: Fertility was invoked for the birth of Faustina’s sons. 47. Mars and Venus: Mikocki 1995, 381 (Pergamene coin), other coins and medallions at 384 (RIC 3, Pius 1680; CREBM 4, Marcus and Verus 999–1001 [Faustina II; to Venus Victrix]; Gnecchi, Med. 2, p. 67 no. 8), and an Ostian statue group at 385. 48. Pius and Eleusis: Alföldi 1979, 586–589, modifying Beaujeu 1955, 306. 49. Sabina and Faustina I as New Demeter: Mylonas 1961, 155, 179; going back to Rubensohn 1892, 103–104, which notes that she had her own hierophant. Sabina: IG 22, 1088. See also Ameling 1992, 157 n. 54. 50. Pius and Eleusis: SIG3 869. Medallions: Alföldi 1979, 587, citing for Faustina’s medallion Münzen und Medaillen AG Basel, Katalog 43 (1970), 357.2–3. Faustina’s temple: Mylonas 1961, 155, 180–181. A Boeotian cup bears a similar design: Rubensohn 1899, 67–68, pl. 7. 51. Alföldi 1979, 587, cites Reizenstein 1921, 226 (n.v.), for Faustina I and the symbolism of the era. 52. Marcus and Commodus initiated: Phil. Vit. Soph. 2.10, 7; Dio 71(72).31.3, implying 177. Alföldi 1979, 589, cites Mylonas 1961. In fact Mylonas 1961, 162, 180–181, lays more

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stress on Marcus’s activity at Eleusis: it was he who restored the sanctuary destroyed by the Costoboci in 170 (IG 22, 3639; Scholion on Aelius Aristides, Panathenaica 183.2 [3.308 Dindorf]); sculpture refers to the ‘giants’, the Costoboci. Marcus constructed the temples L10 (to Faustina I) and F (to Sabina), honouring his benefactor Pius by erecting a temple on the Eleusinian Sacred Way to his deified wife (as New Demeter), as Pius himself had done on the Sacred Way at Rome: an ingenious construction, implausible because of the late date for the attention paid to Faustina I. 53. Date of temple to Faustina II: Cortés Copete 1998 (AE 1998, 1273). Cortés Copete holds that all the restoration work and development carried out by Marcus, who enjoyed high repute as a patron and restorer of the shrine and its surroundings, was a response to the revolt of Avidius Cassius and an attempt to win back the loyalty of an impoverished and discontented province, especially Athens. (His interpretation of IG 22, 3.1.3399 should be modified.) 54. Ceres, Annona, and Pius’s far-reaching grain and other economic measures: Noreña 2011, 120–122. 55. Cybele: Mikocki 1995, 355 (miniature bust in chalcedony, ?Faustina I). 56. Cybele at Rome: Turcan 1989, 49–61; Rémy 2005, 264–268. Medallions of Hadrian and Pius, with Sabina and Faustina (not all posthumous): Gnecchi, Med. 2.9 no. 1, 2.?18 no. 81, 2.25 nos. 9–11, 3.3 no. 5, 3.16 no. 60, 3.26 no. 19, 3.31 no. 34; Marcus: 2.40 no. 19, 2.41 no. 21. Saviour goddess: RIC 3, Pius 1145; Turcan 1989, 52–57 no. 4; cf. AE 1927, 115 (Bovillae, for the safety of Pius, Marcus, and the whole Divine House). Lugdunum and bull sacrifice for the safety of Pius and his offspring, ad 160: CIL 13, 1751. Honours from Ostian ‘Tree-Bearers’: CIL 14, 97. Shrine restoration: Rémy 2005, 356 n. 96. 57. Praenestine ‘school’: CIG 5998; CIL 14, 2901, with Segenni 2001, 385. 58. Faustina II as ‘New Hera’: AE 1990, 998 (Hieropolis-Castabala). ‘New Sebaste’: Mikocki 1995, no. 376. Alexandrian inscription, where Demougin and Empereur 2002, 156, stresses the rarity of the title (usually posthumous): see next n. New Faustina: Hahn 1994, 313, with n. 8 for coins. 59. Oxyrrhynchus: P.Oxy. 3, 502, l. 4. Pharia and ‘Saviour of the Fleet’: Bernand and Bernand 1998; cf. Bricault 2000; Demougin and Empereur 2002: ‘Members of the association of the Augustan images and of Faustina .  .  . honour P. Aelius Panopaeus, a leading member formerly Procurator of the Augusti’ (ad 161–169). The Bernands note that Pharia assimilated with Isis, protector of sailors, and remark on ‘Sosistolos as unique’. On Isis Pharia, see Bricault 2000, noting for Ceres Tertullian, Apology 16; citing Gnecchi, Med. 3 (1912), 34 nos. 43–44; and with a catalogue of coins of Isis Pharia at 148–149. Attributes of Athena and Tyche: Geissen-Weiser 1948, no. 1492. Shortage at Rome: HA Pius 8.11; [Epit. Caes.] 15.9. Claudius pelted: Suet. Claud. 18.2; Rémy 2005, 205. Commodus and the cult of Isis and Sarapis: Hekster 2002, 134–135, scouting stress on mystery cults and insisting on the connexion with the transport of grain displayed by coins. 60. Associated deities: Szaivert 1986, 228–231; see also Mikocki 1995, 203–205, nos. 362–383; Rémy 2005, 375 n. 61. He cites Gnecchi, Med. 2.25 no. 16 (Ceres), no. 12 (Diana), 25–26 no. 17 (Venus), 24–26, 25 nos. 13–14 (Vesta). Scarcity of references to Isis: Rémy

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2005, 268, but citing Strack, Reichspr. 246–247 no. 706, 248–249 no. 720 (Diva Faustina and Faustina II). 61. Grief of Marcus: Dio 71(72).30.1; Mal. Fr. 118. Consecration: Fer. Dur. 3.7; Jul. Caes. 35.334b. 62. ‘Received among the stars’: Mikocki 1995, 367–368, reporting Gnecchi, Med. 2, 1937, 39 no. 4, with ‘The Deified Faustina’ on the obverse; CREBM 4, Marcus and Commodus 1591–1592, with ‘Devoted Deified Faustina’ and Faustina as Diana Lucifera/Eternitas in a chariot on the reverse. 63. Temple: HA Mar. 26.5; not included in Xiph. Abolition: HA Car. 11.6–7. 64. The word there, meaning ‘at Halala’, is rejected in Cecamore 1999, 332–333. 65. Elagabalus’s takeover of the Taurus temple: HA Car. 11.5–7. Fictional: Cecamore 1999, 339. 66. Altar: BMC 4, p. cxxxiii. 67. Temple of Faustina II: Cecamore 1999, referring to Rodríguez Almeida 1980, Fr. 69–70a, 103. 68. Sun and Moon: Rémy 2005, 268. At Rome a radiate nimbus is added to the emperor’s head on coins. 69. Faustina and Moon: Cecamore 1999, 342–344, on HA Car. 11.6. Carthage head: Gros 1995; ascribed to Lucilla in Fittschen 1982. Calling out of deities, practised in 146 bc against the Juno of Carthage: Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.9, with Ghedini 1984, 174 n. 270; see Kettenhofen 1979, 101–103, on AE 1949, 109; cf. IRT 291 (Domna as Regina or Dea Juno). Shrine at Carrhae: HA Car. 6.6, where D. Magie notes that the Semitic god Sin is meant; cf. 7.3–5. 70. Commemorative coinage: CREBM 4, Marcus and Commodus 698–727, 1550– 1594. Other forms of commemoration: Dio 71(72).31.2–3; Eck and Weiss 2001, 253–258. 71. Fer. Dur. 3.7. At pages 157–158, the editors argue that both were originally commemorated on the roster. But the calendar of Polemius Silvius has the birthday of Faustina I (contra Kienast 1990, 136, 141). 72. See OCD4 s.v. ‘Damnatio memoriae’; Flower 2006, xix–xx. 73. Deified Fulvus: Petraccia 2006, citing L. Robert, in Hellenica 2 (1940), 37–38.

Chapter 7 1. Commodus Leader of the Youth (with Ovid’s phrase in Ars Amatoria 1.194): HA Com. 2.1–3, 12.2; CREBM 4, Marcus and Commodus 1517–1522 (with ‘Liberality’). See Hekster 2002, 91, on Szaivert 1986, nos. 308–309, 336–337, 342–343, 347; cf. 344, where he is ‘The Hope of the People’. 2. Visit to Miletus and Eleusis: Ehrhardt 1984, 386 n. 18. Triumphs: Rachet 1980, 222 n. 75, implausibly prefers a second separate triumph for Commodus (27 November, 23 December). HA Com. 2.4, 12.4; cf. HA Mar. 16.1, which has Commodus saluted ‘Imperator’ on 27 November.

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3. Marcus’s movements in late 176: HA Mar. 27.4–5. Illness: Birley 1993, 196–197, on Galen, 14, Progn. 11.657–661 Kühn. 4. Advancement of Commodus: Dio 71(72).22.2; HA Mar. 27.5; HA Com. 2.3–5. 5. Commodus’s tribunician power: HA Mar. 27.5. See Rachet 1980, 227, ending the first tenure at 9 December (ILS 400–401). ‘Normal prerogatives’: Tac. Hist. 4.3. 6. On Commodus’s youthful cruelty (with Suetonian models, e.g., Suet. Cal. 27.3), see Priwitzer 2009, 129–130. Senatorial feeling: Dio 72(73).4.4; Her. 1.8.6; HA Com. 3.9, 4.3, on the sword from the Senate. 7. Departure from the Danube: Dio 72(73).1.1.2; Her. 1.6; HA Com. 12.7. 8. Reference to Commodus in Meditations?: Birley 1993, 218, on Mar. Med. 9.11, 10.14, 11.18.9. 9. Marcus’s intention: Hekster 2002, 15. 10. Boys’ early education: Tac. Agr. 4.2–3. 11. Commodus’s precautions: e.g., Dio 72(73).18.1; HA Com. 9.6. 12. Marcus after Faustina: HA Mar. 4.5, 29.1, with Birley 1993, 195–196, app. 2. 13. Proposal of Ceionia: HA Mar. 29.10; Wallinger 1990, 43. 14. Commodus’s marriage: Dio 71(72).33.1; HA Mar. 27.8. Praesens: PIR2 B 165. 15. Estates: Syme, ‘Praesens’, 575, citing PIR2 B 164. 16. Son of Lucilla and Pompeianus: Her. 4.6.3, with C. R. Whittaker; HA Car. 3.8; cf. PIR2 C 971. See Chausson’s stemma: 2003, 159, fig. 12. 17. Pompeianus’s stock advancing: Birley 1993, 196. Descendants in civil posts: Pflaum 1961, 41, referring to ILS 1181; Chausson 2003, 143. 18. Death of Marcus and its cause: citing Dio 71.33.42–34.1; Her. 1.3–4 (‘riddled with inaccuracies’; cf. the damning analysis in Alföldy 1973); HA Mar. 18.1, 27.11–12; see Birley 1993, 209–210. Priwitzer 2009, 156–157, reviews speculations. Vict. Caes. 16.14 and [Epit. Caes.] 16.12 give the place as Vindobona; Tertullian, Apology 25, gives Sirmium. 19. Discussion of Commodus’s mental antipathy to Marcus: Priwitzer 2009, 106 n. 95. 20. Commodus defying Pompeianus and later spurned by him: Dio 72(73).20.1; Her. 1.6.4–7. Marcus’s intentions on the Danube: Hekster 2002, 40–42, on Dio 71(72).33.42; HA Mar. 24.5, 27.10. Hekster regards the bronze medallion of 178 dedicated to Marcus and Commodus as ‘Propagators of Empire’ (Kaiser-Raiss 1980, 16, pl. 1.7) as decisive. Reasons for return to Rome: Hekster 2002, 42–48. Priwitzer 2009, 147–148, with bibl. n. 499, regards Marcus’s intentions as defensive. 21. Depravity: Dio 72(73).17–21; Her. 1.15.1–8, 12. Attacks on senators: Dio 72(73).5.1; HA Com. 8.2. Extravagance of dress: Her. 1.14.8; HA Com. 9.6. Lust and incest: HA Com. 5.8, 5.11, 10.1. See Priwitzer 2009 for comprehensive treatment—Commodus the performer: 101–104; luxury, money-grabbing: 133–136; effeminate dress: 136–139; lust: 140–145; greed: 145–146; previous explanations: 105 n. 89 (e.g., Wiedemann 2001; Hekster 2002, 137–162). 22. Favourable judgments: Priwitzer 2009, 159–170; cf. C. R. Whittaker ad Her. 1.6.8. Balanced view of Commodus: Hekster 2002, 197–202. 23. Commodus and Hercules under Marcus: Priwitzer 2009, 151–152, with n. 541. How seriously he took the impersonation: Hekster 2002, 11.

Notes to Pages 139–143

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24. The gladiator: Hekster 2002, 128–129, 137–162. Legislation against the upper class on stage and in the arena: Levick 1983. 25. More popularis than Marcus: Priwitzer 2009, 107. 26. Change of name: Kaiser-Raiss 1980, 58–59; Kienast 1990, 148. 27. Commodus’s titles and consulships: Kienast 1990, 148–149. Felix: HA Com. 8.2. Use under Severans: Van’t Dack 1991. 28. Perennis and Cleander: Priwitzer 2009, 118–122, with n. 221 for the precedents. 29. Commodus’s final period: Hekster 2002, 103–111, 135–136. 30. Domitian’s assassination: Suet. Dom. 17.3; Dio 67.17. Herodian’s use of Dio: Roos 1915; followed by Alföldy 1973, 350. 31. Commodus and his father: Acts of Appian; P.Oxy. 33.1.5 = Musurillo 1954, 69. 32. Plotina included: Priwitzer 2009, 174. 33. Sources for Commodus: Priwitzer 2009, 116–117, with HA Com. 10.2. 34. Commodus’s coinage: Fittschen 1982, 84. 35. Possible successors: Champlin 1979, on Her. 2.3.1–4. Critique of the construction: Syme, ‘Patrician’, 1331–1333. Aurellius Pompeianus’s name: Oates 1976. Pertinax: PIR2 H 73. 36. Ti. Claudius Pompeianus at the Temple of Concord: HA Pert. 4.10, with Hekster 2002, 17, on his invitations to take over. 37. Glabrio: PIR2 A 73; Her. 2.3.4; cf. Dio 73(74).3.3. Female relatives: CIL 14, 2484 (add. p. 492). Pedigree traced from the consul of 152: ILS 1133. 38. M. Acilius Vibius Faustinus: PIR2 A 86, from ILS 5024. The name Vibius is significant, recalling Empress Vibia Sabina, half-sister of Rupilia. 39. Disturbances of 193: HA Pert. 10–11. 40. Denunciations of Commodus: HA Com. 18–19. 41. Dedication to Divus Commodus, brother of Severus (Thugga): AE 1951, 75; cf. Dio 75(76).7.4; HA Com. 17.11–12; HA Sev. 10.3–6, 11.3–4, 12.8, 19.3; Vict. Caes. 20.30; CIL 8, 9317. Further documentation: Birley 1999, 246 n. 24; Hekster 2002, 189–191, with nn. 135, 138. Senate’s view: HA Com. 19.2. 42. Fathers deified: Her. 4.2.1. 43. Resurgence of Hercules: Hekster 2002, 190–193. With titles such as Pius and Felix, which Severus also took over, parity with predecessors has to be taken into account. 44. Severus’s dream: Dio 74(75).3.1. 45. Domna as ‘Mater Castrorum’: PIR2 I 663 (p. 314); Levick 2007, 42–43, 141–142. Army connexions: Ghedini 1984, 18 nn. 48–49. Portraits: Fer. Dur. 174 n. 807. Jordan helmet: Rostovtzeff and Baur 1931, 2, 183, with pl. 23 (Berlin Museum, Sammlung Lipperheide 86). 46. Fink et al. (Fer. Dur. 175) suggest that the title carried a military cult, and C. R. Whittaker ad Her. 3.5.1 (p. 283) notes that it coincides with one of Severus’s salutations as ‘Imperator’. Maesa’s and Sohaemias’s titulature, official and unofficial, e.g., at Lambaesis (CIL 8, 2564): Kettenhofen 1979, 145–148, 152–155 (sceptical on its status). In AE 1955, 260, Sohaemias is also Mother of the Camps.

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47. Hairstyles of Faustina II and Julia Domna: Baharal 1992, esp. 114, also pointing out (112) the resemblances between portraits of the brothers Caracalla and Geta, on the one hand, and Commodus and Annius Verus, on the other. Baharal 1992, 113, notes, too, that Annius Verus is referred to on CIL 8, 11323, as Faustina’s son, as Geta is called Julia’s son on 9035, but it is only in conjunction with Marcus’s fatherhood, and we have to remember the crucial role of Faustina II in Antonine legitimacy. Links between Faustinae and Domna: Lusnia 1995. 48. Bust of Manlia Scantilla (Faustina II, Fittschen’s Type 7): Candilio 2000. Role of Domitia Lucilla: HA Jul. 1.3. 49. Lucilla’s plot: Dio 72(73).4.4–6, with the claim that Lucilla’s aim was to destroy Pompeianus, through his nephew Quintianus (PIR2 C 975); HA Com. 4.1–4, 8.3. Lucilla exiled: HA Com. 4.4; Lucilla killed: 5.7. Modern analyses: Balsdon 1962, 148 (damning); Grosso 1964, 145–164; Càssola 1965 (role of Pertinax); Birley 1999, 60–61; Hekster 2002, 52–55 (senatorial involvement); Priwitzer 2009, 122. Ending of Lucilla’s coinage: Priwitzer 2009, 190–191, accepting that she could still appear in 177/178. HA names Pompeianus (PIR2 C 975), Quadratus, Norbanus, Norbana, and Paralius, perhaps identical with the Pyrallus (of Fronto, Ad am. 1.20.5 [Haines 2.94; ad 161–167]; Paralium Mai2; followed by Van den Hout), on whom, see PIR2 P 1101. Date of conspiracy: coins displaying ‘Security’ confirm 182 (RIC 3, Commodus 45). Commodus in the arena in 182: coin reverses stress ‘The Valour of Augustus’ (RIC 3, Commodus 39–41). 50. Argument that a child of Crispina provoked Lucilla to act: Aymard 1955, 88–91, on RIC 3, Commodus 667, 677 (‘Fertility’); CREBM 4, Marcus and Commodus 674–677, 1676–1677 (‘Good Fortune’, ad 176); Hekster 2002, 52. Strack, Reichspr. 119–120, shows children of Marcus and Faustina II similarly announced. Priwitzer 2009, 122 n. 237, is sceptical. 51. No portraits of Lucilla after 169: Gros 1995, 47. 52. Young Ummidius Quadratus: Syme, ‘Patrician’, 1334, n. 144; cf. FOS 57; Birley 1993, 186. 53. Prefects of the Guard—Tarrutienus and Perennis: PIR2 T 35, 203. Execution of Saoterus: Dio 72(73).12.2; HA Com. 4.5. Julianus the ‘prefect’: Dio 72(73).5.1 (PIR2 S 135). Fall of Paternus: Dio 72(73).5.1–2. Vitruvius (PIR V 528): HA Com. 4.7–8. 54. Quintilii: Dio 72(73).5.3, 7.2; HA Com. 4.9, with PIR2 Q 21, 27, with 24 and 22 for offspring consuls in 172 and 180. For the villa on the Appian Way, see PIR2 Q p. 14; Ricci 1998. 55. Death of a ‘noble woman’: Dio 72(73).5.1, ‘Vitrasia Faustina’, with Syme, ‘Patrician’, 1334. 56. Commodus’s reign after Lucilla’s conspiracy: Hekster 2002, 55–77. 57. Perennis’s fall: Dio 72(73).9.3–4; Her. 1.9.3–9; HA Com. 6.1–2, with Brunt 1972, 172–777; Hekster 2002, 61–64. 58. M. Aurelius Cleander: A. Stein, PIR2 A 1481; AE 1952.6 (‘nurse’); cf. Pflaum, Carrières, 465, no. 180bis, Mantissa add., 1007–1008. Birley 1999, 78 n. 27, points out that the evidence allows Cleander the title ‘guard prefect with the anomalous title a pugione’ (cf. Hekster 2002, 70). Cleander’s role: Dio 72(73).13; Her. 1.12.3–13.6; HA Com. 7.1–3, with Grosso 1964, 116–125, and Hekster 2002, 72–75, which analyses modern interpretations. 59. Death of Antoninus: HA Com. 7.1.

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60. Vibia Sabina and her husband: PIR V 411; FOS 800. Death of Burrus: HA Com. 6.11. Agaclytus: CIL 6, 1592 = 31827. See Pflaum 1961, 37–39. Sister of Septimius Severus: ILAlg. I.241–242; ILS 388 (211 or later) from Calama. Name erased: I.Eph. 287, 289. 61. Annia Fundania Faustina: PIR2 A 713; FOS 60; HA Com. 5.8, 7.7. Vitrasius Pollio: CIL 6, 1540 (with stemma), making him ‘affine of the imperial House’. Petronii: PIR2 P 272, 311–312. 62. Mamertinus: PIR2 P 311; Septimianus: 312; Antoninus: 272. Executed: HA Com. 7.5. 63. Marinus: PIR2 D 71; Pflaum 1961, 36–37. See now Birley 2005, 327–328, with doubts on Marinus’s eastern origin but cautious of the doubts of B. Salway, in Cooley 2000, 149, on the marriage to Cornificia. Julia’s proposed marriage: Tac. Ann. 4.40.6. 64. Cornificia’s death: Dio 77(78).16.6a. 65. Pompeianus: Hekster 2002, 71–72. Sillar 2001, 418–419, proposes Ti. Claudius Pompeianus, military tribune under Severus in 197 and consul in 212, citing HA Com. 5.12 (‘Claudius’); HA Car. 3.8 (Lucilla’s son Pompeianus’s murder made to look like work of robbers). Military tribune: CIL 13, 1766. Second consulship: AE 1965, 338 (ad 209). Claudius Pompeianus, a Severan praetor: Ulpian, Fragmentum Vaticanum 232. Distinguished descendants after Caracalla: Sillar 2001, 419 n. 58. 66. Where initiative lay: Hekster 2002, 75–77. 67. Crispina’s fall: Dio 72(73).4.6; HA Com. 5.9. Date: Duncan-Jones 2006, 224, rebutting the dating of RIC 3, p. 365 (183), and citing CIL 3, 12487, where she is honoured in ad 187. Long survival: Grosso 1964, 663. 68. Assassination: Dio 72(73).22; Her. 1.16–17; HA Com. 17.1, with Hekster 2002, 80–81. Marcia on death list: Her. 1.17.5. Lengthy planning, with loyal men placed in provinces: Birley 2000, 191. Laetus: PIR2 A 358. 69. Annia Aurelia Faustina Augusta (PIR2 A 710), daughter of Annia Faustina (FOS 58): AE 1936, 40; Dio 79(80).5.1, 4; Her. 5.6.2. Name erased on a Spartan inscription of 221–222: Gofas 1990. Proculus, consul in 200, father of the regular consul of 235, Cn. Claudius Severus: PIR2 C 1025; Bassus: P 700. 70. Ti. Claudius Severus Proculus: PIR2 C 1028. Cn. Claudius Severus and his descent: Pflaum 1961, with their survival at 31. 71. Julia Aquilia Severa: PIR2 648. 72. Female descendants of Ummidii: Syme, ‘Ummidii’, 692. Flavius Antiochianus: PIR2 F 273; Pomponia Ummidia: P 781. 73. See Kajanto 1965, 272, for Numitor’s cowherd (RE 6, 2087) and use of the surname Faustinus/a: sixteen senators, eleven women. CIL 200 men + slaves/freed 9, women 232; slaves/freed 6 (in Africa 139 out of 447); Christian men 25, women 38. CIL 6 (Rome) index contains two pages of Faustinae and Faustini. 74. M. Aurelius Faustus ‘general’, ‘secretary’, etc.: I.Eph. 3088, 3091; Fabii Faustiniani: 666a/b (cf. 1041), 3225, 3424 (third-century lettering), 4107 (mid–second century). 75. Wallinger 1990, 62, notes scandal taken over by modern writers. Balsdon 1962, 145–147, repudiated it; Pflaum 1983 was less critical than it might have been. Farquharson 1951, 82, comes to a favourable conclusion, despite lack of evidence. Constantius’s wife:

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Amm. Marc. 21.6.4. A Faustina of lower rank is allowed in 286 to petition against a will: Cod. Iust. 3.28.18. 76. Faustina Bordoni/Boldoni: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), 2.s.v. 77. Faustina/e in Germany and France: I owe this information to the kindness of Mrs. D. Henwood. 78. Feline Faustina: Pym 1983. 79. Progression: Noreña 2011, 228–229, 283. 80. Women in Livy I: Levick 1994.

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Glossary

A.: Aulus, forename, given name C.: Gaius, forename, given name caduceus (-cei): wand carried by Hermes (Mercury) Cn.: Gnaeus, forename, given name consul: one of two leading annual magistrates: either regular, leading, eponymous, ordinary, i.e., holding office at the opening of the year; or replacement (suffect) holding office during later months (normally six, four, or two) decennalia (plural): festivities celebrating ten years of an emperor’s reign deme (from demos [-oi], ‘people’): subdivision of a community denarius (-ii): silver coin worth four sestertii fasces (plural): bunch of rods carried before magistrates, embodying their power to punish (consuls had twelve; praetors, six; and so on) imperium (-a): power of command granted by assembly of Roman people; outside Rome, military power; primary power of emperors, whose English title is derived from imperator, ‘commander’; the Roman Empire, sphere of command of the Roman people ‘knight’ (eques): member of the upper class (the equestrian order) who was not a member of the Senate, possessor of property worth 400,000 sestertii L.: Lucius, forename, given name legate (legatus): (a) subordinate officer of an emperor or a proconsul, in charge of a legion or a province, sometimes concerned especially with the administration of justice; (b) ambassador lictor: attendant on a magistrate with imperium, often carrying his fasces, sometimes on other personages M.: Marcus, forename, given name M’.: Manius, forename, given name P.: Publius, forename, given name paterfamilias (patres-): head of a household, with supreme authority over its members phylarch/Greek phylarchos (-oi): tribal leader, sheikh phyle (-ae): tribe; subdivision of a Greek community

pietas: devotion pius: devoted plebs: common people of Rome Pomerium: sacred boundary of Rome, marking the distinction between imperium exercised in Rome and abroad praetor: magistrate with imperium, often in charge of a court, holding office two clear years before the consulship prefect (praefectus [-i]): military officer or governor of a minor province procurator (-ores): agent in charge of estates or business affairs; if acting for the emperor (procurator Augusti), normally of equestrian rank and, in imperial provinces, in charge of taxation as well as estates quaestor: junior magistrate whose post admitted him to membership in the Senate Senatus Consultum: senatorial decree; abbreviated ‘SC’ on coins and inscriptions sesterce(s)/sestertius (-tii): bronze coin and unit of currency surname (cognomen): name assigned to individuals for personal peculiarities or achievements (e.g., ‘Strabo’, ‘squinting’; ‘Parthicus’, ‘victorious over the Parthians’); often hereditary and distinguishing one branch of a clan from another (e.g., Cornelii Lentuli, Cornelii Scipiones) T.: Titus, forename, given name Ti.: Tiberius, forename, given name toga of manhood: garment formally assumed by Roman male citizens when they had reached puberty tribune: (a) military, one of six junior officers in a legion or commander of an auxiliary cohort; (b) plebeian, magistrate of the plebs tribunician power: powers of a tribune, without the office, conferred exclusively on emperors and their successors

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Persons Index

Abercius, 32, 155, 200n77 Abundantia, 129 Acilius Glabrio, Manius, 146, 155 Acilius Glabrio Cnaeus Cornelius Severus, Manius, 146 Acilius Vibius Faustinus, Manius, 146, 155 Aelii Lamiae Silvani, 184n32 Aelius Antoninus, Titus, 63, 115, 117 Aelius Aristides, 11, 55, 60, 155 Aelius Aurelius, Titus, 114, 116 Aelius Caesar, Lucius, 15, 29, 45, 47, 49, 52, 102, 155, 156 Commodus and, 43 Hadrian and, 53 Marcus Aurelius and, 51 memorial to, 123 wife and, 26 Aelius Hadrianus, Titus, 58, 115, 155 Aelius Lamia Silvanus, Lucius, 62, 155 Aemilius Laetus, Quintus, 151, 155 Aeneas, 132 Aeternitas, 129 Agaclytus, 28, 71, 150, 155 Agilius Septentrio, 107, 155 Agrippa, Marcus, 73 Agrippa Postumus, 67 Agrippina the Elder, 78, 110, 155 Agrippina the Younger, 7, 34, 36, 83, 142, 155, 180n72 assimilation and, 121 autobiography of, 6 Claudius and, 30, 92 fire and, 97 military cloak of, 31–32

Narcissus and, 28 Nero and, 30, 33, 66 Alexander of Abunoteichus, 11, 12 Alexander Severus, 7, 119, 158 Ammianus Marcellinus, 66 Annia Aurelia Faustina, 152, 155 Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla, 31, 98, 114, 116, 128–29, 142, 148, 150, 155 betrothal of, 190n43 birth of, 100 Claudius Pompeianus, Ti., and, 73–74 Commodus and, 85 inscriptions and, 93 oisoning and, 83 Verus, L., and, 36, 47, 67–68, 70–71 Annia Cornificia Faustina, 23, 155 Annia Faustina, 77, 78, 93 Annia Fundania Faustina, 150, 155 Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina, 76, 95, 114, 116, 117, 155 Annia Galeria Faustina, 151 Annius Libo, Marcus, 22, 71, 150, 155, 156 Annius Verus, Marcus, 22, 49, 64, 70, 115, 117, 152, 156, 159 birth of, 134 Commodus and, 71–72 Hadrian and, 51 Julius Servianus, L., and, 44 Rupilia Faustina and, 146 Verus, L., and, 72 wealth of, 23 Annius Verus Caesar, Marcus, 156 Antinous, 30, 156 Antistius Burrus, Lucius, 150, 156

Antonia Picentina, 125, 156 Antonia the Younger, 34, 119, 156 Antoninus Pius, 3, 4, 6, 27, 34, 41, 98, 108, 115, 126, 130, 131, 156 adoption of, 45–47 apotheosis of, 69, 69f becoming emperor, 57–58 biography of, 15–16 bust of, 46f career of, 47–49 classical system of imperial administration and, 11 coins and, 103 Domitia Lucilla and, 31 as Enhancer of the Citizens, 104 Faustina I and, 58–62 Faustina II and, 36 girls and, 105 Hadrian and, 10, 46–50, 53–54, 57–58 as heir, 49–50 intellect and, 25 leisure interests of, 106 Marcus Aurelius and, 36, 62 marriage alliances and, 5 Matidia the Younger and, 35 revisions of, 54–56 statue of, 55f title of, 12 war and, 9 weddings and, 99–100 Antonius Polemo, Marcus, 48, 156 Apollonius, 121, 156 Appia Annia Regilla, 7, 49, 113, 127, 156, 203n33 Appia Severa, 184n23 Aquilia Severa, 152 Ariadne, 127 Arnuphis, 12 Arrius Antoninus, Caesar, 150, 156 Arulenus Rusticus, 107 Athena, 134 Attis, 132 Aufidius Fronto, 204n41 Aufidius Victorinus, Caesar, 20 Augustus, 3, 6, 21, 34, 38, 91, 156 deification of, 119 double principate and, 53 gladiatorial performances and, 143 Hadrian and, 42–43, 54

234

Persons Index

Livia and, 27 marriage incentives and, 103 succession and, 41, 52 women and, 25 Aurelia Fadilla, 62, 155, 156 Aurelius Antoninus, Titus, 114, 116 Aurelius Caesar, Marcus, 98 Aurelius Cleander, Marcus, 144, 149–50, 156 Aurelius Commodus, Lucius, 115, 117 Aurelius Faustus, Marcus, 152 Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, Titus, 117, 156 Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, Titus, 22, 45 Aurelius Victor, Sextus, 15, 16 Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus, Lucius, 141 Aurellius Commodus Pompeianus, Marcus, 141, 146, 156 Ausonius, 80 Avidius Cassius, 7, 10, 15, 66, 73, 77, 156 revolt of, 83–87, 205n53 Avidius Nigrinus, 42, 44–45, 184n23 Avillius Flaccus, Aulus, 86 Bacchus. See Dionysus Berenice of Judaea, 66 Britannicus, 31, 34, 78, 156 Bruttia Crispina Augusta, 36, 99, 141, 148, 150, 151, 156 Bruttius Praesens, 141 Caelestis, 129 Caelius Rufus, Marcus, 31 Calpurnia, 26 Calpurnius Piso, Cnaeus, 71, 79, 156 Calvisius Ruso, Publius, 185n50 Caracalla, 7, 103, 135, 141, 150, 156, 209n47 Caratacus, 79 Carus, 103 Cassia Cornelia Prisca, 204n41 Cassius Dio, Lucius, 13–15, 27, 29, 122, 140, 142, 144, 148 Catilius Severus, Lucius, 45, 48, 51, 156 Cecamore, Claudia, 135–36 Ceionia Fabia, 46, 49, 52, 66, 77, 83, 141, 156 Ceionia Plautia, 156 Ceionius Silvanus, Marcus, 184n23

Ceres, 60, 96, 121, 126–27, 129–31, 134 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 6, 11, 30, 31, 126, 156 Civica Barbarus, Marcus, 184n23 Civica Pompeianus, Sextus, 184n23 Claudius (I), 34, 65, 97, 116, 120, 132, 133, 144, 157 Agrippina the Younger and, 30, 92 Caratacus and, 79 Messalina and, 81–82 murder of, 31 Octavia and, 62 theatricality and, 91 wives of, 6 Claudius Aurelius Quintianus, Tiberius, 152 Claudius Frontinus Niceratus, Tiberius, 157 Claudius Herodes Atticus, Tiberius, 7, 21, 48, 99, 113, 127, 157 at Sirmium, 74–76 as tutor, 25–26 Claudius Pompeianus, Tiberius, 7, 26, 85–86, 87, 157 Commodus and, 141 Lucilla and, 73–74 as possible successor, 145 Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus, 148 Claudius Saethida Caelianus, Tiberius, 93, 157 Claudius Severus, Cnaeus, 44, 75–77, 142, 151–52, 157, 192n75 Claudius Severus Proculus, Tiberius, 151, 157 Cleopatra, 128 Commodus, Lucius Ceionius, 4, 6, 29, 77–78, 84–86, 98, 113, 147, 150, 151, 156 advancement of, 139–42 Agilius Septentrio and, 107 alimentary scheme and, 105 Annius Verus, M., and, 71–72 birth of, 63–64 Cornificia and, 82 deification and, 137 father of, 81 as heir apparent, 68 marriage of, 31 murder of, 14 Mysteries and, 131

possible successors of, 145–46 reign of, 142–45 succession plans and, 42–45 Concord, 134 Concordia, 129 Constantia, 66, 157 Constantine, 15, 16, 103 Constantine the Great, 66 Constantius II, 152 Cornelia, 30 Cornelius Fronto, Marcus, 20, 25, 104, 113, 150, 157 Aurelius Pius and, 60–61 birth and death dates, 175n5 Domitia Lucilla and, 14, 23, 26 Hadrian and, 45 Marcus Aurelius and, 5, 11, 13–14, 36, 67, 107–10, 112 Verus, L., and, 13, 72 Cornelius Gallus, Caesar, 86 Cornelius Sulla Felix, Lucius, 23 Cornificia, 32, 44, 52, 93, 108, 115, 117, 150, 159 Cratia, 21, 109, 110, 157 Cybele, 129, 131–32 Demeter. See Ceres Diana, 129, 134 Didius Julianus, Marcus, 26, 87, 146, 148, 158 Didius Marinus, Lucius, 150 Diocletian, 15 Dionysus, 127, 128 Domitia Faustina, 63, 98, 116, 157 Domitia Longina, 6, 28, 121, 157 Domitia Lucilla, 46, 51, 148, 157, 185n50, 203n33 Antoninus Pius and, 31 brick stamps and, 22 Cornelius Fronto, M., and, 14, 23, 26 Marcus Aurelius and, 108–10, 113–14 Domitian, 6, 21, 33, 53, 58, 144, 157 Domitia Paulina, 22, 121 Domitilla Diva Augusta, 35, 120 Domitius Afer, 23 Drusus, 54 Elagabalus, 7, 152, 157 Elizabeth I (queen), 110

Persons Index

235

Erucius Clarus, Caesar, 146, 157 Eusebius of Caesarea, 17 Eutropius, 16 Fabia Barbara, 184n23 Fabii Faustiniani, 152 Fabius Cornelius Repentinus, 61 Fadilla, 46, 77, 93, 101, 115, 139, 149, 157 Faustina I, 6, 7, 12, 17, 33, 49, 157 as adviser, 65–67 Antoninus Pius and, 58–62 apotheosis of, 69, 69f appearance of, 3 as Augusta, 35–36, 61 biographical facts on, 13 children of, 115–18 coinage and, 95, 101f, 106f consecration of, 123–26 daughters of, 148–51 death of, 61, 95 as exemplum, 146–48 Faustinian Girls and, 104–6 immediate predecessors of, 38–39 influence of, 66 inscriptions and, 93 Marcus Aurelius and, 51 marriage and, 30 power of, 5, 19 pregnancies of, 11 public recognition and, 94–96 qualifications of, 22–23 reputation of, 4 statue of, 50f wealth of, 20, 23 Faustina II, 6, 9, 12, 17, 18, 157 adulteries and, 80–81 as adviser, 65–67 anomalous distinction for, 34–36 appearance of, 3 auction and, 32 betrothal of, 61–63 biographical facts on, 13 bust of, 65f children of, 76–78, 102, 112–14, 115–18 Claudius Herodes Atticus, Ti., and, 74–76 consecration of, 135–37 Cornelius Fronto, M., and, 26 cult of, 133–34

236

Persons Index

death of, 87–89 as exemplum, 146–48 family names and, 114–15 Faustinian Girls and, 104–6 fertility and, 61, 110–12 immediate predecessors of, 38–39 inscriptions and, 93 Marcus Aurelius and, 66, 68, 84, 100–101, 107–8 Marius Maximus and, 16 marriage and, 31, 62–63, 100–101, 110–12 morality of, 194n104 as mother, 63–64 as Mother of the Camps, 78 poisoning and, 83 portraits of, 7, 64f power of, 5, 19 regnancies of, 11 ublic recognition and, 94–95 reputation of, 4 right to coin and, 36 statue of, 79 wealth of, 20, 23 Favorinus, 113 Flavia Domitilla, 157 Flavia Julia, 6, 157 Flavia Papiane, 98, 157 Flavius Sabinus, 53 Fortuna, 129 Frontinus Niceratus, 93 Fronto. See Cornelius Fronto, Marcus Fulvia Plautilla, 103, 157 Fundanus, 24 Fuscus Salinator, 43 Gaius Caesar, 42–43, 52 Gaius Caligula, 33, 68, 86, 142, 145, 158 Galba, 56 Galen, 14, 75, 77, 109, 158 Galen of Pergamene, 11 Galeria Lysistrata, 61, 158 Galerius Antoninus, Marcus, 96 Gallia Lugdunensis, 147 Geminas, 28 Germanicus Caesar, 52, 54, 71–72, 78–79, 81, 110, 121, 155 Geta, 7, 141, 151, 158, 209n47 Glycon, 11

Gordian III, 142 Gracchi, 30 Gratian, 152 Hadrian, 8, 21, 61, 127, 131, 132, 137, 142, 144, 152, 155, 158 Antinoopolis and, 39, 94 Antoninus Pius and, 10, 46–50, 53–54, 57–58 coinage and, 37, 95–96 deification of women and, 121–23 fertility and, 103 Historia Augusta and, 16 Marcus Aurelius and, 51–53, 185n50 marriage alliances and, 5 Matidia the Elder and, 29, 92 Pompeia Plotina and, 28–29, 36, 38, 122–23 statue of, 55f succession plans of, 42–45 suicide and, 88 Trajan and, 8, 41–42 Vibia Sabina and, 6, 22, 35, 123 Wall of, 9 Heliodorus, 84 Helios, 130 Helvius Pertinax, Publius, 87, 146, 149, 151, 158 Hera, 121 Hercules, 144, 147 Herodian, 14, 147 Hieropolis Castabala, 128 Hygieia, 129 Ignotus, 16 Isis, 129, 131, 133 Jerome (saint), 17 Julia Balbilla, 25, 29, 34, 158 Julia Domna, 6–8, 16, 25, 88, 147, 154, 158, 182n95 adultery and, 80 hairstyle of, 62 theatricality and, 91 Julia Maesa, 7, 121, 147, 154, 158 Julia Mamaea, 7, 154, 158 Julian, 80, 135 Julia Paulina, 22, 43, 158 Julia Sohaemias, 7, 154, 158

Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappus, 30 Julius Antoninus Pythodoris, Sextus, 99, 158 Julius Apolaustus, Tiberius, 98, 158 Julius Caesar, 43, 51, 119, 120, 126 Julius Servianus, Lucius, 42, 43–44, 158 Julius Severus, Caesar, 76 Julius Vindex, 196n130 Junius Rusticus, Quintus, 25–26, 107, 158 Juno, 96, 124, 129 Juno Lucina, 71, 118, 130, 134, 204n46 Jupiter, 124 Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 130, 136 Justinian, 17, 32, 158 Juvenal, 80 Kadmos, 39 Kore Soteira (Saviour Maiden), 129 Lamia Silvanus, Lucius, 101 Lex Voconia, 19 Licinianus, Lucius, 42 Licinius Sura, Lucius, 42 Lilybaeum, 78 Livia, 6–7, 27, 33, 104, 120, 126, 145, 153, 181n80 as Augusta, 34 beauty of, 24 as empress, 31 homage and, 121 ortraits of, 79 rivate influence of, 65 ublic recognition and, 94 Tiberius and, 30, 97 vilification of, 92 Livilla, 81 Livy, 154 Lucan, 34 Lucian, 11, 12 Lucifera, 129 Lucilla. See Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla Ludwig II, 145 Macrinius Avitus, Marcus, 87, 158 Manlia Scantilla, 148, 158 Marcellus of Side, 127 Marcia, 9, 151, 158

Persons Index

237

Marcus Aurelius, 3–4, 9, 12, 15, 23, 34, 54, 75, 155, 157, 158 Antoninus Pius and, 36, 62 Arch of, 10 auction and, 32 betrothal of, 55 children of, 76–78, 112–14, 115–18 civility of, 71 coin portraits of, 95 Commodus and, 46, 139–40 consecration and, 119, 135 Cornelius Fronto, M., and, 5, 11, 13–14, 36, 67, 107–10, 112 death of, 142–45 Domitia Lucilla and, 108–10, 113–14 as father, 63 Faustina II and, 20, 66, 82, 84–85, 87–89, 100–102, 135 favour to, 51–53 gladiators and, 81 Hadrian and, 51–53, 185n50 health and, 174n28 inscriptions and, 93 intellect and, 25, 107 leisure interests of, 106 medallions of, 127, 132 Quintilii and, 74 remarriage and, 141 statue of, 55f Verus, L., and, 9, 47, 56, 64, 68–70, 72–73, 83 Marius Maximus, 15–16, 41, 80, 85 Mark Antony, 128, 158 Mars, 130 Martial of Bilbilis, 42 Martius Verus, Publius, 86 Marullinus, 21 Matidia the Elder (Salonia Matidia), 6, 12, 35, 38, 49, 58, 68, 71, 121, 159 consecration and funeral of, 122 Hadrian and, 29, 92 Matidia the Younger (Mindia Matidia II), 6, 12, 35, 66–67, 105, 121, 158 Memnon, 30 Mercury, 126 Mindia Matidia II. See Matidia the Younger Minerva, 122

238

Persons Index

Mummius Rutilianus, Publius, 11 Munatia Plancina, 79 Narcissus, 28, 151 Nero, 6, 22, 32, 35, 139, 142, 144, 147, 158 Agrippina the Younger and, 30, 33, 66 Octavia and, 62 Nerva, 10, 15, 21, 29, 102, 123, 158 adoptive emperors and, 56 alimentary scheme and, 104 Hadrian and, 53 Trajan and, 21, 53, 58 Nike, 129 Octavia, 62 Octavius, Caesar, 51 Oracle of Apollo, 9 Orosius, 16 Panthea, 109, 158 Pedanius Fuscus, Cnaeus, 42, 158 Pedanius Fuscus Salinator, Cnaeus, 43, 159 Pedanius Secundus, Lucius, 42 Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, Marcus, 46, 77, 139, 141, 149, 159 Peter the Patrician, 14 Petronius Sura Mamertinus, Marcus, 77, 150, 159 Petronius Sura Septimianus, Marcus, 150, 159 Pharia, 133, 134 Philip the Arabian, 14, 37 Pietas, 129 Pius. See Antoninus Pius Platorius Nepos, Aulus, 42, 159 Plautius Quintillus, 77 Pliny the Younger, 21, 26, 28, 92, 105, 107, 159 Hadrian and, 36, 56 letters of, 14 on marriage, 24 Plutarch, 14 Pompeia Marullina, 21 Pompeia Plotina, 5, 6, 9, 16, 21, 30, 33–34, 145, 153 adultery and, 80 deification and, 121 education and, 25

Epicureanism of, 38 Hadrian and, 28–29, 36, 38, 122–23 Trajan and, 5, 6, 28–29, 92 Pompey the Great, 21 Pomponia Ummidia, 152 Pomponius Bassus, 152 Pomponius Proculus Vitrasius Pollio, Titus, 150, 155 Procopius, 32 Pulcheria Augusta, 159 Quadratilla, 23 Quintilius Condianus, Sextus, 74, 159 Quintilius Maximus, Sextus, 74, 159 Regulus, 133 Remus, 46 Romulus, 25, 46 Rupilia Faustina, 22–23, 51, 146, 159, 185n50 Sabina. See Vibia Sabina Salonia Matidia I. See Matidia the Elder Salvius Julianus, Publius, 149, 159 Saoterus, 144, 148, 159 Sappho, 30 Scipio Aemilianus, Publius, 103 Sedatius Severianus, Marcus, 11 Selene, 129, 130 Seleuceia, 29 Seneca, 26, 175n35 Septentrio, 107 Septimius Severus, 14, 15, 103, 146, 147, 149, 158, 159 coin portraits and, 95 Julia Domna and, 6, 7, 91 Sergius Paullus, Lucius, 192n75 Severus Alexander, 136, 142, 159 Sextilia, 35 Sextus, 62, 107, 159 Sodales Antoniniani Veriani, 72 Sogno, Caesar, 24 Sosius Falco, Quintus, 146, 159 Suetonius Tranquillus, Caesar, 14, 15, 16, 27 Tacitus, 10, 14, 27, 45, 113 Taruttienus Paternus, Publius, 149, 159 Terentius Gentianus, Decimus, 42, 159 Tertullian, 134

Theodora, 32, 153, 159 Tiberius, 33, 43, 65, 94, 159, 181n80 Augustus and, 52–54 Calpurnius Piso, Cn., and, 79 Livia and, 30, 97 marriages and, 21 Tigidius Perennis, Sextus, 144, 149, 159 Titus, 6, 21, 35, 159 Trajan, 3, 9, 10, 38, 43, 102, 123, 131, 142, 143, 159 adoptive emperors and, 56 alimentary scheme and, 104 deification of women and, 121 Hadrian and, 8, 41–42 Nerva and, 21, 53, 58 Pliny the Younger and, 36 Pompeia Plotina and, 5, 6, 28–29, 92 Vibia Sabina and, 22 Triptolemus, 130, 131 Triumvir Octavian, 24 Tullia, 126 Tyche, 129, 130, 134 Uchi Maius, 93 Ulpia Marciana, 22, 35, 92, 119, 121 Ulpian, 26–27, 29 Ulpius Phaedimus, Marcus, 179n54 Ummidia Cornificia Faustina, 152 Ummidia Quadratilla, 21, 75, 148 Ummidius Quadratus, Marcus, 23, 77, 159 Ummidius Quadratus Severus Sertorius, 21, 44, 51 Valeria Messalina, 7, 28, 34, 81, 153, 159 Valerius Hermaiscus, 132–33, 160 Vedius Antoninus III, Publius, 98–99, 160 Velleius Paterculus, 65 Venus, 129, 134 Verus, Lucius, 12, 43, 53, 74–75, 117, 128, 148, 150, 187n66 betrothal of, 67–68, 190n43 career of, 67–68 Commodus and, 139–40 Cornelius Fronto, M., and, 13, 72 death of, 71–72 Lucilla and, 36, 47, 67–68, 70–71 Marcus Aurelius and, 9, 47, 56, 64, 68–70, 72–73, 83 poisoning and, 83

Persons Index

239

Verus, Lucius (continued) as quaestor, 56 reputation of, 72–73 statue of, 55f tutors and, 25 Vespasian, 21, 33, 35, 59, 61, 175n35 Vesta, 96, 134 Vettulenus Cerialis, Sextus, 44 Vettulenus Civica Barbarus, Marcus, 70, 133, 160 Vettulenus Civica Cerialis, 44 Vettulenus Civica Cerialis, Sextus, 43, 184n23 Vibia Aurelia Sabina, 74, 115, 150, 160 Vibia Sabina, 39, 49, 121, 130, 141, 153, 156, 160, 198n31 apotheosis of, 124 coinage of, 37, 95, 181n94, 182n97 fertility and, 103

240

Persons Index

Hadrian and, 6, 22, 35, 123 honours and, 202n13 influence and, 28–29 Julia Balbilla and, 30 Matidia the Elder and, 92 statue of, 97 Vibius Sabinus, 29 Victoria, 129 Victoria (queen), 60 Vitellius, 35, 160 Vitrasius Pollio, Lucius, 58 Vitruvius Secundus, 149, 160 Xiphilinus, 14 Zenios, 39 Zeus, 39 Zonaras, 14 Zosimus, 16

Subject Index

accountants, 122 activities, public, 96–99 actors, 76 Acts of Hermaiscus, 38 Acts of the Alexandrian Martyrs, 38, 144 Acts of the Greeks and Romans of Old (Marcus Aurelius), 107 adoptive emperors, 56 adultery, 80–82 advisers, 143–44 Faustinas I and II as, 65–67 Africa, 15, 77, 150 age empresses and, 26 succession and, 45 Agricola (Tacitus), 14 Alban Mount, 51 Alexander (Lucian), 11 Alexandria, 38, 93 Alföldi, A., 130–31 Alföldy, G., 11, 113, 173n1 alimentary schemes, 104–5, 199n50 alliances, aristocratic, 77 alms, 104 alumnus (foster child), 107 Amastris, 128 Ameling, W., 115–18, 192n74 ancestry, imperial, 151–52 Ancyra, 76, 87 Antinoopolis, 39, 94 Antonine age, 4, 8–12, 17, 128 Antonine Column, 69, 73, 124, 191n68 Antonine dynasty, 23, 60

apotheosis, of Antoninus Pius and Faustina I, 69, 69f appearance of Faustinas I and II, 3 public, 97 Aquileia, 73 Arabia, 76 arcae (treasure chests), 20 Arco di Portogallo, 123 aristocratic alliances, 77 aristocratic system, 11 Armenia Major, 70 art, 4, 103 Arval Brethren, 119, 143, 202n17 Asia, 15, 48, 49, 54, 71, 150 Asia Minor, 14, 20, 76–77, 87, 93, 128, 139 assimilation, 120–21, 126–29 association, 120, 126, 135 auction (169), 32 auctoritas (authority), 20 Augusta (title), 34–36, 61, 63, 65, 92, 100 Augustan Concord, 60 Aurelian Way, 47 autobiography, 4 Baharal, D., 194n104 Balkans, 87 ballet dancers, 80 Balsdon, J. P. V. D., 195n119, 210n75 Barnes, T. D., 52, 53, 54, 187n66 base metal coins, 96 battle scenes, 187n66 beauty, 24

Beckmann, M., 96, 100, 123 best. See optimus Birley, A. R., 8, 34, 70, 74, 77, 88, 141, 186n65, 190n43 on affairs with gladiators, 80 on children of Marcus and Faustina II, 115–16, 118 on Claudius Pompeianus, Ti., 73 on Commodus, 140 on Cornificia, 82 on Fortunatus, 71 on Marcus Aurelius, 108, 113 place-holders and, 52 on Pompeia Plotina, 38 birth rate, 104, 105 Boatwright, M. T., 10, 92, 93 body language, 80 Bol, B., 115 Bononia, 142 brick stamps, 22 Brief History (Eutropius), 16 British politics, 104 Britons, 9 bronze coins, 96 Byzantium, 87, 99 Cappadocia, 11, 70, 86 Cappadocian Taurus, 87 cenotaph complex, 69 Champlin, E., 43, 146 Chausson, F., 60 children, 75 alumnus, 107 assistance to, 104–5 death of, 200n76 of Faustina II, 76–78, 112–14, 115–18, 137 mortality rate of, 112 Christianity, 12 Chronicle (Eusebius of Caesarea), 17 Chronographia (Malalas), 16 Cilician Gates, 87 Codex (Justinian), 17 codicils, 66–67 coiffure, 95, 128 coins and coinage, 4, 7, 17–18, 58, 59f, 60, 63, 93, 103, 120, 203n30 assimilation and, 128 base metal, 96

242

Subject Index

betrothal of Faustina II and, 62 consecration and, 121, 125 Faustina I and, 101f, 106f fertility and, 111f as propaganda, 94 public life and, 94–96 right to coin, 18, 36–38 succession and, 145 Concord, 100, 102, 103, 198n31 concordia (harmony), 8 concubines, 141, 143 consecration, 119, 121 of Faustina I, 123–26 of Faustina II, 135–37, 203n28 of Matidia the Elder, 122 conservatism, 45 conspiracy, 74, 144 Cortés Copete, J. M., 205n53 Costoboci, 9 Council House, 98, 99 cults, 11, 119, 120, 125 of Cybele, 131–32 of living Faustina II, 133–34 Cyzicus, 128 Danubian tribes, 9, 73 decurions, 122 deification, 35, 54, 119–21, 137 deities, 96–97, 119, 126–30 demes, 39 Demetrieus (tribe), 39 desertion, 79 Dialogus de Oratoribus (Tacitus), 113 Digest (Justinian), 17, 48 Dionysiac artists, 76 disasters, 97 dissident history, 6 diva (female deity), 119 Diva (title), 35, 134 Divine House, 31, 126 Di Vita-Evrard, G., 185n50 divus (male deity), 119 documentary sources, 17–18 domi militiaeque, 10 dominus (master), 8 double principate, 53–54 dowry, 57, 82, 108 Duncan-Jones, R. P., 37 dynastic principle, 174n19

economic decline, 86 education, of women, 19, 25–26 Egypt, 84, 94, 128, 133 Eichler, F., 187n66 Eleusis, 130–31, 139 elite, 8 emperors adoptive, 56 as husbands, 106–10 joint, 68–70 Pius Antonius as, 57–58 as sons, 108–9 empresses, 75 age and, 26 dependency on males and, 26–28 independent action of, 28–30 influence of, 20, 28–30 marriage and, 30–31 necessity of, 21–22 Palatine and, 33–34 personal qualities of, 23–25 power of, 31–33 qualifications of, 22–26 representation of, 92 right to coin and, 36–38 sons and, 30–31 succession and, 30–31 vilification of, 92 vulnerability of, 26–28 wealth of, 22–23 Enhancer of the Citizens (title), 104 Enmann, A., 16 Ephesus, 54, 128, 152 Epicureanism, 28, 38 epigraphic habit, 17 Epitome, 15, 16 estates, 23 Excerpta Valesiana, 14 exploitation, 154 Extracts (Marcus Aurelius), 107 family, 5, 72. See also children continuity, 9 names, 114–15 nuclear, 75 Farquharson, A. S. L., 153, 210n75 Father of the Fatherland (title), 95 Faustinas I and II. See persons index Faustinian Girls, 57, 89, 104–6, 133

Faustinian Guild, 122 Faustinian School, 105 Felicitas (Good Fortune), 9 female deity. See diva fertility, 103 coinage and, 111f of Faustina II, 61, 110–12 infertility, 63 festivities, 97 Fittschen, K., 18, 63–64, 95, 115, 118, 129 Flavians, 33, 46 Flory, M. B., 34 foreign policy, 86 Formiae, 204n41 Forth-Clyde isthmus, 9 Forum, 80 foster child. See alumnus France, 153 funerary honours, 96 Galatia, 76 Gamelieus (tribe), 39 garments, 31–32 Gaul, 128 Genius of the Roman People (title), 123 Germany, 10, 153 Germe, 133 Gibbon, Edward, 7, 8 Ginsburg, J., 92 girls assistance to, 105 birth of, 111 Faustinian Girls, 57, 89, 104–6, 133 gladiators, 80–81, 143 gold, 32 coins, 96 Golden Age, 124–25, 131, 151 Golden House, 33 Good Fortune. See Felicitas gossip, 98, 126 gout, 88 governorship, provincial, 48 grants, monetary, 104–5 Great Guild of the Treasuries, 23, 122 Greece, 9 Gros, P., 128, 129 guilds, 122 Gyarus, 60

Subject Index

243

Hahn, U., 202n13 hairstyles, 120, 147, 189n27, 209n47 coiffure, 95, 128 of Faustina II, 61–62, 95 portraits and, 6, 18 Halala, 87, 88f Harmonieus (tribe), 39 harmony. See concordia Hekster, O., 119, 144, 147, 151 Hellenizing temple, 10 Hemelrijk, E. A., 25 Heraieus (tribe), 39 Herdsmen, 84, 86, 196n131 Hermione (city), 98 Hierapolis, 49 Hieropolis Castabala, 128 Historia Augusta, 15–16, 53, 70, 74, 88, 135, 136, 145, 152, 176n13 on Antoninus Pius, 49 on Commodus, 86 deaths of Faustinas I and II, 13 on Hadrian, 42, 52 on Marcus Aurelius, 84–85 on poisoning, 83 on scandal, 79–80 on Verus, L., 72 Historia Nova (Zosimus), 16 Histories against the Pagans (Orosius), 16 history, 5 dissident, 6 imperial, 16 social, 6 History (Herodian), 14 homage, 119–21 honorific dedications, 92 honours, 202n13 funerary, 96 public, 78–79 horoscopes, 68 humour, 58 Imperator (title), 78 imperatrix, 31 imperial administration, 11 imperial ancestry, 151–52 imperial history, 16 imperial portraiture, 6 individual deities, 129–30 infertility, 63

244

Subject Index

influence of empresses, 20, 28–30 of women, 20, 65–66, 93 inheritance, 14, 23, 43, 61, 66, 103 inscriptions, 4, 7, 17, 58, 93, 100, 125 Institutes (Gaius), 17 intellect, 25–26, 107 Italica, 21 jewellery, 31–32, 67 Jewish community, 38 joint emperors, 68–70 Julio-Claudian period, 7, 53 Just, R., 32 Kaisergeschichte (KG), 16 Kalliteknios (tribe), 39 Kampen, N. B., 91, 103 Keltanen, M., 37 KG. See Kaisergeschichte kinship, 185n50 Krappe, A. H., 81, 193n100 Kuhn, A. B., 192n74 landowners, 104–5 Landskron, A., 187n66 Lateran, 51 Law on Vespasian’s power, 33 Leader of the Youth (title), 85, 139 legal sources, 17–18 Levant, 87 Life of Verus, 52 Lightning Miracle, 191n68 literary sources, 13–17 Lorium, 47, 57, 124 Lower Moesia, 87 Lugdunum, 132 Lusnia, S. S., 189n27 Lycaonia, 93 Lystra, 128 Maeonia, 133 Magnum Collegium, 20 maîtresse en titre, 141 Malalas, John, 16 malaria, 112 male deity. See divus males, dependency on, 26–28 Marcianios (tribe), 39

Marcomanni (tribe), 73, 141, 191n68 marriage, 5, 24, 30, 60, 67, 100 compliance and, 20 of Faustina II, 31, 62–63, 101, 110–12 imperial, 6 incentives, 103 of Lucilla and Verus, L., 70–71 reluctance to, 103 remarriage, 71, 141 master. See dominus Mater Castorum, 78–79 Matidios (tribe), 39 Mattingly, H., 126 Mauretania, 9 Mausoleum of Hadrian, 137 medallions, 17, 127, 130, 132 medical aid, 10 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), 4, 14, 34, 60, 61, 82, 107–9, 112 on Commodus, 140 on Faustina II, 75, 87 Mellanby, J. H., 200n75 memoirs, 4 Memoranda (Marcus Aurelius), 107 Mikocki, T., 93 military, 11–12 military success. See victoria Millar, F., 192n74 Minervian Guild, 122 misrepresentations, 4 Mommsen, Th., 115 monarchy, 58–61, 154 monetary grants, 104–5 monuments, 92, 93, 98, 102, 123, 128 of Antoninus Pius and Faustina I, 69, 69 Moors, 9 morality, 194n104 personal, 109 mortality rates, 10, 174n22 of children, 112 motherhood, 63–64, 65, 112 Mother of the Camps (title), 19, 78 mythistoricus, 15 names family, 114–15 survival of, 152–53 Narbonensis, 21

Nemausus, 47 New History (Zosimus), 16 Nicaea, 133 Nicomedia, 133 nomenclature, 12 family, 114 Noreña, C. F., 8, 102 North Africa, 150 November, renaming of, 99 nuclear family, 75 Numidia, 128 nuncupatio votorum, 187n66 nursing, 113 Nymphaeum, 99 October, renaming of, 59, 99 On the Caesars (Sextus Aurelius Victor), 15 opiate, 110 Opitergium, 73 oppression, 86 optimus (best), 8 Orfitianum, 75 Ostia, 81, 99, 100, 102, 134 Oxyrrhynchus, 133 Palatine, 33–34, 135 Panegyric on Rome, 55, 92, 98, 105 Panegyricus, 28 Pannonia, 52 pantomime contests, 98 papyri, 17 Parent of the Legions (title), 79 Parthian tribes, 9, 67, 70, 84 partisans, 68 paterfamilias, 20 paternal inheritance, 23 Pater Patriae (title), 58, 140, 181n88 patriciate, 47 Paulinios (tribe), 39 performance of privacy, 91 Pergamum, 128 periods, 8–9 permanent loans, 104 personal morality, 109 personal qualities, of empresses, 23–25 Peter, H., 16 Pflaum, H.-G., 10, 76, 77, 150, 194n104, 195n119, 210n75

Subject Index

245

Philippopolis, 133 Phrygian Apamea, 128 Piazza Colonna, 73 place-holders, 52 plague, 9–10, 86, 174n22, 196n131 plebeians, 47 Plotinianios (tribe), 39 poetry, 175n35 poisoning, 71, 83 Poland, 153 politics British, 104 rivalry and, 46 women in, 7, 28, 148 portraiture, 95, 177n26, 197n16 of Faustina II, 7, 64f hairstyles and, 6, 18 of Livia, 79 potentia (potency), 20 poverty, 4 power of empresses, 31–33 misuse of, 80 personal relationships and, 28 social, 8 of women, 5, 19–21, 27, 28, 31 prayer, 25 predecessors, of Faustina I, 121–23 priesthoods, 47, 72, 119 Salii, 51 supreme, 56 princeps, 59 principate, 4 double, 53–54 privacy, performance of, 91 private life emperors as husbands, 106–10 family names, 114–15 fertility of Faustina II, 110–12 marriage of Faustina II, 110–12 theatricality and, 91–92 Priwitzer, S., 80, 86, 187n66 profectio, 187n66 propaganda, 94 property, 23, 66 propriety, 66 prostration, 32 provincial governorship, 48 Prusias ad Hypium, 39

246

Subject Index

public appearances, 97 public honours, 78–79 public horse, 186n54 publicity, 154 public life activities, 96–99 coinage and, 94–96 creation of dynasty and, 99–104 Faustinian Girls and, 104–6 recognition and, 94 representation, 92–93 theatricality and, 91–92 travel, 96–99 public opinion, 66 public presentations, 4 public recognition, 94 public scandal, 79–80 Public Vows, 100 Punic War, 132 Pym, Barbara, 153 Quadi (tribe), 73, 191n68 quaestorship, 62, 77 Quintanensia, 23 Rain Miracle, 191n68 Ramsay, W., 180n67 recognition, public, 94 recruits, shortage of, 103 regents, 52 religion, 131, 175n35 remarriage, 71, 141 Rémy, B., 10, 27, 35, 58, 127, 187n66, 203n28 representation misrepresentations, 4 public, 92–93 resentments, 45–46, 67 resisting readings, 92 respect informal expressions of, 36 signs of, 32 revolt, of Avidius Cassius, 83–87, 205n53 Rhine bridge, 78 right to coin, 18, 36–38 rivalry, 46 rough trade, 80, 82 Ruler of the Universe (title), 78

Sabinios (tribe), 39 Sacred Isopythic Leukophryena, 98 Sacred Way, 124, 132 sacrifice of the Taurobolion, 132 Salii (priesthood), 51 sanctuary at Eleusis, 130–31 San Lorenzo (church), 124 Sarmatians, 10, 142 Saviour of the Fleet (title), 133 scandal, 79–80 schemes, alimentary, 104–5, 199n50 secondary impregnation, 81 Secular Games, 102 Senate, 47–48, 77, 87, 100, 123, 135, 136, 137, 145, 173n1 Augustus and, 6 Avidius Cassius and, 84 body language and, 80 consecration and, 119 empresses and, 26, 44 Hadrian and, 8 language of, 65 SC Orfitianum, 75 Temple of Apollo and, 33 senatorial order, 175n35 senior women, 31 September, renaming of, 59, 126 sestertii, 59f Severan dynasty (193–235), 6, 8, 103, 128 Severy, B., 91 sexuality, 109–10, 148 shrines, 92 silver coins, 96 Sirmium, 74–76, 142 smallpox, 9, 174n22 Smyrna, 76, 98, 111, 115, 127, 129 social history, 6 social power, 8 sons, 30–31 sophists, 48 sources documentary, 17–18 legal, 17–18 literary, 13–17 Spain, 9, 21, 103, 128, 153 aristocracy of, 3 State Treasury, 89, 124 statues, 59, 92, 93, 99–100 of Faustina I, 50f

of Faustina II, 79 groups of, 128 of Hadrian, 55f stephanephorate, 127 Stoicism, 26, 107 stopgaps, 52 Stucchi, B., 123 St. Urban (church), 127 succession, 30–31, 41–42 adoptive emperors and, 56 age and, 45 Antoninus Pius and, 45–50 coinage and, 145 double principate and, 53–54 Marcus Aurelius and, 51–53 plans, 42–45 policy, 12 revisions and, 54–56 successors, of Commodus, 145–46 Suda, 14 suicide, 88 supreme priesthood, 56 Syme, R., 11, 47, 86, 98, 178n15 on Antonine empre, 8 on Marius Maximus, 15–16 Syria, 7, 15, 41, 71, 73, 84, 87, 147 Szaivert, W., 95, 133 Taurobolion, sacrifice of, 132 Taurus Mountains, 135 Temple of Apollo, 33 Temple of Augustus, 104 Temple of Concord, 145 Temple of Faustina, 10 Temple of Quirinus, 120 Temple of Serapis, 133 Temple of Venus, 100, 147 Temple of Vesta, 97 Temporini, H., 123 Tertullianum, 75 theatre, 97, 105 theatricality, 91–92, 107 theology, 175n35 Thesmophorios, 39 Third Century Crisis, 9 travel, 96–99 treasure chests. See arcae Tree-Bearers, 132 Treggiari, S., 20

Subject Index

247

tribes. See also specific tribes of Antinoopolis, 39 Danubian, 9, 73 Triumviral period, 126 Trophonieus (tribe), 39 Tyana, 87 Ummidii, 178n15 Valois, H., 176n8 Van den Hout, M. P. J., 191n58 Várhelyi, Z., 175n35 Vatican Museum, 3 Verus, 15 Vestal Virgins, 27 Via Flaminia, 123 vices, 176n8 victoria (military success), 9 Victorian culture, 10 Viminacium, 142 virtues, 176n8 Vogel, L., 124 Wallinger, E., 80, 210n75 warfare, 9, 187n66 wealth, 19–20 of empresses, 22–23 of Pius Antoninus, 57 Weber, W., 195n119 weddings, 99–100

248

Subject Index

Wegner, 187n66 Weiss, P., 96, 99 wet nurses, 113 Whittaker, C. R., 180n63, 208n46 Williams, W., 58, 69 women, 70. See also empresses; marriage ancestry and, 152 children and, 75 deification of, 119–21 education of, 19, 25–26 inferiority of, 107 influence of, 20, 65–66, 93 intellect and, 25–26 motherhood, 63–64, 65, 112 in politics, 7, 28, 148 power of, 5, 19–21, 27, 28, 31 remarriage and, 71 scandal and, 80 senior, 31 theatricality and, 91 transgressive, 6 writing about, 4 wonderworkers, 11 Woolf, G., 105 Year of the Four Emperors, 141 Youth Association, 107 Zenios (tribe), 39