Chapter 9 has shown how Rome came under the influence of both Etruscan culture in its first three hundred years and was introduced in the second century B.C.E. to the social customs of Greece and the Hellenized lands of Asia minor. Yet, although Rome became increasingly Hellenized during the last century of the Republic, it was still predominantly a society suspicious of sexual pleasure, and remote from any concept of love as a passion bringing joy and sorrow.
The symposium is the only context in Greek society or literature in which men associated with women who lived by their charms and their sexuality, but these women were not equal partners; instead, they were usually hired, either as musicians for collective entertainment or as short-term sexual companions for individual guests (Fig. 10.1). These marginalized women had no other role in society; to be an unprotected foreigner was at times little better than the position of a slave (see Chapter 3).
As in Greece, so in Rome well-born wives were differentiated from the shadowy foreign or freedwomen who lived by their sexual charm. But respectable Roman women had always been accepted at social occasions among their own class; hence there was not the clear dividing line between the “respected” domestic wife and the exploited outsider familiar from Greek society. To judge from our sources in the last years of the republic, the more independent women of good family were now beginning to decide for themselves what kind of social occasion they enjoyed. Both in ostensibly factual texts and in imaginative writing a new kind of women appears precisely at the time of Cicero and Caesar: a woman in high position, who nevertheless claims for herself the indulgence in sexuality of a woman of pleasure. The theme of this chapter is this new pattern of female behavior and its influence on the celebration of love and submission to women in Roman poetry between the time of Catullus (85?–54 B.C.E.) and Ovid (43 B.C.E.–17C.E). This period coincides with the rise of Caesar and the first thirty years of Augustus’s long principate.
Figure 10.1. Greek red-figure vase made in Athens, late sixth century B.C.E., signed by Smikros, on the body are depicted a flute player and a hetaira amusing the male guests at a symposium.
To visualize the world of these “modern” women we must forget the respectable dinner parties described by Cornelius Nepos (writing after 50 B.C.E.):
There are numerous actions decent by our standards which are thought base [by the Greeks]. For what Roman is ashamed to take his wife to a dinner-party? Where does the lady of the house not occupy the place of honor, and receive guests? This is all very different in Greece: she is only invited to dinners of the family and sits only in the inner part of the house, which is called the women’s quarters: no one enters unless bound by ties of kinship.
(Lives of the Foreign Generals, preface 6–7; Horsfall 1989: 29–30)
Instead, realistic prose reportage and the emerging genre of personal love elegy offer glimpses of glamorous and assertive women, living a life of parties and self-gratification and choosing their own lovers. They are portrayed both inside elite society and in a more shadowy undefined half-world. Two of these women, at least, named by Cicero and Sallust, were historical figures, though male prejudice has surely distorted the record of their lives. Of the women celebrated by love poetry Catullus’s beloved has been identified with the historical Clodia, wife of Metellus. Although she is the only poetic mistress that can be identified with any confidence, Apuleius, writing two centuries after Catullus, provides names “from real life” of the women beloved by each of the poets. This is little more than the predictable search for biography. Women like Tibullus’s Delia or Ovid’s Corinna are more imaginative creations than real flesh-and-blood lovers; the poets themselves are skillful in omitting any detail that might even define the social status of the women they celebrate. But whatever the basis in society for this new model of woman, the literary figure sets a fashion. Corresponding with this “new woman” is what one might call a “new man,” the poet-lover characterized by a voluntary and quite un-Roman subordination to her dominant personality.
First and most famous of these femmes fatales is “Lesbia,” the brilliant and faithless lover represented in the poetry of the young Veronese aristocrat Valerius Catullus. Although his poems are not arranged sequentially, to narrate the rise and fall of their relationship, they enable the reader to evoke its nature, and the discrepancy between his idealism and her experience. For Lesbia is a married woman and the relationship begins as a secret.
Lesbia hurls abuse at me in front of her husband.
That fatuous person finds it highly amusing!
Nothing gets through to you, jackass, —for silence would signal
that she’d been cured of me, but her barking and bitching
show that not only haven’t I been forgotten
but that this burns her, and so she rants and rages
(Poem 83; Martin 1979: 120)
Their first meeting is arranged through an accommodating friend.
He gave me access to a field once forbidden
he gave me a house and gave me its mistress also,
and in that place we explored our mutual passion.
there my radiant goddess appeared to me, stepping
lightly, and paused once—to stand with the sole of her sandal
on the wellworn threshold and her bright foot crossed it
as in that time when passionate love for her husband
brought Laodamia to the house which Protesilaus
had built in vain …
(68.67–75; Martin 1979: 102)
Catullus, who also wrote beautiful poems in celebration of marriage, gives to this clandestine union the symbolism (for example, crossing the threshold) and sanctity of a marriage.
Darling, we’ll both have equal shares in the sweet love you offer
and it will endure for ever—you assure me.
O heaven, see to it that she truly keep this promise,
that it came from her heart and was sincerely given,
so that we may spend the rest of our days in this lifelong
union, this undying compact of holy friendship.
(109; Martin 1979: 146)
For her he invokes every value of Roman life: the compact between men and nations, friendship itself, and family love. “I didn’t regard you just as my mistress then: I cherished you / as a father does his sons or his daughters’ husbands” (72.3–4). “An old man cherishes his grandson no more deeply, / watching him nurse in the arms of his only daughter” (68.119–20). As long as his love is reciprocated, Catullus pours out direct addresses to his Lesbia such as were never written by any Greek:
Lesbia, let us only live for loving
and let us value at a single penny
all the loose flap of senile busybodies!
Suns when they set are capable of rising
but at the setting of our own brief light
night is one sleep from which we never waken.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred …
(5.1–7; Martin 1979: 7)
When she grows tired of him, he knows that he must learn to endure it:
Yes there were days which shone for you with rare brightness,
now she no longer wants it. You mustn’t want it,
you’ve got to stop chasing her now—cut your losses,
harden your heart and hold out firmly against her.
Goodbye now, lady: Catullus’ heart is hardened,
he will not look to you nor call against your wishes.
(8.8–12; Martin 1979: 10)
But he cannot hold out, and the poems of rejection outnumber those of reciprocated love. Their intense pain turns in the end from internalized anguish to graphic abuse of “Lesbia” as one who has become shameless and promiscuous. Witness his message, sent through the intermediaries Furius and Aurelius:
Back to my girl then, carry her this bitter
message, these spare words.
May she have joy and profit from her cocksmen,
go down embracing hundreds all together,
never with love, but without interruption,
wringing their balls dry …
(11.15–22; Martin 1979: 14)
A last poem—or so it seems—does not even have an indirect message for her, but fantasizes his despair at her degradation in terms of the prostitute’s tricks and hand-jobs:
Lesbia, Caelius—yes, our darling,
yes, Lesbia, the Lesbia Catullus
once loved uniquely, more than any other!
—now on street comers and in wretched alleys
she shucks the offspring of greathearted Remus.
(58; Martin 1979: 59)
It is predictable for the discarded lover to abuse the woman who rejected him, but students of Catullus’s and “Lesbia’s” society have seen confirmation of his abusive accusations in the account of her way of life offered by another male source, Cicero, who has cause to reinterpret her relationship with Catullus’s successor. For “Lesbia,” the name chosen for his Roman mistress by Catullus, as an admirer of Sappho, is generally believed to have been the noblewoman Clodia, perhaps ten years Catullus’s elder. Clodia was first wife, then widow, of the stuffed-shirt Metellus Celer. After she left Catullus, she went on to an equally intense affair with another brilliant young man from out of town, M. Caelius Rufus—perhaps the very Caelius addressed in poem 58. Caelius was prosecuted for political violence in 54 B.C.E., and Cicero, as defending counsel, diverted the jury away from Caelius’s probable guilt by attributing the prosecution to Clodia. He portrayed the charges as the malice of a jilted lover, and depicted her as little more than a high-class harlot. Cicero’s version shows us the daughter of one of Rome’s noblest families claiming the sexual freedom of a woman with no social standing to lose, and making no effort to conceal her behavior—”a woman not just noble but notorious” (For Caelius 32); Caelius’s accusers have supposedly reproached him with the “passions, love making, adulteries, visits to Baiae, beach picnics, parties and revelling, songs, choruses and boattrips” of la dolce vita (35), and Cicero in turn shames Clodia with the life-style he claims she has taught Caelius.
Clodia was from a family so noble it could be indifferent to bourgeois public opinion, and her brother, Publius, a maverick demagogue, was Cicero’s most dangerous political enemy. It is into his mouth that the advocate puts his most damning insults.
Imagine that your young brother is talking to you. “Why are you storming and raging, sister, why are you crazy? [He breaks into a well-known comic verse.] Why make a small affair seem great by kicking up a fuss?
You set your eyes on the young next-door neighbour; his health and height and good looks excited you; you wanted to see more of him; you often got togther in your gardens. You want to keep this dependent son of a stingy father tied to you by your purse strings. You can’t manage it; he kicks and spits and drives you off. He doesn’t think your presents are worth it. So take yourself off some place else! You have your gardens by the Tiber carefully located just where all the young blades come to skinny dip. You can pick up a partner there any day. Why bother this fellow who rejects you?”
(36; trans. Elaine Fantham)
To win the case, Cicero diverts the jury away from Caelius’s political thuggery and feeds their prejudices with the idea of a woman ready to finance her lovers; “a widow living loosely, a wanton living promiscuously, a rich woman living extravagantly and a randy woman living like a harlot” (38; trans. Elaine Fantham).
The historian Sallust (86?–35? B.C.E.) would have us believe that many married noblewomen of this period found their pleasures outside marriage. After describing the dissolute young men who joined the failed coup d’état of Catiline, Sallust constructs a kind of female counterpart to this revolutionary mob, in this portrait of the wanton wife of a rising politician,
[Sempronia] had often committed many crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband also and her children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune: well read in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman should, and having many other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or her honor. Her desires were so ardent that she sought men more often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the conspiracy she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts, been privy to murder. Poverty and extravagance combined had driven her headlong. Nevertheless she was a woman of no mean endowment; she could write verses, bandy jests and use language which was modest or tender or wanton. In fine she possessed a high degree of wit and charm
(Sallust, Catiline 25; Rolfe 1971: 43)
A passage like this, especially in an old-fashioned translation, tells us as much about male imagination (ancient and modern) as about female license, but it should impel us to ask questions about both sexes. Why had these noblewomen suddenly kicked over the traces? And why does a well-brought-up son like Catullus disdain the usual casual fooling around and become infatuated with a bored noblewoman and endow their relationship with all the highest values of Roman public and private life? In Catullus the trigger may have been a unique conjunction of provincial innocence and metropolitan decadence, but the exaltation of extramarital love that is first found in this poetry becomes the dominant principle of a generation of love-poets—poets who found nothing similar in the Greek models of their formal genre.
Propertius and Tibullus, both children of the civil wars, who reached manhood about the time of Octavian’s great victory over Antony and Cleopatra (31 B.C.E: their actual dates of birth are unknown), turn the women glorified by their poetry into Lesbias—or Cleopatras. The young lover is a slave, or a squire, subjected by his ruling passion to a brilliant and tyrannical mistress—a Cynthia or Delia, variously represented as living independently, kept by, or married to, another man, or mercenary and victimizing the poet by her pursuit of wealthier men. “Cynthia is not seduced by high office / the only thing that weighs with her / is the weight of a man’s purse,” cries Propertius (2.16; Warden 1972); Tibullus too laments: “O Delia, reject forthwith that grasping witch’s guidance. Must every love give in to bribery? … alas! my song is vain. Her door unmoved by words / waits to be knocked by a moneyladen hand” (Tibullus 1.5.59–60, 67–68; trans. Elaine Fantham).
Propertius’s poetry gives perhaps the fullest picture of the world in which these women lived, though as a poet he freely shapes his invention. In one poem Cynthia speaks as though she were another man’s property, locked in and forced to climb out to join him:
Had you forgotten
our night games on the Subura
(nobody slept there), those subterfuges
that wore a track across my window ledge?
There I was dangling on a rope
lowering myself, hand over hand
into your arms. We used to make love then
on street corners, twining
our bodies together, while our cloaks
took the chill off the sidewalk.
(4.7.15–22; Warden 1972: 85)
In another poem she has her own establishment in which Propertius is one client among many:
No ancient beauty had a house as full of men as yours.
Not Thais, though the whole of Greece was beating at her doors.
Or Lais, who from Menander won the title of a play,
and for the sons of Erichthon became the people’s toy.
What Alexander has destroyed shall be restored by Phryne.
So many lovers she enjoyed—but you have twice as many.
(2.6.1–8; Warden 1972: 85)
The poet-lover protests his enslavement: “he who now lies as dust and ashes / once was the slave of a single love” (2.13.34–35); “No wife nor mistress shall ever seduce me away from you, you shall always be my wife and mistress, both” (2.6.41–42); “You alone are my house, / you, Cynthia, are my parents, you are all the occasions of my joy” (1.11.23–24; trans. Elaine Fantham). Here, in the echo of the orphaned Andromache’s words to her husband Hector, is the measure of the seriousness this Roman poet could attribute to his love. More often, however, the portrait of his subjection is mixed with an almost comically vivid presentation of the angry virago whose ugly words contrast with her beauty on his late night visit to her bedside;
So you’ve come at last, and only because that other woman
has thrown you out and closed the doors against you.
Where have you spent the night—that night that belonged to me?
Look at you creeping back with the dawn, a wreck.
It’d do you good to have to spend the sort of night
you make me spend! You’d learn what cruelty is.
I sat up over my loom, trying to stave off sleep
then tired of that and played the lyre a little.
(1.3.35–44; Warden 1972: 9)
But the loom, symbol of the honest wife, and the lyre, symbol of the entertainer, are as incongruous a combination as Propertius’s protestations of loyalty and his bouts of wild infidelity.
The most likely place for young men to encounter the women of these affairs, whether hired call girls, professional entertainers like Cytheris, or faithless wives, was again the dinner party. The sixty-year-old Cicero is embarrassed—but perhaps also thrilled—to meet the versatile (and much bedded) actress Cytheris at a party given by her former owner Volumnius:
“I had no idea she would be there. But after all, even Aristippus the Socratic did not blush when someone twitted him with keeping Lais as his mistress: Lais is my mistress, he said but I’m my own master. As for me, even when I was young I was never attracted by anything of that sort …”
(Letters to his friends 9.26 (197); Shackleton Bailey 1978)
Horace, who enjoys imagining a pleasant private dinner with a girl like Cytheris, feeds his moral indignation with the image of a young wife who slips from the dining table to oblige a wealthy guest, apparently condoned by her husband:
Soon she’s pursuing young philanderers
among her husband’s guests. Careless of whom
she chooses, hugger-mugger she confers
the illicit pleasure in a half-lit room,
only the husband seeming not to note,
at any man’s command she leaves her place,
pedlar or captain of some Spanish boat—
whoever pays the price of her disgrace.
(Horace, Odes 3.6; Michie 1963: 149)
In Latin love poetry the party is a shared pleasure of men and girls; Catullus invites Fabullus to bring his lovely lady—and all the food and wine because the poet is penniless (13). Propertius boasts of his success, “lording it as a guest among the girls” (2.30.16), but marks the end of his affair by imagining the mockery behind his back at all the dinner parties: “I was the latest after dinner joke: everybody had their Propertius story” (3.25.1–2; Warden 1972: 9). Ovid imagines a new seduction at such a party.
“So your man’s going to be present at the dinner party?
I hope he drops down dead before the dessert.
Does this mean no hands, just eyes (any chance guest’s privilege)
just to look at my darling while he
lies there with you beside him in licensed embracement
and paws your bosom or neck as he feels inclined?”…
When he pats the couch, put on your respectable-wife expression
and take your place beside him—but nudge my foot
as you’re passing by. Watch out for my nods and eye-talk
pick up my stealthy messages, send replies …
(Amores 1.4.1–4, 15–18; Green 1982: 89–90)
One poem—the last in which Propertius recalls Cynthia—conveys to the full the range of life in this half-world of Rome’s Bohemians. It begins with Cynthia’s departure with an effete admirer on an excursion to Lanuvium:
It’s there that Cynthia went, driving a
team of ponies, elegantly clipped, on a visit
(so she said) to Juno, though the goddess she was serving
sounded more like Venus. You saw it, Appian Way, how was it?
That magnificent procession, the pomp
of chariot wheels hurtling across your paving
and she (what a sight) crouched over the pole, swerving
like a demon into every pothole and sump.
As for that smooth-skinned fop, I’d rather not speak
about him, with his fashionable carriage
all draped in silk, the bracelets round the necks
of his Molossian dogs …
(Propertius 4.8.15–24; Warden 1972: 217–18)
and continues with Propertius’s retaliation: a private party.
There’s a girl I know called Phyllis, she’s a neighbour
of the goddess Diana on the Aventine
not much to recommend her when she’s sober
but she’s quite charming with a little wine.
Then there’s Teia, who lives close to the Tarpeian
gorge—a pretty girl, but when she’s in liquor
she isn’t satisfied with just one man.
So I asked them over to make the night pass quicker …
. . on a patch of green
stood a couch well concealed just for the three of us
to lie on. If you wondered, I was in between,
Lygdamus served the wine …
(4.8.29–36; Warden 1972: 218)
But the party is interrupted by Cynthia’s unexpected return “flattening the doors against the wall, with her hair unkempt but beautiful in the wildness of her fury: … her eyes flashed like thunderbolts; she was savage as a woman could be: the scene as dramatic as the sacking of a city” (4.8.51–56; Warden 1972: 217–19).
The purpose of the poem is the exaltation of the mistress, represented in heroic terms borrowed from the triumphant return of Odysseus to reclaim his wife from the suitors: but unlike anything in the Odyssey is the lover’s delight in his own abject submission:
so I sued for terms,
desperately throwing my suppliant arms
around the feet she’d hardly let me touch.
(4.8.71–72; Warden 1972: 220)
The poet had begun his first book with the image of Love pressing his victorious foot upon the poet’s captive neck. He all but ends with a reiteration of this image. The intensity of Propertius’s realization of this woman and of their emotional relationship surely reflects both a new attitude to women and a new kind of woman.
What social forces led freeborn women of good family to reject their protected respectability and claim the sexual license of the outsider? What changed the values of well-brought-up young men, that they should openly exalt the kind of affair that had once been transitional and surreptitious—acceptable only in the interstices between reaching manhood and contracting marriage? For while the poet-lovers still represent themselves as unmarried men, it is also part of their persona that they postpone indefinitely the duty of marriage and reproduction.
It is easier to see why women no longer accepted the demands of respectability. These generations had seen the social order itself repeatedly disrupted. Women were released from surveillance by the absence of their menfolk on campaign, in overseas administration, or during the civil war in flight or exile. While older or more sober women showed their emancipation by taking on responsibility for family finances, political negotiations, or petitions for their husbands’ survival, others in less stable marriages might see no reason for fidelity, and daughters married off as a political bond between their father and his allies (or even former enemies) might assert themselves. The age patterns of Roman marriage were designed to avoid any time for the girl’s seduction or experimentation before marriage. But if the young wife grew restless, the limited economic control possessed by the husband without legal manus also reduced his power to protest her behavior if it conflicted with the interests of the wife’s natal family. In extreme cases, in order to obtain a divorce he still had to pay back five-sixths of her dowry. Unless women had learned chastity as a moral imperative they might claim for themselves the self-indulgence practiced by their husbands.
But why should the men have assigned such life and death importance to these affairs—whether adulterous or merely unsanctioned by society? One reason may have been their own loss of social standing. Propertius and Tibullus both claim to have lost family estates (as did Virgil and Horace) and may not have been sought after as sons-in-law. Another was the more general loss of respect for social structures brought on by the division of the nation into warring camps and the rise of upstarts who now enjoyed the confiscated property of the old upper class. “How could I supply sons to swell my country’s triumphs?” says Propertius (2.7.13) in resistance to the idea of marriage. One of his kinsmen had been killed in the civil war, and once Romans were fighting each other, warfare became a nightmare instead of an adventure. Ironically too, Propertius in rejecting a military life invokes as a cautionary example the behavior of Antony, who had brought his own ruin upon him by his obsession with the fatal Cleopatra. Octavian exploited this account of Antony’s downfall, adapting the myth of Hercules’ submission to the oriental queen Omphale as a reminder of Antony’s un-Roman pleasures (Fig. 10.2).
Yet both Hercules and Antony were paradoxically models for the love-poets’ own life-style and indifference to “success.” Success in public life was now out of men’s own control, dependent upon powerful men like Pompey, Caesar, or Octavian. Subordination to a capricious woman was at least an individual choice, and these women may have been easier to satisfy than the military leaders with their incessant political re-alignments and their campaigning on the outer fringe of empire. Society had shown itself unstable and untrustworthy: better to seek a strictly private satisfaction.
Figure 10.2. Mold for a clay vase (ca. 30 B.C.E.) showing Hercules and Omphale, the Lydian queen with whom Hercules was forced to trade clothing as part of his expiation for murder. The vase, called Arretine because the original center of production for these late Republican and early Imperial relief wares was Arezzo, comes from the workshop of Perennius; this shop seems to have specialized in highly Classicizing images of lovers, mythological and idealized.
We shall never know to what extent women of established family endorsed the life of pleasure described by the elegists, or the degree to which the poets’ own actions matched their professions of enslavement to love. As we shall see in Chapter 11, Octavian seems to have been sufficiently alarmed by the decline of marriage and reproductivity among the privileged classes to use legislation to reinforce its appeal; at the same time he made both adultery and the condoning of adultery by an “injured” husband offenses open to criminal prosecution and punishable by expulsion from society. Ordinary anonymous citizens might continue to be chaste or promiscuous unnoticed, but respectability was now enforced on those in the public eye.
This had its impact on both art and life. Ovid, born some fifteen years after Propertius and Tibullus, could build on an elegiac code of love and permute the complexities of a literary love affair as a game with known rules. But he had to be careful in both his “autobiographical” and his prescriptive love poetry. He took care that his tales of Corinna, including her infidelities to himself and to his rivals, could not be reconstructed to suggest a living woman in a defined social milieu; and he took pains—but not quite enough—to direct his teaching of seduction in the Art of Love (2 B.C.E.) away from respectable women, ostensibly encouraging young men only in the permitted pursuit of noncitizen “easy” women.
Aid my enterprise, Venus! Respectable ladies, the kind who
wear hairbands and ankle-length skirts,
are hereby warned off. Safe love, legitimate liaisons
will be my theme. This poem breaks no taboos.
(Art of Love 1.31–34; Green 1982: 89–90)
But at length, when he had exhausted the possibilities of manuals for the men, he turned to instruct the women directly, still claiming to be concerned only with women outside respectability:
Take lessons from me girls (those of you whom the law,
And modesty, and your code, will permit): be mindful of
creeping
Old age, don’t waste precious time—
Have fun while you can, in your salad days
(Art of Love 3.57–61; Green 1982: 89–90)
Had Ovid gone too far? His scandalous advice might still have brought no trouble upon him, if there had been no scandal in high places. But the real-life Clodia and Sempronia found their successors, and it was part of society’s vengeance upon Augustus that his only child, Julia, should shame him. As Octavian, he had divorced her mother Scribonia the very day that her female child Julia was born. Yet according to the early fifth-century antiquarian Macrobius, Julia survived neglect and grew up with “a love of literature and much learning, easily accessible in that home,” and charmed by her mild courtesy and lack of cruelty (Saturnalia 2.5.2). She would dutifully accept an early betrothal by her father to his nephew (who then died), then marriage to his closest friend, the middleaged Agrippa, by whom she bore five living children, and on Agrippa’s death, a final enforced marriage to her father’s stepson and Livia’s son, Tiberius, who left her and Rome to live at Rhodes. As mother of the two adopted Caesars, Gaius and Lucius, Julia had been publicly honored by her father for her wifely fertility, but even during her “happy” marriage to Agrippa, she boasted of ensuring that she conceived only his children by limiting her lovers to the months when she was already pregnant: “I never take on a passenger unless the ship is full” (Macrobius 2.5.9 Richlin 1992: 72). This and other witty retorts quoted by Macrobius, and derived from the Augustan epigrammatist Domitius Marsus, reflect the more sophisticated attitude to women’s sexuality of poets like Ovid and of Julia’s own circle in Rome. They show Julia herself opposing her conception of what was right for “Caesar’s daughter”—luxury, elegance, and sexual autonomy—to the chastity and frugality her father expected of “the daughter of Augustus” (Richlin 1992). But while Julia only claimed the same sexual liberty that her father had himself enjoyed in his youth, (See Suetonius, Augustus 63 and 69 and Hallett 1977: 158–60) her behavior violated the model of propriety for royal women cherished by Augustus and presented to the public eye by her stepmother Livia. Once the emperor’s wilful ignorance of her sexual adventures was shattered, he denounced and disgraced his daughter with public and uncontrollable rage. It is ultimately from him that we derive the hostile tradition that makes Julia the first meretrix Augusta (Imperial whore), a counterpart to the loathed Cleopatra, and one imitated by her own daughter Julia, who would share her mother’s fate of exile nine years after her.
The absoluteness of Julia’s destruction at Augustus’s hands, and the cruel isolation he imposed in exiling her to a barren island, could not put an end to elite adultery, nor could Augustus’s sentence of exile on her daughter in 8 C.E., and his equally sadistic relegation of Ovid, Rome’s greatest living poet, to a Black Sea garrison outpost in the same year. These imperial acts could and did signal the end of open acknowledgment of adultery, ensuring that men and women in the next generation would not again proclaim their real or imaginary loves in prose or verse. Perhaps caution rather than virtue was all that Augustus restored, but when the circumstances that had undermined family and class stability receded, it is likely that the impetus to glamorize a different kind of partnership receded also. The new woman and the new love poetry were banished, until they returned, first in the heavy disguise of medieval troubadour songs of courtly love, then in the full flush of Romantic and “decadent” nineteenth-century poetry and fiction.
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