An Accurate Biographical Analysis Of Livia Drusilla

Accurate biographical analysis of Livia Drusilla is difficult because, in addition to the lack of primary source materials regarding Roman women, Livia’s relationship with power and the powerful has placed her among the most polarizing figures in classical history. While imperial statues depict her as a matronly protectress of Rome, historians like Tacitus reviled her as manipulative and treacherous. The biases from both extremes are deeply rooted in the complexities of socio-political maneuvering. However, most sources seem to agree that she held the absolute respect and attention of the people through both fear and love. By peeling away the layers of rhetoric that characterize the traditional images of Augusta, one may come to appreciate

In Annales 1.10, he says of her the she was “terrible to the State as a mother, terrible to the house of Caesar as a step-mother”. Livia’s characterization throughout the first book is that of a manipulative women who oversteps her role as wife and mother in order to further her own ambitions of power. Tacitus places the guilt for what he sees as the decline of the empire squarely at her feet. In particular, Livia’s support of Tiberius is particularly offensive, implying that she manipulated the line of succession to secure her own son’s rise to power. Her ultimate betrayal is her supposed role in the death of Agrippa Postumus. “Tiberius and Livia, the one from fear, the other from a stepmother’s enmity, hurried on the destruction of a youth whom they suspected and hated”. Yet, all these actions might be considered typical for a Roman political family. It is the association of Livia and the feminine element intruding upon this exclusively male sphere of public life and power that makes her actions apparently unacceptable. Alternatively, one may consider Livia’s actions as being motivating by more realistic concerns, namely supporting the legacy of her child through ensuring the dynastic succession. Whether or not she was actually involved in the conspiracies leveled at her by Tacitus, analyzing her through this lens of an ambitiously maternal figure seems more understandably human. Thus, Livia may

The histories of Tacitus attempt to project personality upon the public image whereas formal artworks seek to apply image to the private personality. Both are exercises in power, but not by Livia herself. As a woman, even the wife and mother of emperors, Livia is constrained by the official narratives. Neither the severe and manipulative figure presented by Tacitus nor the divinely maternal image depicted in her portraiture gives one access to the essential human personality of Livia. Taken together, one does see common themes. Livia fundamentally defined herself through her role as a mother, both to the continuing imperial dynasty and to the Roman empire itself. This maternal nature was more than passive, and it is likely she was active in the political lives of her children and possibly her husband. Livia’s conception of her role as a mother allowed her to obtain a more powerful position than allowed by traditional conceptions of the matrona. This sort of feminine intrusion into the public sphere of politics was a source of both reverence and revilement to her contemporaries and later historians, and consequently produced biased and often conflicting reports. As both a private figure and a public actor, as a wife and mother, as a goddess and a empress, Livia was a more complex individual than can be understood through any single image of