January 16, 2020 39
legends, Kim Il Sung could walk on
water and turn pine cones into bullets,
while it was said that Augustus could
silence frogs and tame eagles, and that
when he first entered Rome as Julius
Caesar’s son, a rainbow formed around
the disk of the sun—but it also empha-
sizes that the ruler is a father and a
family man.
In his early years in power, Kim Il Sung
was regularly depicted surrounded by
his family, and his paternal responsibil-
ity extended to the country as a whole:
the first phrase North Korean children
were supposed to learn was “Thank
you father Kim Il Sung.” On his birth-
day he would give every child in the
country under ten a kilo of sweets. This
custom was continued by Kim Jong Il,
whose courtesy titles included Father
of the People and Beloved Father, and
now under Kim Jong Un. The adults
don’t do so well: in 2013 the Brilliant
Comrade reportedly celebrated his
birthday by giving his senior aides cop-
ies of Mein Kampf. The Kim family re-
mains the center of attention: a grand
mausoleum houses the remains of Kim
Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and their pic-
tures decorate public and private build-
ings throughout the country, as well as
the lapel badges worn by every citizen
from the age of twelve.
Augustus too built an immense
family mausoleum that still stands in
central Rome, as do the remains of
monuments he dedicated in the names
of relatives, including the porticus of
his sister Octavia and the theater of
her son Marcellus. Octavia personified
the ideal Roman matron who lived for
family and state: she agreed to marry
Mark Antony in 40 BCE to seal a tem-
porary truce between him and her
brother, endured his subsequent deser-
tion to Cleopatra, and after they both
died brought up Cleopatra’s surviving
children alongside her own. Augustus
adopted Marcellus, his oldest nephew,
and went on to adopt a succession
of other male relatives, including Ti-
berius, after Marcellus’s death in 23
BCE at the age of nineteen. Toward
the end of his reign the phrase “Domus
Augusta”—the first family—came into
use, making his the only Roman politi-
cal household to be known not by its
name but by its rank.
Augustus also diligently promoted
family values in the state, passing leg-
islation that gave Romans incentives to
marry and produce legitimate children,
and that criminalized adultery. These
values extended to his own family: he
had his daughter and granddaughter
taught the traditional women’s arts of
spinning and weaving, and he forbade
them contact with men outside the
family. In 2 BCE the people and Senate
acclaimed Augustus pater patriae—Fa-
ther of the Fatherland.
This emphasis on family and father-
hood is one way such regimes make
themselves acceptable to their subjects.
It also makes sense of the smooth tran-
sition from dictatorship to dynasty in
North Korea, providing a clear route of
legitimacy from father to son. In Rome,
however, things were more compli-
cated: not a single ruler in Augustus’s
dynasty was succeeded by his biologi-
cal offspring. As Guy de la Bédoyère
emphasizes in Domina, his new history
of the imperial family, the repeated
failure of the male line meant that the
dynastic bloodline, and therefore the
dynasty itself, relied on women. This
helps account for the highly visible
public role of women like Augustus’s
daughter, Julia, his sister Octavia, and
above all his wife, Livia, ancestor of all
four of his successors.
De la Bédoyère adopts a novel struc-
ture for his book, organizing it as a se-
ries of lives not of the male rulers but
of their female relatives. As Robert
Graves demonstrated eighty years ago
in I, Claudius, the strong characters
and sometimes scandalous behavior of
the women of the Domus Augusta can
make for absorbing historical fiction. In
Domina, however, the same material is
often dense, repetitive, and frustrating.
One obvious difficulty is that we
know very little about these women,
which leads to lengthy discussions
of unanswerable questions. Did thewomen of the Augustan household
read books? It’s not clear. Did Livia
accompany Augustus on diplomatic
visits abroad? Hard to tell. Elsewhere,
de la Bédoyère simply takes the claims
of later Roman writers on trust: “Had
there not been some sort of story in the
first place, Tacitus, Suetonius and oth-
ers would not have troubled to tell it.”There are always social and finan-
cial benefits in being a member of the
ruling family, even for its women, but
de la Bédoyère exaggerates, along with
those same Roman commentators, the
extent to which these women aspired to
or even exercised real power. Although
Augustus gave Livia a variety of public
honors and privileges, her reported ac-
tivities were focused on restoring wom-
en’s shrines, promoting her family, and
protecting female friends from the full
force of the law. In his attempt to show
that “by some of the public at least she
was perceived as the other half of Augus-
tan power,” de la Bédoyère stretches the
contemporary evidence too far: a coin
issued in Egypt depicting her with the
legend Livia Sebastou does not translate
as “Livia Augusta [empress]” but sim-
ply “Livia, wife of [the] Augustus.”
Caligula’s sister Agrippina, who be-
came her uncle Claudius’s fourth wife,
was the first imperial consort to be
given the courtesy title Augusta in her
husband’s lifetime. She was also, de la
Bédoyère insists, “in fact if not in name,
joint ruler” and was “presented to the
public as such.” I’m not so sure: like her
predecessors, Agrippina could put ina private word for (or against) people,
but when she accompanied Claudius on
official business, she sat separately. It is
possible that some form of informal re-
gency was reflected in her appearance
on her son Nero’s earliest coinage: he
was, after all, only sixteen years old.
Or perhaps, as the wife of a god and
a dowager first lady, she was simply a
useful symbol of continuity and divine
favor for the teenager’s precarious new
regime: in provincial sculpture and pri-
vate cameo portraits she crowns him,
and when she attended the Senate she
was hidden behind a curtain. It was
not until a century later under the Sev-
erans, another dynasty preserved by a
female bloodline and the subject of an
epilogue in de la Bédoyère’s book, that
a Princeps’s mother could openly at-
tend meetings of the Senate.In fact, it seems that the only seri-
ous political activity women could un-
dertake within the earlier regime was
against it, episodes trivialized by their
male relatives or later writers as sex
scandals. Julia was exiled for adultery
in direct contravention of her father’s
legislation, but only after she took up
with Mark Antony’s son and appeared
in the forum publicly to garland the
statue of Marsyas, a well-known sym-
bol of political liberty. Claudius’s third
wife, Messalina, is best known to pos-
terity for her fondness for specialist
parties, culminating in her winning a
sex competition with a courtesan, but
her downfall and murder came after
she engaged in a pseudo–marriage cer-
emony with the consul-designate Gaius
Silius, prompting fears of a coup. And
although the Roman historian Sue-
tonius suggests that Nero’s stepsister
Claudia Antonia was killed for turn-
ing down his proposal of marriage, the
charge was plotting against the regime.
This lack of evidence for real politi-
cal power is on its face surprising in an
era of extraordinary change, especially
for women. Decades of civil war had
opened up new opportunities. The
mighty Fulvia, the first wife of Mark
Antony, commanded troops. Augustus
passed legislation exempting women
from guardianship (the requirement
to get permission from a male guard-
ian for financial transactions) and in-
creasing their right to inherit property
if they bore enough children, pragmati-
cally combining the new realities with
his family values campaign. Women
emerged over the following decades aspublic benefactors and patrons, erect-
ing statues, funding buildings, and sup-
porting their communities financially
throughout Italy. Outside the Roman
Empire, they ruled as monarchs in their
own right: Cleopatra of Egypt, Musa of
Parthia, and Boudicca of the Iceni.These queens all inherited power from
their fathers or husbands, but that is not
a phenomenon limited to monarchy: in
republican regimes, too, membership of
leading political families is often how
women get the opportunity for real po-
litical power themselves. Indira Gan-
dhi’s father had been prime minister of
India before her, Benazir Bhutto’s of
Pakistan, and the two women who have
served as prime minister of Bangladesh
were respectively the wife and daughter
of former presidents. The problem for
the women of the Domus Augusta was
that the regime was neither a monarchy
nor a republic, but a radical and fragile
combination of the two, sustained by a
deeply conservative ideology promoted
though their largely powerless bodies.
This means that while these women
helped to sell dynastic succession to the
regime’s subjects, they can’t help explain
how it managed to rule in the first place.
Livia and Agrippina did play some part
in the elevation of their own children to
power, in particular by delaying news of
their husbands’ deaths until their sons’
positions were secure. Both sons were,
however, signally ungrateful. When
Livia died in 29 CE, after sixty years
as the wife or mother of the head of
state, her son Tiberius failed to return
to Rome for her funeral before putrefac-
tion had set in, and then vetoed her dei-
fication, overturned her will, and purged
her friends. Nero went further, actually
orchestrating Agrippina’s death: after
the failure of assassination plans involv-
ing a self-collapsing bedroom ceiling
and then a self-destructing boat, she
was eventually stabbed to death on
hurriedly trumped-up treason charges.
The question of succession, however,
reflected the brutal realities of a mili-
tary regime: a mother’s intervention on
her son’s behalf only worked if the sol-
diers agreed to it. From the beginning,
the choice of ruler depended above
all on the Praetorian Guard, the elite
army unit charged with protecting the
Princeps and Rome itself.
When Augustus died, Tiberius’s
first action was to equip himself with a
Praetorian escort, and Praetorian co-
horts helped put down a mutiny against
h i m. Once i n power, he i ncreasi ng ly de -
pended on the Praetorian commander,
Sejanus, and for five years left him to
govern Rome alone. The next Prae-
torian commander bought Caligula’s
favor with the services of his own wife,
and was said to have ensured his succes-
sion by suffocating Tiberius. Another
Praetorian commander killed Caligula
four years later, and the Senate’s brief
attempt to restore the Republic was
outmaneuvered by other Praetorians,
one of whom found Claudius cowering
behind a curtain in the palace. They
took him to their camp to proclaim him
Princeps, and he rewarded them with a
bonus worth five years’ salary, the same
price they were paid by Nero on his ac-
cession thirteen years later.
However unusual, dynastic dictator-
ship is not that hard to establish if it
suits military interests. But this means
that the army, not the family, ultimately
controls the succession. QHenri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Messalina, 1900BridgemanImages