Livia, Empress of Rome
A Biography
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Rome is a subject of endless fascination, and in this new biography of the infamous Empress Livia, Matthew Dennison brings to life a woman long believed to be one of the most feared villainesses of history.
Second wife of the emperor Augustus, mother of his successor Tiberius, grandmother of Claudius and great grandmother of Caligula, the empress Livia lived close to the center of Roman political power for eight turbulent decades. Her life spanned the years of Rome's transformation from Republic to Empire, and witnessed both its triumphs under the rule of Augustus and its lapse into instability under his dysfunctional successor.
Livia was given the honorific title Augusta in her husband's will, and was posthumously deified by the emperor Claudius—but posterity would prove less respectful. The Roman historian Tacitus anathematized her as "malevolent" and a "feminine bully" and inspired Robert Graves's celebrated twentieth-century depiction of Livia in I, Claudius as the quintessence of the scheming matriarch, poisoning her relatives one by one to smooth her son's path to the imperial throne.
Livia, Empress of Rome rescues the historical Livia from the crude caricature of popular myth to paint an elegant and richly textured portrait. In this rigorously researched biography, Dennison weighs the evidence found in contemporary sources to present a more nuanced assessment. Livia's true "crime," he reveals, was not murder but the exercise of power. The Livia who emerges here is a complex, courageous and gifted woman, and one of the most fascinating and perplexing figures of the ancient world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wake of Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra, this is an attempt to similarly rescue the wife of her antagonist, Augustus, from the demonization of ancient historians. Livia Drusilla of the Claudii (58 B.C.E. 29 C.E.) was vilified by Tacitus and later by Robert Graves's I, Claudius as the ambitious schemer who poisoned five of her son's competitors for the Roman throne. Beautiful, intelligent, an aristocrat of impeccable lineage, through her first husband, who haplessly backed Mark Antony against the emperor Augustus, Livia was mother of two future emperors. While pregnant with her second son, she became mistress to Augustus and soon married him. As empress, Livia espoused an idealized image of virtue and restraint. British journalist Dennison (The Last Princess) clears Livia of the charge of poisoning Marcellus, Augustus's son-in-law and presumed successor, attributing his death to typhoid fever. As to the scant evidence offered posthumously that she killed Augustus's three grandsons, another son-in-law, her own grandson, and even Augustus himself, Dennison claims Livia's real crime was the exercise of power in an assertively masculine society. This is an erudite, nuanced, and engrossing portrait of a turbulent era and of an empress demonized for refusing to be invisible. 8 pages of b&w photos.
