FREE BOOK PREVIEW: Hail (Julia) Caesar

If you were with us on History Hack during lockdown, you’ll remember that we used to do a Down the Pub every week, because we were going out of our minds, and needed to drink. Emma Southon was basically our Ancient correspondent, and every time she’d make us cackle with her tales of Ancient Rome. For my birthday, one of my favourite people, Dan, gave me a copy of her latest book. I think he’s trying to brainwash me into consenting to an Ancient Rome road trip, but so far, I haven’t been able to put it down.

First off I’ll give you the sales pitch, because it’s brilliant:

Here’s how the history of the Roman Empire usually goes…

We kick off with Romulus murdering his brother, go on to Brutus overthrowing Tarquin, bounce through an appallingly tedious list of battles and generals and consuls, before emerging into the political stab-fest of the late Republic. After ‘Et tu, Brute?’, it runs through all the emperors, occasionally nodding to a wife or mother to show how bad things get when women won’t do as they’re told, until Constantine invents Christianity only for Attila the Hun to come and ruin everything.

Let’s tear up this script. The history of Rome and its empire is so much more than these ‘Important Things’.

In this alternative history, Emma Southon tells another story about the Romans, one that lives through Vestal Virgins and sex workers, business owners and poets, empresses and saints.

• Discover how entrepreneurial sex worker Hispala Faecenia uncovered a conspiracy of treason, human sacrifice and Bacchic orgies so wild they would make Donna Tartt blush, becoming one of Rome’s unlikeliest heroes.

• Book yourself a table at the House of Julia Felix and get to know Pompeii’s savviest businesswoman and restauranteur. Indulge in an array of locally sourced delicacies as you take in the wonderful view of Mount Vesuvius… what could possibly go wrong?

• Join the inimitable Septimia Zenobia, who – after watching a series of incompetent, psychopathic and incompetently psychopathic emperors almost destroy the Empire – did what any of us would do. She declared herself Empress, took over half the Roman Empire and ran it herself.

Today, Emma’s given me permission to work from one chapter in order to convince you all how good it is, so I went for what you might think is a familiar name, but an unfamiliar version of the story. So here goes…

This one made me want to chuck the book across the room; not because I hated it, but because I was just enraged at there sheer f**ery wrought on one woman by successive men. I get what Emma says when she loves and hates the Romans at the same time. I’m glad I kept reading, because she goes full Britney (Julia, not Emma) and it is glorious. This, is the story of one Roman Emperor reaping everything he sowed…

Born in 39 BCE, so about 260 years before Gladiator II is set. ‘In her naming, and in the eyes of so many who have thought about her, Julia is little more than an offshoot of her dad (Augustus) an appendage to his glory as he rose to become the first Roman monarch in five hundred years and she was dragged along behind him to be made the first Roman princess.’

The day she was born, her da served her mum Scribonia divorce papers. Right as she's lying there, having just survived her third labour without painkillers holding her swaddled, hours-old daughter, he walks out on their marriage because it is no longer useful to him. Augustus is ice cold like that his entire life.

Whilst her father was ‘warring his way around Italy and stealing people's wives,’ Julia and her mother kept a low profile at home, ‘and that's where she probably would have stayed for the rest of her life, living the average life of a very rich girl, had her father been normal or if he'd had any other children.’

He and his last wife never had children, which is a mystery. I’m with Emma in the hope that it was some cosmic joke:

‘As both had children from previous relationships, one can't help but wonder whether some god or other wasn't trying to interfere with whatever Augustus would have done if he had had a son. Or maybe fate just has a sense of humour. Either way, at some point Augustus came to some kind of terms with the fact that Julia was going to be his one and only child, and so he retrieved her from her mother's household and installed her in his own magnificent palace on the Palatine Hill. This definitely happened before Julia was in her tweens, at some point between the age of one and eleven. I'm never sure whether I hope this happened earlier or later, because she was taken from what was probably a relatively normal aristocratic household and placed into Augustus's luxurious cage. Augustus's palace felt like a cage because he was a micromanager obsessed with his image. This obsession was both deeply creepy and the key to his success. Hyper-aware of how he looked to his contemporaries and how he would look to historians, he once wrote a casual letter to his stepson Tiberius claiming that he didn't make the people he gambled with pay their debts because 'my generosity will exalt me to immortal glory?’

Obviously this makes him sound like a maniac. Even more bizarrely, he forced his grandsons to imitate his handwriting as part of their education and boasted about it. Augustus was also powerfully, and apparently sincerely, dedicated to 'bringing back

traditional values', including locking his daughter away so she could remain modest and private and spend her days weaving tunics for her father to wear… Her father instead made sure that she was taught to spin and weave, like the old Republican women of myth and yore, and forbade her from ever saying anything that could not be safely recorded in the household diary. So I am never sure whether I would want Julia to have some years of relative freedom, with her own friends and her mum, before she was shoved into her golden cage, or whether she would have suffered more from knowing a world outside of the walls of her prison. I do know that I would probably stamp on a puppy to get my hands on that household diary though.’

In lieu of having had any form of brother, Julia’s misfortune in life was that she had two roles to fulfil. She was to remain virtuous and perfect and supply Augustus with grandsons. She was first married off at the age of 13 to her first cousin, Augustus’s only male relative, so he was certainly trying to keep it in the family. He didn’t even bother attending the wedding, which is nice when you’re pimping out your daughter, but on brand. Unfortunately for Augustus, Marcellus died about a year after the wedding, leaving Julia a widow at about fifteen. She got two years grace before she was handed off again, this time to her father’s best friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who was in his forties which is creepy but again, on brand.

Do we know what Julia was like, as a person? Emma has a stab at that:

We do have one source claiming to record some quips and jokes of Julia's, making her just about the only Roman woman to have ever made a joke. Naturally, being Roman jokes, they are about as funny as syphilis. Also, they were written down in the fourth century CE, a solid 450 years after Julia lived, so it's tough to consider them genuine quotes. They appear in a work of philosophical fiction by a Late Antique aristocrat called Macrobius. The book, written in about 430 CE, presents itself as an account of a discussion held between attendees at a Saturnalia (Roman Christmas) party. It contains a lot of stuff, including some long critiques of Virgil which suggest that you might never want to go to one of Macrobius's dinner parties, and in the middle of book two an unexpected description of Julia, daughter of Augustus, in her later life. Macrobius describes her as a smart lover of literature, kind, generous and lacking in cruelty, slightly vain, a bit arrogant, constantly cracking jokes at her father's expense and, in general, a woman of high spirits and great fun. Like Princess Margaret. This is a description of her when she is thirty-seven (an age Macrobius offensively describes as very old indeed), and lord knows none of us are the same at thirty-seven as we were at eighteen. The general sense, however, is of a woman who embraced every opportunity to enjoy herself, no matter how limited those opportunities were. We will get to most of her little quips later, as they're spoilers, but one stands out as being emblematic. It begins with a friend rebuking Julia for being, basically, too much fun in the way that the Vestal Virgin Postumia was too much fun and suggesting that she conform better to her father's austere lifestyle. To this suggestion, Julia replied, he never forgets that he is Caesar, but I remember that I am Caesar's daughter.' By this she means, he has responsibilities. He has to be well behaved. But I am a princess, and I can do what the fuck I like.

By 12 BCE, Julia had given Augustus all the male heirs he could have wished for.

21 BCE, Gaius Vipsanius Agrippa was born.

19 CE there was a girl (probably Julia the Younger)

17 BCE another boy called Lucius,

15 BCE another girl

12 BCE a final boy rounded off the set.

You need to read the full chapter in the book to enjoy the full extent of Augustus and his ‘morality legislation’, but suffice to say, he makes the utterances that come out of JD Vance’s mouth on the subject of judging other people’s business sound positively benign. Julia, with her pile of children, legitimised his nonsense, even when he abducted two sons and took them of this heirs.

When historians ancient and modern write about this, they usually write from Augustus's perspective or a neutral third-party perspective… What no one considers is what it might have been like for Julia to have her sons taken away from her and raised by her own father as the sons he always wanted. Meanwhile, her daughters were left with her, useless lumps to her father until they were of marriageable age. Julia had produced her heir and a spare (and some girls) and now Augustus could focus on training up some babies in his image. Julia suddenly lost all value, and her husband got bumped right down the line of succession.

…So it's no wonder, really, that she ended up going a bit off the rails. In 12 BCE, while Julia was pregnant with her fifth child, Agrippa died. Again, Julia's reaction to the death of her husband of a decade is not recorded, but as they travelled together extensively and had a very impressive five kids, one suspects they liked each other at least a bit. At a bare minimum, the end of a long marriage and loss of someone she'd known her whole life can't have been pleasant. And it left Julia a widow again, before she was thirty. Technically, Augustus's own laws allowed Julia to be released from guardianship and from the obligation to remarry. Technically, Julia had done enough to earn herself a little break to focus on Julia, maybe read a book, get a mani-pedi. But Julia was Julia Augusti Filia and the daughters of Augustus were never free to focus on themselves. Augustus might have got his sons from her, but Gaius and Lucius, at six and three, were still babies.

They were Augustus's long-term plan, but he still needed a short-term emergency contingency and Julia was still useful for conferring legitimacy. He chose as his potential second-in-command until the kids came of age his dour, lumpen stepson Tiberius.

Tiberius's reactions to being made to marry Julia are well recorded in the surviving sources and he did not like it. First, his stepdad forced him to divorce his current wife, Agrippina

Vipsania, who was - because the Julio-Claudian family was disgusting - Agrippa's eldest daughter and Julia's stepdaughter. He and Vipsania were very happy together and Tiberius did not want to divorce her. Indeed, he had to be prevented from even catching sight of her after the divorce following an embarrassing incident where they met at a party and Tiberius cried.

…Either way, the general sentiment of the sources is that the marriage was doomed from the start. The couple do seem to have got on OK for a little while and Julia even got pregnant early in the marriage. That was enough to get Julia to travel with her husband to Aquileia where she gave birth to her sixth child, a son who survived just a few days.

The death of their son seems also to have been the death of their marriage… Tiberius and Julia lived separate lives until, in 6 BCE after five years of marriage, Tiberius declared that he was over the whole politics and Rome thing and retired to live a life of whittling in Rhodes. It's unclear what sparked this. Some think that he was trying to escape Julia.

Others, that Tiberius was jealous of Gaius and Lucius, who were now entering public life. Yet others suggested that Tiberius was afraid of Gaius and Lucius, who were becoming arrogant and insolent in their supremacy. Whatever the reason, he went on hunger strike until Augustus let him leave Rome and never spoke to his wife again.

It's interesting to me that Tiberius just cracked and ran away from Rome, effectively exiling himself, because this decision coincides with Julia also losing her patience with her golden cage and rebelling in a spectacular fashion. The fact that two very close members of Augustus's family went rogue at almost exactly the same time is suggestive I think. Especially as they both abandoned the things that made them valuable to Augustus, the things most important to their personae as public figures.

Tiberius abandoned his successful political and military careers and fled to become a private colonial commoner. Meanwhile, Julia abandoned any semblance of the traditional feminine morality and virtue her father was attempting to force on Romans and started shagging around.

The year 2 BCE was a big one for Augustus and his family. It marked twenty-five years since Augustus had 'restored' the Republic and to celebrate he had 'accepted' the title of Pater Patriae - father of the country. The youngest of Julia's sons, Lucius, had finally turned sixteen so Augustus decided to share the consulship with his teenage heir. Finally, in his very own month of August, he had officially opened his own forum and the Temple of Mars Ultor. A whole lot of celebrating went on and everything seemed to be going very well. Until one day, a letter arrived at the Senate from Augustus with distressing news.

Augustus told the Senators in his very serious letter that his daughter had committed multiple adulteries with a long list of men and that she had been doing this in public, including on the speaker's platform (the rostra) in the Forum. With this, the Senate learned that all Julio-Claudian family business was public business and that Augustus expected them to have legal opinions on his daughter's sex life.

It appears that, with her husband out of town and most of her kids adopted out from under her, Julia lost patience with her father's rule and reforms and went absolutely wild. The earliest source for the scandal claims that she had five boyfriends, including her first fiancé, Mark Antony's son. She had then gone out of her way to violate the places her father held most dear, the places representing his good old-fashioned, totally imaginary Republican values. She fucked in the Forum. She fucked on the rostra. She fucked by the statue of the satyr Marsyas, who represented liberty and free speech and was often used as a symbol of opposition to Augustus by his enemies. She fucked his great rival's son. She found everything that Augustus claimed to stand for and love, every possible way to hurt him, and she fucked on it. As a display of daddy issues, Julia's rebellion was world class.

…We have no record of how Julia reacted to the realisation that her father knew what she was up to, or to her antics being exposed to the Senate. Realistically, if the accounts of her nocturnal activities in the Forum are even slightly true, she can't have been surprised. Rome was a village full of gossips at the best of times, and everyone knew what everyone was doing in their bedrooms. If someone stubbed their toe in the Forum, every Tom, Dick and Cassius down the road would hear about it before dinnertime. Getting her tits out in a big open public space meant she basically wanted her dad to know about it. So let’s assume that she wasn't shocked to be found out. She might have been surprised, however, by the cavernous, extreme depth of her father's anger, shame and sense of betrayal and how publicly he dealt with it. The general rules of Roman parent-child relations were that disputes were dealt with privately, quietly and with a minimum of publicity, especially with daughters… Augustus had made the Domus Augusta (the imperial family) a public institution. Plus he was right in the middle of eroding familial privacy for his own personal gain. So, he dealt with it in public. He got the Senate involved and made them listen to a litany of accusations about the princess banging various consuls in places where Senators spent a lot of their day. I imagine this was a lot like when we all first read the Charles and Camilla TamponGate transcripts. Just horribly awkward and gross.

Augustus reacted to his daughter's betrayal of everything he stood for in the same way he reacted to Quinctilius Varus losing three legions in the Teutoburg Forest: badly. That time, he spent months locked in his house, growing his beard and occasionally banging his head on a door frame wailing, 'Quinctilius Varus, give me back my eagles!' After Julia's failure to be what he demanded she be, he also locked himself away in shame and fury and made ludicrous, melodramatic statements. In this case, he took to declaring that he wished that he had never married and died without children. When he heard that one of Julia’s friends, Phoebe, had taken her own life in the fallout, he sulkily declared himself jealous of her father. He referred to Julia as a boil. In his fury, he had her main boyfriend executed, and he exiled Julia to Pandateria (Ventotene) in the Tyrrhenian Sea where she was banned from drinking wine or having male visitors or male attendants, even enslaved ones, unless they were particularly unattractive. Julia was accompanied to the island by her mother Scribonia. Scribonia had no obligation to follow her daughter. She went out of love and devotion for her youngest child. Julia was thirty-seven when she was exiled. She had been married three times, widowed twice and abandoned once…

The people of Rome were generally more shocked by Augustus's punishment of Julia's adulteries than they were by the adulteries themselves. He claimed either that she had been plotting against him with her boyfriends, or that her extra-marital bonking was in itself treason - a wild claim - and that this justified his harsh punishment. People, including Tiberius, repeatedly tried to persuade him to bring her back from exile, saying she had suffered enough for what was, really, barely a crime. But Augustus was not the forgiving type. After one such occasion, when people tried to appeal to him in open session, he became furious and told them that he hoped the gods cursed them all with daughters and wives like her. His only concession was to move her to a slightly nicer exile after five years. Julia moved to live in the city of Rhegium (Reggio Calabria) in southern Italy, where she was allowed to leave the house and meet people and have an allowance and a household.

This probably suited Julia just fine. After almost forty years of being the public daughter of a monarch, recipient of every luxury and unable to do a damn thing she wanted, the life of a reasonably rich provincial woman was probably just what she needed. No one in the empire knew better than her how hard the forced transition from republic to monarchy was and how much she had had to sacrifice without ever benefiting. Once living in provincial comfort, albeit surrounded by her father's spies, she could chill out a bit. She was still being punished though, separated from the glamour of Rome and from all her children. She had to hear about their tragic fates second hand.

First Lucius died of illness in Gaul in 2 CE, then Gaius was killed in Armenia in 4 CE. Following the loss of both his heirs, Augustus hastily adopted Julia's last son, Agrippa Postumus, only to exile him in 6 CE for liking fishing too much. Her two daughters survived in Rome, until 8 CE, when the eldest, Julia the Younger, was also exiled by Augustus for adultery. Only Agrippina, known as Agrippina the Elder, remained with Augustus. Julia maybe hoped that her father would mellow and forgive as he got old, as he continued to lose grandchildren. At the very least, she may have thought, she would get something in his will and could rebuild a little when he was gone. If she ever hoped these things in her exile, she was very, very wrong.

Augustus never forgave Julia and he explicitly disinherited her. He even forbade her from being interred in his family mausoleum in the event of her death. Instead, when he died in 14 CE at the age of eighty, he left everything to his wife Livia and her son, his heir, the last man standing, Julia's ex-husband, Tiberius. Tiberius and Livia were now responsible for her allowance and her life. And they didn't care. In fact, they seemed to hate her more than her father ever did. For all the noises made about his harshness and his anger, Augustus didn't kill her and he didn't deprive her of a good life after the first couple of years. He didn't even make her get a job. On the other hand, Tiberius did two things: he immediately stopped paying her allowance and he killed her last son. Agrippa Postumus was stabbed on his island within days of Tiberius taking power, and Julia quickly found that her regular cash injections stopped coming. Tiberius left her to destitution and despair, until she wasted away. Within a year of Tiberius's ascension to the throne, Julia was dead. She outlived four of her six children. She was born a normal aristocratic woman and became a princess. From that day, to the moment of her death, her life was lived at the mercy of emperors as an unwilling trailblazer in the brave new world of the imperial family.

There are 20 more stories where that came from in the book. Fly my pretties. It will cheer you up royally in the most miserable month of the year…

A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women is published by Oneworld Books and is available now from all booksellers with taste.