Antonia Minor

Roman noblewoman

• Born: January 31, 36 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: May 1, 37 c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Through her children and her involvement in Roman Imperial politics, Antonia helped determine which of the Julio-Claudian emperors came to power.

Early Life

Antonia (an-TOHN-ee-uh) Minor was the daughter of the triumvir Marc Antony and Octavia. Her mother was the sister of Octavian, who became the Roman emperor Augustus in 27 b.c.e. Very little can be known of Antonia’s early life, and only selected incidents of her life as a whole. Her early life must have been chaotic. Her parents’ marriage had been arranged to cement an alliance between Antony and Octavian/Augustus. Antony, however, preferred the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. During the first six years of Antonia’s life she could have seen little of her father, who was living in Alexandria while Octavia remained in Rome. Antony committed suicide early in 30 b.c.e., after his defeat at the Battle of Actium. Although he lost the empire to Augustus, it was through Antonia that three of Antony’s descendants (Caligula, Claudius, and Nero) eventually ruled Rome. In fact, the Julio-Claudian emperors might more accurately be called the Julio-Claudio-Antonians.

By Antony, Octavia had two daughters, known as Antonia Major and Minor (or Antonia the Elder and Antonia the Younger). In addition, she had a son, Marcellus, by an earlier marriage. Octavia also took into her home Antony’s children by Cleopatra and a son by his first wife, Fulvia. Because it is known that women of Rome’s Imperial family were well educated, it is safe to assume that Antonia received more than just basic schooling. More important, the connections established in her early years would give her a wide circle of allies and make her a significant political figure for the rest of her life. Her older sister also contributed to the dynasty-making of Augustus by providing a son who married Agrippina the Younger (the granddaughter of Antonia Minor) and became the father of the boy who became the emperor Nero.

Because he had a daughter but not a son who could succeed him, Augustus looked to his nieces, nephews, and grandchildren to find the male heir he needed. Because he was not technically the king of Rome, he had to find subtle ways of promoting members of his family to make them acceptable to the senate, the army, and the people. The succession problem remained the fundamental weakness of the Empire until its end, exacerbated by the failure of the rulers to produce male children. During the first two centuries of the Empire, only two emperors—Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius—had sons who lived to succeed them. Manipulating marriages to produce potential heirs became a full-time concern of most emperors, and women like Antonia, who were blood relatives of the emperor, came to play a major role in that process.

Augustus’s only male relative, his nephew Marcellus, died in 23 b.c.e., and Augustus found it necessary to look to his female relatives to produce an heir for him. In her early teens, in one of the numerous dynastic marriages arranged by Augustus, Antonia married Nero Claudius Drusus, the stepson of Augustus. They produced several children, of whom three survived: Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius. Germanicus became the father of the emperor Caligula, and Claudius became emperor in his own right. After Drusus died in 9 b.c.e., Antonia refused to remarry, in spite of pressure from Augustus to do so. At that point all of Augustus’s grandsons had died, and his daughter was in exile. He did not want to rely on his stepson Tiberius as his successor. He disliked Tiberius and wanted a blood relative of his to rule after him. Antonia was still young enough that she could have provided the aged emperor with more potential heirs. Her refusal to remarry showed a certain courage.

Life’s Work

Antonia spent her life caring for various children, in addition to her own, in the Imperial family and trying to advance the careers of her favorites. Her son Germanicus married Agrippina the Elder, granddaughter of Augustus. When Augustus finally yielded to the inevitable and regretfully adopted his stepson Tiberius and designated him as his successor, he insisted that Tiberius adopt Germanicus, to show that the line of emperors would ultimately run through Augustus’s family, not Tiberius’s. When Germanicus died under suspicious circumstances in 19 c.e., his wife and children—Antonia’s grandchildren—became the focus of opposition to Tiberius, who was a very unpopular ruler. Eventually, Agrippina and her two older sons were put to death. The younger children, including Caligula, lived for a time with their great-grandmother, Livia, or other relatives before coming to live with Antonia.

At this time (15-20 c.e.) Antonia was also providing a home for Herod Agrippa and the children of several other eastern rulers. Antonia’s movements cannot be traced with any precision, but it is known that she owned a house on the Palatine Hill in Rome and several country houses, including a villa at Bauli, on the Bay of Naples, which was excavated in the early 1900’s. One ancient source notes that she had a favorite fish in her fishpond there, which she adorned with gold rings. People came from considerable distances to see this curiosity. Some of the children in her care at this time were distantly related to her through her half sister, the daughter of Cleopatra and Marc Antony. According to the biographer Suetonius, it was during this period that Antonia caught Caligula in bed with one of his sisters.

To say that Antonia spent her life caring for various children is not to say that she was necessarily a loving person. Her son Claudius suffered from physical, and possibly mental, problems with which Antonia found it difficult to cope. Suetonius says she often commented that Claudius was “a monster, a man whom nature didn’t finish but only began.” If she wanted to say that someone was stupid, she would say he was “a bigger fool than even my son Claudius.” Her interest in her family’s political advancement may have made her tiresome to some of her relatives. Once he became emperor, Caligula refused to meet with her—his own grandmother—without having someone else present. Suetonius claims that Caligula’s unkind treatment of Antonia prompted her to commit suicide, if the erratic young emperor did not poison her outright.

In 31 c.e. Antonia played a direct role in uncovering a conspiracy against the emperor Tiberius and saving his life. Scholars have speculated that she was more interested in preserving the throne for her own descendants than in protecting her brother-in-law. Whatever her motives, she passed along to Tiberius a warning that the praetorian prefect, Aelius Sejanus, was planning to remove Tiberius and claim power for himself. Sejanus and hundreds of his partisans were executed. One of the aftershocks of the unveiling of this plan was that Tiberius learned that Antonia’s daughter Livilla had been Sejanus’s mistress. The two of them were believed to have poisoned Tiberius’s son Drusus. Livilla was put to death.

One of the most remarkable things about Antonia may have been the very fact that she survived as long as she did. Many women in the Roman Imperial family came to unhappy ends. Augustus’s daughter Julia was banished for sexual indiscretions and starved to death. His granddaughter, also named Julia, suffered a similar fate. The elder Agrippina was banished and also died of starvation. Agrippina the Younger was murdered by her son, Nero.

Antonia, however, was given extravagant honors by both Caligula and Claudius. She was held up to the public as a paradigm of motherhood. She received the title Augusta, a college of priests was established in her honor, games were held, and her image was portrayed on coins and in statues displayed in a variety of places across the Roman Empire. In fact, more can be known today about her appearance than about the events of her life.

Significance

Roman women could not hold political power directly, but they could exercise enormous influence behind the scenes. Three women—Augustus’s wife Livia, Antonia, and Nero’s mother, Agrippina—did as much as any emperor to direct the course of the Empire during its first seventy-five years. Livia and Agrippina often seem to have acted out of malice and ambition. Antonia, by contrast, has been called level-headed and a possessor of integrity. Perhaps with her mother as a model, she cared for a number of children in addition to her own and worked tirelessly to protect her family’s interests. Without her intervention to warn the emperor Tiberius of a plot against his life, the entire course of Rome’s history would have been dramatically altered.

Bibliography

Barrett, Anthony A. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Frequent references to Antonia show how her influence continued to be felt, even to her granddaughter’s generation.

Barrett, Anthony A. Caligula: The Corruption of Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Barrett shows Antonia’s influence on the Imperial family, leading up to Caligula’s principate.

Erhart, K. P. “A Portrait of Antonia Minor in the Fogg Art Museum and Its Iconographical Tradition.” American Journal of Archaeology 82 (1978): 193-212. The numerous images of Antonia can be divided into three large groups and their chronology established by the hairstyles portrayed.

Nichols, J. “Antonia and Sejanus.” Historia 24 (1975): 48-58. An analysis of the sources about Antonia’s role in subverting Sejanus’s plot to overthrow Tiberius.