Julia III

Roman noblewoman

• Born: 39 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Rome (now in Italy)
• Died: 14 c.e.
• Place of death: Rhegium (now Reggio di Calabria, Italy)

Julia, the daughter of Emperor Augustus, promoted her father’s political agenda through marriage alliances and by having sons. Her unconventional behavior contributed to the enmity between the Julian and Claudian branches of the Imperial household and deeply grieved Augustus, indirectly influenced his political decisions, and furthered the rift between the Julians and the Claudians.

Early Life

Most information about Julia (JEWL-yuh) III, daughter of Augustus, comes from Roman historians writing after her death. Of these, Velleius Paterculus is her nearest contemporary, but the account by Suetonius is the most comprehensive. The fifth century c.e. Christian writer Macrobius, the only biographer who purports to record Julia’s own words, is some four centuries removed from her life.

Julia was the only child of Octavian (later Augustus, emperor of Rome) and Scribonia, whom her father wed after a brief, unconsummated marriage to Marc Antony’s stepdaughter Claudia. Octavian divorced Scribonia on the day of Julia’s birth, claiming that he could not bear her nagging. Soon thereafter, Octavian took the pregnant Livia Drusilla from her husband Tiberius Nero and remained happily married to her until his death in 14 c.e. Julia received a strict, conservative upbringing in her father’s household. She was taught weaving and spinning and was expected to conduct herself modestly at all times. Octavian became emperor when Julia was eight years old and assumed the honorary title Augustus in 27 b.c.e. Because he had no male heir, Augustus betrothed his daughter to M. Claudius Marcellus, son of his sister Octavia, in effect designating Marcellus his successor.

Life’s Work

Julia married Marcellus in 25 b.c.e. When she was widowed three years later, Augustus married her to his friend and adviser Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, twenty-three years Julia’s senior and also married to Marcellus’s sister. With Agrippa, Julia had five children: Gaius Julius Caesar (II), Lucius Julius Caesar (IV), Julia (IV, or the Younger), Vipsania Agrippina (II, or the Elder), and Agrippa Julius Caesar (Agrippa Postumus). Augustus adopted Gaius and Lucius soon after Lucius’s birth in 17; in doing so, he fulfilled the requirements of the de maritandis ordinibus, his own law requiring every citizen to produce three children, and at the same time designated Gaius and Lucius, respectively, as his successors. In 13 b.c.e., Augustus symbolized this designation and honored his daughter as a mother by issuing a coin with his own idealized image on the front and a portrait of Julia, flanked by her sons, on the reverse.

Julia was a cultured, intelligent woman whose kind and gentle nature made her extremely popular. The first Latin woman to be apotheosized in the east, she was called “divine” in Paphos, “the new Aphrodite” in Mytilene, and “Aphrodite Genetrix” in Eressus. However, Julia’s unconventional ways caused her father anxiety. Macrobius preserves a number of anecdotes that illustrate this father-daughter conflict as well as demonstrate Julia’s wit and independence. There and elsewhere, the free-spirited Julia is often compared to the more traditional and conservative Livia. Some scholars even posit a rivalry between the two, prompted by Julia’s ambition and resulting in a rift between the Claudian branch of the Imperial family, represented by Livia and preferred by the older generation, and the Julian branch, represented by Julia and favored by the younger, more progressive generation. Sometime during this period, Julia embarked on a number of adulterous affairs with young noblemen in her circle. Augustus was initially suspicious but wanted to believe his daughter chaste. Reassured by her children’s resemblance to Agrippa, he decided that Julia was simply lighthearted and liked to say that he had “two somewhat wayward daughters—the Roman Republic and Julia,” as quoted by Macrobius. The explanation for Julia’s appearance of fidelity is also preserved by Macrobius, who reports that when asked how she managed to produce only legitimate children, Julia replied, “I never take on a passenger unless the ship is full.”

Agrippa died in 12 b.c.e., and Augustus settled on Tiberius, Livia’s son from her first marriage, as Julia’s next husband. At the time, Tiberius was married to Vipsania, whom he loved dearly, but Augustus saw this as an opportunity to unify the Julians and Claudians and compelled a divorce. After their marriage in 11 b.c.e., Tiberius at first acted as a good husband to Julia; they had one child together, but it died in infancy. Soon, Tiberius learned that Julia had resumed relations with one of her lovers. Although he was indignant and cut off marital relations, he did not accuse her publicly, out of respect for Augustus and the scandal it would cause.

When Julia’s son Gaius assumed the toga virilis—the “toga of manhood”—in 5 b.c.e., he was admitted to the senate, given the title princeps iuventutis (prince of youth), designated as a consul in advance for the year 1 b.c.e., and allowed to serve prematurely as commander in the provinces. Soon afterward, Tiberius requested permission to withdraw from politics and retire to the Greek island of Rhodes. The historian Tacitus identifies Tiberius’s soured relations with Julia as his primary motive for this move, a possibility echoed by Suetonius. Tiberius later claimed that he desired to avoid the appearance of rivalry with Gaius and Lucius. Regardless of his reasons, the loss of an experienced soldier and capable administrator like Tiberius both angered Augustus and damaged Tiberius’s reputation. Thus, the rift between the Julians and the Claudians, which Augustus had tried to mend with his daughter’s marriage, was instead enlarged.

In 2 b.c.e., Augustus was confronted with evidence of his daughter’s indiscretions and compelled to invoke the Lex Julia de adulteriis, which provided harsh penalties for adultery, against his daughter. According to Seneca, Augustus sent a letter to the senate stating that Julia

had been accessible to scores of paramours, that in nocturnal revels she had roamed about the city, that the very forum and the rostrum, from which her father had proposed a law against adultery, had been chosen by the daughter for her debaucheries, that she had daily resorted to the statue of Marsyas, and, laying aside the role of adulteress, there sold her favours, and sought the right to every indulgence with even an unknown paramour.

Of the men implicated in Julia’s affairs, Iulus Antonius was either executed or committed suicide, while the others were exiled. Julia was banished to the island of Pandateria, deprived of every sort of luxury, and forbidden male visitors unless they were first thoroughly scrutinized by Augustus. Julia’s mother, Scribonia, voluntarily accompanied her daughter in exile. Augustus, however, having long attempted through the passage of laws and by his own example to promote conservative values, was deeply grieved by his daughter’s downfall and refused visitors for some time. After Phoebe, one of Julia’s freedwomen also implicated in the scandal, hanged herself in disgrace, Suetonius reports that Augustus proclaimed, “I should have preferred to be Phoebe’s father!” When Tiberius learned of Julia’s banishment and that Augustus had sent her a divorce decree with his name on it, he was pleased but nonetheless wrote to Augustus urging a reconciliation. The Roman people also lobbied on Julia’s behalf, provoking the relentless Augustus to rail at them in assembly, “If you ever bring up this matter again, may the gods curse you with daughters as lecherous as mine, and with wives as adulterous!,” according to Suetonius.

Augustus suffered further blows in 2 and 4 c.e. with the deaths of Lucius and Gaius, respectively. With Julia and her sons out of the way, Tiberius requested permission to return to Rome. Although Augustus was initially reluctant, he soon agreed, because the political climate required a man of Tiberius’s experience and capabilities. Moreover, as he was now left without an heir, Augustus adopted Tiberius, along with Julia’s youngest son, Agrippa Postumus.

Augustus’s family problems were not over, however: Agrippa Postumus’s behavior soon became offensive, and Augustus disinherited and banished him. Additionally, Julia’s daughter Julia the Younger was caught in breach of the same law as her mother and, like her mother, was banished. The poet Ovid was also exiled at this time, and while the causes are unknown, his assertion in Tristia (after 8 c.e.; Sorrows, 1859) that “two sins . . . ruined me, my poem and my grave error” has caused speculation that he was complicit in this scandal. Augustus was terribly grieved by his family’s disgraces. He often wished aloud to have remained childless and frequently referred to the two Julias and Agrippa Postumus as “my three boils” or “my three running sores,” according to Suetonius.

Julia had been transferred to Rhegium on the Italian mainland in 4 c.e. and her conditions improved slightly. When Augustus died, however, he omitted both Julias from his will and instructed that they be excluded from the family mausoleum. Tiberius, now emperor, cut off the stipend Augustus had allowed Julia and ordered the execution of both Agrippa Postumus and Sempronius Gracchus, an exile since his implication in Julia’s scandal fourteen years earlier. Tiberius also made Julia’s conditions harsher, so that she died of malnutrition in 14 c.e. Tacitus suggests that Tiberius intended this outcome, presuming that “she had been banished for so long that her death would pass unnoticed.”

Significance

As a young woman, Julia functioned as a pawn, serving her father’s political agenda. In choosing her three husbands, Augustus was motivated by the need to designate a successor or to enhance the power and prestige of the Imperial family. Augustus also manipulated his daughter’s public image to promote traditional values and reinforce her sons’ positions, as is indicated by the numismatic portrait of Julia and her sons. Another coin portrays Julia in the manner of the goddess Diana, an attempt to exalt the Imperial family and reinforce Augustus’s power. That the public embraced the idealized image of Julia that Augustus promoted is demonstrated in Propertius’s fourth book of poetry (ca. 15 b.c.e.), where a deceased Roman matron laments, “My bones are defended by Caesar’s grief./ He mourns the death of a fit sister for his own daughter.”

After her downfall, Julia’s image suffered a sharp reversal: ancient historians vilified her; Seneca called her “shameless beyond the indictment of shamelessness,” and Velleius Paterculus characterized her downfall as “shameful to narrate and dreadful to recall.” Modern scholars, too, have often cast Julia as a licentious wanton who stands in contrast to Livia, the ideal Imperial matron. Only recently have scholars acknowledged that the ancient sources are biased by the knowledge of her terrible end and by Augustan propaganda and, following Ronald Syme in 1939, begun to view Julia as either a victim of male political agendas or as a strong, independent woman promoting her own interests within the constraints of the patriarchal system.

Bibliography

Dio Cassius. Dio’s Roman History. Translated by E. Cary. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968-1980. Greek text accompanied by parallel English translation. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Fantham, Elaine, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. A. Shapiro. Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Fantham et al. pay surprisingly little attention to Julia. The space they do devote to her demonstrates sympathy for Julia’s position and admiration for her independence.

Ferrero, Guglielmo. The Women of the Caesars. Translated by Christian Gauss. New York: Century, 1912. Ferrero oversimplifies by casting Julia as a foil for the virtuous Livia, and his work additionally suffers from conservative bias, moral squeamishness, and inadequate references. Nonetheless, his account is more comprehensive than most and readily accessible to the nonspecialist.

Kleiner, Diana E. E., and Susan B. Matheson, eds. I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996. Kleiner and Matheson provide a general overview of Julia’s adult life and briefly examine the political agenda promoted on Augustan coinage.

Macrobius. Excerpt from Saturnalia. In Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation, edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant. 2d ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. The writings in this collection from ancient Greece and Rome, all by men, focus on women’s lives. Includes bibliography and index.

Pomeroy, Sarah B., ed. Women’s History and Ancient History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Discusses Augustus and Julia’s relationship and the emperor’s motivations in choosing husbands for his daughter. Includes index and bibliography.

Propertius, Sextus. The Poems. Translated by Guy Lee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Includes notes, introduction, bibliography.

Richlin, Amy. “Julia’s Jokes, Gallia Placidia, and the Roman Use of Women as Political Icons.” In Stereotypes of Women in Power: Historical Perspectives and Revisionist Views, edited by Barbara Garlick, Suzanne Dixon, and Pauline Allen. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Richlin examines first and fifth century political motivations behind the preservation of Julia’s witticisms.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. “De Beneficiis.” In Moral and Political Essays, by Seneca. Edited and translated by John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopée. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. This volume of selections from Seneca includes bibliography and index.

Suetonius. Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. New York: Welcome Rain, 2001. Includes an introduction by Michael Grant as well as illustrations, maps, indexes, and bibliography.

Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Syme says that Julia was a pawn, serving her father’s political purposes. Includes bibliography and index.

Tacitus, Cornelius. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated with an introduction by Michael Grant. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Translator Grant provides an introduction to this work, which also contains illustrations, maps, genealogical tables, indexes, and bibliography.

Velleius Paterculus. Compendium of Roman History. Translated by Frederick W. Shipley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Text in Latin and English. Includes a biographical addendum about the author and bibliography.