Draycott Fulvia

The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-194-4
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'A thoroughly rapacious woman...as cruel as she is greedy' Cicero 'A woman who took no thought for spinning or housekeeping...meddlesome and headstrong' Plutarch '[She] caused the death of many, both to satisfy her enmity and to gain their wealth' Cassius Dio 'She acted in a haughty manner towards those who were placing her in a position to be arrogant' Orosius 'Nothing of the woman in her except her sex' Velleius Paterculus The charismatic Fulvia amassed a degree of military and political power that was unprecedented for a woman in Ancient Rome. Married three times to men who moved in powerful circles, including Marc Antony, Fulvia was not content to play the usual background role that was expected of a wife - instead she challenged the Roman patriarchy and sought to increase her influence in the face of determined opposition. It's rare to know so much about a particular Roman woman, but Fulvia was so despised by her male detractors that she was much written about. Acclaimed historian Jane Draycott has used original sources to piece together Fulvia's life and sort fact from fiction, while also exploring the role of women in Roman society.

Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra's Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen. She is currently Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University of Glasgow's Games and Gaming Lab.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Draycott, Jane

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

OF ALL THE BAD years (and there were many) in the lead-up to the final fall of the Roman Republic, the year 52 bce got off to an especially bad start. Since the Romans sincerely believed that certain days were unlucky, it followed that if the first day of the year happened to fall on one of these unlucky days, the whole year would be marked by misfortune.1 Sure enough, ominous portents began to appear, indicating that things were about to go from bad to worse.2 First, an owl was seen and captured in the city of Rome. While to us this might seem fairly innocuous, albeit a little spooky, to the Romans the owl was associated with blood-drinking and cannibalistic child-killing witches known as , and its hoot was thought to signal impending death.3 Second, a cult statue of the god Mars started to sweat, and its perspiration continued unabated for three days.4 This undeniable sign of divine displeasure could only have been worse if the statue had been sweating blood. Third, a meteor streaked across the sky. Like the hoot of an owl, this was often considered a sign of impending death or other sort of doom. Finally, thunderbolts sounded while clods of earth, stones, shards of pot, and blood flew through the air, all obvious signs of the gods in the heavens attempting to communicate with the mortals down below. But what, exactly, were they saying? And was anyone listening, in any case? In such ill-starred circumstances, it was perhaps unwise for the Senate to vote to tear down the city of Rome’s temples of the Egyptian gods Serapis and Isis, which only increased the sense of unease.

This febrile climate of superstition and fear was further exacerbated by the fact that, due to electoral malfeasance, bribery and corruption, no consuls had been installed in office on 1 January, as would have been the usual practice. The positions, Rome’s supreme magistracies, would remain vacant until July, by which time the elections for the following year’s consulships were imminent. Everyone agreed: something terrible was about to happen.

On 18 January, a senator named Publius Clodius Pulcher was travelling north up the Appian Way to Rome, returning from an overnight trip to Aricia (modern Ariccia), an ancient town up in the Alban Hills, south-east of the city. He was accompanied by three friends – and, he thought, amply protected by a bodyguard comprising around thirty enslaved men armed with swords.5 Late in the afternoon, the group reached the ancient town of Bovillae (modern Frattocchie), where they passed a shrine to the goddess Bona Dea, the ‘Good Goddess’. She was a deity with whom Clodius had history, having been accused of impiety towards her back in 62 bce after interrupting an evening of sacred women-only rites. This resulted in him being put on trial for sacrilege, though he was ultimately acquitted of the charge. It was near this shrine that he and his entourage suddenly encountered a man named Titus Annius Milo, Clodius’ fellow senator, political rival and one of his many enemies. Milo was on his way south to his villa at Lanuvium (modern Lanuvio), accompanied by his wife Fausta Cornelia, several friends, and his own substantial bodyguard comprising perhaps as many as three hundred enslaved people, as well as his wife’s entourage of singers, maids and pages.6 Numbered amongst Milo’s bodyguard were several fearsome gladiators – first and foremost Eudamus and Birria, a pair sufficiently deadly in the arena that they had achieved celebrity status.7

As the two groups filed past each other, male members of each entourage began heckling their rivals. Roman toxic masculinity having much in common with its counterpart today, from there, things swiftly escalated into what would later be referred to as the ‘Battle of Bovillae’. Cicero covered the fracas extensively in perhaps his most famous speech, the , ‘In Defence of Milo’, composed and delivered a few months after the event. One hundred years later, the historian Asconius wrote a detailed commentary on that speech, providing crucial information that Cicero neglected to include, focused as he was on implicating his enemy Clodius and exonerating his friend Milo for the massacre. Caught up in the violent and bloody chaos, the gladiator Birria hurled a – a Thracian bladed weapon resembling a spear or javelin – into the fray, and it caught Clodius in the shoulder. Clodius and his friends fled to a nearby inn in pursuit of sanctuary and medical treatment, leaving his hapless slaves to cover their retreat. Unfortunately for Clodius, Milo’s forces quickly managed to overpower the servile rearguard. At this point, Milo seems to have decided that he might as well go big or go home, since a dead Clodius was obviously preferable to a surviving and vengeful one.8

So Milo ordered Clodius’ death and his crony Marcus Saufeius was happy to oblige, hauling Clodius out of the inn, wrenching his gold senatorial ring from his finger, and leaving him bleeding in the middle of the road that his ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus had built three centuries before, surrounded by the family’s tombs.9 Then Milo’s party continued on its journey to Lanuvium as if nothing had happened, trampling Clodius into the cobbles under the wheels of their carriage and the hooves of their horses for good measure. A short while later, Sextus Teidius, a fellow senator who happened to be passing that way, found the body and ordered his servants to transport it on a litter back to Clodius’ famously well-appointed house on the Clivus Victoriae, on the north-west side of the Palatine Hill, a prime location in the centre of Rome. Here Clodius’ wife Fulvia was waiting, eagerly anticipating his return from his business trip.

Had Fulvia adhered to social convention, as his closest female relation and someone roughly equivalent to the modern next of kin, she would have had Clodius’ body brought inside and then overseen the process of preparing it for cremation as he was washed in warm water, anointed with scented oils, dressed in his finest pure white woollen toga, and garlanded with flowers to symbolize the fragility of life, with a coin to pay the ferryman Charon for the journey across the River Styx to the Underworld placed in his mouth. Then, she would have supervised the body’s arrangement on a bier in the centre of the atrium with his insignia of office, surrounded by portrait busts of eminent ancestors – of which he had many – ready to be viewed by family members, friends, acquaintances, and Clodius’ many loyal supporters amongst the urban , the common people. Finally, she would have had a plaster cast mould of his face made, to facilitate the production of a death mask and portraits in the future.

Yet what Fulvia actually did was quite different, and entirely unexpected: she immediately sought to unleash terrible vengeance on her husband’s murderers.10 She proceeded to incite the curious crowd of plebeians and enslaved people who had gathered outside, by throwing open the doors and inviting them in – perhaps the first time people such as this would have been inside such a fine Roman home.11 And then she stripped Clodius’ body naked and displayed the extent of his gory wounds. Enraged and egged on by several of Clodius’ friends, who loathed Milo as much as he had, the crowd seized his body, paraded it down from the slope of the Palatine Hill, along the Sacred Way, and through the Forum. This was a complete subversion of the traditional Roman funerary procession, which under normal circumstances was highly regulated and ritualized; we can see just such a procession depicted in a relief dating from the mid to the late first century bce, from Amiternum (modern Abruzzo) in Italy.12 Usually, the differences between the aristocrats holding the funeral – giving the honorific speeches, wearing the ancestor masks, and sitting on the ivory chairs – and the common or garden onlookers were starkly demarcated; here, they were non-existent. Indeed, Cicero would later blame Clodius’ associate Sextus Cloelius specifically for depriving him of a proper aristocratic funeral, and leaving the smouldering remnants of his corpse to be mauled by stray dogs.13 There were some historical precedents for this, on previous occasions when popular (and populist) heroes had died under mysterious circumstances: for example, in 133 bce, an unnamed friend of Tiberius Gracchus was thought to have been poisoned by the Senate, and his body, covered with boils, was likewise snatched up by a crowd and taken down to the Forum in a politically charged gesture.14

The ringleaders displayed Clodius’ battered body to yet more crowds on the Rostra, the public speaker’s platform, in sight of the stone lion that was thought to mark the grave of Faustulus, the foster father of Rome’s founder and first king Romulus and his twin brother Remus, and statues of individuals who had either met their deaths in the service of Rome or performed exemplary deeds of valour.15 No doubt they considered it appropriate, although Clodius’ many enemies thought differently. Finally, they deposited the corpse in the Curia Hostilia, the Senate House, and there, in a frenzy, they built a makeshift funerary pyre from benches, tables and public records. Once lit, it not only succeeded in cremating Clodius’ body – illegally and...