Livia Drusilla

For more than half a century Livia Drusilla stood close to the center of Roman power, first as the wife of Augustus and then as the mother of Tiberius. Born in 58 BC into the patrician Claudian aristocracy, she was married young to her kinsman Tiberius Claudius Nero, with whom she fled Italy during the civil wars after Caesar's assassination. In 38 BC, divorced from her first husband and pregnant with her second son, she married Octavian, the future Augustus. The union joined her ancient Claudian lineage to the upstart Julian house and became the genealogical foundation of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, since every later emperor of the line descended from or was adopted into one of the two families she connected.

Her marriage to Augustus lasted fifty-one years but produced no children. Her sons by her first husband, Tiberius and Drusus, were raised in the emperor's household and became his principal commanders. Livia herself received exceptional public honors, including legal sacrosanctity and freedom from guardianship granted as early as 35 BC, and cultivated a deliberate image of traditional domestic virtue. Contemporaries also recognized her as a political force: she advised Augustus, exercised patronage on a vast scale, and interceded for petitioners and condemned men.

Tacitus and Cassius Dio relay insinuations that she contrived the deaths of Augustus's preferred heirs to clear the path for Tiberius. These charges, transmitted as rumor even by the authors who report them, are unverifiable and reflect the suspicion that attached to powerful women in the senatorial tradition rather than established fact.

Under Augustus's will of AD 14 she was adopted into the Julian family and renamed Julia Augusta, an adoption across family lines as deliberate as any in the dynasty's history. Relations with the reigning Tiberius grew strained, and when she died in AD 29, aged eighty-six, he declined most of the honors the Senate proposed. Her deification came in AD 42 from her grandson Claudius, the third member of her bloodline to hold the throne she had helped construct.