The sisters of Caligula
The Archaic Allegory Volume XXVI
History shall reside in deficiency if there should exist a lack of anthem of its women. The feminine entail an undeniable bearing of significance on the pages of antiquity. Undeniably indeed do they hold up half the sky.
This week’s essay is no mythical retelling as has been the case for the past few weeks. It’s about time we delve back into history. And there is no greater annal to which we owe more history than that of Rome. Today we talk of the history of one of the most prominent women of Rome. The women in the family of Emperor Caligula.
Caligula took the throne of Rome from his great-uncle and adoptive father Tiberius and ruled for a brief period of four years from 37 to 41 AD which saw him turn from a noble emperor to a sadistic tyrant.
But today we do not convene to talk of Caligula—who is, indeed, an intriguing figure to delve into—but those from his family, particularly his sisters Julia Drusilla, Julia Livilla and Agrippina the Younger.
The Status of Imperial Women in Rome
To put it mildly, women were simple subordinates of men in Rome. They were put to be inferior to the male gender. A greater array of restrictions bore on them than the short-length rosary of rights. The women of the royal family, too, were mere figures of influence, not power.
Imperial women could but influence the state policies, though unofficially, but unequivocally strongly. They were married off to form political alliances and assumed no political authority. But strongly did they influence the men around them. The men of power and authority. By seduction and love.
Livia, the wife of the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, for example, wielded tremendous influence over her husband. She was more close to Augustus than his closest counsels and advisors. To a large extent, Livia managed to influence the course of where the imperial family was headed and who could be the heir to the throne.
All in all, women of the royal family weren’t bestowed with tasks better than looking after the family and, most importantly, giving a male heir to the family line. Residing among this tumultuously downtrodden treatment, the women of Caligula’s family presented a cold exception.
Julia Drusilla
Caligula and his siblings did not have a very regal upbringing. It was plagued, however, by political and family disputes for power, much of which sprang from their great-uncle and emperor Tiberius, who is also widely accused of orchestrating their father Germanicus' assassination in order to clear the way for his own son on the throne.
Julia Drusilla and her siblings were reared in exile by their mother and grandmother when Germanicus died. Many years later when Tiberius died and Caligula managed to take the throne of Rome, the new emperor initiated to reunite his lost family by calling back his sisters to the regal life they’d lost when young.
Caligula adored all three of his sisters, but Drusilla was his favorite. So much so that rumors of the two engaging in an incestuous connection quickly spread across Rome, which are now thought to be entirely fictitious but had enough weight back then due to Caligula's failure to be given a male heir.
During 37 AD when Caligula was severely ill—with epilepsy, as estimated by modern scholars—he altered his will to identify Drusilla as his successor. This was seen as a ground-breaking gesture since never in history had a female family member been proclaimed the heir to the imperial throne. Caligula’s aim, most likely, was, in case of his death, to have Drusilla’s husband and his close friend Lepidus take the throne before his sister bore a male child to perpetuate their royal bloodline.
Nonetheless, Caligula soon recovered from the illness and the will never came to effect.
But the emperor soon found himself engulfed in paranoia and severe mourning after the untimely death of Drusilla in 38 AD—reportedly of an epidemic fever which was rampant in Rome at that time—when she was merely 22 years of age.
History evidences that throughout Drusilla’s sickness, Caligula would seldom leave her side and wouldn’t allow her body to be taken after her death. Deeply affected by the loss, the monarch went so far as to deify Drusilla and bestow the title of Panthea, literally translating to “Universal-Goddess”. Subsequently, he had the Roman senate designate her to be a Roman goddess, to be venerated in temples alongside the goddess Venus.
Drusilla was awarded with a temple dedicated to her that included a statue of her that was worshipped the same way any traditional goddess would have been.
After her death, an extended period of mourning was forced on the Roman populace during which laughing, bathing, dining with family and children, or showing any signs of recreation, enjoyment and personal pleasure was punishable by death.
Inscriptions that have survived from the ancient Roman cities of Cyzicus and Mytilene remember Drusilla in resemblance with the goddess Venus.
When Caligula was eventually blessed with his own child, he called her Julia Drusilla in honor of his departed and adored sister. Upon the birth of this child, he took her to every goddess' sculpture in Rome, including that of Diva Drusilla, and even laid the newborn on the lap of the goddess Minerva, pleading with the goddess for care for his daughter.
Because Caligula grew increasingly paranoid after the death of Drusilla and eventually turned into a sadistic tyrant, his relationship with Drusilla was, by design, tainted with incest to have posterity remember him as truly an unstable emperor.
Agrippina the Younger and Julia Livilla
If devotion for Drusilla could not find firm limitations, why should it be any different for the other two, right? Unfortunately, no.
Caligula was an upright monarch before slipping into paranoia, and he was similarly just to his sisters. They had all endured a tumultuous childhood together, after all, and they carried a common despair.
Caligula awarded his sisters numerous cliquish distinctions upon their return to royal life, one of which was the privilege of Vestal Virgins, which allowed them to watch public games from special seats in the stadium. The names of the three sisters were also included in the pledge of loyalty.
Even coins were minted in their honor with Caligula’s image on the obverse and the sisters’ on the reverse.
Agrippina and Livilla, on the other hand, scarcely reciprocated the efforts and turned ambitious soon after Caligula rendered Drusilla his successor. After Drusilla's death and seeing a clear path to the throne, the two sisters forged an alliance with Drusilla's widower and Caligula's close friend Lepidus, who is also evidenced to have been Agrippina and Livilla's lover, to assassinate Caligula and seize imperial power in 39 AD.
The plot, dubbed the Plot of the Three Daggers, eventually came apart, and evidence of handwritten letters outlining how they planned to murder Caligula was produced at their trial. As a result, Lepidus was quickly executed, while Agrippina and Livilla were exiled.
In later years, when Caligula was assassinated and his paternal uncle Claudius ascended to the throne, their exile was eased, and Agrippina returned to imperial politics, this time with greater vigor. In no time, she had her uncle Claudius' wife removed from the scene and arranged a purely political marriage with him, which was condemned by the senate and the people of Rome as incestuous and obscene.
With the passage of time, she ascended to acquire the favor of her husband and the new emperor in order to pave way for her son as the emperor-next-in-line. In little time, she had seized imperial authority to sign government documents and establish her own civil tribunals.
In 50 AD, she successfully persuaded Claudius to adopt her son Nero and choose him as his heir. Nero, as most people know, went on to become one of Rome's most brutal and boorish rulers.
In essence, the three sisters' standing during a time when women were solely regarded to be inferior to men was astounding. They were crafty and, dare I say, nasty in their ambition for dominance. It signaled the transition of imperial women's repute from ordinary child-bearers to history weavers. The women of Rome were to march out and rise above the patriarchal setup in the ensuing decades, defining the last period of Rome's hegemony over the Hellenistic world.
December has arrived. The year is nearing a close.
Here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 for you, gentle reader, to cherish:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
This year, too, shall come to an end surprisingly soon. What has left and what has stayed is all that we are to be grateful and sorrowful of. Let 2023 be gone.
The Archaic Allegory, issue twenty six, Ladies and Gentlemen.