Livia: Empress of Rome
Livia, wife of Augustus Caesar, is one of the most vilified figures in ancient history. Writers from Tacitus to Robert Graves have portrayed her as a bloodthirsty murderess, guilty of poisoning numerous members of the Julian family in her quest to put her son Tiberius on the throne. But the infamous empress has found a worthy defender in Matthew Dennison, who salvages Livia’s reputation with this biography and takes a closer look at the complexities of her character and her times.
Dennison mines the sources to debunk the myths surrounding Livia’s life – pointing out how many of Livia’s “crimes” were recorded only at a remove of generations – and examines the prejudices that have made these myths so widely accepted. The Livia that emerges is a woman of cunning, but not of malice; a woman constricted by a culture that defined women’s greatness only in their relation to men; a woman who subtly used her religious and domestic influence to guide societal and institutional reform. Dennison has an unsettling habit of jumping ahead in the narrative, then backtracking to fill in the exposition. Overall, though, this is a competent and much-needed biography of a misunderstood but age-defining woman.
