The Story of Cytheris / Lycoris – or How to Make it Big as an Actress in Ancient Rome

It was around 70 BC and the Roman Republic was getting ready for its dying years when a new type of theatrical representation gathered popularity in the city: the mime. It was a show that included singing, dancing, acting, mythological references, bathroom humor, striptease, political jokes and a lot of improvisation – so pretty much throw in anything short of the kitchen sink, and you've got a show. Another thing about these mimes was that they allowed female actresses – the mimae – as opposed to the classic tragedies and comedies, where all the parts were played by men.

Troubled times bring new opportunities for those who know where to look, and the success of the mimes brought a shiny new career path for women in ancient Rome – especially since there were very few opportunities for them anyway.

At about that time a slave girl was born in the house of the Roman knight Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus. Years later, she became a famous mima, and when she was freed, she took the name of Volumnia, after her master, and the Hellenized cognomen of Cytheris – hinting to the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of Cythera. However, Roman freed slaves were not actually free to go seek their fortunes as they pleased; they remained in the service of their master – so freeing an actress slave like Cytheris was not an act of gratuitous kindness. There surely was a hidden reason for it.

Hidden, and no so much – as shortly after Cytheris embarked in a passionate love affair with Mark Anthony (the one of Anthony and Cleopatra and “Brutus is an honorable man” fame). See, Anthony was a senator, and it wasn't proper for a senator to be seen with somebody else's slave all day long. It wasn't proper for a senator to be seen with an actress, either, but Anthony was quite famous for doing only improper things – and an actress was somewhat more acceptable than a slave.

And Eutrapelus? Well, there were troubled times, and power shifted overnight. It was important to have someone close to the power players of the day, and Cytheris and Mark Anthony could not have been closer. And the scandal erupted.

Political opponents made fun of Mark Anthony calling him Cytherius – Cytheris's man – and the self-righteous Cicero fumbled, pointing out that Anthony's entourage called the woman Volumnia – which would have been the name of the daughter of Volumnius of the equestrian order – instead of Cytheris – the cognomen which clearly placed her among freed slaves. Cicero's life was filled with such matters of the utmost importance, which is why nobody could blame Anthony for killing him several years later.

Anthony, sexy as always

Anthony made a fool of himself, as he usually did with ladies, but Caesar, still alive and very much in power at the time, would have none of it: so he ordered the love birds to break it off, which they quickly did.

After that, Cytheris had a short-lived affair with Brutus (of the “Brutus was an honorable man” fame), but that didn't last, mostly on account of Brutus being a fugitive soon to be dead traitor. It was also around that time that Cicero, somewhat reconciled with Cytheris now that Anthony was out of the picture, went to see her play, and was so impressed he wrote a letter on how moved he was by each verse she recited. Which, of course, was too little too late and he'd still wind up dead.

Things were on fast forward in those days, and soon Caesar was dead, Brutus was dead, Cicero was dead and Anthony was with Cleopatra and neither was feeling very well. The new man in the town was Octavian, and Cytheris decided (or rather, Eutrapelus decided for her) it was time to stay close to somebody from the new political elite, and that somebody was Gaius Cornelius Gallus, politician and poet (deadly combination), who had just taken the newly created position of prefect of Egypt.

Ancient Rome's Chelsea Girls

Gallus was supposed to be one of Rome's greatest poets, and he wrote four volumes of elegies to honor his beloved Cytheris, now poetically renamed Lycoris (following the Clodia – Lesbia tradition. Speaking of which, Gallus also complains of how cold and heartless his lover was to him, which we know cannot be true, so it must have been a poetic convention of the time, and this throws a whole new light on Catullus.)

So, Gallus was supposed to be this great poet and Cytheris now Lycoris was his muse – and we know that because Virgil, Ovid, and Martial all say so, and it's not wise to mess with the entire battalion of Roman poetry at once. It wasn't until 1978 that a few lines by Gallus were discovered on a papyrus in Egypt, and indeed they reference Lycoris. They're also crappy poetry.

After writing his four volumes of what we now know to be crappy poetry, Gallus did something stupid and Octavian had him killed. Cytheris found consolation in the arms of an army officer, and went on with him to endure the not-so-harsh life in a Roman fort. That's where we lose her. Ever since, the mimae all over the empire took the stage names of Cytheris and Lycoris in her honor, and this makes it very difficult to trace where she went after she left Rome.

The romantic version of the story says that her former master finally let her go for good, and she married the said soldier and lived happily ever after as a family, with the one child she had with Mark Anthony. That's probably not true. So who cares? A couple of millennia later, I think of Cytheris and Anthony, Brutus and Gallus as a sort of weird mirroring of Nico and Lou Reed, Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop. Oh, and Caesar as Andy Warhol.

Ancient Roman Women – Claudia Octavia

So let's move on to the second special request generated by the overview of ancient Roman women - Claudia Octavia, daughter of emperor Claudius and wife of emperor Nero.

This is quite a fairytale, about a girl whose mother dies and is replaced by an evil stepmother, but our heroine faces all difficulties with bravery, and she eventually marries a prince. Then the prince chops her head off. End of story. Ok, our Octavia is anything but a heroine. I mean, even after we got used to the passiveness of Cinderella and Snow-white, Claudia Octavia still deserves a monument named after her, for being the most passive victim of all times.

She just didn't have any chances, with a family like hers. Claudius took everybody by surprise (including himself) by becoming emperor in 41 AD. He already had a daughter, named Claudia Antonia (and here we go), with his second wife, Aelia Paetina, but, as all Romans, desperately needed a male heir, so he married Valeria Messalina, who was also accidentally his second cousin. And yes, it's THE Messalina, the ultimate image of debauchery and promiscuity.

The happy couple had two children – Claudia Octavia and Britannicus – until Messalina decided to re-marry but forgot to inform her royal husband first, and was therefore put to death. Since all his marriages turned out so well, Claudius decided to try his luck one more time, with his first cousin, Agrippina, who already had a son, Nero, about the same age as Octavia and Britannicus (just a bit older than Britannicus, but those few extra months would prove crucial for the power transfer).

Messalina and her two children. Image CC via Wikipedia. 

So, let's review what we have so far: Octavia was the daughter of a man considered both mentally and physically challenged and of a woman who was just about to go down in history as the biggest prostitute of all times. She witnessed her mother being put to death, and then got Agrippina as stepmother, already famed for her intrigues and blood thirst.

Now let's watch things going from bad to worse. As all girls of her standing, Octavia got engaged very young to a guy named Silanus, as her father was looking for political alliances. When the situation changed, the engagement between Octavia and Silanus was dissolved, pushing Silanus to commit suicide on the same day that Claudius married Agrippina. Spectacular.

Claudius

A new marriage was arranged for Octavia, this time to Nero. Of course, they were technically siblings, so Octavia was probably adopted into a different family – how much worse could a new family be, anyway?

Let's fast forward a bit among the next pile of corpses: Claudius died, possibly poisoned by Agrippina, Britannicus died, possibly poisoned by Agrippina and / or Nero, Agrippina died, on Nero's orders. We can reasonably assume that Octavia suffered from the loss of her father and brother, but it would be her stepmother's death that had the biggest impact on her life. Agrippina managed to keep Nero relatively under control for a while, and she insisted on him staying married to Octavia, to justify his claim to the imperial position. From the paternal side, Nero's family was not particularly illustrious, so the marriage to a Julio-Claudian was imperative.

But, with Agrippina out of the way, Nero could do what he pleased, and historians of the time are more than happy to report that he hated being intimate with Octavia. (That's Rome for you, no privacy for the famous, even in the bedroom. Feels so familiar, somehow.) There have also been allegations that Nero tried to strangle Octavia on several occasions – though he strikes me as mad, but not the kind of mad that would get violent on a personal level.

When one of Nero's mistresses, Poppaea Sabina, got pregnant, he finally decided to divorce Octavia, claiming she was sterile, and married Poppaea a couple of weeks later. The divorce caused a general outcry of sympathy, so Nero tried to hide Octavia from the public, by having her exiled to an island under an accusation of adultery. So... his mistress was already pregnant with his child, but Octavia was the one charged with adultery. The Romans thought so too, so the manifestations of sympathy for Octavia increased, and people demanded to have her back, thus forcing Nero's hand to use the ultimate solution: he had her killed. There was a pathetic attempt to make it look like a suicide, by opening her veins in a hot bath, but it was kind of hard to buy the suicide version, considering that Octavia's head was subsequently cut off and sent to Rome, as a gift for Poppaea.

If it's any consolation, Poppaea herself also had a gruesome death, a few years later. Then Nero reconsidered his alliance with the descendents of Claudius and tried to marry Octavia's sister, Claudia Antonia. She refused, and was also killed. Typical Julio-Claudian style: marry the emperor, get killed, don't marry the emperor, get killed.

Tacitus plays up the anti-neronian propaganda by describing Octavia as an “aristocratic and virtuous wife” - as if anyone needed more incentives to feel sorry for her. And there's that awful tragedy called “Octavia Praetexta”, which survived to this day, mostly because people believed it was written by Seneca. Seneca himself has a lot of sins to burden his memory, but this is not one of them.

Oh, and, while trying to do some research online about Octavia, I found very little useful information, of course, but my trusted search engine threw this back at me: “Claudia Octavia is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Claudia Octavia and others you may know”. Maybe I should check my Facebook account more often.

Ancient Roman Women - Octavia Minor

What do you know, I got a special request to write more about Octavia after yesterday's post. She would have gracefully accepted the attention she got, I'm sure, so today is her spot in the light.

Octavia was the sister of a guy named Gaius Octavius Thurinus, who'd became known later as Emperor Augustus. She's called Octavia Minor because there was another older half-sister, also named Octavia, of course (the Romans had that annoying habit – the result being that nobody could tell sisters apart; even ancient authors, like Plutarch, mix up the two, so we don't really need to know any more stuff about Octavia Maior).

When she was about 15, Octavia married a man of consular rank named Gaius Claudius Marcellus, who's of relatively little consequence to this story, but they had three children together – two daughters named, of course, Claudia Marcella, and a son - Marcus Claudius Marcellus. Yes, they were stunningly creative when it came to names. But this is about to grow even more confusing, so bear with me a while.

Julius Caesar had little reason to like Octavia's husband, who took the wrong side in the political debates of the troubled 1^st century BC, so at some point he tried to get Octavia to divorce and marry Pompey in order to forge an alliance (Pompey was married to Caesar's daughter before – this is so much better than any desperate housewives plot). Anyway, Pompey declined the offer – probably because he didn't want a new alliance with Caesar rather than because of Octavia herself, who was said to be a real beauty, and already had a reputation of being a good and faithful wife (read: she was fertile and refrained from having children with anybody besides her husband).

Octavia Minor - Don't you think she looks a little like Lorelei Gilmore? 

So Octavia continued to live besides her inconsequential husband until his death (of natural causes, big surprise). In the meantime, both Pompey and Caesar were also dead, and the big names battling it out on the Roman power scene were Marcus Antonius and Octavian, Octavia's brother – so she drew the short straw again in the lottery of political alliances.

As luck would have it, Antonius' wife, Fulvia, died about the same time as Octavia's husband, so Octavian arranged a quick marriage between his arch enemy and his sister. It caused quite a fuss at the time – Octavia was supposed to be in mourning, and apparently pregnant with her previous husband, so a Senate decree was needed to allow the ceremony to proceed. The propaganda machine was put at good use to present it as a marriage that would guarantee Rome's safety and peace for the next thousand years – a little something that depended on Octavia's ability to bear a male child with her new husband. She was about 30 at the time – which means old, but she sure tried her best. The couple only had two daughters together, named, of course, Antonia and Antonia. To keep herself occupied, Octavia also took in and raised the son Antonius had from his previous marriage (or his sons, assuming he had two – this is a bit blurred, but there are so many children already, who's counting?)

Then things got messy. Antonius left to fight against Parthia, and he fought so hard, he had three children with Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen, creating a neverending supply of plots for Victorian playwrights and Hollywood screenplayers. (Antonius, by the way, didn't look anything like Charlton Heston or Marlon Brando. He was fat like a pig and had a neck like an obelisk.)

Octavia kept playing her part as a victim-wife. She gathered troops and money for her husband's campaign (not that he was actually taking part in any battles), but, when she tried to visit, Antonius instructed her not to set foot in Egypt. He did, however, accept the troops and money she brought him. Later he divorced her – by mail, by all means. Didn't even have the decency to come to Rome and tell her in person.

Marcus Antonius - What's with the hair anyway?

Octavia was probably messed up by the public scandal her life had turned into, but her brother Octavian found a window of opportunity, and he stepped up the propaganda, constantly playing Octavia, the good Roman wife, against the image of the exotic and lavish mistress, Cleopatra. All in all, this allowed Octavian to fight his war against Antonius and to present it to the general public as a war on Egypt, instead of the civil war it actually was.

So, Octavian won at Actium, effectively establishing his undisputed rule over the entire Roman territory, Antonius and Cleopatra both committed suicide, leaving three more children unattended – Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene and Ptolemy Philadelphus (don't assume they got more creative with names in Egypt, all of them had a long tradition going back at least 13 generations. For now, however, they are a convenient break from all the octavias and antonias).

Yay, more children. Octavia took them all in. This means she had at least nine, isn't that lovely. Actually, it's not lovely, but it's weird. Antonius had divorced Octavia before he died, and Roman women did not retain any rights over their own children after a divorce, let alone the children the husband might have had from a different woman. This was clearly Octavian's intervention, to enhance his sister's image and turn her into a saint. Well, he succeeded.

In fact, Octavian's initial plan played out well on the long term: the heirs of Antonius were effectively neutralized and became part of the imperial family, thus killing any serious opposition for the following Julio-Claudian rulers.

The results of the obsessive inbreeding in the imperial family were funny. Emperor Caligula sentenced to death people who celebrated the battle of Actium (because they were celebrating the defeat of his famous great-grandfather, Marcus Antonius) and also those he didn't celebrate the battle of Actium (because they weren't celebrating the victory of his famous great-grandfather, Octavian Augustus). Also, our Octavia was, at the same time, the maternal and paternal great-grandmother of Emperor Nero. No surprise they all turned out nutters.

Now, Octavia had a bunch of children, so her brother, now officially the big cheese in Rome, decided to adopt one, Marcellus, as his heir (remember Marcellus? Yeah, he was in the first litter, it's difficult to keep track). Marcellus died young, as it generally happened to the heirs to the imperial throne, so in the end, Octavia's daughters would have to take the political path that ran in the family and live up to the expectations. Both Antonias would become surprisingly powerful players on the Roman scene, apparently inheriting their mother's fierce loyalty and their father's appetite for power and blood thirst.

When Octavia died, she received public funerals and her brother built several monuments in her memory (including the Porticus Octaviae, which still stands today, and which should not be confused with Porticus Octavia, which was... never mind. He built stuff named after her.) However, he refused some of the honors the Senate tried to vote for Octavia – probably thought enough was enough, after all, she was just a woman. Still, Octavia was one of the first Roman women to have her image minted on a coin – but was in good company, since two of Antonius' other wives, Fulvia and Cleopatra, had their own coins too. The numismatic evidence now helps us establish beyond reasonable doubt that Octavia was the most beautiful of the three, and that Antonius was an ass.

The Roles of Women in Ancient Rome

Yay, girl stuff!

Here's the deal with the roles of ancient Roman women: everybody's writing about them, trying to make the most of very limited resources, but the actual factual data is very limited. The history of Rome covers a huge timeline and a giant territory, but, since there are so few accounts of ancient Roman women, it's very tempting to take whatever bits and pieces of information survived and to force them together into creating a coherent image.

You cannot compare the situation of women in 200 BC with that of women in 200 AD, same as you cannot compare the life of a woman in Alexandria to that of a woman in Britannia. To add even more complications, most portraits we have from ancient literature are not of real women, but idealized images used to enforce the writer's point of view.

So, that being said, I'll do what everybody else is doing, create a very general image, and maybe get into the juicier details later.

Family Roles – Daughter, Mother and Wife

The place of a good Roman woman was at home (I'd say in the kitchen, but few houses had kitchens), or out in the open, but still promoting the values and the name of the family.

It probably wasn't a lot of fun in the beginning. Daughters literary belonged to their father until they were married, and then the authority was transferred to their husbands. If the husband died or divorced, the woman would return to her father. As the republic turned into an empire, growing richer and more tolerant, things changed, the way Romans liked to change things: officially everything remained the same, in reality everything was different. We know for instance about a law allowing daughters to inherit their mother's fortune, which means some women managed to acquire financial independence, and let's face it, financial independence means independence, period.

As for the family roles, accounts vary. In some, women were regarded as mere vessels for procreation. There is a story of a philosopher who thought it perfectly natural to “lend” his wife to his friend, because she was fertile and his friend couldn't have children with his previous wives, and then take her back once she fulfilled her mission. I think I've stated my opinion of Roman philosophers repeatedly on this blog.

Public Roles – Benefactors, Priestesses and Politicians

There were few public roles available for women in ancient Rome – the most famous, of course, being that of Vestals – the celebrated virgin priestesses. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, they got some of the best theater seats, and the contract was for a pre-determined duration; after a while, the Vestals were free to leave and get married. Most of them chose to stay even after their term expired (probably for the complimentary theater tickets).

In Pompeii we learn of a woman called Eumachia, who was a priestess of Venus and certainly belonged to the ruling elite. She commissioned and paid for several buildings, helped during the reconstruction effort that followed an earthquake, and the town rewarded her with a statue, so must have been a relatively prominent figure.

Those were the good public roles for women – the bad ones were those of politicians (well, not much has changed since). Romans hated women politicians. Agrippina's biggest crime is not that of having her husband poisoned, but that of attempting to greet ambassadors together with her son, Nero. Agrippina was a formidable character, but she ended up on the losers' side, so we don't hear many good things about her. Few women managed to get powerful and successful enough to force the Romans to bite their tongue and swallow their pride; most notable among them was Livia, Augustus' wife (it surely paid off to marry the founder of the empire, but also to live about ten times longer than the average life expectancy of the age).

Shady Roles – Witches, Enchantresses and Prostitutes

It's the extremes that draw the attention, so the roles we know most about today are either those in the spotlight or those from the gutters. Pompeii preserved a wealth of inscriptions detailing the prices of the local prostitutes, while the famous poisoner Locusta has a prominent spot among the women serial killers of antiquity.

Regarding the prostitutes, it's unclear how many were slaves and how many free women who chose this path (don't be too quick to judge them, the career options were limited, a dirty one is better than none at all).

Women of the Imperial Family

Being born or getting married into the imperial family was surely the quickest way to get noticed for the women in ancient Rome. Like dying your hair blonde and pretending to be a singer today. Trying to understand Roman women by looking at the imperial family is exactly like trying to understand today's society by looking at Paris Hilton.

Professional Victims

There was one certain way to get your fifteen minutes of fame – become a professional victim. Commit suicide together with your husband, raise children born by your husband's mistress, get yourself killed for something that wasn't your fault or your problem to begin with – and earn the immortal praise of the famous writers.

Octavia seemed to be the name of choice for professional victims in the first century, like Octavian's sister, married to Marcus Antonius for political reasons, then used by the augustan propaganda as an antithetic image for Antonius' mistress, Cleopatra. Another Octavia was the daughter of emperor Claudius, married to Nero (who was also her stepbrother, but those are just details) and then killed by the same – enough to turn her into the main character of a play attributed to Seneca (Seneca is obviously not the author, but that's a different matter).

Read more details about:

• Octavia Minor

Foreign Rulers

If Roman women are presented as stereotypes in the literature of the age, then the foreign rulers are downright caricatures. Cleopatra of Egypt, Zenobia of Palmyra and Boudica of Britannia – images that fascinated the conservative Roman elite, in the same way that the legend of the amazons fascinated the Greeks – weird and scary things, outside the natural order. What we can do now is dust them off, try to figure out fact from fiction, and maybe shed a bit more light on the ancient Romans' concepts.

Regular Women

So, where does all this leave regular women, the millions who belonged to the middle classes and had a normal life? Pretty much nowhere. We can tell what they were wearing, eating and using for make-up, but not what they were doing or thinking.

There is enough data to figure out they were not locked in the house, like the Greek women, enjoyed a certain degree of freedom, were actively involved in the life of their cities; evidence from Pompeii shows that some could read and write and others were regular businesswomen, but there's no way of telling if these were exceptions or the rule. It's like being stuck in a huge warehouse full of colorful trinkets, in perfect darkness, and you can only light a match every half an hour to catch a glimpse of what's around you.