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The year of Livia's birth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Anthony A. Barrett
Anthony A. Barrett
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, aab@interchange.ubc.ca
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Extract

The year of Livia's birth is nowhere explicitly recorded in any ancient sources, and can be determined only by calculating back from the date given in the sources for the year of her death. Both Tacitus and Dio place that death securely in A.D. 29. Tacitus limits himself to the observation that by then she had lived into extreme old age, aetate extrema, but Dio adds the more precise and useful information that at the time of her death she had lived for eighty-six years: ef ἒξ καì ὀγδο⋯κουτα ἒτη ζ⋯σασα Less usefully, Pliny the Elder states that Livia herself attributed her eighty-two years to her consumption of Pucine wine, which she drank exclusively (although in a different section Pliny adds his own observations on the beneficial effect of her daily dose of elecampane). Whatever the merits of Pliny's health tips, his chronological information is of little service in determining when she was born.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , December 1999 , pp. 630 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1999

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References

1 Tac. Ann. 5.1.1; Dio. 58.2.1 (Xiphilinus); Zonaras’ summary is slightly different.

2 Pliny, N.H. 14.60 (cf 19.92); Gardthausen, V., Augustus und seine Zeit (Leipzig, 1896), 2.2, 633–4.Google Scholar Tiberius’ birth: ILS 108, Suet. Tib. 5. K. Nipperdey (Leipzig, 1851–2) on Tac. Ann. 5.1.1 emends Pliny's LXXXII to LXXXVI.

3 AFA (Henzen) XXXIV (A.D. 27), XLIII (A.D. 38). Using a somewhat different logic, D. Kienast, Römische Kaisertabelle (Darmstadt, 1990), 83 defines Livia's birthday as 28 January. There is in fact no truly satisfactory way of expressing Livia's birth in the modern calendar, since in the pre-Julian period January had only twenty-nine days. None of this has any effect on the substance of this note.

4 That Dio referred to the completion of whole years can be shown by his usage in other similar contexts: 56.30.5 (Augustus), 58.28.5 (Tiberius), Claudius (60.34.3).

5 D. Kienast, loc. cit. (n. 3); L. Petersen, PIR (1970), L 301; Ollendorf, L., ‘Livia Drusilla’, RE (1926), 13.901Google Scholar; among the innumerable modern authorities: Willrich, H., Livia (Leipzig, 1911), 8Google Scholar; Suerbaum, W., ‘Merkwürdige Geburtstage’, Chiron 10 (1980), 336Google Scholar; Perkounig, C.-M., Livia Drusilla-Iulia Augusta (Vienna, 1995), 35, n. 153Google Scholar; Carter, J. M., Suetonius: Divus Augustus (Bristol, 1982), 183 gives the years as 58 or 57 B.C.Google Scholar

6 Tac. Ann. 5.1.2.

7 ILS 6124; CIL IV.15555.

8 The desire to reconcile the seemingly inconsistent reports of the fall of Agrippina the Elder and the death of Livia has in the past led some scholars to doubt Tacitus’ sequence of events. Cortellini, N., ‘A proposito di alcune date incerte dell’ ultimo decennio del regno di Tiberio’, Riv. Stor. Ant. 3.1 (1898), 19Google Scholar, places her death at the end of the year, and is followed by Rogers, R. S., ‘The conspiracy of Agrippina’, TAPA 62 (1931), 157.Google Scholar Such a drastic solution is not necessary; see especially Meise, E., Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Julisch-Claudischen Dynastie (Munich, 1969), 237–44.Google Scholar

9 RG 12.2; Ehrenberg-Jones, Does., 46, 49; Ovid, Fast. 1.710.

10 See H. Riemann, ‘Pacis Ara Augustae’, RE 18.2 (1942), 2095; Fishwick, D., The Imperial Cult in the Latin West (Leiden, 1987) 1.2, 205Google Scholar, n. 47 (=Britannia 3 [1972], 164–81). For other possible 50-year anniversary observations by Octavian/Augustus, see Grant, M., Roman Anniversary Issues (Cambridge, 1950), 16–18, 25–9.Google Scholar

11 See Herbert-Brown, G., Ovid and the Fasti. An Historical Study (Oxford, 1984), 219Google Scholar for the haphazard commemoration of anniversaries in the calendars.