Exclusive interview with author Mathew Dennison and a review of his new book about Livia, the powerful female politician of ancient Rome
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“Livia, Empress of Rome is a story of ambition and power,” says author Mathew Dennison. “Among the many people I talked to while writing this book was Sian Phillips, the actress who played Livia in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius. Older now, wholly charming and wonderfully beautiful, she retains a stillness and intensity in which traces of her Livia survive.”
Dennison uses historical, society and cultural details to bring Livia to life. Livia’s real life is hard to prove given that two millennia have elapsed since she held sway in imperial Rome. Dennison shows who she might have been, how life could have shaped her to act as she did. At times the names and details become confusing. In the ancient world, so many people had the same name. But if you love reading about life in ancient Rome, you must pick up Livia Empress of Rome.
Dennison says Livia was much misunderstood, as most women in politics are. Dennison attempts to explain how and why she did what she did. Her story is told through the men in her life. Livia is a mother who loves her family and has a successful second marriage to Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. She has ambition for her son Tiberius from her first marriage, who she wants to succeed Augustus.
“Livia is an intelligent, politically acute woman who, with circumspection, achieved a position of public prominence denied previous Roman women,” says Dennison. “During my research in Rome, I was a guest of the former Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, Sir Timothy Clifford, and his wife Jane in their mountainside village house overlooking the hills of Rome. It was my stay with the Cliffords, in a house full of Greek vases, seventeenth-century engravings of classical ruins and baroque paintings, which gave me the final fillip to begin writing.”
“I wrote much of Livia, Empress of Rome in my house in the country in Wales,” says Dennison. “My desk stands in front of a tall Georgian sash window in a peaceful drawing room which was previously a nonconformist chapel attached to the house. There is no TV reception and no cell phone reception. From the windows the views are densely green, stretching up and down hill over a secret wooded valley. But it is a far cry from Rome and much of my writing happened in the winter, when Wales is cold and wet. On my desk I kept a dish of pine cones which I had collected in the gardens of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta outside Rome. They were stickily resinous and intensely aromatic. On cold, dark Welsh days, their scent transported me back to Rome.”
Dennison wrote Livia, Empress of Rome in the three years following completion of his previous biography, The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter. “That rose to bestseller status in the UK,” says Dennison. “Although the subjects appear widely divergent, both explore alternative forms of power and examine the impact of family politics on the wider political scene. Although there are no confirmed instances of poisoning at the court of Queen Victoria, reputations could still be made and lost on the toss of a coin…much as in ancient Rome.”
In Livia, Empress of Rome, Dennison explores the perceptions of the different roles of men and women in ancient society. “It is also a story about history and the calumnies perpetrated by writers of history,” says Dennison.
Dennison is currently completing a biography of the first twelve rulers of imperial Rome called The Twelve Caesars. It will be published in the UK by Atlantic in May 2012.
Livia, Empress of Rome: A Biography by Mathew Dennison. Hardcover, 336 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; First Edition (January 4, 2011), Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-0312658649 $27.99
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