Servilia (ca. 100–after 42 BCE) is most famous for the consilium of the Caesaricides at Antium on 7 June 44 BCE, where she first silenced Cicero, and then promised to have a senatorial decree modified. Cicero tells Atticus:
When I began to say what ought to have been done – and I said nothing new, only what everyone says every day, nor did I touch on the point that someone else [Antony] should have been got rid of – that they ought to have summoned the Senate, have spurred the People when they were burning with enthusiasm, taken charge of the whole commonwealth, – then your friend [Servilia] exclaims ‘I've never heard anyone talk like this!’ I controlled myself. But it seemed to me that Cassius will go (indeed Servilia promised to get that grain-commission taken out of the senatorial decree) and our friend Brutus was rapidly forced to withdraw from his empty remark that he wanted <to be in Rome>.Footnote 1
Thinking especially of this consilium, Syme proclaimed:
the daughters of the great houses commanded political influence in their own right, exercising a power beyond the reach of many a senator. Of such dominating forces behind the phrases and the facade of constitutional government the most remarkable was Servilia, Cato's half-sister, Brutus’ mother – and Caesar's mistress.Footnote 2
But questions remain about Servilia's influence. What precisely did Servilia object to in Cicero's speech? Why did her words have such an unprecedented effect on Cicero? How did she go about having a senatorial decree modified? Beyond these questions, there is also a worrying gap between ancient evidence of Servilia's influence and modern claims. As R. Bauman wrote, Servilia “ought to be the greatest political strategist of the late Republic, but does not quite present as such.”Footnote 3 How much do we actually know about Servilia's influence and the role of women in Late Republican politics generally? Maybe more than we think we do.
Susan Treggiari's Servilia and Her Family is both a biography and an inquiry into Servilia's political influence. In chapter 1, Treggiari sketches the Roman social and political background, and the intersections between a male realm of public affairs and a female realm defined by domestic virtues. In chapter 2, she traces Servilia's paternal and maternal families, the Servilii Caepiones and the Livii Drusi. Chapter 3 covers Servilia's childhood; questionably, Treggiari seems to credit a series of heroic tales from Plutarch about the childhood of Servilia's half-brother Cato, and speculates that Servilia was the source for them (48–50). Chapters 4 and 5 cover Servilia's two marriages, to M. Iunius Brutus (tribune of the plebs in 83) and D. Iunius Silanus (consul in 62). In chapters 7–8 (131–60; see below for chaps. 6 and 9) Treggiari turns to Servilia's children, Brutus and the three Iuniae. She conjectures that Servilia had a hand in their distinguished marriages, as well as those of her grandchildren.Footnote 4 Chapter 10 (183–216) considers the best-known period of Servilia's life, after the Ides of March, and her vain efforts to protect Brutus, including the June 44 consilium. After Philippi, we hear that Servilia received help from Atticus; the date of her death is unknown.Footnote 5
Treggiari is clear about what she brings to the project, citing advances since Syme's day: “in our understanding of the socio-legal context, in the collection and analysis of data on individuals, and in an even more critical approach to the literary sources” (xii). It is good to have the author of Roman Marriage explain the precise parameters of Servilia's independence:
Since her father's death Servilia was legally independent (sui iuris), free of paternal power … She will have had a male guardian who administered her fortune, but he did not have any authority to choose her husband or sanction her marriage, only to authorize the payment of her dowry. (75)Footnote 6
On prosopographical matters – the main feature of the book – Treggiari is refreshingly candid and free of false certainties. When Servilia's son M. Iunius Brutus assumed the name Q. (Servilius) Caepio Brutus, had he been adopted by his uncle or another Servilius (146–52)? Was the adopter alive at the time, or did he name Brutus heir on condition he take his name (Treggiari eschews the term “testamentary adoption”)? Treggiari is agnostic on both counts. But she conjectures that Servilia played a part, and points out that Brutus became head of both his maternal and paternal gentes. Now he could claim descent from both of Rome's legendary enemies of tyrants, L. Iunius Brutus and C. Servilius Ahala, as he did in his coinage and a family tree at his villa (24–25, 76–77).Footnote 7
The most vulnerable part of the biography is Treggiari's treatment of Servilia's affair with Julius Caesar (chapters 5–6 and 9). The affair began while Servilia's second husband was still alive, and endured, Treggiari believes, until Caesar's death. Methodologically Treggiari feels the pull of both Syme, who called “biographies of emperors … a menace and an impediment to the understanding of history,” and Bradley, who has said that “fictional history in the form of the historical novel or the imaginative reconstruction may sometimes succeed as well as or even surpass conventional history” (ix).Footnote 8 Treggiari is clear that she has written a biography, not a novel, and she scrupulously flags every conjecture. Still, with Caesar, subjectivity dominates. Treggiari disparages Servilia's husbands and sets them up as foils, calling Brutus “a rather disappointing match” (78), Silanus “a second-rate man” (90), and “both husbands … mediocre” (dust jacket). Much of what she says about Caesar is fond speculation. “It is tempting to see Caesar as the only man with whom she shared a freely chosen relationship of physical passion” (119). Treggiari imagines the two corresponding while Caesar was in Gaul, meeting in Gallia Cisalpina in springtime, or quarreling about Cleopatra (123, 164).
At the same time, Treggiari ignores negative gossip about the affair or explains it away. As far as I can tell, she never confronts Plutarch's testimony that the affair was disreputable: “But as regards the women of his household Cato appears to have been wholly unfortunate. For his sister was in ill repute for her relations with Caesar.”Footnote 9 In fact, Treggiari asserts the opposite: “How shocking was this liaison? … The assumption of the sources is that it caused no problems, that Silanus was a complacent husband, and that Servilia's reputation was unaffected and her social position enhanced” (112). She explains away Cicero's crack that Servilia obtained confiscated properties of Pompeians at a discount because she had prostituted her daughter Tertia to Caesar: “If anything lies behind this, it may be only that Servilia and her daughter were on friendly terms with Caesar”(164).Footnote 10 A preferable approach would be to accept gossip as part of the story – soldiers chanted Saturnians about Caesar's affairs in the streets – and to ask what function gossip performed. In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, the philosopher Kate Manne has urged us to see isolated misogynist words and deeds as serving the overall police function of patriarchy and functioning to keep women in their place.Footnote 11 That sounds a lot like Cicero, who reflexively treated Servilia's public interventions as sexual and sordid, while calling her a mulier timida (‘timid woman’) when she failed to intervene as he wished.Footnote 12
Servilia and Her Family is, as I have said, more than a biography. It is also an inquiry into the sources, mechanisms, and extent of Servilia's influence. Chapters 11–12 are analytical. Treggiari seeks to determine whether Servilia “played an important role in the social and political life of her time,” and in particular how she had the senatorial decree modified after the June 44 consilium (217).Footnote 13 In chapter 11, Treggiari surveys Servilia's potential acquaintances, both direct and indirect, through Caesar, Cato, or Brutus; in chapter 12, she deploys a wealth of comparative data to speculate on the nature of Servilia's interactions with these acquaintances: “When she wanted to get a decree altered, she could approach enough key figures, either directly or through freedmen or friends, to ask them to fix it” (251).
In truth, Treggiari's inquiry can only raise possibilities. She does not find who fixed it. Instead she offers three general conclusions about Servilia's influence. First, Servilia was successful because she was discreet: “Servilia and all her daughters kept a lower profile … worked behind the scenes … played by the old rules … Those who achieved a lifetime of success…concealed their influence” (278).Footnote 14 Second, Servilia was successful because she limited her interventions to family matters: “If … Servilia ‘meddled’ in public life, the occasions for doing so may have been limited to certain events in her family's life (such as candidacies, the Vettius affair) and the crises of the well-attested period 44–43” (279). Third, Servilia's exercise of influence is underrepresented in our sources precisely because it was discreet and confined to domestic matters: “I incline therefore to the opinion that women had more influence than appears in our sources … A ‘softly, softly’ approach might not be recognized” (219).
Yet this could simply be said to be circular. Absence of evidence is treated as evidence of Servilia's discreet influence. The problem, it seems to me, is that Treggiari's “critical approach to the literary sources” has caused her to undervalue important evidence for Servilia's influence. Plutarch records three instances in 62–59 BCE when Servilia, her sister-in-law Marcia, and her half-sister Porcia spoke up on behalf of Pompey in Cato's consilium.
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62: Servilia and the other women press Cato to drop his opposition to Metellus’ bill giving land to Pompey's veterans: “great dejection and fear reigned in his household, so that some of his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussions on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept. He himself, however, conversed fearlessly and confidently with all and comforted them.”Footnote 15
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59: The women press Cato to accept Pompey's offer of a marriage alliance: “[Pompey] sent for Munatius, Cato's companion, and asked the elder of Cato's two marriageable nieces to wife for himself, and the younger for his son … When Munatius brought this proposal to Cato and his wife and sisters, the women were overjoyed at thought of the alliance, in view of the greatness and high repute of Pompey.” But Cato replied: “‘Go, Munatius, go, and tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women's apartments …’”Footnote 16
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59: The women press Cato to swear by Caesar's law giving land to Pompey's veterans: “the women of Cato's family earnestly and with tears beseeched him to yield and take the oath, earnestly, too, did his friends and intimates.”Footnote 17
Treggiari doubts the historicity of these episodes for two overlapping reasons (116–20). First, she deems Plutarch unreliable because his Lives of Cato and Brutus are tainted by hagiography (xii). Second, she assumes that Servilia hated Pompey, who had killed her first husband, and had raised Brutus to hate him too.Footnote 18 Yet the two cancel each other out. No source says that Servilia hated Pompey, while the single source that says that Brutus hated Pompey is Plutarch.Footnote 19
We know more than we think we do: Plutarch's accounts of Cato's consilia can show us two things. First, they show Servilia and the other women having a voice, through consilia, in both private and public matters; in fact, the women appear to initiate discussion. As Flower has shown in her superb article on the June 44 consilium, private consilia could serve as an antechamber to public debate: “speeches later delivered in front of the Senate, or in a law court, or at a contio might have had their initial origins in remarks first prepared for presentation in a consilium.”Footnote 20 Second, Plutarch's accounts of Cato's consilia show us the women apparently pursuing, on all fronts, a single agenda: that of reconciling Cato and Pompey.
Seen in the context of these earlier consilia, the June 44 consilium exemplifies both the possibilities and the limits of women's political influence. On the one hand, Servilia was sufficiently connected to public life and political opinion to call Cicero's bluff when Cicero represented his views as “what everyone has been saying daily” (ea quae cotidie omnes).Footnote 21 Servilia counters, “I have certainly never heard anyone say that” (hoc vero neminem umquam audivi), and Cicero falls silent. On the other hand, Servilia's influence did not necessarily extend beyond the consilium. Must Servilia's promise to have the senatorial decree modified signify anything more than that she would communicate the group's decision to the group's friends in Rome? In other words, the scene may reflect the ordinary probouleutic functioning of the consilium, rather than Servilia's personal power. As Treggiari points out, the villa at Antium where the consilium took place may have belonged to Servilia, in which case she would have had the personnel present.
Why did Servilia and the other women work to reconcile Cato and Pompey? The question goes to the heart of Servilia's motives, and to the possible political role of women generally. Treggiari takes it as axiomatic that Servilia put her family first: “Theoretically, duty to the country was paramount. But in practice a Roman politician was likely to put himself and his family first” (256–57). But a context for reconciling Cato and Pompey has now been suggested by K. Morrell's bold Pompey, Cato, and the Governance of the Roman Empire.Footnote 22 Morrell argues that Cato and Pompey, moved by shared Stoic ideals of the community of man, had long worked separately to end abuse of provincial subjects, before coming together in 52 BCE to pass the lex Pompeia de provinciis. On Plutarch's testimony, Servilia, Marcia, and Porcia senior had been pushing for this reconciliation a decade earlier. Furthermore, if we postulate that women (like men) could have both personal and political objectives, other pieces of Servilia's biography fall into place: in 54 she connected the praetor Cato to the prosecutor when they tried to combine charges of provincial extortion and electoral corruption against M. Scaurus; at the June 44 consilium the opinion of Cicero's that she objected to was that the conspirators should have staged a coup and seized “the whole res publica”; in March 43 she opposed an extraordinary command for her son-in-law Cassius in order not to offend the consul Pansa; in July 43 she again summoned Cicero to a consilium, heard his view that Brutus should invade Italy, and ignored it.Footnote 23 Private consilia gave women a structural place in Roman public life, which Servilia exploited throughout her career.
Despite these disagreements about sources, methods, and conclusions, I think that Servilia and Her Family has permanent value. I have mentioned Treggiari's socio-legal contextualization and prosopographical analysis, which are nonpareil. Treggiari has also shown the greatest concern for readers, providing a glossary, real handmade indexes with subheads, and a wonderful appendix sympathetically appraising Servilia's depiction across nine novels in English (298–311; Phyllis Bentley's Freedom, farewell! [1936] is her favorite). Teachers of Classics and popular culture courses, however, will regret that her generous purview does not extend to the character Servilia, and her public suicide, in the television series Rome (2005–7), “that travesty of Roman history” (309; cf. xi).
