Fulvia and Octavia in Plutarch's Antonius: Feminine Power in the Late Republic

Molly Ayn Lewis (The Ohio State University)

Plutarch’s Life of Antonius concerns itself primarily with the fall of a great man through the machinations of Kleopatra’s foreign feminine wiles, but Kleopatra is not the only woman in the Life who exerts power over Antonius.  Indeed Fulvia and Octavia, Antonius’ wives during his liaison with Kleopatra, also exert a good deal of positive political pressure upon their husband and  by doing so illuminate two different approaches by Roman women towards the exercise and application of public power  within a patriarchal society.  Fulvia’s ability to redirect Antonius’ attention away from his foreign alliance by her defiance of feminine stereotypes was effective, if inflammatory, but Octavia’s adaptation of the private feminine voice to the public sphere effectively kept in check, for a time, the will of her politically savvy and ambitious brother Octavian and earned her a place of prominence in the infant principate equal to that of Octavian’s wife Livia. 

The actions of the two are similar, but their methods and motivations serve to mark a line between what was and was not considered appropriate for a Roman woman acting in a public capacity.  Female power relied upon careful manipulation of a wife’s place in the family unit to influence the nominal heads of household.  Under cover of her husband’s authority a woman could levy troops, lead armies, and build monuments so long as she did it for the overt benefit of her male relatives.  The moment she failed to conceal her own motives under a professed wish to aid her husband, she lost the cloak of family, and in the eyes of the masculine political world she became a woman who wished to ἄρχοντος ἄρχειν – a domestic Kleopatra needing to be subdued rather than a θαυμαστὸν γυναικός to be celebrated.