Servilia and Atia In the Streets of Rome: Rewriting Women’s Politics

Antony Augoustakis

Baylor University

Polly Walker seems no coincidental choice by the creators of HBO’s acclaimed series, Rome. The actress delivers a commendable performance, never falling short of her demanding role as the evil mother of Octavian.  This portrayal of Octavian’s mother, however, most often stuns the historically informed viewer. What the series targets to represent, however, seems to hold some truth: in a male-ordered world where women are excluded from active political life, characters like Atia have to build “networks as alliances” and thus tend to become the “shadow rulers” of Rome (http://www.hbo.com/rome/). In this paper, by focusing on the fictional feud between Servilia and Atia, as it unfolds in the twelve episodes of the series and by examining the extant literary evidence for both female figures, I shall look at the potential affiliation between these two women and their historical counterparts. In charge of the upbringing of their children, especially their sons, not seldom do Roman matronae affect their sons’ decisions.  Likewise in Rome, the rivalry between two noble women forms a subplot assisting the main theme of civil strife  in the late Republic, a theme which leads to the climax of events, Caesar’s murder by Brutus.

The historical record for Atia Balba Caesonia is scant. She remarried in 53 BC L. Marcius Philippus (by contrast to her portrayal in the series as infatuated with Antony). Servilia’s passion for Caesar, based on and expanded upon our historical evidence, is transformed into indignation and hatred that fuels her son’s decisions in March 44 BC.  Servilia’s affair with Caesar impedes Atia’s plans to promote her own son, Octavian, and improve her family status in Rome, after the death of her husband, Octavius, and in the prospect of her uncle’s return from Gaul, who is not very well disposed towards his conniving niece. Stripped of her clothes in public, Servilia’s humiliation in the streets of Rome by Atia’s henchmen is the result of the former’s scheme of avenging her enemy by enlisting Octavia to an act of incest with her brother. In rewriting the highly competitive politics of the late Roman Republic, the show aspires to underscore the importance of women as paragons in securing generational succession but at the same time, to re-focus the camera from the male protagonists of the period to the less accounted for, and mostly marginalized in our sources, wives and mothers.