ABSTRACT
When Octavian1 ‘restored the Republic’, that is, founded the Principate in 27 BC,2 he initiated the most far-reaching change in Roman history. It was one that had a profound effect on every aspect of life, including women’s role in public affairs. That role was still dominated by the upper echelons of society, but with a difference, for there was now an elite within the elite. The women of the Domus Caesarum, the House of the Caesars, stood apart from the general run of women from senatorial and equestrian families. Socially an Octavia, a Livia, or a Julia might have been content to describe herself as prima inter pares, but in reality there was the same subtle distinction between her peers and herself as between the emperor and his peers. It is not for nothing that Tacitus says of Livia, offended by someone’s disregard of her wishes, that she felt ‘violated and diminished’ (TA 2.34.4). This is the language normally reserved for attacks on the maiestas, or majesty, of the emperor himself.3 There had been nothing like it in the Republic, even in the days of the great first-century dynasts.4
