In his Historia Naturalis (Natural History), Pliny the Elder describes how Livia Drusilla – newly betrothed to Gaius Octavius, the future Emperor Augustus – was sitting in her garden in the countryside outside Rome when an eagle flew overhead. In its talons was a white hen which it dropped, the startled fowl landing in Livia’s lap with a sprig of laurel in its beak. The event was clearly an auspicious omen and after consulting the oracles, Livia planted the laurel – a symbol not only of victory and peace but of immortality and virtue too – which grew into a sacred grove from whose branches the crowns that adorned Rome’s champions were later fashioned.
The grove was situated on the Prima Porta estate some eight miles north of Rome where the Via Flaminia and Via Tiberina fork: the site took its name, “First Door”, from an arch of an aqueduct which told travellers they had arrived at Rome. There was an existing villa on the estate which was probably part of Livia’s dowry, and with the precipitate arrival of the fowl carrying its sign from the gods, the house was renamed the Villa Ad Gallinas Albas – the House of the White Hen – though it is familiarly known as the Villa of Livia.
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