The Egyptian Royals Collection

by Michelle Moran

  “What? Are you thinking of worshipping Roman gods now?”

  I looked down and realized that I was holding a statuette of Mars. “Of course not!” I put down the statue at once.

  Julia laughed. “He looks like Agrippa, doesn’t he?”

  The round marble face and short, cropped hair did look a little like him. “He must be a very loyal man,” I remarked. “All of this time your father has been gone, and he’s never once betrayed him in the Senate.”

  “Agrippa would lay down his life for my father. His eldest brother chose the wrong side in the war against Julius Caesar. He fought alongside Cato, if you can imagine, and when Cato was defeated, Julius Caesar took Agrippa’s brother as a prisoner. It was my father who intervened and saved his life, so Agrippa feels as though he owes him,” Julia said. “Sometimes, he comes to our villa just to check on Drusus and me. Of course, there’s the Praetorian Guard to watch over us, but he comes anyway.” She lowered her voice. “And he never betrayed me that night in the Circus.”

  I paused. “What night?”

  “When my father went searching through Marcellus’s room thinking he was the Red Eagle! Agrippa found us renting a room near the fornices and never told my father that I was there as well.”

  There was a sudden pressure on my chest so hard that it hurt to breathe. “You’re the one Marcellus was sneaking out to meet?”

  Julia giggled. “Didn’t your brother tell you?”

  “No!”

  “Well, you should talk to him more often.”

  When we returned to the Palatine, I stormed into my chamber, startling Lucius and Alexander at their work.

  “What’s the matter?” my brother asked. “Shopping didn’t go well?”

  “You lied to me!”

  He scrambled to a seated position on the couch, scattering his scrolls from the ludus. “About what?”

  “You never told me Marcellus was meeting with Julia in the fornices!”

  “I just found out! Julia only told me a few weeks ago.”

  “Weeks?” I cried. “And were you ever going to tell me?”

  “He was waiting for the right time.”

  I glared at Lucius. “So you know about this as well? My brother tells you everything, but keeps his own twin in the dark?”

  “It wasn’t meant to be that way,” Alexander argued.

  “Then how was it meant to be?”

  Alexander moved across the room and shut the door. “He was meeting with her. I knew it would hurt you and I didn’t want to see you upset.”

  “So better to see me embarrassed,” I said heatedly. “Better that I learn about it while shopping in the Forum!” Then another thought occurred to me. “So Marcellus isn’t the Red Eagle.”

  “It’s still possible,” my brother said. “Haven’t you noticed that since he’s been gone, not a single actum has been put up?”

  “It could also mean the rebel is smart enough to make it look like him.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “I’m sorry, Selene,” my brother said quietly.

  “I wonder how long they’ve been—”

  “Only a few months before he left,” he assured me. “Before then, he was seeing a lupa.”

  I gasped.

  “Everyone’s done it.”

  “Have you?” I challenged.

  “Of course not me!” He glanced at Lucius. “I mean everyone else.”

  I seated myself and closed my eyes, wishing that if I kept them shut, I would never have to see Alexander, or Lucius, or Marcellus’s bright face when he returned and whispered into Julia’s ear.

  Lucius perched himself on the arm of my chair, and I opened my eyes. “Come with us to the odeum today,” he said.

  “Yes,” Alexander replied. “You never come. And you’re the one who professes to like poetry.” Since Lucius had moved into Octavia’s villa, my brother had begun going with him to the local odea. The little covered theaters hosted musical competitions and poetry readings. And since Marcellus had left, my brother was visiting the odea even more frequently than the Circus. “Come on,” Alexander pleaded. “The one on the Campus is the prettiest little theater you’ve ever seen.”

  “It might even give you some ideas,” Lucius prompted.

  “Ovid is going to be there,” my brother said temptingly.

  “And who is Ovid?”

  Alexander and Lucius looked at each other. “Just the greatest young poet in Rome!” Lucius cried. “Come with us!” He took my arm, and I allowed myself to be led to the Campus Martius, where a small stone building welcomed visitors with a handsome mosaic and an ivy-covered arch. Because it was nearly Saturnalia, a green and saffron canopy fluttered over the crossbeams, invoking the colors of fertility and protecting the patrons from the December drizzle. Two men of the Praetorian Guard took seats behind us, and Alexander explained what was about to happen.

  “Today is for poetry,” he said. “You see the young man with the red cheeks waiting to go on stage? That’s Ovid.”

  “How old is he?” I exclaimed.

  “Sixteen.”

  “And his family lets him perform?”

  “Not everyone’s father refuses to acknowledge the value of literature,” Lucius said.

  “What about Horace and Vergil?” I asked.

  Alexander wrinkled his nose. “Augustus owns them. All they write is politics now. Ovid writes about what’s real.”

  When I frowned, Lucius said, “Love,” then added quickly, “and love’s pain.”

  I crossed my arms. “And you think I want to hear about love’s pain?”

  “Shh,” Alexander said. “Just listen.”

  Ovid took the stage, and immediately the patrons of the Odeum hushed. This was not like Octavian’s theater performances, where men stood from their seats and threw dates at the actors and chanted, “Bring on the bear.” The audience was composed mostly of young men. A few women sat with their friends, giggling and pointing, but everyone grew silent when Ovid declared, “I call this ‘Disappointment.’”

  Several men chuckled.

  “Why is that funny?” I whispered.

  “Because he’s always talking about his triumphs,” my brother said.

  Then Ovid began:

  But oh, I suppose she was ugly; she wasn’t elegant;

  I hadn’t yearned for her often in my prayers.

  Yet holding her I was limp, and nothing happened at all:

  I just lay there, a disgraceful load for her bed.

  I wanted it, she did too; and yet no pleasure came

  from the part of my sluggish loins that should bring joy.

  The girl entwined her ivory arms around my neck

  (her arms were whiter than the Sithonian snow),

  and gave me greedy kisses, thrusting her fluttering tongue,

  and laid her eager thigh against my thigh,

  and whispering fond words, called me the lord of her heart

  and everything else that lovers murmur in joy.

  And yet, as if chill hemlock were smeared upon my body,

  my numb limbs would not act out my desire.

  I lay there like a log, a fraud, a worthless weight;

  my body might as well have been a shadow.

  What will my age be like, if old age ever comes,

  when even my youth cannot fulfill its role?

  The audience laughed uproariously, and Ovid continued:

  Ah, I’m ashamed of my years. I’m young and a man: so what?

  I was neither young nor a man in my girlfriend’s eyes.

  She rose like the sacred priestess who tends the undying flame,

  or a sister who’s chastely lain at a dear brother’s side.

  But not long ago blonde Chlide twice, fair Pitho three times,

  and Libas three times I enjoyed without a pause.

  Corinna, as I recall, required my services

  nine times in one short night—and I obliged!

  Has some Thessalian potion made my bod
y limp,

  injuring me with noxious spells and herbs?

  Did some witch hex my name scratched on crimson wax

  and stab right through the liver with slender pins?

  He went on to describe the shame of not performing, and I stared at my brother in disbelief. When Ovid was finished, the entire audience was on its feet.

  Alexander turned to me. “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s disgusting and crass. Is this all that he does?”

  “You didn’t like it?” Lucius exclaimed, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. “He has other material, too,” he promised. “Entire odes to his mistress Corinna.”

  “The one he took nine times?” I asked dryly.

  “It’s meant to be satire,” my brother said. “I thought you’d find it funny.”

  “Perhaps I’m not in the mood.”

  “But the theater is handsome, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Grudgingly, I admitted that it was. For a little stone building crushed between two shops in the Campus Martius, it had a certain charm. It wasn’t anything our mother would have frequented in Alexandria, and she would never have condoned our enjoying coarse Latin poetry in a Roman theater with golden bullae around our necks. But then, our mother was gone, and Egypt had been swept up in Augustus’s new empire. Marcellus had been all that made my exile bearable. When I listened to him laughing in the halls of the villa or shouting at the teams in the Circus Maximus, I could forget for a while that Charmion and Ptolemy were dead, that I would never return to the Egypt of my childhood, and that my father’s memory had been expunged from Rome.

  Alexander and Lucius tried their best to cheer me, and for a while there was news from Egypt that seemed hopeful. Cornelius Gallus, the poet and politician whom Augustus had set up as prefect over my mother’s kingdom, had fallen from favor and committed suicide. What better time to turn to me and Alexander than now, when Egypt was without a leader? But news arrived just as swiftly from Gaul that a new prefect had been found. So even as Saturnalia came and went, I found little to be happy about.

  When my brother and I had our fourteenth birthday on the first of January, Julia presented me with a beautiful pair of gold-and-emerald earrings, but her generosity did nothing but irk me.

  “We should go to the Forum,” she said eagerly, “and pick out a silk tunic to match them.”

  “And who would I wear it for?” I demanded, ruining the light mood in the triclinium, where Octavia had hung Saturn’s sacred holly branches from the ceiling, and their waxy leaves reflected the lamplight.

  Julia frowned. “What do you mean? For yourself. For Lucius.”

  “All Lucius does is stare at my brother.”

  Julia looked at the pair of them rolling dice in the corner of the triclinium. “So do you think they’re more than friends?” she asked.

  I looked at her aghast. “Of course not!”

  “They spend all their time together,” she pointed out.

  “So do we,” I whispered. “And I’m not your lover. Marcellus is.”

  She glanced swiftly at Octavia. “Please don’t tell her, Selene. She would never forgive me if she knew. Please.”

  I wanted to reply with something cutting, to tell her that Octavia knew already, but the need in her eyes was too urgent. And why was it her fault that she was the one destined for Marcellus, and not I?

  “So you don’t like the earrings?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Of course I do.” I attempted a smile. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Then we’ll shop for something to match them tomorrow!”

  I tried to be in a better mood when we went to the Forum. Even though the weather was grim and a cold mist hung over the streets, I followed Gallia down the Via Sacra in my warmest cloak.

  “At least it’s not snowing,” Julia said. “Imagine what it must be like in the mountains of Gaul.”

  “How cold does it get there?” I asked Gallia.

  “Very bitter,” she replied. “When the snow falls, even the animals go into hiding. Every year there are children who starve for lack of food, and the old women without families are prey for the wolves.”

  Julia shivered. “No wonder my father’s letters are so pitiful. He’s sick all the time. And weak.”

  “The Gallic winters can do that. If he is wise,” Gallia said, “he will leave his most hearty men there and take the rest south toward Cantabria.”

  Julia looked at me, and I knew she was thinking of Marcellus. Somewhere in the cold mountain ranges of Gaul, he was suffering with Juba, Augustus, and Tiberius. Their men were probably wishing for the comforts of home, where holly hung in bright sprigs on their doorposts and the rich scent of cooked goose filled their halls. Some of them would never live to see another Saturnalia, and I wondered how Livia was managing in such a bitter place. Probably just fine, I thought acerbically. She has Augustus all to herself, and Terentilla is eight hundred miles away.

  When we reached the Forum, Julia wrapped her cloak tighter across her chest. “Perhaps we should have left this for another time. Let’s take the shortcut,” she suggested.

  Gallia led the way through the Senate courtyard, where despite the bitter weather, lawyers were arguing a trial. The heavily dressed men stood at two separate podiums, shielded from the light rain by a thin canopy. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, and I pulled at Julia’s cloak. “Do you think we should see what’s happening?”

  “In this weather?” she exclaimed.

  “But look at all the people. It might be another trial like the one for the slaves of Gaius Fabius.”

  Julia hesitated, torn between the warmth of the shops and curiosity. “Only for a moment. And only if it’s good.”

  We stood behind the platform in the space reserved for senators and members of what was now the imperial family. A young defendant had been placed between two soldiers, but it was obvious from her clothes that she was no pleb. The fur of her cloak brushed her soft cheeks, and the sandals on her feet were new and made of leather. Her long braid had been threaded carefully with gold, and no man would have passed her on the street without thinking that she was pretty. It was her lawyer’s turn to speak at the podium, and she listened with downcast eyes.

  “You have heard Aquila’s lawyer tell you that this girl was once his slave,” he said angrily. “You have heard him lie like a dog from his mouth and say that she was stolen from him as an infant. So how can Aquila tell that this girl is the same child he purchased fifteen years ago? Does she have the same plump cheeks?” he demanded. “The same fat legs and ear-piercing cry?” The crowd in front of him laughed a little. “And why has Aquila suddenly come forward now claiming that she is his former slave? Could it be that she is pretty?” The crowd shook their heads in disapproval, and a heavy man in a fur cloak narrowed his eyes at them. “Could it be that he has lusted after Tullia for months, and knowing that she is the daughter of an honorable centurion, he has decided that this is the only way to have her?”

  “Liar!” the lawyer for Aquila shouted.

  “I can prove to you that I’m not lying! This girl you see before you has never been a slave, and I will bring a dozen people who witnessed her birth and who will vouch for her identity.”

  “And who are these people?” Aquila’s lawyer challenged. “Slaves who can be easily bought off?”

  “Not as easily as judices,” Tullia’s lawyer retorted, and there was a stiffening of backs among the seated men. “It’s true. The midwives of Rome are slaves, but I will bring to you her mother, her father, even her aunts, and you will see the resemblance—”

  “They can see a resemblance between you and me!” Aquila’s lawyer scoffed. “See? We both have short hair and dark skin. Does that make me your child?”

  Several of the judices laughed, and an uneasy feeling settled in my stomach.

  “Tomorrow, I bring witnesses,” Tullia’s lawyer promised. “And when this case must be decided, I ask that you use reason. What man would wait fi
fteen years before bringing charges of kidnapping? Why Tullia? Why now? And remember,” he warned ominously, “that the next time a man wants to abuse a pretty citizen, she could be your sister, your daughter, even your wife!”

  The judices rose, and the crowd began to disperse.

  “It’s over?” Julia exclaimed. “Why not bring the witnesses today?”

  “Because it is raining heavily now,” Gallia pointed out.

  Neither Julia nor I had noticed. We watched the soldiers escort the girl from the platform, and the eyes of the man in fur watched her hotly. She avoided his gaze, looking instead at the weeping woman still standing in the rain. Her mother, I thought sadly. Next to the woman a broad-shouldered centurion placed his hand on his heart in a silent promise. The girl seemed to tremble, then her legs gave way beneath her.

  “Tullia!” the man shouted, and I was sure he was her father.

  The soldiers lifted her swiftly back onto her feet, and the centurion spun around to the fat man in his furs. “I will kill you!” Her father lunged, but several soldiers moved quickly to stop him.

  “Let the judices decide!” Tullia’s lawyer pleaded.

  “He’s paid them off!” the father accused. “Even her lawyer knows that their pockets are filled with this maggot’s gold!”

  Aquila straightened his cloak. “Be careful,” he warned. “Masters can discard slaves who are no longer useful to them.”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment, then the centurion hissed, “If I were you, I’d watch myself. Even maggots have to sleep.”

  More soldiers rushed to separate them, splashing through the mud before violence could be done.

  “We must come back tomorrow,” Julia said suddenly.

  “You will not like it,” Gallia warned. “The judices have been bought.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You saw their faces. Who were those men laughing for?”

  “Aquila’s lawyer,” Julia realized. “But that isn’t fair!”

  Gallia turned up her palm. “It is foolish to think that rot can be confined to a single fruit. Once slavery is planted, everything decays.”