The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “Octavia made no fuss about giving you to me,” I confided. “That is because she does not like you.”

  Her eyes widened. “She has always been most kind to me.”

  “Of course. She is kind to everyone. My sister-in-law is the epitome of virtue. But even she has her limits. Your brothers reminded her of your father, and she became fond of them. You, however, remind her of your mother, who stole her husband from her. It is not your fault, but if you believe she could fight with her whole heart to protect you, you are wrong. She was glad when I asked for you. Truly.”

  Selene nodded bleakly. I don’t think what I was saying surprised her, once she had a moment to think about it.

  “You haven’t a real friend in the world with the slightest degree of influence. Except for one.”

  “One?” Selene looked puzzled. Poor child, she probably did not believe she had any friend.

  “One friend, who fortunately wields even more influence in Rome than Octavia does.”

  “Who is that friend?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  She shook her head, an anxious look on her face. She was, after all, only fourteen.

  “If you are intelligent,” I said, “if you are loyal—that friend is me.”

  With that, I sent Cleopatra’s daughter off to her new tutor. She gave me a searching look before she went, the look one might give to a lifeline, wondering if it will hold.

  The conversation left me drained. I had not told that child a single lie. A gladiatorial arena—that was how I saw my world. I usually did not speak of this, and it cost me something when I did so, as it might cost one to speak frankly of death.

  Would I have climbed so high had I known what awaited me?

  Of course I would have. To be with Tavius, if for no other reason. I would have faced down lions to be his wife.

  I was in an unhappy, uneasy mood, but everything would be bearable once he held me in his arms.

  I prayed to Diana, my patron deity, Oh, goddess, let him come home.

  My mother . . . all I have left of her are bits of memory, like fragments of dreams. I can recall the scent of spices and musk that clung to her. I remember how she tossed back her head when she gave her throaty laugh. The last time I was in her presence, she wore a linen shift with rents in it, which she surely had torn herself in mourning for my father. The kohl on her eyelids was smeared and her hair disheveled. My two small brothers and I stood staring at her, and she—goddess on earth, pharaoh in a woman’s form—knelt on the green marble floor of our nursery. She embraced each of us in turn—first my twin, Alexander Helios, then little Ptolemy, then me. When she held me in her arms, her nails bit into my shoulders and I whimpered. “Live,” she hissed in my ear. That was her farewell before she killed herself, by means of a cobra’s bite.

  She would never wear the chains of captivity. How could she, being who she was? Better to join her ancestors, better to pass into immorality. We—Ptolemy, Alexander Helios, and I—were paraded down the Sacred Way before our enemies. We bore that shame in her place. It was fitting.

  For us, Rome was a place of pestilence. My brothers and I came down with fever again and again. Octavia tended us, fretted, wept when Ptolemy died, wept again when Alexander Helios passed away. My mourning was silent and deep. My twin had been named for the sun, I for the moon. The sun was swallowed by darkness, but somehow the moon lingered in the night sky.

  I obeyed my mother. I lived, dwelling among the enemy. No one received my complete trust. And yet I had one surviving half brother, Jullus, son of my father, Mark Antony. Blood called to blood. We grew to care for each other.

  “Father forgot about me,” he told me once. “Octavia raised me after they married. When he shed her, he shed me too. He left me behind with the family of his worst enemy. Just a forgetful man.”

  “Jullus, who was your mother?”

  “Another wife our father cast off along the way.”

  “She died?”

  “When I was three or four. Died pining for Father. Or so I’ve heard.”

  I was ten when this conversation took place, Jullus almost fourteen. We sat in the garden of Octavia’s house, I on a marble bench, he on the ground, hugging his knees. The sun glinted on his dark, curly hair. The air smelled of marigolds.

  I dared to whisper a question I would not have uttered in anyone else’s presence. “Why hasn’t Augustus killed me?”

  “For the same reason he has not killed me, sweet Sister. He likes to make a show of benevolence.”

  “And any day he might decide . . . it is time for the show to end?” I felt ice in the pit of my stomach.

  Jullus gave me one of the endearing lopsided grins he used when he wished to reassure me. “Oh, little moon, don’t worry. If he kills either of us, it’ll be me, not a small, harmless girl like you.”

  At the age of fourteen, I came under the tutelage of Livia, Augustus’s wife. When I entered her household, I foretasted death. I saw Lady Livia looking at me warily and always imagined her thinking, Isn’t it time to be rid of this perilous burden? She said she would be a friend to me, but I did not believe her.

  Meanwhile Julia, Livia’s stepdaughter, fluttered around like a butterfly, my age but happy, doted on, and safe—above all, safe. Her nuptials would be a grand occasion. I doubted I would ever be allowed to marry and bear my parents’ grandchildren. I might have hated Julia if I had energy for that. But all my being was focused on survival.

  I obeyed Livia in everything, and I deferred to all the other members of the household. I guarded my words and my expression. People called me Selene, and of course I did not correct them. My full name, Cleopatra Selene, I only whispered to myself at night.

  Live, Mother had commanded me.

  Sometimes I felt it would be less trouble to die.

  Let us live, my Lesbia, and love

  And value all the talk of strict

  Old men at a single penny.

  Suns can set and rise again;

  For us, once our brief light has set,

  There’s one unending night for sleeping.

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred . . .

  I enjoyed committing these words by Catullus to memory while I awaited my wedding day. I had had to memorize so much poetry I did not care for—vast sections of the Iliad and many hymns to patriotism, full of martial fervor. It was a relief to memorize lines that spoke to my soul.

  Krito, my tutor, told me often that I was fortunate to have a renowned scholar like him teaching me, and indeed he had a formidable reputation. Father wished me to receive an excellent literary education. That meant acquiring a good command of Greek and reading the works of literature and philosophy that Krito considered fit for the eyes of a girl. A diligent student, I generally did what Krito told me to do. But when he gave me the Oresteia to read in the month before my marriage, I balked. These plays concerned Orestes, a dutiful son who very properly took vengeance on his father’s killer, who happened to be the boy’s own mother. I was not in the mood for anything that grim.

  I reached up and took another book from a high shelf in the library that served as my schoolroom. It was one I had peeked at when no one was looking. “Please, Krito, can’t I read this instead?”

  Krito’s round face went pink under his bald pate. “Catullus is hardly proper reading for a young girl.”

  “But I will soon be a married woman! And you know that when I wed, my studies will be over. Don’t you want our time together to end on a happy note? Please, Krito, can’t you indulge me this once?”

  He had begun, lately, to treat me less as a child. My future friendship would be valuable to him. And so he surrendered, and instead of reading a Greek tale of bloody vengeance, I read Roman poems about passion. Again and again Catullus begged for love and for an impossible, nearly infinite amount of kisses as love’s expression.

  “Is Catullus still alive?” I asked Krito.

&
nbsp; “He died about twenty-five years ago.”

  “Was he old?”

  “Just thirty, I believe.”

  “Who was Lesbia?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Did she ever become his wife?”

  Krito frowned and said, “No, she was his mistress, someone else’s wife. And you see why this is not the sort of book a young girl of good family should be reading.”

  “But I like reading it,” I said. “And after all, my father keeps it in his library.”

  “Your father has this volume here because Catullus has few equals as a poet. But Catullus spent his youth in thrall to an immoral woman—exactly the wrong person for him to have fallen in love with. If you must read this book, think of it as a negative example. It is a treatise on how not to conduct a reasonable life.”

  I have wondered who I might have become if Krito had snatched the volume of Catullus’s poetry out of my hands. But he did not, and at an impressionable age, I was plunged into the poet’s world of sensuality and longing. Clearly, Catullus was not Lesbia’s only lover, not even the favored one. But in poem after poem, he burned for her.

  At night I lay awake for hours in my small bedchamber, listening to the snoring of a maid who slept on a pallet in the anteroom in case I should need her. The room was perfectly dark except sometimes for a little bit of moonlight filtering through the half-closed shutters. I thought about my approaching marriage and asked myself if Marcellus and I might come to feel true passion. And I wondered how that would be—how it might feel to burn.

  Livia invited my mother to my wedding, just as she had promised. It had been decided that both my stepmother and my mother would help me dress for the ceremony, which was usually a mother’s role. So on the morning of my wedding day, Mother fussed with my hair while Livia saw to it that my white muslin dress hung properly and tied the traditional wool band—the knot of Hercules—around my waist.

  There were deep lines in Mother’s face that her thick chalk-paste makeup could not hide. She was much my father’s senior; he had married her because it seemed politically convenient at the time. Livia was easily young enough to be her daughter.

  When I was properly decked out as a bride, Livia looked at me with approval. Then something unfathomable happened. My mother began to weep. I could see she truly could not help it. Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobs, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, forgive me, forgive me,” she said.

  Livia looked stricken. “I see you are shedding tears of joy, Scribonia. I can well understand how happy you must be to have such a beautiful daughter, about to be wed.”

  At once, I suspected she was saying this not just to soothe my mother, but to avert an ill omen. I felt a stab of fear.

  “Oh, yes, they are tears of joy!” my mother hastily agreed. “How beautiful you look, Julia.”

  But there was no true joy in her voice or her expression, only grief and regret. I wondered at first why she should weep in this way, and then I did not wonder. She had played no part in my rearing, and we were half strangers. I realized she felt loss, seeing me grown up, attired as a bride, and I wished I knew what to say to comfort her.

  A maid fetched her a handkerchief. She dried her eyes, forcing a smile.

  My mother’s sorrowful tears. My father’s absence. It was not how I had pictured my wedding day.

  I donned a sheer red veil that completely covered my face and tinted the whole world red when I looked through it. Accompanied by Livia and my mother, I went out to the atrium, which was crowded with guests. Marcus Agrippa came and stood beside me. “Feliciter, my dear,” he said to me, kindly enough, looking down from his towering height.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for taking my father’s place today. You do me great honor.”

  “The honor is mine.”

  I had known Agrippa all my life, but we had little to say to each other at any time, and on my wedding day it was no different. I remembered that his wife had died in childbirth only a few months before, and imagined that a wedding brought back poignant memories. He looked as if giving me away was the last thing he wanted to be doing.

  I longed for Father. He would have known just what to say to me, on this day of all days. He would have let me see his pride in me, and then he would have joked and gotten me giggling. Whenever I thought of him, my feeling of being abandoned revived. And I worried—had he recovered from his illness in far-off Spain? He was never out of my thoughts.

  My cousin Marcellus came forward. He had the family look—that is, he was fair and blue-eyed, slim, and not particularly tall. His hair was darker than mine and my father’s—the color like burnished bronze. He had high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, and a wide mouth. His lips were compressed now, and he looked determined to get everything right.

  Priests offered the usual sacrifices. The examination of the entrails was followed by a proclamation that the signs were good. Agrippa took my hand and placed it in my cousin’s. “Where thou art Gaius, I am Gaia,” I said. Marcellus gave me a barely perceptible nod. All the guests shouted, “Feliciter!”

  At the wedding feast, my bridegroom hardly looked at me as I perched on his dining couch. He said the correct things to the right people who came forward to congratulate us. I said little, demure silence being required of a new bride. Quietly, I took in the swirl of people, listened to the laugher and the conversation. The dining room and the atrium were packed, men and women squeezing in to attend the wedding of the First Citizen’s daughter.

  I ate roasted peacock, sipped honeyed wine. People paid me compliments. I smiled and thanked them, trying to act like a gracious lady. Meanwhile I anticipated my wedding night.

  A virgin bride is supposed to be slightly fearful. But I wasn’t. I imagined some great secret was about to be revealed to me that all adult women know. I was hoping that intimacy with my new husband would be, if not ecstatic, at least interesting.

  Aunt Octavia, wearing a perfectly draped yellow stola and fine emerald earrings, approached and for a moment simply gazed at her son with joy and pride. Then she said to me lightly, “You must get Marcellus to work less hard than he does. Perhaps a wife will have more success with that than a mother.”

  Marcellus made a face. “Please, Mother . . .”

  “He works and works,” she said. “Studies rhetoric and law, attends every meeting of the Senate and of the city aediles. The program your father has laid out for him is rigorous. Too rigorous, I think.”

  We did not notice that Agrippa was standing by, listening. But he was, and suddenly asked, “Is there any military training mixed with all this rigor? Anything about how to fight?”

  Marcellus said stiffly, “I practice with arms daily at Mars Field.”

  “Practice daily?” Agrippa looked as if he might laugh. “Well, that’s impressive.”

  Marcellus’s face reddened. “I wish to study strategy too.”

  “By all means, study strategy.” With that, Agrippa walked away.

  To my knowledge, it was completely unlike Agrippa to be rude.

  My aunt made an anxious little gesture, patting Marcellus on the shoulder. Marcellus gave her a half smile and shrugged.

  Later, Jullus Antony came forward to congratulate Marcellus and me. He brought in his wake Selene, holding her hand, as if she were a shy flower he must protect.

  Jullus was notably tall and robust-looking, the tallest man in the room except for Agrippa. He had been put into my aunt Octavia’s care before I was born, when he himself was very small. A kind stepmother, she had embraced the motherless boy, Antony’s son by a dead wife. Jullus had stayed in her charge during what was supposed to be a temporary separation from Antony. That separation never ended. Even after my father and Antony went to war, Aunt Octavia had kept the boy and treated him as if he were her own child.

  He and Marcellus had grown up together and were about the same age. “Feliciter, my friend, you are a fortunate man,” Jullus said. He looked at me then. Of cours
e we had spoken to each other many times before—but only as young people do in passing, when they are part of the background of each other’s lives. This moment felt different. Jullus stared at me and held my eyes for several heartbeats. “Yes, Marcellus is very fortunate.” I could not identify the emotion in his voice, but it seemed out of place.

  I did not know how to answer. Selene spoke up quickly. “Julia, you are the most beautiful bride. May the gods smile on your marriage!” I caught the glance she gave Jullus, the hint of reproof.

  He had let go of her hand, but now he took it again. They walked away then, to make room for other guests who wished to congratulate Marcellus and me.

  My new husband and I had been given a suite of rooms in Aunt Octavia’s house. When the last sounds of guests’ revelry faded, I found myself alone in a flower-decked bedchamber that had been sprinkled with a pungent perfume. A scarlet coverlet, trimmed with golden threads, was spread over the bed. The wall mural looked freshly painted—a bucolic scene of pretty children at play. I sat on the bed, fully clothed, not knowing what else to do.

  Marcellus entered. He had on just a tunic—he had taken off the toga he had worn for the ceremony and also removed the wreath of flowers from his head.

  “This is . . .” He sounded partly amused, partly embarrassed.

  He came and sat down beside me, untied the knot in the band of wool around my waist, did it quickly and expertly as a bridegroom should. Before this, we had shared the sacred cake, stood in the light of the wedding torch, been showered with nuts thrown by a crowd of children. Only one act remained to make our marriage complete.

  “At least they didn’t marry me to Marcella,” Marcellus said half to himself. It was a joke. Marcella was his sister.

  “Do you think I’m ugly?”

  “No, you’ve grown up prettier than I expected.”