The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel

by Phyllis T. Smith

  The person I had most missed when I was in Mauretania was my brother Jullus. His affectionate greeting and the sight of him in senatorial dress had warmed me as nothing else could. He had wanted to find a place in the world, and at first sight, it seemed he had certainly claimed an enviable berth. He, at that time, held a junior magistracy and played a responsible role in governing the city of Rome. He and Marcella had two handsome sons.

  “You say I have done well. So have you,” I said to him one day, as we sat alone in the gardens at his home in Rome.

  He gave me a look that jarred me. What I thought I saw in his dark eyes was desperation. The change in him at that moment was so startling that I grabbed his arm and whispered, “Jullus—you’re not in any danger?”

  He gave a great hoot of laughter. “Danger? Gods above, Sister, I am likely the safest man in Rome. Why, Augustus himself is so concerned for my well-being that if I so much as hint he might want to send me to war, his face goes gray. He tells me how he needs me here, can’t do without me.”

  I understood. As our father’s son, he would never be truly trusted.

  I did not say, Is it so important to go to war? for my brother was Mark Antony’s son. Of course he wanted to be blooded on a battlefield. And it would have been one thing if some infirmity had held him back. But to be treated as a potential traitor . . . ?

  “You have high governmental rank for a man your age. Perhaps in time . . .”

  Perhaps in time Augustus would relent toward him?

  He shook his head. Then he laughed. “The thought of Mark Antony’s son with a sword in his hand is enough to make Augustus toss up his dinner. And can you really blame him? He is very kind to me. In the end he’ll make me consul, maybe even give me a province to govern, as long as that province is strategically unimportant, and is very, very peaceful.”

  “Consul?” I said. Other than First Citizen, that was Rome’s highest office.

  “Certainly, I’ll be consul. Even if Augustus doesn’t think I quite merit that, Marcella will nag him into giving it to me.” His face twisted. “Because she loves me so, so much. And she always had her heart set on being a consul’s wife.”

  Juba and I planned to return to Mauretania in early May. A few days before we were to depart, Livia surprised me by inviting me to come with her to the ceremony honoring the Good Goddess to be held at the house of one of that year’s consuls. I was amazed that she thought it fitting that I attend, for this was a most sacred and supremely Roman occasion. But she said, “You are a Roman citizen. It is required that the women who attend be wives or daughters of men of consular rank. You certainly qualify—your father held the consulship more than once.”

  I must have looked startled. A Roman consul’s daughter—that was the least of who I was.

  Livia smiled at me. “If you do not wish to come, that is perfectly fine. But I would very much like for you to attend.”

  So I went and, side by side with Livia, walked into the mansion on the Palatine where the event was to take place. The consul’s wife, a plump little woman named Ravilla, welcomed me courteously. I saw other women looking at me wide-eyed, but everyone greeted me as if there were no question I belonged. The consul himself had been banished from the house, as had the male servants and even male animals. Even busts of male ancestors were hidden from sight. The house was bursting with women—the most high-ranking women in Rome.

  This all-night ceremony had, in the waning years of the old Republic, fallen into disrepute. The women were said to get drunk, strip naked, do all manner of forbidden things. In Julius Caesar’s time, a man in a woman’s clothes—the lover of one of the celebrants—had been smuggled in, causing a great scandal. Livia, I knew, had taken matters in hand and now enforced a certain standard of decorum.

  Steaming platters of food had been placed on tables set against the walls of the atrium. Women chatted happily, walking about, sampling the food. “Here is the honey pot,” Ravilla intoned solemnly as female slaves carried in a huge ceramic jar and set it on a solid-looking oak table. “It is full of milk.” The tradition was to call wine milk on this night. Soon, everyone present had a goblet of wine in her hand. Women who on any other occasion would not dream of drinking wine unmixed with water, on this night drank it unmixed.

  Female harpists played. Girls beat cymbals. I saw Julia in the crowd. She came up to greet me with an embrace. “Oh, I am so glad you have come!” By then, many of the younger women had begun to dance. “Come,” Julia said. “Dance with me.”

  We moved our bodies to the beat of the cymbals. All around us women—the most respected women in Rome—were dancing. I saw Livia doing a slow, graceful dance. She seemed to stand apart from the other women—she danced alone, keeping time not to the cymbals’ beat but some other stately music only she could hear.

  I was surrounded by women of my own age—young wives. They all looked giddy. Some were already a little bit drunk. “This is my husband!” one of them cried, and she moved her pelvis in quick, frantic thrusts.

  “Oh, this is mine!” cried another. She moved her pelvis in a different, slower rhythm, gasping like a spent lover while she did it. Suddenly we were all laughing. It must have been the wine.

  “And you, Cleopatra’s daughter, how does your husband make love to you?” a black-haired woman whispered in my ear.

  I moved my hips a few times—feeling rather shy—but the women laughed good-naturedly.

  “Well, here is how a great general does it,” Julia said, and she gave two hard thrusts of her pelvis and then stopped. She tittered. “And I burn—I burn when he does that, ladies. You cannot imagine the ecstasy—” Then she stood still and threw back her head and quoted a poem:

  “At his merest touch

  My heart beats fast

  I am trembling with love

  Flame sears me

  And the taste of his lips

  Is honey

  Oh, Cupid, slay me now . . .”

  I had read this poem long ago and not thought it had much merit. But a rapt look transformed Julia’s face. Her recitation was so full of feeling that I was flooded with emotion, listening. Flame sears me . . . I wanted to be in Juba’s arms.

  And then suddenly she was laughing—and we were all laughing and dancing together.

  As the evening wore on, the music became louder and the dancing wilder. Julia remained in the thick of it all, whirling around, snapping her fingers above her head. But after a time I went to stand beside Livia.

  She, not the consul’s wife, was truly in charge, the arbiter of what was acceptable. She never once issued a rebuke; I had the feeling she did not have to; her presence was enough. I did not see anyone tear off her clothes; nor did anyone become falling-down drunk. But some of the women danced on and on as if purging themselves of pent-up feeling. Grief and rage played on some faces, joy on others. As the hours passed, some of the women kissed and caressed each other. This evidently was permitted.

  Livia continued to stand apart, never interfering, but watching with an eye sharp as a hawk. She would certainly come away from these revels knowing far more about the attendees—mainly senators wives—than she had before the night began. Perhaps that was her intention. I, for my part, could not tear my gaze away from Julia. She moved with abandon, her eyes shut, a rapturous expression on her face; she was inexhaustible.

  I stayed at Livia’s side. As the night wore on, we opened our hearts to each other, more than we had before. Perhaps it was the atmosphere; perhaps it was the wine.

  “This ceremony is more than it at first appears to be,” Livia said. “We hold the world together, we women. In honoring the Good Goddess, the mother of all life, we acknowledge who we are.” Livia spoke in a quiet voice, so only I could hear. “We bring life into the world. That shapes our perspective—or it should.”

  I remembered how I felt when Alexander was born, the new sense I had had of myself as a vessel of life.

  “Today there is war, but it is confined to the fringes
of the empire,” Livia went on. “That is bad enough. I have seen what war does to people—from the humblest to the rich and powerful. All suffer. You of course can have little memory of what it was like when the empire was ripped apart. You were so young.”

  “I remember living in Alexandria when it was under siege,” I said. “We inside the palace did not know hunger, but we sensed it when people in the city began to starve. My nurse told me I had no need to be afraid. But of course she lied.”

  “The gods allowed you and me to survive in that bitter time. Do you think we therefore owe them a debt?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have long believed that.”

  We sipped wine without speaking for a while. It was stronger drink than I was used to. “I feel a bit light-headed,” I told Livia.

  “Eat something,” she said. “The night is barely half over.”

  I munched meat-filled pastries. Around me, women went on dancing.

  “Now, here it is—this is the most important part of the celebration,” Livia whispered.

  Maidservants brought in a sow. It was enormously fat. They prodded it along with sharpened sticks, but it remained ponderously slow in its movements, grunting with each step. Women moved to create a path for it.

  “The Good Goddess rules,” women began chanting.

  Livia looked at me gravely. “Repeat the sacred words,” she said.

  We spoke them together: “The Good Goddess rules.”

  “On most occasions, women in Rome do not give animals in sacrifice. Only men do it,” Livia whispered. “But this night is different.”

  Ravilla, the consul’s wife, wielded the knife. Stranding in the crowd of women, Livia and I watched as Ravilla bent and slit the sow’s throat cleanly. The creature sank to the floor, gave one long shudder, then was still. “The Good Goddess rules!” Ravilla cried, raising her bloody knife.

  Slaves bore the carcass away. Others mopped up the blood.

  Afterward, the feasting, drinking, and dancing continued.

  “It was good you and Juba came back to Rome when Augustus asked you to,” Livia said to me. “Being ruler of an empire works in an unpleasant way on even the strongest mind—it creates suspicions even when there is no cause. Sometimes Augustus needs soothing. Were you afraid when you received that summons?”

  “Yes.”

  “I promise as long as you are loyal, there will never be cause for fear.” She smiled. “I have heard you are turning Mauretania into a garden, a beautiful land out of myth, ruled by an exquisite queen and a philosopher king.”

  “People exaggerate. Mauretania is not a garden.”

  “Oh, but you have gone a long way toward making it one. And let us be honest—it is you who is doing it, more than Juba. I wish I could do as much for Rome. Sometimes all the choices we face here are ugly.” She looked at me with grave eyes, eyes that seemed to contain infinite wisdom. “The past has us all in its coils. One has to accept certain limits.”

  “I know there are things I lost as a child that will never return to me,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Some losses can never be remedied. My father died for the Republic, and I married the man who, finding the Republic in its death throes, destroyed it for good and all. I will never have my father back, and I will always know he would feel the greatest shame if he saw the choice I have made. I live with that knowledge. I bear it. Can you guess what my justification is?”

  “The fact that the empire has peace.”

  “You are precisely right.” Livia’s eyes shone. Without a pause, she went on. “I’ve heard that the people of Mauretania have never been so happy and prosperous as they are now under your rule. That must give you great satisfaction.”

  “It does,” I said. Then I asked a question: “Why did you invite me to come tonight?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “To remind me that I am Roman. And, I believe, to make an ally of me in protecting Rome’s peace.”

  “How perspicacious you are.”

  I thought I saw a glint of humor in her eyes. “Are you mocking me?”

  “No,” she said gently. “That I would never do. I am congratulating myself on the woman you have become.”

  Much later that night I told Livia I was pregnant again—news I had not yet even shared with Juba. I told her this as eagerly and happily as I might have if she had been my mother. She drew me close and kissed me on the forehead.

  “If I have a daughter, I will name her for you,” I said.

  “For me?” Livia laughed. “That is a great honor. But really, it is not necessary.”

  “I want to,” I said. My voice was a little bit slurred from drink. “I think . . . I owe you my life.”

  She looked thoughtful. “It was wise of you to name your capital Caesarea. Another loyal gesture can’t hurt. Augustus sets store by names and symbols, as men do. But really . . . you had best think again, when your mind is clearer. This wine is very strong.”

  I smiled at her. “If I have a daughter, I will name her Livia.”

  “I am honored. In truth, though, I have never much liked the sound of Livia. My second name is much more melodious. Drusilla.”

  “It’s a pretty name,” I said.

  The sow that had been sacrificed had been butchered and cooked. Everyone had a slice of the sweet meat.

  When dawn came, most of the women had stopped dancing. But I saw Julia, her face flushed, still moving in time with the beat of the cymbals. “Oh, look at her,” I said to Livia. “Everyone else is yawning, but she dances and dances!”

  Livia did not reply. I glanced at her face and saw an expression that surprised me. She gazed at Julia as a mother might at a child climbing up too high on a tree or running onto a road where men raced their horses. She just shook her head.

  While Selene was in Rome, she never set a foot wrong. She had a presence about her now, the elegance of a queen. And also, I thought, a sharp mind. I took pride in the decisions I had made that had helped to set her on her life course. She had grown into a magnificent woman.

  Before she and Juba returned to Mauretania, Tavius gave them rich guest gifts. He also gave them what they surely wanted more than silver or gold, a freer hand to govern their kingdom. He felt great trust in Juba. So there were warm, affectionate farewells all around.

  At this time, I did not think of my own family and the empire as two separate things but as completely intertwined. My son Drusus and Marcus, my foster son, were now serving with the army in Gaul. Marcus was a fine soldier; Drusus was extraordinary. I am his mother, and my word might be doubted, but I say only what is true. Drusus possessed an instinctive grasp of strategy and tactics rare for one of his years. He also had a gentleness, a kindness, that in no way detracted from his ability as a soldier. In Gaul, he had begun to make a name for himself, gaining not only the respect of the soldiers under him, but their affection. Unlike Tiberius, he had a knack for winning hearts.

  Drusus had come home to Rome for a short time to marry Antonia, Tavius’s niece. Looking at the two of them together, two glowing young people, one saw the flush of first love. After he left, Antonia, to her great joy and mine, discovered she was pregnant.

  Tiberius, meanwhile, chafed at the bit. He had important administrative work to do in Rome but was eager to return to Gaul himself. I asked him one day, half mischievously, “Won’t you hate leaving your wife?”

  As expected, he looked at me as if I had uttered an absurdity.

  “You are happy with Vipsania?” I persisted.

  He shrugged. It would have been unlike him to admit to being happy with anything or anyone.

  Vipsania admired Tiberius, and he enjoyed being admired. He gave orders, and she did what he told her to. Her pliant nature suited my son. If he did not praise her, at least in my presence, he never complained about her.

  It mattered, of course, that their marriage was successful, not only for simple, human reasons, but because it was a knot that bound Agrippa close in alliance with o
ur family. Agrippa had become, by this time, almost a full partner to Tavius in governing the empire. Of course this meant that the state of his marriage to Julia had an importance far transcending the personal happiness of two people.

  Since their wedding, most of the time, weighty affairs had kept Agrippa from Julia’s side. She—young, vibrant—could not be expected to live the life of a shut-in in her husband’s absence. But as time went on, I became more and more concerned about the company she kept. I did not wish to alarm Tavius. Instead, at a time when I knew he would be absent, I invited Julia to my house for a little talk.

  It was midsummer, hot in Rome. We sat in a shaded veranda in the midst of the garden. A slave served us juice in crystal goblets and plates of figs and dates.

  “Gaius, Julilla, and Lucius are well?” I said.

  Julia nodded. I noticed a tension in the set of her shoulders. Did she know what I had summoned her to talk about?

  “Agrippa will be surprised, I’m sure, when he sees how big they have grown,” I said. “It is a pity he has been away so much.”

  “Yes, a great pity.”

  “It’s natural that you want to go out and enjoy the company of interesting people. I have heard that you have made a particular friend of Sempronius Gracchus and you socialize with the men and women in his circle. Now, I find that perfectly natural. I’m sure those people are very amusing.”

  I had done my best to speak in an easy, offhand manner. Still, I could see her bristling and then struggling to contain herself. “Oh . . . people bring you tales about how I spend my time?”

  I looked her coolly in the eye. “People bring me tales about everything that happens in Rome.”

  It was true I had a network of informants. It was equally true that Tavius and I never punished people for their opinions or their private behavior. But we needed to know the popular mood.