The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “Am I to take it you do not fully approve of my friends?”

  “Whether I approve or not hardly matters. I am concerned for your well-being. I am afraid your association with a man like Gracchus might lead to unpleasant talk.”

  I wanted to cry out to her, Take care, you foolish child! But instead I had to tread carefully, for fear of provoking her anger and defiance.

  She eyed me warily. “You have not discussed this with my father?”

  “I saw no need to.”

  She relaxed a little. “Well, Gracchus is a harmless, witty man. I enjoy his company, and that of his friends.” She shrugged. “It’s a question of keeping myself occupied, that is all.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am sure that with your husband away, life can be rather boring.”

  Was she sleeping with Gracchus? Nothing I had been told provided an answer to that question. I only had my suspicions, which I hoped were groundless.

  I asked myself—of all men in Rome, why had she picked Gracchus to befriend? A memory flitted through my mind, Julia, at five or six, dressed in silk for a festival, her hair done up in curls, running to her father, crying, “Papa, look at me! Look at me!” I wanted to push the image away, but it persisted. Was she still that little girl and picking unsuitable friends in a bid to attract Tavius’s attention?

  I leaned toward her. “I want you to be happy and to be free to form the friendships that please you. But you are Augustus’s daughter. For you to make a man like Gracchus your particular friend . . . could be misunderstood.” He is a libertine, I might have added. His reputation as a womanizer is well known. In politics, he is no friend of your father. But surely Julia knew all this.

  “Of course. I am supposed to act like a sort of clay doll that smiles and listens to the people’s cheers while Father stands by beaming.” She tossed her head. “As for talk . . . well, if people tell lies, let them. I am tired of being a clay doll. Do you blame me?”

  “It would be better if you saw less of Gracchus,” I said.

  She did not answer me but just sipped some wine.

  Are we rational beings? I would like to think of myself that way. But when I observe other people, I see how often they fail to be governed by reason. I have seen people plainly hold two intentions in mind that contradict each other, and so thwart and frustrate themselves at every turn. I have known them to pretend, even to themselves, that they are pursuing one course of action when it is plain as day they are doing the contrary thing. I have seen them love and hate the same person in equal measure. And I have seen intelligent people refuse to look at what is right before their eyes—or refuse to admit that they do see it.

  Did Julia wish to provoke her father’s anger? Who could say?

  Perhaps it ought to have been obvious to me that my stepdaughter’s behavior needed to be firmly checked. But there was no way to rein her in without involving Tavius. I imagined the most horrific explosion if Tavius heard of his daughter’s doings. He would be injured, Julia would be injured—it seemed our whole family would suffer a wound that might never heal. So I did something unusual for me. I dallied, I equivocated. I allowed myself to hope that my warning to Julia would be sufficient to at least make her more cautious.

  Of course Livia knew Gracchus and I were lovers. Was there anything that happened in Rome that evaded her all-seeing eyes?

  I went back home, carried in a closed sedan chair, my nails digging into the palms of my hands. Curse her, I thought. May she be banished to the lowest pit of Hades for spying on me.

  I was frightened as well as angry. She had not spoken to my father—but might she yet do so? I attributed her silence to protectiveness, but I did not believe it was me that she wished to protect. My father—his well-being came first and last with her. She would not upset him if she could avoid it. And he would be upset—terribly upset—if he learned about Gracchus and me.

  At home, I sought out Phoebe. She was a freedwoman now. I had freed her because it was impossible to keep my closest female friend a slave. And she had become that—my close friend, my confidante.

  “Will you be getting ready to go out this evening?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. “I think I had better not.”

  “Oh, my lady, what is wrong?”

  “You are free now, Phoebe,” I said, “but I am still a slave. Maybe that is the gods’ justice.”

  Sitting in my bedchamber, I told her what Livia had said. Phoebe knew all there was to know about me and Gracchus already. I knew I could absolutely rely on her loyalty.

  “Perhaps you had better be circumspect for a while,” she said.

  I nodded. I would be careful and keep close to home.

  The prospect made me want to weep. It was not only the thought of being separated from Gracchus. I felt as if I would be locked in a dungeon cell. It was so awful—as if I were about to be smothered. “Oh, Phoebe, why am I what I am? Why can’t I be content with what I have? Do you think the gods have cursed me?”

  “Of course not, my lady.”

  I sent word to Gracchus I would not see him for a while. In my caution, I only trusted Phoebe to carry the note to him. When she returned, she said he was saddened, but understood.

  Almost two months after this, I was at the chariot races with my father and Livia. I had during this time been careful to avoid Gracchus and his circle.

  The sun beat down fiercely on that particular day, and the heat made me uncomfortably aware of my body. Father and Livia were in a particularly cheerful mood. I remember her leaning close to him, whispering something in his ear that caused him to dissolve in laughter.

  I caught sight of Appius Pulcher, one of Gracchus’s friends, walking up to a tier above where we sat. A young poet, Ovid, and his wife accompanied him. All three waved at me, and naturally I waved back.

  Later at dinner Father said, “That Ovid fellow—he writes obscene verse.”

  “Have you read what he writes?” I asked, a hint of challenge in my voice.

  “Yes, a bit of it—but I wouldn’t keep a volume of his work in my library.”

  “He is actually very talented.”

  Father nodded. “Which makes the use to which he puts his ability all the more regrettable.”

  “He writes about love. Do you consider that wrong?”

  “What is wrong is the complete absence of morality in his work. You ought to reconsider some of your friendships, I think.”

  I said nothing. I felt two emotions: fear—what did Father know about my friendships?—and also anger. It seemed so unfair that when he controlled so much of my life, he must even control my friendships.

  “Now Livia has her own artistic friends,” Father went on. “Poets and sculptors. But she limits her friendships to people who are respectable.”

  “Father,” I said, “be assured, when I am as old as she is, I’ll have old friends too.”

  His face changed, as if I had slapped him. “I don’t like your manner of speaking lately,” he said. “I don’t like the people you surround yourself with, and I don’t like discourtesy.”

  I had seen Father look at other people as he looked at me now. One knew at such moments that he could pinch them out of existence like gnats. His reproachful gaze would fall on them and in due course—oh, no, he would not kill them, but if they were public men, their careers ended for good and all. Whoever they were, they were banished from his presence and his favor, which in Rome was a kind of death.

  “It was a jest,” Livia said in a strained voice. “I’m sure Julia did not mean to be discourteous.”

  “I misspoke. Forgive me,” I said. “Forgive me, Livia.”

  She nodded. “It is forgotten.”

  Father gave me a thin smile.

  But I knew what I had said would not be forgotten, not by him. When did he ever forget anything? And what concerned me most was not his anger at my barbed jest. How much did he know about the part of my life I endeavored to keep secret from him? The people you surround yourself wit
h. Had it come to his ears that I was friendly with people he despised—or had more come to his ears than that? What had Livia said to him?

  I loved Father, but I was angry, so angry at him. It was hard to always contain my anger in his presence. And perhaps this was how he had begun to feel toward me. Love and anger warred in him. If indeed, he loved me at all.

  There were subjects Tavius and I did not talk about. We each silently understood that such discussion could only tear away at the foundations of our marriage. My feelings about the role he had played in the destruction of the Republic and the death of my own parents was one such topic. Another was the fact that he had not always been faithful to me in the years since we wed. The one time when we had spoken freely about these matters, the result had been a long estrangement. He had come close to divorcing me. Silence was better.

  There were two other subjects we approached in a gingerly way and discussed only when we had to. The first was Tiberius, my son. He had great gifts as a soldier and an administrator, but Tavius did not like him. He used him, promoted him as an able man, indeed exhausted him with work, but had no affection at all for him. This always troubled me.

  The second subject was Julia. Increasingly when I spoke of her to Tavius, I had the feeling I was touching an open wound. Did he know as much as I did about the life Julia was living? Did he know more? I never put any question to him. I was afraid of what my asking questions might let loose.

  When Julia made her silly little joke about my “old” friends, I saw something frightening in Tavius’s expression. He was not mainly reacting to the offense to me—though I doubt any other person on earth but Julia would have dared slight me in Tavius’s presence. There was a much deeper emotion underneath the surface. I feared it—I feared a rage in direct proportion to his love for his only child. She was the mother of his heirs, the wife of his greatest general. A volcano erupting, an all-out conflict between Julia and Tavius could rain misery on all of us and threaten the empire.

  A few days after the dinner with Julia, Tavius said, “The number of Roman citizens has fallen again. People avoid marrying and having children.”

  We were in the study, which he used for the sort of work that required privacy and concentration. It was up a long staircase, on the top floor of the house. Some of our most important conversations took place here, away from listening ears.

  “Yes, I know it is a problem,” I said.

  “Young people today want to live just for their own pleasure.”

  The light from the single porthole window shone on his hair. It had gone white in places. I remembered a golden-haired young man confessing he had fallen passionately in love with me, saying he would divorce his wife as soon as their baby was born and that I must leave my husband and children. I almost could have laughed as Tavius went on, talking about the moral looseness of the younger generation. But looking at his grim face, I knew I had better not even smile.

  “I doubt there is much we can do about contemporary morals,” I said carefully.

  “I have some legislation in mind.”

  He was enough of a politician to first tell me about the part of his new legislation I would like. Mothers of four or more children would be freed from the financial guardianship of men; this was a privilege I already had insisted on for myself and had obtained as the First Citizen’s wife. They would have the right to enter into business contracts and dispose of their money without any man’s permission. But there would be severe tax penalties for people—both men and women—who did not marry and have children. Even those who were widowed and did not remarry within a set time. It struck me at once that this law would greatly penalize men like Julia’s unmarried, childless friend Sempronius Gracchus.

  The legislation also set a penalty for both male and female adulterers—exile.

  I said, “I think this legislation will be seen as intruding too much into people’s private lives. You have protected Roman liberties, and people praise you for it. Tavius, this will not bring you praise.”

  His mouth set in a tight line.

  I knew he would brook no argument. Still, I had to say, “Some of our own friends will take this ill. Even Maecenas . . .”

  Maecenas was a major prop of Tavius’s rule, an important and popular figure in his own right. When we happened to travel away from the city of Rome, he handled administrative affairs in Tavius’s stead. Beyond that, he had presided over a new birth of Roman arts and letters. But his marriage was childless. His preference for male lovers was well known and little remarked upon by his friends. His wife freely slept with other men, married and unmarried. Tavius himself in the past had been one of her lovers.

  “Maecenas?” Tavius said. “Gods above, I’ve made him rich enough that the fine for no children won’t bother him. He’ll realize this has nothing to do with my friendship and regard for him.”

  Would he? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was more sensitive than Tavius knew.

  “And trials for adultery?” I said.

  “There won’t be many. And there will be legal safeguards. I doubt there will be many convictions in the end. It’s mainly a question of setting forth an ideal—a monogamous ideal.”

  I still did not like this. “It will cost you popularity,” I said.

  “If it does, so be it.” Then, quietly, Tavius said, “You’re my ideal.”

  I tilted my head. “I?”

  “Yes. A faithful wife. Faithful in body, faithful in soul.”

  He rarely said this sort of thing. I could not help being moved.

  “Even if I am not as pure as you, at least I know such purity is to be revered,” he said.

  I found I had nothing to say. The truth was, such virtue as I had came easily to me. He was all I had ever wanted.

  Tavius’s new legislation was enacted into law despite widespread grumbling, particularly among the young. The tax penalties came under the most fire. As for the legal penalties for adultery—people saw that an eyewitness was required to make a charge stick and considered rightly that the law would have little impact on how people lived their lives.

  There was one provision in the new law that Tavius had not mentioned to me and that gave me a chill when I read it.

  A husband could not legally kill his wife or her lover if he discovered them in the act of adultery; he had to prosecute them in the usual way. But a man could execute his daughter out of hand in the same circumstances.

  A father’s right of life and death over his children is hollowed in our tradition—and almost never exercised. In theory, a father could execute a child at any time for any reason or none. Why, then, was this new provision needed? Was it a warning to straying daughters? Or to one straying daughter in particular?

  I have wondered if it would have entered Tavius’s head to pass any of this moral legislation if Julia’s behavior had not troubled him. A peasant father in a like case, unwilling to directly confront his daughter, might have vented his frustration by railing about falling morals to any passerby. Rome’s First Citizen imposed moral strictures on all of Rome.

  Yet I think, despite the tenor of the legislation, Tavius never sought to find out definitely if Julia had a lover. He thought of her as having unsuitable friends, friends who needed to be pushed to live conventional lives. These friendships in themselves suggested a certain mode of living—but only suggested it. He did not want to know if Julia were truly an adulteress. And in truth, neither did I.

  The naming ceremony for my first grandson took place on a clear June day, in Octavia’s house, where Antonia continued to live, with Drusus away in Gaul. The child was strong and vigorous. He was named after his father.

  I looked at the small, red-faced mite in his cradle and had a sense of the continuity of life. My father’s life and my mother’s were both continued in this child. At times, exhausted or discouraged, I wondered if existence had any true purpose. But gazing down at the baby, I did not doubt—here was the meaning I sought.

  I was now a grandmother. It was
a moment for looking backward, across the long sweep of years, and also for surveying the road ahead.

  While the merrymaking was still going on in Octavia’s atrium, I drew Julia aside. We sat in a small sitting room, alone. I wanted to reach her heart and her soul.

  “I feel I am the same person inside that I was at your age, and even when I was an unmarried girl,” I said. “But I know that is not so. I have changed. The years have changed me.”

  She looked at me warily, wondering, I suppose, where this conversation was tending.

  “I regret the gulf that exists between generations. There are things I know, that I have learned from hard experience, that I wish I could teach my children and you. But perhaps those things can only be learned through the pain of living. And there may be matters I no longer understand. I believe I remember what it was like to be full of the passions of youth, but perhaps I am mistaken.”

  “What is it you would like to teach me if you could?”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “That this world is a dangerous place. That it is more so for people in our position and even more so for women. One mistake can bring ruin.”

  Her face had gone tense, but I sensed a hardening in her. It was as if she were willfully steeling herself not to hear my words.

  “You may think what I am saying is banal. Oh, the world is dangerous—who does not realize that? But you have not lost those you loved, as I have.” I glanced away. “What do you think of your father’s new legislation?”

  “It is making him unpopular with everyone who is young and free,” she said in a clipped voice. “I think that it is foolish.”

  “Yes. He cannot afford to do foolish things, but he did this. Why do you imagine that is?”

  She gave me a long stare. “Are you blaming me?”

  “There are debts you owe your children. There are debts we owe to future generations, to that baby in there . . .”