I Am Livia

by Phyllis T. Smith

  I sat down on the study couch. The slave came with the wine. “Leave us—and close the door,” Tiberius Nero told him. He drank a cup of wine in silence. When he finally spoke, his voice had a stilted and pedantic tone. “Livia, Caesar feels that by reason of your Claudian bloodline and your father’s rank among the defenders of the Republic, marriage to you would bring him unique political advantages. It would help conciliate certain portions of the nobility, you see. Therefore, he has asked me to play the part of a patriot and, for the peace of Rome, free you so that you can marry him.”

  I absorbed it. Caesar wanted me to be his wife. I looked down for a moment. I did not want Tiberius Nero to see my joy. “He asked you to divorce me?”

  “For Rome’s sake.”

  “And what did you say?”

  Tiberius Nero shut his eyes.

  “What did you say?” I asked again. I waited, unable to breathe.

  He licked his lips. “I told him I would not stand in your way.”

  A woman’s heart is not a simple thing. I had never been in love with my husband. But when I realized Tiberius Nero would not fight for me I felt as if I had been slapped across the face. I wanted him to give me up to Caesar, oh, I wanted it. And yet in this moment it stung me that he would agree to do it.

  I suppose what he read in my expression was contempt. He flushed. “Understand, I don’t believe Caesar has taken it into his head to marry you without encouragement from you. I’m not as big a fool as you may think. I won’t destroy myself for a woman who’s given her heart and her body to another man.”

  “I haven’t given him my body.”

  As soon as the words were out, I realized what I had revealed. I doubt I had fully admitted the truth to myself until that moment. I covered my face with my hands and began to weep.

  Tiberius Nero cursed softly.

  After a time, I stopped crying. I went to my bedchamber and called Pelia to bring me a basin of water and my mirror. I washed my face, and Pelia combed my hair. Then I ordered my litter fetched.

  When I was walking through the entranceway, about to leave, Tiberius Nero came after me and caught me by the arm. “I hope you’ll admit that I have been no bad husband to you. If you suffered hardship, it wasn’t through any fault of mine, but because of the times we’re living in. If anything, I’ve been only too willing to accommodate myself to your wishes.”

  “What you say is true.”

  Why was he saying it, though? I realized that he feared my enmity, and this shook me to the core. I could have wept again over the awfulness of the situation. I carried my husband’s child but was betraying him. And instead of living in the virtuous Republic of my father’s dreams, we were ruled by a young man with an army at his back. A senator even feared saying no to this young man when he asked for his wife. To give it all one final twist—it was this young man I could not help loving. None of it was as it should be.

  I had no right to blame Tiberius Nero for anything, I thought. What a net he had been caught in. “Why, Tiberius, you are the father of my son and the child I will soon bear. I will always be your friend.”

  He dropped my arm and took a step away from me.

  I went outside, where my litter was waiting. I told the bearers to carry me to the house of Caesar Octavianus.

  His slave led me in through the entranceway, and Caesar met me in the atrium. We stood still at first, just looking at each other.

  He thought that by asking my husband to divorce me so that we could be married, he was doing what I wanted him to do. But we had not discussed this explicitly. I believe he considered it possible that I had come to tell him that he had misunderstood, that marriage to him was not my desire. So there was a moment in which I saw doubt and vulnerability in his expression. This moment was inexpressibly sweet to me. But it passed. He said in a businesslike tone, “I’m glad you’re here, Livia Drusilla. There are matters we must discuss.” He led me into a small room furnished with worn-looking couches.

  My litter, of course, lay outside his door. Someone would recognize it; the gossip mills would be at work. People would imagine what was happening inside between the two of us. They no doubt conjured up scenes of passion. Meanwhile, we sat down on couches facing each other, as if we had met to negotiate some business contract.

  “What you told Tiberius Nero makes little sense,” I said. “I don’t think marriage to me is a good political move for you.”

  “No?” he said, his expression impassive.

  “No. If I were unmarried, it might be. Some people might be reassured by your choosing to marry someone of my background. However, the idea that you will heal whatever breach exists between you and the nobility, by demanding the wife of one of the nobility’s more prominent members, is on the face of it absurd.”

  “You think so?”

  “I am sure of it,” I said.

  Caesar shrugged. “It’s hard to ask a man to give you his wife, without in the process paying him such a mortal insult that he’ll gladly sacrifice his life to stick a knife in you. I think my meeting with Tiberius Nero was a great success because at this moment you are here with me, and he and I are both alive. It was better to spout nonsense about politics to him than to say the truth.”

  “By the truth, do you mean that you’re in love with me?”

  He said in a constricted voice, “I already told you I want you.”

  He did not say the word “love.” But why shouldn’t he be guarded? I had replied with mockery when he spoke of love before.

  “I’m afraid that this marriage will bring you ill fame,” I said.

  “Everything I have done for the past five years has been so well calculated. Don’t I have the right to just once…?” He paused as if unable to find the right words.

  “…act foolishly?”

  “Livia Drusilla, I’ve considered all the possible consequences of marrying you. I find them acceptable. I’d like you to tell me if you wish to be my wife.”

  This was the moment of choice I had never had before. I would decide my destiny. I could say “No.” I knew that if I did, he would not force me to marry him. Or I could say “Yes.”

  People would whisper that I’d angled for what marriage to Caesar would give me—power and riches. I would not have sold myself for either. I saw Caesar sitting there, his features tense, his eyes on mine, waiting. What I wanted was not power, not riches, but him.

  I said, “I wish to be your wife.”

  He smiled. “Then all is well.”

  “No,” I said. “All is not well. Don’t you see? You were my father’s enemy. And I’m married. I have two children—one not even born—whom I will lose if I divorce. I feel—terrified.”

  “Sometimes you reach a place where the earth seems to open in a great fissure,” Caesar said. “Retreat is impossible. So what you must do is leap.”

  “Leap,” I repeated.

  “Livia, it can’t be all perfect and right the way you want it. You have to choose between two imperfections, because that’s all there is. Either you stay Tiberius Nero’s wife, or you divorce him and marry me. We can’t change your parents’ fate. As for your children—a father must have custody, but do you think Tiberius Nero will try to prevent my wife from seeing her children? I doubt if he’d even want to. I promise you, you’ll see them every day if that’s your desire.”

  “Do you know what I wish?” I found that for the second time that day I was crying. “I wish it were five years ago. And I had never married, and a boy from Velitrae came to my father and asked to marry me. And since he was such a fine young man, with such a good head on his shoulders, my father liked him the moment he set eyes on him. And there was no such thing as civil strife in Rome, and so we married and prepared to lead very uneventful lives. Why couldn’t it have happened that way?”

  Caesar came over to the couch I was sitting on and put his
arms around me.

  I imagined the last five years had never happened. All who had died in these years, beginning with Julius Caesar, still lived, and Caesar Octavianus was that boy from Velitrae, an innocent boy with no blood on his hands.

  I raised my face. I wanted to be kissed by that boy. And he kissed me.

  To be kissed by the person you have longed for so deeply is joy beyond measure.

  He held me close. My arms were around him. I felt the soft wool of his tunic, and I was conscious of his body underneath, its clean male scent. Our lips met again and again in burning kisses.

  When I finally drew away from him, I was trembling. The air felt warm. He stroked my cheek, and his merest touch filled me with longing.

  Only the most virtuous and pure, they say, go to the Elysian Fields after death. In that far-off place, existence is unending bliss. I am sure my father and mother are there. I doubt if I deserve to join them. But I experienced Elysium on earth, in the presence of Caesar Octavianus. To sit in a room with him, alone as we had never before been alone. To rest my head against his shoulder and feel his warmth. To hear his voice. To look at him. That was bliss beyond bliss to me.

  “Caesar—how can I go on calling you Caesar? It sounds so formal—so—” It was a name I associated with years of enmity.

  He hesitated and then said in a low voice, “My family has always called me Tavius.”

  “Tavius,” I said. The boy from Velitrae was called Tavius.

  At that moment, Caesar Octavianus became Tavius for me.

  We were strange people, Tavius and I, as anyone who had watched us during those first hours we spent alone together would have realized. If his oddity and mine did not take precisely the same form, still the edges of one seemed to fit those of the other, like two sides of a split piece of pottery. Maybe in some way we had both sensed this, and this was part of what had drawn us together. Every time his hand so much as brushed mine, I felt desire. But it was not the moment, with me pregnant, for us to consummate our love. So what we could do was talk. We did not exchange sweet nothings or fantasies of our future life together. We talked about Rome. A conversation began that day that would continue for a very, very long time.

  I remember him saying in an almost harsh tone, though we still sat pressed together on the couch, “Livia, do you think things have happened the way they have because I’m ambitious? Oh, I am, but it’s also the situation. Things have gotten so rotten that someone had to come along and not flinch from doing what was necessary to put them right. Had to. Sometimes I can feel history blowing right on the back of my neck, pushing me along.”

  “You feel history blowing on the back of your neck?”

  “I was using a metaphor. Look, do you think we can go through another ninety years like the last ninety? Even another ten years? How much more can any country stand? I sometimes wonder why Italy hasn’t broken off from the mainland of Europe and sunk into the sea.”

  He went into an account of the last ninety years. Assassinations of the good and pure. Senators, holding office for life, who would do nothing to address Rome’s ills but would kill to protect their own wealth and position. Times of relative peace ending in violence. Civil war and again civil war. His account was detailed and complete and brilliant. I was sure he had gone through it before, probably many times, maybe to persuade others of his viewpoint, or maybe to persuade himself. It was self-justifying; I knew that, even as I sat there listening, loving him, and, if such a thing were possible, falling even more deeply in love with him because I perceived the luminous nature of his mind. The Republic had been governed by a corrupt oligarchy. Rome needed to be led by a single strong and enlightened leader. He was that leader.

  “Do you know what troubles me most?” Tavius asked. A shadow passed over his face. “That after all this is over, people will say Caesar Octavianus destroyed the Republic. Destroyed a thing that has been in its death throes for much, much longer than most people live. That was actually struck dead the first time a senator murdered his political opponents and was lauded for it.”

  “We took the wrong turn in the road,” I said, which was a great understatement.

  “Again and again,” he said. “And if there is a way to go back, I don’t know it. But I know a way forward.”

  I thought about the ideal my father had died for: a just and harmonious Republic in which the nobility acted for the benefit of the people and the people admired their leaders and followed them loyally. There had been a time, surely, when a Republic of this kind had actually existed, but that had been long before my birth. I no longer dreamed that the Republic could be restored. My hopes for my country were much narrower. I wanted us to live in peace.

  “You are saying we were unworthy of the Republic,” I said to Tavius. “And so the Republic is dead, maybe forever, or at least for a very long time. And we are left with one alternative, preferable to complete destruction. You.”

  “That is a grim way to put it,” he said, “but yes, it’s what I believe.”

  “My father believed in the Republic, with all his heart,” I said. “And yet—the thing he believed in, what had it become but a government run by and for a tiny clique? Run ineptly by them. Those who tried to help the people were slaughtered. And so the Republic, as it was constituted, deserved to die. But you—you must offer the people something real, to make them loyal to you. Your rule must be based on more than fear.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  I thought he assented too quickly. I studied his face.

  He caught the look I gave him. “Livia, don’t assume I’m completely self-serving or that I don’t love my country. Those are wrong assumptions to make.” Ardor entered his voice. “Understand, I come to Rome as a builder, not a destroyer.”

  If you gaze into a cup of wine mixed with water, it is hard to tell how much of each liquid is present. It is much easier to say that the cup contains both water and wine. I knew Tavius was driven to seek preeminence, but I was ready to believe he also wished to serve a greater purpose.

  He and I had been born in a terrible time. We sought a path out of darkness. My prayer is that when the gods judge us they remember this.

  I surrendered my father’s dream, fully aware of the moral gravity of what I did. “The civil strife must end,” I said.

  “I will end it,” Tavius said.

  And I will help you do it, I thought.

  I spent most of that day with him. At noon we were served an extremely simple meal of bread and cheese. “Moderation in all things, that’s my motto,” Tavius said.

  He had made himself ruler of half the Roman empire before his twenty-fourth birthday, and he told me his motto was “Moderation in all things.”

  We ate out in the garden. It was small, as was to be expected in a crowded, commercial district. “Why do you live in this part of the city?” I asked him.

  “It has never mattered much to me where I lived.”

  “We will, of course, move to the Palatine Hill.”

  He smiled, amused. “Of course.” We ate in silence for a while, then Tavius said, “I want to marry you immediately.”

  I nodded. “As soon as my child is born.”

  “No, right away. I’ve consulted the College of Priests.”

  “You’ve consulted them—already?”

  “Yes. The last thing I want to do is offend the gods. It turns out we can’t have a religious rite while you’re pregnant. The College has advised me that we can go through two separate marriage ceremonies—one immediately, the ordinary ceremony the common people use, and then after the birth, the religious rite proper to patricians.”

  “Two marriage ceremonies?” I said.

  “I’m told that as long as Tiberius Nero and I agree he is the father of your child, an ordinary wedding won’t compromise the baby’s legitimacy as a religious rite would. We can hold a religious ce
remony after your baby is born.”

  “But Tavius, there will be a scandal over our marriage in any case, and all this rush will only add to the talk. For me to marry you when I am carrying another man’s child will reflect badly on both of us. Why not just have one proper wedding after I deliver my baby?”

  “Because I don’t want it that way,” he said, and for the first time I heard steel in his voice.

  I felt an inward jolt. Where was the man who had so sweetly agreed to our moving to the Palatine?

  He sensed my dismay. “There are all kinds of strange twists on this path I’m on,” he said. “I might have to go and put down an invasion by Sextus Pompey at any time. Suppose we must part for months, without a marriage to bind us. What then?”

  We could lose each other, I thought.

  “If you prefer it, I won’t touch you until after you have your child. Believe me, I know how to wait. But I want you here, in this house with me for these months, as my wife.”

  We had lived through the same cataclysms, even if we had been on opposing sides. We both had a sense of how quickly unforeseen calamities could overtake us. I understood his sense of urgency.

  “Livia, don’t you want to be with me?”

  “More than anything on this earth.”

  Just before I left him to go home as I must, Tavius said, “Would you like to see the baby?” A few times during the hours I had spent with him, I had heard an infant crying somewhere in the house. With my mind elsewhere, I barely noticed the sound; it might have been a servant’s child. Now I realized the baby he referred to was his new daughter. I wondered if Tavius’s former wife, Scribonia, often visited her child, and how much of a presence she would be in our lives.

  I said that of course I wanted to see his daughter. I realized I would soon become this little girl’s stepmother. So we went into the nursery, where a maidservant sat rocking the cradle. Smiling, Tavius lifted the infant.

  I am not the sort of woman whose heart thrills with tenderness whenever she sees a baby. What moved me, became a picture I always would carry in memory, was the vision of Tavius, the happy and loving new father.