I Am Livia

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “I don’t like Antony,” I said.

  “Personally, I can’t stand him. But we’re allies. I married my sister to him.”

  “Does your sister like him?”

  “Yes, strangely enough she does. But she’s so sweet-natured she likes almost everyone. Anyway, for now at least, I don’t worry much about Antony.”

  “Good,” I said and nibbled Tavius’s ear.

  “Are you sure you want to wait until the baby is born to consummate our marriage?”

  I found it hard to keep from touching him, hard to exercise restraint. But the fact that I was carrying my first husband’s child remained a barrier, in my own mind at least. “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Now we come to Sextus Pompey,” he said briskly and drew Sicily off the Italian coast.

  “I rather like Sextus. He was very kind to me.” Snuggling with Tavius, I felt so comfortable, I spoke without thinking. I recognized my mammoth blunder even before a look of displeasure crossed his face.

  Tavius drew one slash mark after another, coming from Sicily into Italy. “He raids my coast. He covets everything I have. When we made peace, he broke the terms that same month.”

  Maybe Sextus would have said Tavius had broken the terms. Julius Caesar and Sextus’s father had been enemies and rivals, and the enmity had inexorably carried over into the next generation. “It’s all-out war between the two of you?”

  Tavius nodded. “There’s a lull now, but yes. It will be war to the finish.”

  Since the day of our wedding, I had felt as if no grief could touch me in my happiness. Now I saw how foolish that sense of invulnerability was. I quailed at the thought of more civil war. “That’s a pity,” I said.

  Tavius gave me a sharp look. “You truly have a soft spot for Sextus, don’t you?”

  “Not if he’s your enemy.”

  A brooding expression settled on Tavius’s face. “Most of the nobility in Rome has a soft spot for him. He was born one of you. I wasn’t. So they prefer him.” Tavius’s mother had been patrician, but his natural father sprang from humbler, rustic roots.

  I touched his cheek. “Why should anybody prefer Sextus to you? Or anyone on earth to you? I can’t imagine why anyone would.” I brushed my lips against his. “We will have to open people’s eyes.”

  “We,” he said. He spoke the word as if he were not sure he liked the sound of it.

  “We,” I said.

  There are people who say that from the moment Tavius and I married, I grasped for power. None of them ask, power for what? I wanted Rome’s citizens to be content. I knew that all but the most savage form of government depends on the people’s sanction. And the most savage kind does not last long. I dreaded another Ides of March.

  With my marriage, I had made a commitment not only to Tavius as a man but as a ruler. I saw his intelligence and strength. Of course I loved him; it would not have been strange if that had affected my view of what his leadership could offer Rome. But many others—military officers, common soldiers, and hard-eyed politicians—shared my assessment of his qualities. And if some followed him only for gain, not a few looked to him to save our country. Like me, they were patriots. Rome cried out for wise government and stability. That was what I hoped Tavius would bring us.

  My parents had numbered among those defeated and destroyed. It was natural for me to feel for the plight of the vanquished. I imagined myself making Tavius’s rule gentler than it had been.

  “I want people to talk about how great and good you are, not because they’re afraid not to but because they mean it from their hearts,” I told him.

  “And you’d bring about that delightful state of affairs…how?”

  You will have to become great and good.

  “Good works,” I said. “As much as we—or the treasury—can afford. And we should entertain all the people who matter. I want them to see a likable young couple, so devoted to each other. We must be models of old-fashioned virtue. I’ll make all your clothes at home. Well, oversee the maids making them. But a woman spinning wool has a special meaning. It’s associated with all the old virtues in people’s minds. Everyone should know that I do spin wool.”

  Tavius looked as if he might laugh.

  “You don’t believe that symbols can be potent in politics?”

  “I believe they can be. But I wonder how much time you plan to spend spinning wool and making my clothes.”

  “Not much,” I said.

  He grinned. “We shall be virtuous and austere. I’m all for it.”

  Of course he was humoring me. I charmed him, I amused him, he desired me. Did that mean I could take him down a road he never would have stepped on otherwise? I did not know. But I had a vision of what we could be together. “I’m in no rush to move to the Palatine Hill,” I said, “because this house is ideal in a sense. It’s so humble. Even when we move, I don’t want a very grand house, just the kind any senator might have. No one should look at any aspect of our lives, and say, ‘That’s how a king and his queen would live.’ It’s so important that we shape how people see us.”

  “What’s important is how the army sees me. And I have vigilantly attended to that.”

  “You think popular opinion doesn’t matter?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Tavius almost snapped out the words.

  Perhaps he had heard criticisms in what I intended as helpful suggestions. It struck me—not for the first time, but forcefully—that I must make a regular study of this complicated being who was my husband. I had not yet completely gained his confidence.

  He carried crushing burdens, and felt himself alone with them. I perceived and spoke to his loneliness. “Do you know why I care so much about these matters?” I asked. “Because I love you. Everyone else has interests of their own, which are separate from yours. How can they not? If Agrippa or Maecenas did not have their own ambitions, you would be the first to say they were pathetic creatures. But I—I just love you.”

  I reached up to stroke his hair. Just perceptibly, he narrowed his eyes. An image came into my mind of a boy I had once seen taming a half-wild puppy. Soft words and gentle pats had done the trick; before long the puppy ate right out of his hand. Here was my poor love, who had lived through such great dangers. He needed kind handling.

  “Do you understand how much I adore you?” I said. “How close to you I want to be—how very close? You can tell me anything, and no matter what, I’ll always be on your side. I’ll always think first of you.”

  He said in a constricted voice, “But just a little while ago you were saying you ‘rather like’ Sextus Pompey.” His eyes stared into mine. “Is that true? Do you like him?”

  I thought of that sad young man, Sextus, who had gone out of his way to do Tiberius Nero and me an enormous, unexpected favor. From the bottom of my heart, I wished him well. “I barely know Sextus Pompey.”

  “He is my enemy. Do you like him?”

  I faced a test. I could not have Tavius doubting my loyalty. “He did me a kindness. I would prefer he were your friend. But if he makes war on you, then he is my enemy.” I sensed these words were not enough. Part of me recoiled, but I said, “If he makes war on you—if he would harm you—then I want him dead.”

  Tavius watched me carefully. “Well, then you should be happy soon. Because he’ll meet the shade of his beloved father, and I’ll have Sicily. Will you be happy?”

  “As long as you’re safe and glorious, I will always be happy.”

  Tavius must have heard the ring of truth in my voice, because he smiled. “I probably haven’t paid as much attention lately as I should to popular opinion, or to cultivating the nobility,” he said. “It’s stupid to be neglectful, but with war in Gaul and with that viper’s son Sextus—well, you can only attend to so much at a time. I’m only one person.”

  “You used to be only one person,” I said.<
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  His expression turned slightly skeptical, but he did not contradict me.

  I set myself the task of winning Tavius’s unlimited trust. Was it hard? Not really. Occasionally I had to choose my words carefully and even shade the truth, in order to convince him of my all-embracing commitment to him. But it is not so difficult to convince a man of what he wants to believe. After all, he was in love with me. He wanted to trust me. And I suppose he sensed my fundamental sincerity. I did adore him.

  If ever a man needed a wife ready to be a true partner, Tavius did. He governed a vast territory and was fielding two armies, one in Gaul, the other readying to do battle with Sextus Pompey. Soon after we married, he showed me into a great room he had set aside in the house just for the three freedmen who screened petitions and letters that arrived for him. In the midst of stacks of waxed tablets and parchment scrolls, the secretaries scrambled to keep up with a constant inundation.

  “Somewhere here there’s important information I absolutely need,” Tavius said. “But it’s hard for anyone else to sort out what I should know about. So I read a lot of letters and petitions myself. I could spend all day every day just reading my mail.”

  Tavius hungered for real achievement, not empty honors. He wanted to bring effective government to Rome and the provinces under his rule. Often, he would work all day, and then after dinner with me go back into his study and work some more. His conscientious drudgery would have amused Mark Antony and other public men who lacked his diligence.

  If there was an administrative snarl in some wretched backwater he governed, people appealed to him, and he tried to unravel it. When a road leading into Rome fell into disrepair, someone would come whining to Tavius, and he would see that it was fixed. Every time the grain deliveries for the bread distribution to the city’s poor arrived late, that became his personal problem. He labored to set up efficient governmental structures that would not require his constant attention. Meanwhile, day to day, he juggled a thousand details, trying to bring order out of chaos. This was his reward for winning a desperate struggle for power—exhausting labor and a constant flood of supplications.

  The three freedmen overseeing his correspondence had been picked for their acumen and efficiency. But naturally, they enjoyed only so much of Tavius’s trust and could exercise only so much authority.

  “You can’t do everything, dearest,” I said to him one day as we sat on the couch in his study. “You need a helper you can truly rely on, who understands your goals and can exercise discretion.”

  “I can’t figure out what color your eyes are,” Tavius said. He took my chin in his hand and tilted my face so he could see it better.

  “I have ordinary brown eyes.”

  “There are flecks of gold in them right now. But in certain light, I can’t see those flecks at all. Sometimes, I swear, your eyes are absolutely black.” He kissed me on the mouth, then on the throat.

  A shivery sensation ran through my body. I wanted him so. “Soon, my beloved. Soon,” I murmured.

  He drew away, his face tense with need. “O god Apollo,” he muttered under his breath.

  I was still a not-quite-attainable object to him, the wife he had married but not yet slept with—literally; as usual in noble households when a wife is many months pregnant, we had separate bedchamber. This left Tavius in the grip of passionate, obsessive desire. At times, I would be reading and would raise my eyes from the book to find him sitting there, quietly watching me. Sometimes, wakeful in the middle of the night, he came into my bedchamber with a candle, to sit and watch me sleep. He looked at me the way a man might at some incredibly precious object he had just bought for a great price. It was as if he did not fully believe I belonged to him.

  And I? When I gazed at him, sometimes I forgot to breathe. I imagined all the delights ahead and ached with longing. And I visualized a marriage far different from the one I had known, both passionate love and an affinity of mind.

  I pressed my hand against his cheek, ran my fingers across his lips. “Tavius…”

  “What?”

  “I want to supervise your mail,” I said. “I’ll be very good at it. If you tell your freedmen to report to me, I promise you won’t regret it.”

  “Do you know how much work you’re asking for? Why do you want to work that hard?”

  “I just do. I’m peculiar.”

  Of course I wanted to help him and ease the load he had to bear. But I also sensed the influence it would give me if I took charge of Tavius’s correspondence. To decide which information came to his attention and which did not, to be ready to urge action or no action on a host of matters, to draft his replies to letters from important men all over the empire…that would surely give me a kind of power. I could foresee, also, that as time went on, it would seem more and more natural that I handle many matters on my own.

  “I love you,” I said. “Let me help you.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “More than anything.”

  He tilted his head, thinking. Even in the first rapture of love, Caesar Octavianus did not act impulsively when it came to matters that touched on his political survival. I did not press him for a decision. Delicacy, gentleness—those were my tools. I waited.

  Then one day he brought me into the study and showed me the pile of scrolls on his wide, oak writing table. “How can I read all those petitions and do anything else?”

  I clucked my tongue. “If you only had the right person to sort through all that…”

  “All right, we’ll try it,” he said.

  Before my child was born, before I was in the full sense Tavius’s wife, I had an unofficial role of authority in his government. I reached for it with both hands, and once I had it, I felt like an eagle chick that for the first time had a chance to fly. That is to say, I took to it.

  I might read through a long, rambling missive from the chief magistrate of a little provincial town, and also letters from his groaning subjects. This is why the magistrate wants to raise taxes, and this is why it might be the wrong time for it, I would tell Tavius. He would decide what he wanted to do about taxes, and I would draft a reply to the magistrate for him. Our working together was not separate from our personal bond, the heart of our marriage. Rather, it was like our two minds making love. We meshed so well—and this melding came about so quickly—it startled and delighted both of us.

  One evening when we dined alone, we had a discussion that greatly moved me. “Sometimes I feel certain the gods favor me,” he said. “Not because they love me, you understand, but because they love Rome, and I’m what Rome happens to require. When both the consuls died right after I became propraetor, it looked so convenient some people thought I must have secretly murdered them. But I didn’t. They just died and cleared the path for me.” Tavius shook his head, remembering. “It seemed uncanny.”

  “Fortune favors the brave,” I said.

  “Suppose the gods decided what I needed now was to marry an extraordinarily intelligent wife? I think they’re fully capable of arranging that, don’t you?” He spoke earnestly, not as if he meant to flatter me but almost as if he were talking to himself.

  If he had written me a dozen poems rhapsodizing about my eyes, my hair, and my dulcet voice, it would have meant far less to me. It is a joy to be appreciated for the thing you want to be appreciated for. To be appreciated as a woman, and also to be appreciated as a creature with a mind—what more could I have wanted?

  I had flown high and had great reason to be happy, but there is no such thing as perfect contentment on this earth. Whenever Tavius left for a session of the Senate I remembered the fate of the man he called his father, and I feared knives. Apart from that, my life had its complement of mundane difficulties.

  No marriage ends with absolute finality when a child of that marriage is loved by both parents. Scribonia regularly came to visit her little J
ulia. She would fuss over the baby and imply that much was lacking in the child’s care. Tavius had a way of being nowhere to be found when she arrived. I would be left to placate her. Meanwhile, my son was being reared in his father’s household. I saw little Tiberius as frequently as I wished, just as Tavius had promised. Tiberius Nero also remained a presence in my life. My heart was not rent by guilt when I saw my former husband; there was too much steel in my character for that. But I felt a sense of obligation. He knew it. He had a way of finding little chores for me, small domestic problems he expected me to solve. Luckily Rubria was extremely competent, and willing to help me, for I essentially had charge of two households. All in all, my life was extraordinarily busy.

  I gave birth in mid-January. My second son arrived with much less travail than his brother had. Afterward, I lay in my bedchamber, the swaddled infant in my arms. The baby looked so beautiful to me, so perfect. He even smelled sweet. He had wailed just after his birth, but now slept peacefully. I wanted to hold him forever.

  Tavius came and sat on the edge of the bed. “Do you know what I wish?” I asked.

  “The same thing that I’m wishing.”

  If only that baby had been Tavius’s son.

  “He’ll always be special to me,” Tavius said, “because he was born to you, here in my house.” He peered at the baby, a tender half-smile on his face. “Livia Drusilla’s son. Little Drusus.”

  “His father intends to name him Decimus Claudius Nero,” I said.

  “Why shouldn’t he have two names? And two fathers? I can testify that more than one father can be a great advantage to a man.”

  I smiled. But my son had to be acknowledged by Tiberius Nero. His place in the world depended on my former husband’s prompt assertion of paternity. “The baby must be wrapped up warmly and carried to Tiberius Nero’s house,” I said to Tavius. “Will you give the orders, please?”

  Tavius nodded. “You should rest now.” He grinned. “The sooner you recover from the birth, the sooner we can set about making sons of our own.” Clearly he did not understand what it would cost me, to send my newborn baby away. I felt as if I were tearing out a piece of my heart.