I Am Livia

by Phyllis T. Smith

  Jokes circulated about how Tavius and I had managed to produce a child so soon after our marriage:

  Fortunate are the parents for whom

  The child is only three months in the womb.

  But little Drusus—the nickname stuck—was acknowledged by his father on the day he was born, and well-informed people did not doubt his legitimacy. This included, of course, Tiberius Nero. He rejoiced, as well he should have, at the birth of a second fine son.

  I engaged a wet nurse for Drusus, just as I had for little Tiberius. My former husband was only too happy for me to supervise the care of both my sons. I told myself I was doing what any woman of my rank would do—overseeing servants who looked after my children. I tried to believe it did not make a great difference that we lived in separate households. But of course it did. If they woke up sick or afraid in the night, Rubria and a staff of servants would tend to them. Their father was there too. But not their mother. Never their mother.

  There were times when I imagined my sons crying for me, in their father’s house. I ached to hold them. And sometimes when we were together I thought I saw an accusation in little Tiberius’s eyes. Why did you leave me?

  Tavius and I had a second marriage ceremony just three days after my second son’s birth. The timing was my choice. Tavius said, “Why rush? It’s not as if we can consummate the marriage yet, so why put yourself through a wedding ceremony before you’re fully up to it?”

  “We are a traditional patrician couple,” I informed him. “We would not dream of living together one day more than necessary before we have our marriage sanctified.”

  I spared Tiberius Nero the duty of giving me away a second time, but I put on a bride’s scarlet veil again. The priest of Jupiter sacrificed a pig, examined its entrails, and said that heaven smiled. Tavius and I ate the consecrated cake. Then after we shared dinner with a handful of guests, we kissed, and I went back to my own bedchamber and fell asleep.

  On the ninth day after Drusus’s birth, Tavius and I attended the naming ceremony Tiberius Nero held for him. I expected Tavius and Tiberius Nero to be cautiously polite with each other, but they seemed at ease. At one point, Tavius said something—I was not close enough to hear his words—and Tiberius Nero’s face lit up with a smile.

  “What did you do, offer to make him consul?” I asked Tavius later.

  He shook his head.

  “What then?” I asked.

  He touched the tip of my nose. “Must you know everything? I promised him that I would always do whatever I could to further his sons’ future careers.”

  My first thought was Their future careers? One is a newborn baby, and the other is a three-year-old. But I could see from Tavius’s face that he meant it as a solemn pledge, and I sensed that this promise could someday matter greatly to my boys. So I threw my arms around his neck and told him how kind he was. He smiled and shrugged. He loved nothing better than being congratulated on his benevolence.

  By then I had learned some of Tavius’s foibles and flaws. I knew how he could all at once become guarded and curt, even with me, and then quickly turn cheerful and affectionate again. He always ate sparingly, never drank much—but he loved to gamble. He would bet on anything—a footrace, a boxing match, what the weather would be like. When he took time to relax, his favorite recreation was shooting dice with Maecenas or with members of his bodyguard. The intense look in his eyes when he watched the dice fall amazed me. So did his exhilaration when he won even a tiny bet, and his brief but real chagrin when fortune did not favor him. But he won more money than he lost, so I had little to complain of.

  From the beginning of our marriage, I had avoided entering his bedchamber, fearing he might take it as an invitation I was not yet ready to make good on. But one night, a fortnight after Drusus’s birth, he smiled and said, “You can come inside, you know. Oh, just for a moment, to wish me sweet dreams. I won’t bite you.” So we walked into his bedchamber, his arm around my shoulder, my arm around his waist. The room contained a plain, low sleeping couch, a cedarwood cabinet, and a small oil lamp, lit and hanging from a hook.

  He pulled me close. His breath felt warm on my neck. I closed my eyes, lost in the sensation of his body against mine. I could have sobbed with my need for him. He drew me toward the bed.

  “Tavius,” I said, “it’s too soon. Tavius…not yet.”

  He let go of me and gave a rueful laugh.

  “Soon,” I said.

  I went back to my own chaste bedchamber, blew out the oil lamp, lay down, and pictured him on his bed, gnashing his teeth. I tossed and turned. Five years had passed since the first time I looked at him and wanted him. Now I needed to wait only a little longer to have my desires fulfilled. But as I lay in the dark, the waiting seemed cruel. Every particle of my being anticipated his touch. I imagined ecstasy, the moment when we would be one flesh.

  Physically I had not yet recovered from Drusus’s birth. But since my wedding, I had been living in an idyll of love. Though I had not yet slept with my husband, exquisite expectancy colored all my days. Oh, sometimes I felt a twinge of apprehension. What if when we finally made love, reality fell short of my imaginings? Or worse, of Tavius’s? There were even dark moments when I thought: What if he should compare me to others and find me wanting?

  I tried not to notice the women—the women I saw looking at him with hungry eyes every place we went. He had great power, wealth, and beauty. They gazed at him as they did at champion gladiators or famous charioteers. When they smiled at him, he would smile back. I told myself, If all they do is look, why should I mind? I am his wife. He loves me, not them.

  One evening in February, we held a small, informal dinner party to which we invited a few of Tavius’s closest supporters. At one point, I sat on Maecenas’s dinner couch while he kept me entertained with anecdotes about young poets and artists he knew. “You see, I’ve staked out my territory,” he said. “I’ll meet these people, cultivate them, and introduce the best of them to Caesar. He will help them, and they will add luster to his name. That’s the greatest contribution I can make to the rebirth of Rome.”

  The gravity with which Maecenas said this surprised me. He was rarely grave about anything. When anyone asked if he wanted an official role in the government, he looked as if it had been suggested he be put on the rack. But Tavius valued his political advice, and when difficult diplomacy needed to be conducted, it was Maecenas he turned to. He said Maecenas had a wonderful gift for charming people even as he eviscerated them.

  I became aware that Maecenas’s wife, Terentilla, had gone to sit on the couch on which Tavius was reclining. They did not touch each other, but I was struck by the familiar ease with which she sat there. Maecenas noticed my glance. “They’re old friends,” he whispered.

  Everyone knew that Maecenas’s marriage to Terentilla provided companionship and not much else, that both had male lovers who came and went. I drank some wine, my eyes never straying from my husband and his “old friend.”

  “I’m not sophisticated,” I said in a low voice.

  “It’s good you’re not,” Maecenas said. “Caesar prefers you that way.”

  “Is he…sophisticated?”

  “He is and he isn’t. He’s like a schoolboy in love when it comes to you.”

  I watched Tavius and Terentilla. They were just talking. But I felt tension in the pit of my stomach.

  “The town we grew up in wasn’t a sophisticated place,” Maecenas said. “There’s a part of him that’s remarkably straightlaced. But what did you hope? That he’d lived like a eunuch?”

  I shook my head. My eyes were still on Tavius and Terentilla. She had bright yellow hair—dyed, I was sure—arranged around her face in ringlets. As I watched, she smiled into Tavius’s eyes.

  “Terentilla seems to know him very well,” I said.

  Maecenas leaned close and whispered in my ear, “I
t’s over between them. I swear to you, it’s been over for a while.”

  “That’s good,” I said, still watching them. “And all the others—the others I see eating him up with their eyes?”

  “Is it permitted for me to offer you some advice?” Maecenas asked, his voice kind.

  I shrugged, gritting my teeth.

  “There are few women in Rome Caesar can’t have. You’re bound to see them throwing themselves at him. You must learn to look away, because it will take on exactly as much significance as you give it. Think of it this way: It’s beneath your notice.”

  I nodded.

  Then I got up and walked to Tavius’s dining couch. I looked at Terentilla. Not angrily. I just gazed at her and waited. Her eyes widened. As if she had suddenly remembered an urgent errand, she rose. She went to recline on Maecenas’s couch, and I took her place beside my husband.

  “I have been having the most wonderful conversation with Maecenas,” I told Tavius. “I agree with him completely about patronizing artists and poets. You’ll do it, won’t you, dearest?”

  “Yes, you should,” said Metella, another of the women present. “Everyone should know the best artists are in Rome, not in Athens or some other remote village. You can make the arts flower, Caesar.”

  “I intend to.” He smiled. “Insofar as I can afford it, anyway.”

  “Thank you, my love,” I said, and kissed him on the lips.

  He was patient in letting me decide the moment when I would become his wife in body as well as in heart and soul. And I loved him the more because I could see that this patience cost him something.

  One night, I took him by the hand and led him into my bedchamber. The question in his eyes made me smile.

  I had prepared the room with scented candles. The air was full of a sweet, subtle musk and smells of cedar and roses. Red silk pillows and a coverlet of red silk, decorated with gold thread, lay on the bed.

  “I love you,” I said. “I will love you all my life.”

  He gazed at me for a long time, his head tilted to the side in that way he had. His pupils were dilated, and his blue eyes looked almost black in the candlelight. He bent to kiss me, and my arms went about his neck. I caressed his shoulders and tangled my hand in his hair. He held me close and whispered my name.

  All that night, we were lost in each other.

  I knew that in the spring, Tavius would leave for war. He planned an all-out attack on Sextus Pompey, an invasion of Sicily. Only a short time together was vouchsafed us. We spent a great deal of time in bed—in bed but not sleeping. We would talk and make love, make love again and talk some more. I loved him so, I could not get enough of his body. I only had to look at him to want him. He would kiss me on my breasts, my thighs, and I would feel fire where his lips touched. I had never known such delicious sensations before, never knew what ecstasy was possible.

  Now across the years I remember the sound of his young voice, whispering or filled with laughter, and his scent, and the warm feel of him. No one had ever touched me with as much tenderness as he did. I was so new to such joy. Often it seemed as if the words “Where thou art Gaius, I am Gaia” were literally true, that there was no division at all between the two of us.

  But of course we were separate beings. I would go for a time believing Tavius and I shared the same view of the world. Then would come a moment of surprise and dismay. We did not look at everything with the same eyes.

  “Do you think I should let the Senate name a month of the year after me?” Tavius asked me once, as we lay together and he stroked my thigh.

  It was nearly noon. The shutters of the bedchamber were half opened, and I could see his face clearly. His lips turned up at the corners in a faint smile.

  “Who suggested such a thing?”

  “A friend of mine. Numerius.” He named a senator who was a particular sycophant.

  “That man is no friend of yours,” I said.

  Tavius stopped petting me. “Actually he is.”

  “He is an idiot. You don’t need idiotic friends.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No.”

  Tavius went back to fondling me, and I touched him in a place that made him gasp and for a while we stopped talking.

  Later I murmured, “The month of Octavianus, is that what Numerius had in mind?”

  “I suppose so. My father”—he meant Julius Caesar—“had the month of Julius named after him.”

  I almost blurted out, And that’s one reason your “father” is dead. But even when we lay in a warm embrace, I did not speak carelessly to Tavius about political matters. On the contrary, I plotted out important conversations with him. I sensed we were about to have an important conversation now. In fact, we were treading close to dangerous ground.

  “Livia, I won’t have a month named after me,” Tavius said. “I never considered it. I was just curious to hear your reaction.”

  “I am your wife who loves you, and therefore my reaction is absolute horror,” I said.

  He frowned. “Because you love me so much.”

  “Because I adore you.”

  “You think a little thing like having a month named in my honor would get me knifed?”

  My mind groped for a gentle way to say what I needed to. Tavius treated the memory of Julius Caesar as sacred. I feared that for this reason he had not been able to extract the right lessons from his “father’s” assassination.

  “You’re getting that veiled look of yours,” Tavius said, leaning over me.

  “What look is that?”

  “The one that says ‘How can I break the truth to this poor fool?’ I can read you as well as you can read me, my love. Tiberius Nero never could, I know, but I certainly can, and don’t forget it. Say what you have to say to me, before I get annoyed.”

  I reached up and ran my hand through his hair. How pleasant it was to touch that golden hair of his, to curl a smooth lock around my finger. “Have you ever analyzed what mistakes your father made that contributed to his assassination?”

  “Certainly. He forgave people who had betrayed him, who then turned on him again. He showed too much clemency. Excessive clemency, you may have noticed, is not a vice of mine.”

  “He had another, worse failing,” I said. “I see it beckoning to you every time a false friend lavishes you with flattery.”

  “What failing are you referring to?”

  I pressed my face against his shoulder.

  “What?” he said again.

  “Do I have to say it?”

  “I think you’re talking about hubris.”

  “Your father was not satisfied with power—he had to have the trappings to go with it. He named a month after himself. He was dictator, but he made it clear he wanted to be king. Knowing that Romans hate kings. All his mercy won him no goodwill, because he rubbed senators’ faces in the fact of their subjection. He didn’t let them pretend he was their equal.”

  Tavius moved away from me and lay back on the pillow, gazing at the ceiling. I could not tell if he was angry or just pondering what I had said.

  I could not restrain myself at that moment. I leaned over him, and said, “A man who suggests you name a month after yourself is inviting you to die! The sycophants are your enemies, Tavius. They will lull you into thinking you can do whatever you want and still be safe. And you can’t!”

  “Why are you getting upset?” Tavius asked in a mild voice.

  “Because I’m afraid for you. And I’m terrified you won’t hear what I’m saying.”

  He pulled me on top of him and locked his arms around me. “Do you know what you and I are, Livia? We’re the kind of people—well, if there were a great shipwreck, say, and only two people were left alive, washed up on shore, the two would be us. We would somehow find a way to not get swallowed by the sea.”

  If the sea is fier
ce enough, it swallows everyone, I thought. And in the end, a great sea swallows us all.

  But this much is true: We would neither of us be easy to drown.

  I kissed him again and again. His lips, his neck, his eyes. “I’m going to make old bones,” Tavius whispered in my ear. “And then, when I’m a decrepit old stick, do you know what I’ll do?”

  “You’ll make them name a month after you.”

  I could feel him silently shaking with laughter. I laughed too, thinking, O Diana, please let it happen that way. Let us have all those years together.

  After my son Drusus’s birth, I began giving dinner parties to which I invited mainly senators and their wives. The evening that Mucia came stands out in my memory. My mother had liked and admired her, and as a child I had regarded her with awe. With her perfectly coiffed white hair and dark, knowing eyes, she looked just the way I imagined Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, must have. Mucia and her husband, a senator named Atratinus, had survived the past five years by remaining aloof from partisan battles. They were people of integrity and had a large and devoted circle of friends.

  When Mucia arrived, she embraced me and whispered, “I see so much of your mother in you.” I had to blink away tears.

  She and her husband politely greeted Tavius, who stood beside me. I noticed the tensing of small muscles around Mucia’s mouth and eyes as she looked at him. Later, as we dined on the first course, I felt her unobtrusive scrutiny and could almost read her mind: Here is Alfidia and Claudianus’s daughter, poor child, married to this savage, Caesar. Gods above, what the world has come to.

  My role as hostess was to put people at ease and get them talking. But this evening, I made it my business to draw out not my guests but Tavius. What did he think of this poet, that architect? At first he looked puzzled to be put through his paces this way, but soon he became absorbed in talking about art. Surely, I thought, no one who listened to him could take him for other than what he was—a charming, brilliant man. See, I was telling Mucia. He is not at all what you thought. He is civilized. Really. He has elevated tastes.