I Am Livia

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “For heaven’s sake, I’m coming back.”

  How do you know?

  “Wipe your eyes, will you?”

  “Forgive me. You’ll come home in triumph, and I’ll laugh at what a fool I was.”

  He kissed me, and I let him go.

  I looked after our affairs in Rome. Lonely months passed. I waited for news of success in Sicily, and felt dread—dread that was not completely misplaced. One day a message came from Tavius:

  My love, the invasion did not succeed. We will have to try again. I am coming home. Please, however disappointed you may be by this news, keep a cheerful countenance when you are among others. Let them know I am still in charge.

  He was alive, he was coming home. That was what mattered most to me. But when his fleet had met that of Sextus Pompey at sea, he lost. In every battle he had fought before, his had been the winning side. Being ever victorious was part of what had kept him in power. I feared that, seeing him weakened, all those who submitted to his rule only out of fear would be emboldened. His political enemies might soon be on him like a pack of mad dogs.

  I stood on the edge of our little garden. Tiberius Nero had gone away on holiday and left our sons in my charge. Rubria had also come to stay with me. Drusus was in his cradle, sweetly dreaming, my perfect baby who hardly ever cried, but would wake to reach for me with his tiny hands, cooing. Beside Drusus, in another cradle, Julia lay asleep. Rubria sat watching over the two of them.

  Meanwhile, little Tiberius played at battle, jabbing his small wooden sword into the rosebushes. “That’s right,” I said. “Fight hard. You will be the victor.”

  He darted a quick glance at me. He had my eyes exactly—wide set and unusually large. He went back to fighting his imaginary enemy. Tiberius Nero had shown him how to hold a sword, and, at only four years old, he knew to keep his sword arm close to his body except when he made a thrust. I felt a rush of pride, gazing at him.

  I sat down beside Rubria. “I’ve had a letter from my husband. The invasion did not take place. It’s all to be done again.”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “It’s a setback, that is all,” I said.

  Rubria, this plebeian woman so different from me, had become my confidante. She studied my face for a moment, then relaxed. Good, I thought. If Rubria doesn’t know that deep down I’m quailing, no one else will.

  Trepidation filled my mind. After a defeat, would Tavius keep the loyalty of the people of Rome? Sextus, son of a famous father, had his own appeal. And people like a victor.

  How could I help my husband?

  “If you wanted to endear yourself to the common people of Rome, what would you do?” I asked Rubria.

  As she stared silently across the garden, I could not tell if she was thinking or if she had somehow not heard my question. At last she said heavily, “I would do something about the fires in the tenements.” I knew she was remembering the deaths of her husband and child.

  The wooden three- and four-story tenements in the poorer parts of Rome easily burst into flame. Private fire brigades would put the fires out—but only if the owners could pay. A tenement owner might stand desperately dickering while a fire raged. Meanwhile the flames would engulf nearby buildings.

  I hurt, thinking of Rubria’s loss. I knew she did not want me to allude to it, so I said, as if the matter had nothing to do with her, “I’ve heard some cities have public fire brigades always on alert. But in Rome we have never had them.”

  I found myself imagining how it must feel to be trapped inside a burning tenement. I myself had almost died by fire, and my mental pictures were all too vivid. I shuddered and resolved that Rome would have public fire brigades.

  In the next days, as I awaited Tavius’s return to Rome, details trickled back about the defeat. There had been a battle at sea. Sextus—who liked to call himself Neptune’s son—had arrayed his forces skillfully. The admiral in charge of Tavius’s forces had been outmatched. More than half of his galleys had been sunk. Tavius himself had come close to drowning and was lucky to survive. Many men died.

  I did what I knew Tavius wished me to. I attended the theater and the chariot races. I dined with senators and their wives almost every evening. I kept a cheerful countenance.

  “How is Caesar? Have you heard from him?” a senator might ask. “How do matters stand now with the war?”

  I would sigh and shake my head. “Caesar, oh, he’s fine, but not happy.” Who would believe me if I said he was happy? “He wrote me that he will have to launch the invasion all over again. He is very irritated about it, as you can imagine. He hates delay.” Then I would put my hand on the senator’s arm and ask him what he thought about establishing public fire brigades in Rome. How would one go about doing it? And would it be horribly costly?

  Maybe after we parted the senator thought, Well, I suppose the Sicilian disaster is not irreparable. Caesar’s wife is cheerful. In fact, all she wants to talk about is public fire brigades.

  That at least was my hope.

  A month after I first had news of the Sicilian defeat, I heard a clatter in the atrium and found Tavius there with a group of high-ranking military officers. I wanted to throw myself into his arms. As I approached, feelings surfaced on his face; I saw that he had longed for me. Then his expression changed. He was controlled, a commander surrounded by his men.

  “Dearest, welcome home,” I said, smiling. I greeted the soldiers as graciously as if they were guests at a dinner party.

  Tavius wheezed with each breath. I could not keep myself from giving him an anxious look.

  “I caught a little head cold,” he said.

  “Mucia was just telling me about a medicinal drink made with herbs, very good for head colds,” I said. “I’ll go and brew you some.”

  I left him with his officers, went to the kitchen, and gave the cook instructions to mix up a heated drink. Then I went into the corridor leading to the atrium and listened to snatches of conversation. I learned that we were in no immediate danger from Sextus, but Tavius was determined to launch another invasion soon. I heard no enthusiasm from his officers until he said, “Agrippa will lead it.” Then the relief in their voices was palpable.

  Agrippa had just won an enormous victory in Gaul. This was good, of course. Our position would have been horrible if we had been losing two wars. But the contrast between Tavius’s failure and his friend’s glorious success was stark.

  Still, listening to Tavius’s voice, I heard only confidence. Even I could not tell how much of that was for show. But he could not keep from coughing.

  When the officers had left, Tavius did not come looking for me, as I had expected he would. I found him in his study, examining the correspondence that I had put aside for him to read.

  “You’re going to sit there and read letters—now?”

  He raised his eyes from the documents. I saw a flicker of emotion in his face, but it passed before I could even decipher it. “What would you like me to do?” he asked in a cool voice. “Sit here and weep?”

  “I’d like you to tell me what our situation is.”

  “We lost. So we will mount another invasion, which will succeed.”

  The cook arrived, with a cup full of Mucia’s remedy. I held it to Tavius’s lips, and he took a sip. “At least it doesn’t taste as awful as it smells,” he said.

  “Drink it all,” I said.

  He made a face but took the cup and sipped from it.

  I stroked his hair. “I missed you.”

  He nodded. His features were grim. I felt that inside himself he was reliving the defeat.

  “I want to organize public fire brigades for Rome,” I said, trying to distract him. “I have plans, figures.”

  “It’s a bad time for a large outlay of public money.”

  “They’ll cost less than you probably imagine.�
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  “How much, exactly?”

  It said something about us, I suppose, that we could put thoughts of the Sicilian defeat aside and sit there and discuss public fire brigades.

  Later that afternoon, Tavius summoned Maecenas. “I want you to go to Mark Antony in Athens,” he told him. “You and my sister must persuade him it’s in his interest to help me destroy Sextus.”

  As I sat by, listening, something in me flinched at those words: Destroy Sextus. Sextus had shown me only kindness. But he and my husband were locked in a life-and-death struggle. I had to harden my heart.

  “What Antony will want,” Maecenas said, “is a promise of assistance from you when he invades Parthia.” Antony at that time was planning to become another Alexander the Great by conquering the Parthian empire.

  Tavius nodded.

  “Meanwhile, you’ll bring Agrippa home?” Maecenas asked.

  “Of course.” Tavius looked away. “It’s a great victory he won in Gaul. By rights, he deserves a triumph.”

  Maecenas frowned.

  To publicly celebrate Agrippa’s victory—to emphasize it after Tavius himself had suffered a staggering defeat—would be like announcing to Rome which of the two was a great general. But every military commander dreamed of riding through the streets of Rome in a triumphator’s chariot. To deny Agrippa a triumph would be to risk alienating the one friend we most needed now.

  “You do intend to grant Agrippa the triumph he deserves?” I said to Tavius.

  He looked at me for a long moment. Finally he nodded.

  “Will you help me write Agrippa a letter?” he asked me, after Maecenas had gone. “I don’t know if I can manage the right congratulatory tone.”

  The letter to Agrippa was dispatched to Gaul that day, and the reply came back with lightning speed. I sat with Tavius in his study when he received and read it. He swallowed and looked shaken.

  “What in the world did he say?” I cried. For I imagined disaster: Agrippa inflated with pride, refusing to come home and help us, instead setting himself up against Tavius.

  “He said he will come home at once, and we will defeat Sextus. And he is full of boundless gratitude and will never forget that at such a moment I offered him a triumph. I can see, just by these few words he’s written, how much that mattered to him. But he absolutely refuses to have a triumph now.”

  “Why?”

  “ ‘It would not be appropriate at this time.’ ” Tavius read the words from the letter, then shook his head in wonder. “That’s all he says.”

  Maecenas wrote from Greece that Antony wanted to speak to Tavius personally about allying with him in the war against Sextus. Tavius agreed to meet him in the city of Tarentum. He wanted me to come. It would in a sense be a family gathering since Tavius’s sister—whom I had never met—would be there. There was no question, though, of bringing the children on what would be an uncomfortable overland journey through swampy terrain. Julia’s mother would happily take charge of her, while my boys did not live with me in any case. It would be less than a month’s absence. Still I hesitated to leave them—to leave all three of them, because I oversaw Julia’s care as if she were my own child. But in the end I gave precedence to Tavius’s needs and kissed my little ones good-bye.

  Tavius and I traveled five days by carriage. After an uneventful journey, we arrived in Tarentum. It was a beautiful, small city—full of gleaming marble buildings and exquisite public statuary—located in Southern Italy but founded by Greeks. Antony owned a villa here. He greeted Tavius with a boisterous shout and hugged him, then embraced me too. Octavia was more quiet in her greeting, but I saw tender love in her face when she looked at Tavius.

  Tavius had once told me that his sister liked nearly everybody. Well, she did not like me. I knew it from the first. When she smiled and greeted me, her eyes—Tavius’s blue eyes—were empty of warmth. “I’m so pleased to finally have a chance to get to know you,” she said to me, in the strained tone of an inexpert liar.

  At twenty-seven she was milky-skinned and girlish looking. She had a quality one hopes to see in Vestal Virgins but usually does not—not quite of this earth. Pregnant with her first child by Antony, she was mother to a boy and two girls by her first husband, an aged senator she had married at fifteen. If I guessed rightly, there had been no awakening to passion in her first marriage, and Antony had not awakened her either. She must have known Cleopatra had borne Antony twins and that people still spoke of their scandalous love affair. I don’t think it occurred to her she ought to try to compete on that particular playing field, the one on which Cleopatra won every prize. But she was aware of her responsibility to the Roman world to help keep peace and amity between her husband and her brother. I knew from her letters to Tavius, which he often shared with me, that she did everything she could to make each see the other in the best possible light.

  Given Antony’s power, many would have regarded him as a supremely desirable husband. But with the perquisites of rank came—Antony. I doubted he was remotely the mate Octavia would have picked based on personal affinity. Tavius spoke of her almost reverently, sometimes with a hint of guilt. He knew the burden he had placed on her, and he appreciated the fact that she never reproached him even implicitly by seeming unhappy.

  How could Octavia and I have liked each other? When she looked at me she saw a woman who had forsaken husband and children—abandoned duty, when duty was Octavia’s life—for a love match. I saw in her the epitome of a womanly ideal I could have realized only by smothering myself.

  Inside the villa, our husbands tried to settle the fate of the world. Meanwhile, Octavia and I sat for hours on end amid roses and irises in a fragrant garden, enduring each other’s company and making endless conversation about our children and domestic matters. I have rarely found it so hard to talk to anybody. Both of us were chary at first about bringing up politics. I could not even discuss clothing or hairstyles with Octavia, because she showed no interest in either. Eventually, I discovered that she read a great deal—far more than I had time for anymore. So we talked about poetry, especially about the new poets Maecenas discovered and acted as patron to. Then she said, “Did you know Tavius once wanted to be a poet?”

  “And write tragic plays. Yes, I know.”

  “He used to write beautiful poems when he was a boy. My mother saved them, but I couldn’t find them after she died. That’s such a pity. I wanted them to keep. He doesn’t write poems anymore, does he?”

  “When would he have time?”

  “It’s as if he has killed part of himself.”

  I stared at her.

  “I mean by abandoning his poetry.” She bit her lip and avoided my eyes.

  I finally broached the subject uppermost in my mind. “Do you think Antony will help him with the war?”

  “Oh, yes. He’ll join in declaring Sextus an outlaw, and he’ll give Tavius some ships, and then when he goes off to Parthia, he’ll expect Tavius to lend him some legions. To fight yet another war.” She let out a long breath. “It could at least build goodwill between them, but it won’t, because of the way Antony is doing it. He had to make Tavius come, to personally ask for his help.”

  “You couldn’t persuade him to do it differently?” I asked.

  “No. I tried. I know Tavius is sensitive. It kills him to beg for anything. It kills him to be made to feel weak or small. But Antony doesn’t see that. He only sees that he should have been Julius Caesar’s heir. He expected to be, you know. He told me about it, one night when he had a bit too much wine. The way he fought for that man—how he was discounted—” She stopped. “I pity everyone. That’s a weakness of mine.” Her expression changed. It was like a door closing. “You don’t have that weakness, do you?”

  I tossed my head, and said, “No.” Then I added, “Maybe I did once, but I outgrew it.”

  It was the wrong thing to say to her.
She looked insulted—as if I had called her a child. In truth, I had misspoken and expressed what I truly felt. In some ways, she did strike me as childlike.

  We spent two more days in each other’s company, and never said another word to each other that mattered.

  Antony and Tavius sealed a pact, taking sacred oaths to support each other in peace and war for a term of five years. Afterward, Antony hosted an extravagant farewell dinner meant to foster personal ties. All I remember of it is Antony needling Tavius. As he drank cup after cup of wine, the needling got worse. “Drusilla,” Antony said to me—he still refused to call me by my proper name—“I had to respect your father. At Philippi he put up a fight. Believe me, he was no coward. I saw him in the thick of it. But I looked around in the midst of battle—and who did I not see?” He laughed. “ ‘Where is he?’ I asked. ‘Where is Julius Caesar’s chosen heir? In his tent? How, by Jupiter’s cock, can he still be in his tent?’ ” He looked at Tavius and shook his head, grinning. “Just your miserable luck, right? To take sick on that day.”

  “Miserable luck,” Tavius echoed, and he smiled. But his eyes—his eyes. They looked just the way they had at Vedius’s villa. Cold blue fire. I felt fear. Fear for whom? I suppose for Antony. Incredibly, for Antony. The thought came to me—ridiculous on the face of it—Tavius will kill him.

  Octavia started talking about nothing at all. “Have you noticed how cool the weather has been? It will be hot soon enough. Then we’ll want it cool again, won’t we?”

  “This little man will be born, once it gets warm,” Antony said, and placed a hand on her belly. As they lay together on the dining couch, they looked like an affectionate couple, though one of them—Antony, of course—was red-faced with drink.

  Next day came the final parting. We stood in the road outside Antony’s villa, Tavius and I ready to climb into a carriage to begin our journey back to Rome. Antony towered over Tavius by half a head. His shoulder muscles bulged under his tunic. He had a neck like a bull. As he and Tavius stood next to each other, I saw how unequal the two were physically. Antony’s bulk seemed to symbolize the greater strength of his military—the reason why all through the conference Tavius had grimly taken what Antony dished out.