Empress Of Rome 1: Den Of Wolves

by Luke Devenish

  ‘Our son,’ said Tiberius Nero, helping her rise from the soil. ‘Where’s little Tiberius?’

  ‘At the brook with Hebe,’ she said, allowing herself to be led away.

  Livia clutched the sand in her fist as she walked, uncertain why she didn’t let it fall away, but knowing only that she wanted to keep hold of it. She tried to remember when her mother had said the strange words to her. Her mother had died so long ago and yet the words seemed fresh, as if she’d whispered them to Livia only yesterday.

  Then she remembered a fragment of the vivid dream she had had in the rock fall – or was it a dream? Livia tried to understand what it could have been, until slowly she ceased pondering the puzzle of it at all and shifted her mind to the words themselves. She heard her own voice commenting on the haruspex’s prophecy: ‘The words were very strange. There could be other meanings to them.’

  And it was then that Livia began to think of a new plan, a plan she wouldn’t share with Tiberius Nero.

  She considered what goals she might place in her heart to inspire her; what risks would be needed if she was to achieve them. It was intoxicating to think of; her fantasy of escape. Livia had never held such a dangerous plan in her life, yet the workings of it felt right and deserving. She stoked and kissed them. The heavy yoke of womanhood lifted from her neck with a beautiful revelation: the plan was divine.

  Then the weight of life’s reality crushed Livia again. Tiberius Nero squeezed her hand tightly in his as they approached the little brook where Tiberius slept in Hebe’s burned arms.

  ‘Here we are, Livia. Safe and well.’

  Tiberius Nero was still her husband. Livia was still a woman of Rome. Be it husband, father, uncle, brother or son, she could never be free of a man’s control.

  To be free was a sacrilege.

  Sacramentum

  January, 39 BC

  Three months later: the beginning of a

  new year of peace between Caesar’s heirs,

  Antony and Octavian

  of the Second Triumvirate

  With people giving presents of coins stamped with the double face of Janus, Rome was appropriately in two minds as it welcomed the new year. There were Romans who wanted forgiveness, and there were Romans who would never forget. But the new year festival of Janus was relegated to a side arena while the centre of the Forum Romanum was filled by a more serious event.

  At the trumpeters’ signal, one hundred and fifty disgraced men sank as one to their knees upon the flagstones that faced the Temple of Divine Julius Caesar. The massive marble edifice of the shrine dazzled their eyes in the winter glare. The Forum’s temple to Rome’s murdered Great Man was yet to receive its intended wash of reds and purples, but its brilliant whiteness was fitting in its purity for the much-anticipated ‘Return to the Fathers’ ceremony. The military tradition of Sacramentum was the inspiration. With every soldier in the empire renewing his vow of allegiance to Rome on this day, the recalled individuals of the ‘proscribed list’ were given an opportunity to do the same.

  From his place in the field of kneeling men, sixteen-year-old Tiberius Nero shivered in his plain grey tunica, his toga virilis having been forbidden to him. He stared at the semicircular alcove built into the base of the huge temple’s rostrum. It marked the place of the Dictator’s cremation, and in Tiberius Nero’s mind it marked the pyre of Marcus Livius’s witchcraft-driven madness, too. This was the dead pater familias’s legacy to my young master, as he saw it. By the ceremony’s end Tiberius Nero would know whether his own short life was to be spared – or stopped at the point of his enemy’s sword.

  At the second signal from the trumpeters all the proscribed men fell forward to their faces, none softening the impact with their arms. Marked for pain, they accepted it as theirs, and noses broke and teeth shattered in those who wished to seem especially penitent. All lips pressed hard to the flagstones in a mass osculation of gratitude at having been allowed to return to Rome.

  There were no further trumpet signals. The four hundred wives, sons and daughters of the proscribed knew that the lack of a cue was a cue in itself. Deemed even lower than their husbands and fathers, they were expected to seem spontaneous in their own pleadings for mercy. Having watched her husband’s subservience, Livia mirrored the procedure with the rest of the women in their dun-coloured cloaks and undecorated hair. She pressed her own lips so hard to the marble she could taste dirt in her mouth.

  The show of obedience received, the massed ranks of witnessing senators rose from their seats on the temple’s high rostrum and applauded. The bleached brilliance of their togas added to the blinding spectacle. Justice was being honoured in Divine Caesar’s name.

  A single senator emerged from among them, taller than most and younger than all. Lithe and lean, the exposed skin of his face, arms and hands had been oiled so that he shone like a pearl. His eyes held a rigid certainty that he deserved to stand before them all; that it was right he should be newly titled divi filius – the son of a god. But his hair gave him away as something less than the Great Man he would have Rome believe. His curls were soft and unruly, the uncombed mop of the watchful child that, at heart, he still was. He was frozen as a boy forever, having been made a man too soon by the nature of his great-uncle’s death. Heir to Caesar, he had not earned greatness on his own accord.

  Yet he was the most beautiful of all men in Rome, and this brought powers of beguilement that were wholly his own. He was Octavian. He could seduce Rome.

  The applause ceased. Hearing all but seeing nothing where she lay, Livia found it difficult to breathe. Her nostrils were crushed by the force with which she drove her face to the stone, and she took in air by her mouth and swallowed grit. She struggled not to cough. No sound was acceptable while her fate sat in the hands of others – she knew this – so she fought against the impulse to choke, her eyes dripping tears in the strain.

  There was silence.

  Livia expected, as all did, that executions would commence. She waited for the sound of drawn swords and the clank of cuirasses as the soldiers began the grim task. But a lone man simply sobbed, softly and unashamedly, without fear or self-pity; the same senator who had emerged from the assemblage to stand before them.

  It was Octavian who wept.

  In the grip of emotion at his own act of supreme forgiveness, the twenty-three-year-old triumvir began to walk among the prone, welcoming those he had once condemned. He took hold of hands and raised fearful men to face him. When their eyes met his he kissed them on the cheek – each time casting his own gaze towards Antony.

  Octavian’s fellow triumvir also now emerged from the throng of senators. Moving like an actor on a stage, Antony left the rostra to join the returned exiles on the flagstones. His new wife of barely three months – Octavia, the sister of Octavian – emerged from the crowd and embraced Antony, wholly for her brother’s benefit. Her face held a radiant, victorious smile for all the people of Rome to see, with not a sparkle of joy behind it. Her soul had been smashed by her men.

  Although she could still see nothing, Livia could tell that Octavian was speaking only to Antony and not to Rome at all. The older man closely observed the forgiveness of those who had once taken up arms with his dead wife, Fulvia. Antony had publicly washed his hands of them, and of Fulvia. Octavian was testing him to see if this was really so.

  Livia heard only snatches of Octavian’s words.

  ‘The friends of Antony are now my friends again … The time of civil war has passed … Antony and I again accept this honour that the Senate and People of Rome have bestowed upon us … With our absent colleague Lepidus we will continue to guide Rome in this Triumvirate …’

  Livia heard a footfall near the flagstone she lay upon and held what little breath she could inside her lungs. Octavian was now standing directly above her. She heard the rustle of a scroll and realised he was reciting from a prepared speech. ‘There now begins a new epoch of peace and prosperity for Rome …’ he declared.

&n
bsp; The senators applauded, Antony loudest of all. Massed at the Forum’s periphery, the assembled mob of Octavian’s clients whooped in agreement. A sharp cramp suddenly seized Livia by the neck. It was all she could do not to move her head to the side to relieve it. She dared not shift a muscle and held hard against the discomfort, keeping herself rigid. The pain became agony; white-hot spears driving cruelly down her spine. She clenched her teeth against it, trapping her tongue, chewing and gripping the flesh to distract herself. She knew beyond certainty that Octavian’s eyes were upon her – the nephew of the man her father had stabbed in the belly. Octavian was enjoying her suffering. A stifled cry rolled from her throat.

  The whisper of the son of the divinity was so low that only Livia heard it. ‘Relax yourself,’ he said. ‘Shift your pose. I will tell no-one.’

  Darkness spilled across her and as she moved her head to the side she saw that Octavian had placed himself to give her a view directly up his toga. She stared up his hard, lean calves to his thighs, her gaze hidden from Rome.

  ‘I know who you are – your father was one of the killers, wasn’t he?’ Octavian spoke to her gently.

  Livia nodded from the ground, scraping her cheek again the stone, though Octavian could not see it.

  ‘I still think of their crime every day. I think of what they stole from me – of what they stole from Rome. Do you ever think of it?’

  Livia nodded again. The disgraced men would be spared execution but she would not, she knew it now – she was too stained by her father’s ignominy. She waited for Octavian’s sword blow to put an end to her wretched life and she felt the muscles of her pelvis give way in the terror of anticipation. Urine trickled where she lay, soaking into the coarse grey goat’s wool of her winter palla. The stink reached her nose and she wept softly in misery that her final moments should be spent in such degradation.

  But no sword blow came.

  ‘It is all in the past now,’ Octavian told her soothingly. ‘We must put our thoughts towards Rome.’

  In the gloom beyond Octavian’s thighs, Livia saw then that he was aroused by her vulnerability.

  *

  Livia wandered to the edge of the Forum Romanum in a dreamlike state. She turned once to look for Tiberius Nero among the throng of men near the temple rostrum and saw him kneeling to kiss the hem of Octavian’s toga. The triumvir urged Tiberius Nero to stand, making a show of being embarrassed. But he was not ashamed for Tiberius Nero at all – Livia could see that in his boyish smile. Octavian was amused by it.

  She turned towards the Palatine Hill, staring up at the terracotta roofs and white terraces of the homes of the aristocracy – her own among them. The peaked roof and rear wall of another temple rose from behind the mansions that covered much of the steep hill. It was painted blue, a full shade brighter than the pale winter sky. The front of the temple wasn’t visible from where she stood. Livia had lived in Rome her entire life and had passed the building many times when journeying down the other side of the hill towards the Circus Maximus, but never once had she gone inside it. Livia sensed my own presence behind her as she began to mount the long flight of steps that led from the Via Nova at the Forum’s edge – the New Road – directly up the north side of the Palatine. I slipped little Tiberius into her arms.

  ‘Thank you, Iphicles.’

  ‘It is my pleasure always to serve you, domina.’

  The burns from the villa fire had added to my scars from when I had turned the furnace spit. Since our return to Rome, Livia had taken me from the kitchens. She was yet to assign me another role within the household, and in lieu of this, I had begun creating my own. If I could achieve it, I would never leave my domina’s side.

  Tiberius squirmed in Livia’s arms so she let him down from her hip to put his little feet on the steps. He was walking properly now and wanted to mount the hill himself. Livia and I took a hand each and he walked between us. She couldn’t take her eyes from the great blue temple at the summit of the hill.

  ‘That building, Iphicles.’

  I squinted against the thin winter light. ‘The home of the Great Mother – Cybele.’

  ‘Have I ever been inside it?’

  I thought this a strange question but didn’t say so. ‘You would know that better than I, domina.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever have. Aren’t I foolish?’

  I wasn’t sure what to say, given Livia’s sacrilegious confessions on religion. To her the worship of gods seemed something like choosing fruit at a market stall. She selected one god before rejecting it for another, before rejecting that god in turn. They were there to serve her, not the other way round. And despite her initiation in Cybele’s cave, I had never once seen Livia honour the Great Mother in the four years since.

  ‘Would you like to visit on our way back to the house?’ I suggested. ‘It’s not far out of our way.’

  Livia declared that she would. Swinging the laughing little boy between us, we ascended the last of the steps to reach the Clivus Victoriae – the Victory Hill Road – which ran behind the ancient fortifications marking the walled village of the Palatine in Romulus’s day. We travelled along the road itself, dodging carts of produce and slaves carrying litters that held highborn women. There was no raised footpath for pedestrians here because the thoroughfare was so old and narrow.

  All around us, people were still giving out Janus coins. We squeezed past the houses of the wealthiest neighbours on the left, looking up to the second-and third-storey balconies. The residents of these homes had the best views in Rome, seeing right across the roofs of the granaries in the Forum Frumentarium below and towards the glories of the far Capitoline Hill.

  Just before we reached the Porta Romulana – the ancient Gate of Romulus – that would have led us down the other side of the hill, I indicated a narrow alley that ran between two of the most impressive mansions. ‘This way leads to the Temple of the Great Mother, domina.’

  Livia stopped to lift the coarse goat-hair palla from her neck and placed it at the top of her head as a temple hood. Her night-black hair was undressed, rolled only into a bun, and the palla wouldn’t stay where she wanted it. She reached underneath the collar and pulled out enough fabric from the plain grey stola underneath to cover her head, letting the cloak fall back to her shoulders. She could see me watching her adjust herself.

  ‘I miss my domina’s fine clothes,’ I said a little provocatively.

  ‘I need to seem to be penitent,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be necessary forever.’

  ‘I agree that you “seem” very penitent indeed, domina, but does that mean that you really are?’

  My look was cheeky; teasing. Since she had freed me from the kitchens I was testing how much she would accept of my boldness. On another day she might have whipped me for it, but today she tolerated rather more. Her encounter with Octavian had left her altered in a way she could not quite articulate. She felt uncharacteristically light-hearted.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how I really am,’ she said to me. ‘Only how I appear.’

  I met her eye and held it, and I saw that it startled her just a little to see my desire for her made plain within my look. I was very emboldened indeed. We rounded a corner in the twisting alley together.

  ‘We are here, domina.’ I held back, keeping Tiberius with me to allow Livia to approach the blue temple alone. But she wished us to stay near her. Together we emerged from the alley to face the great structure from its western side. We walked reverently across the flagstone square until we reached the temple’s southern entrance. A broad flight of steps led to the pillared portico. Beyond it were the great wooden doors, always open in the hours of daylight. We stood gazing up at the dim interior.

  ‘You must have been here before, domina,’ I said. ‘Your father was a devotee of the Great Mother.’

  ‘My father despised her,’ said Livia flatly, ‘but he believed she had her uses. Let’s go inside.’

  Shaken once again by her blasphemies, I pulled the col
lar of my own winter cloak over my head and did the same with little Tiberius as we mounted the marble steps. Crossing the portico, we entered the temple itself. A lone acolyte paying homage inside saw us pass through the doorway and stared at our faces for a moment. We barely noticed him. Robed and cowled, the worshiper’s face was obscured by a heavy veil of hair.

  At the rear of the vaulted interior, fragrant with smouldering spice, was a huge stone image of the Great Mother. Seated on her throne and perhaps twenty feet in height, the great statue of Cybele was carved from white alabaster. The goddess wore the long, belted dress of Eastern women, and on her head was the polus, her cylindrical headdress. A translucent silk veil fell from the top of her crown in swathes, stirring slightly in the draught and covering the entire statue. Yet it was sheer enough for the goddess to be visible in the shifting, dappled light beneath it. At either side of the statue’s knees sat a lion, a sacred beast to Cybele, carved life-size to stress the titanic scale of the deity. Cybele’s left hand rested lightly on the left lion’s head. In her right hand she held a tympanon, a shallow, circular drum.

  The instrument stirred a memory in Livia. ‘I’ve seen a drum like that before – I’ve seen many of them and heard them played. The noise they make is terrible.’

  Awed by the surrounds, I could only whisper in reminder. ‘It was in the cave.’

  The cowled acolyte moved in the shadows.

  Livia was suddenly unsure what had drawn her here. ‘Let’s go home, Iphicles.’

  We turned to leave, and saw the other statue that dwelled within the temple. This one was much smaller, carved only slightly larger than life-size, and sat against the western wall at right angles to Cybele. It was also a woman, wearing the same cylindrical polus on its head and dressed in chiselled marble robes, reclining on a couch.

  ‘Why does Cybele have two images of herself within the temple?’ Livia asked.

  ‘This is not the Great Mother,’ I said quietly.

  A buzz of flies could be heard from somewhere, as if something rotten lay hidden in a corner of the vast room. Livia looked closely at the reclining form. It had no breasts. The chest was featureless and flat like a young man’s – like my own thin torso.