Brides of Rome

by Debra May Macleod

  Taking a break from the adoring mob, Caesar turned to smile at his wife sitting alongside the Vestal. The two women seemed to be getting along very well. The high priestess was even giving Livia a gift. Wonderful. He nodded at Livia in approval, and she smiled back at him.

  Pomponia carried on. “You will mint Vesta on your coinage and adopt the modest dress of a Vestal in your statuary. You will extol our order at all public sacrifices and festivals, and you will make regular donations in the amount that I specify. I shall spend part of your first donation by commissioning a statue of Tuccia for the gardens outside the Circus Maximus.”

  Pomponia accepted a glass of cool cucumber water from a passing slave, took a sip, and then continued. “I must admit, it will be amusing to watch the public ridicule your attempts at purity. After all, the rumors of your purchases at the slave market are already the tastiest topic at every dinner party in Rome.”

  She swirled an ice chip in her glass until it made a clinking sound. “And then there’s your own matrimonial history. A divorced woman with children by another man. Or rather by two other men. There is no question your elder son is the legacy of that square-headed Tiberius, but Drusus . . .” Pomponia shook her head and bit her lip in mock concern for Livia’s welfare. “Caesar would recoil at how often Diodorus used you. And he’d do much worse if he knew you’d birthed a Greek bastard.”

  Livia’s nostrils flared and she opened her mouth, but Pomponia spoke first. “Oh, look, Livia. The general is making a run for it. Let’s see how it all ends.”

  As the crowd roared anew, the slave who was playing the part of Marc Antony dramatically broke free of his restraints and tried to climb the wooden bars of the prison cart to escape the sea of snakes at his feet. He slid down the bars at every try.

  And then in an act of pure desperation, he tipped over the throne upon which was tied the slave Cleopatra and scrambled on top of it.

  The slave woman’s face was buried in the moving sea of snakes. It moved and bobbed for a while, but then she succumbed to either suffocation or the venom of countless snake bites.

  The mob loved every moment of it.

  Pomponia stared at the unmoving body of the slave Cleopatra. She grew pensive and sincere. “Do you know what is strange, Lady Livia?”

  “What is that, Priestess?”

  “I believe that you and I had more in common with Cleopatra than we think. I met her, you know. The last time was on the day I became a full Vestal.”

  “Oh? What was she like?”

  Pomponia thought about this. “Overconfident.”

  When Livia didn’t reply, Pomponia sat back in her chair. Well, that’s done, she thought. I now hold a she-wolf by the ears.

  The Vestal took another sip of the cucumber water, hoping it would help her face cool from the quiet confrontation. Livia had retreated, but she wouldn’t wait long to advance again. They both knew it.

  Pomponia pushed the thought from her mind and forced herself to enjoy Caesar’s victory show. Had she not played a small part in making it happen?

  In the prison cart before the Rostra, the slave Antony was still balanced on the overturned throne of his queen. No matter how many snakes coiled and glided their way up to him, he managed to either avoid them or toss them off. If this went on much longer, the crowd would grow bored.

  Caesar gave a quick nod of his head to a centurion who stood beside the cart. The soldier unsheathed the dagger that hung at his side, thrust his arm through the bars and stabbed the slave in the chest. The slave bellowed a cry of pain but then toppled over to land in the moving nest of snakes below him.

  The show was over. But Caesar’s triumph would go on.

  More importantly to Pomponia, so too would the triumph of the Vestal order. She had seen it through the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire. Not since the time of Romulus and Numa had a leader of Rome been as dedicated to the Vestal order as Caesar Augustus, Rome’s first emperor.

  Following the military defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, and the now-legendary story of Tuccia’s miracle, the people’s devotion to Vesta was also stronger than ever. Rome was at peace.

  Of course, the goddess’s living flame had always burned in the temple and in the homes and hearts of those in Rome. But now that flame, the viva flamma, was spreading.

  It was burning in lands beyond Italy: in Macedonia, Greece, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, and Egypt. Pomponia knew it would continue to spread to Judea, Britannia, Arabia, Germania, and even to lands that had not yet been discovered, new lands the geographers said existed beyond the Ocean of Atlas. After all, the very nature of fire was to spread.

  Chapter XXI

  Triginta Anni

  Thirty years

  tivoli, 25 bce

  Four years later

  She wasn’t fated to walk through the green fields of Tivoli with Medousa after all. Neither would she walk through them with Quintus. But she was walking through them just the same with her memories of them both. That was something.

  Pomponia sat down on a marble bench and enjoyed the view of the beautiful Temple of Vesta in Tivoli. Surrounded by gardens, lush, rolling green hills and vividly colored flowers, and boasting a fine vineyard for libations to the goddess, the circular temple perched on the edge of a grassy cliff to overlook the roaring falls of the Aniene River.

  A Vestal priestess named Cassia approached and sat beside her. Pomponia liked Cassia. She reminded her of Tuccia.

  “Any decisions, Pomponia?” Cassia asked.

  “I am staying with the order,” said Pomponia. “Although I think I will stay here in Tivoli for a while longer. I’m finding it harder and harder to leave my quiet villa for the noise of the city. The temple here is lovely, and the Aniene falls are an excellent source of sacred water that I’d like to start sending to Rome.” She picked a long piece of grass and twirled it around her finger. “I can be useful here, especially if Quintina stays with me. Tuccia has Nona and more than enough priestesses and novices in Rome.”

  Cassia wrapped an arm around Pomponia. “I am not surprised,” she said, “but I am happy to hear the words anyway. This will be big news for our little town. May I tell Cossinia and the other priestesses?”

  “Of course.”

  Cassia made her way back to the temple. As Pomponia watched her go, she touched the Vesta intaglio ring that hung from a chain around her neck.

  Her love and her loss of Quintus didn’t blind her to the truth. The marriage between the two of them would have been an unhappy one. Not at first, but eventually. He could not have changed his sullen disposition, and she could not have tolerated it.

  It was better that she remained a bride of Rome. She could be Quintus’s bride in the afterlife. Perhaps Pluto could make sure he was a pleasant husband to her.

  She stood and walked to the edge of the falls. The rush and spray of the water was invigorating, and yet thoughts of the past—of Medousa, of Quintus—always made her melancholy.

  It was fitting that she should find herself at the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli. It was a newer temple, newer than the old one in the Roman Forum at least, and it was the first temple that Fabiana had ordered to be built after being appointed Vestalis Maxima.

  The sound of a dog barking in the distance slipped into Pomponia’s ear, and for a moment her heart longed to see the little dog Perseus scampering toward her, his nails clicking on the marble floor and his tongue hanging out.

  She had buried his thin white body in the flowers at the base of Fabiana’s statue. How could she so dearly miss something that had tormented her so?

  She heard conversation and turned toward the garden beside the white marble temple, where Quintina was leaning against the trunk of a tall cypress tree. She was talking to a young priest from the Temple of Mars in Tivoli. What was his name? Oh yes, Septimus.

  He said something to Quintina that Pom
ponia could not hear, but it made the young priestess put her hands on her hips in indignation and march away from him, straight up the marble steps and through the doorway of the temple.

  Septimus watched her walk away with a grin of self-satisfaction on his face. Yet instead of leaving once Quintina had disappeared into the sanctum, he stood where he was and continued to stare at the closed bronze doors of the temple.

  The sight made Pomponia think on the words of Horace, one of Caesar’s favorite poets: Mutate nomine, de te fabula narratur. Change the name, and the story is about you.

  But then the poetic sentiment faded. She heard Medousa’s voice—churlish, cautionary—bringing her back to reality with one of the slave’s more pointed sayings: Nec amor nec tussis celatur. Love, like a cough, cannot be hidden.

  She walked to the temple and spoke to Septimus from the top step, her eyebrows raised. “I’ve heard the skin on a man’s back comes off like plaster from a wall.”

  “Yes, Priestess.” He nodded deferentially and left.

  And then Pomponia pulled open the doors and stepped into the sanctum to join her sister Vestals around the eternal fire.

  Epilogue

  Ducunt Volentem Fata, Nolentem Trahunt

  Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling.

  —Seneca

  syria, 24 bce

  One year later

  She still wore the same purple dress she had been wearing that night. The night the men had burst through the doors of her villa and dragged her by the hair over the floor, and outside into the stinking cart. The night the grimy, toothless slave women in the cart had mocked her as she shrieked her protests to her captors. I am not a slave, you fools! Return me to my home at once! I am family to Caesar!

  It hadn’t taken long for her demands to turn to pleas. Please! I am rich, I can pay you anything! My sister is a powerful woman! She will pay a fortune for my freedom!

  At one time, her dress had been the finest that money could buy. Now it was rags. Now she had to knot it in places to hold it together.

  Sitting cross-legged on the ground, she bit into a crust of bread that was so hard it made her gums bleed. Her next bite was more cautious, but her mouth was too sore to chew. She tossed the bread aside with a thump.

  She felt a sudden tug at her ankle and flinched in pain. The skin under the iron manacle was rubbed raw. Her captor—a fat, filthy, foul-mouthed man named Hostus—tugged the chain harder, and she stood up. If she didn’t stand, he would just drag her. He liked to do that. She scowled at his odious bare chest with its tufts of black hair. Rain or shine, the madman never wore a tunica but scurried about with only a sagging loincloth, ratty sandals, and a whip.

  Hostus handed the chain to another man. This one was well dressed and composed, but not Roman. She knew the style—yes, Egyptian. He placed a gold coin in the slave owner’s greasy palm and took hold of her chain. She followed obediently behind him.

  Not that it mattered anymore, not that she really cared after all these years, but she found herself wondering where she was. The convoy of slave carts had been traveling for weeks. All she knew was that the sand stung her eyes and the landscape was more barren than any place she had ever seen.

  Yet here in the middle of the barren desert, in the middle of nowhere, there stood a rickety arena held together by splintered wood and worn ropes. Through the uproar of cheers and jeers, through the ruckus of shouts and sobs, through the crack of the whip against flesh, she heard a sound she had heard many times in Rome: the roar of a hungry lion.

  She dropped to her knees, wrapped her fingers around the chain, and pulled. “No!”

  But her raspy voice was lost in the blowing sands as the Egyptian dragged her toward the arena.

  Afterword

  In 1989, when I was twenty years old, I visited the Roman Forum for the first time. The experience sparked a lifelong fascination in ancient Roman history and religion, particularly Vesta. I have been back to Rome several times since, including during the writing of this book series. I never want to lose that fascination, and I sincerely hope that I have passed it on to you, even in a small way.

  In Brides of Rome, book one in the Vesta Shadows series, my goal was to bring the beautiful Vestal order and religion to life in an engaging, informative, and respectful way. I wanted to position the Vestals within the larger world of ancient Rome, particularly during the Augustan Age as this time was so important to the order. To do that, and to dramatize Vestal rituals and beliefs, I used everything from ancient references and coins to modern excavations.

  Yet this novel is historical fiction. I have taken well-known figures, events, reports, and conditions from a variety of academic and artistic sources, and I have blended them with my own interpretations and, since history is full of holes, educated guesses. To create an original story for a mainstream readership, I have adjusted or simplified complex ideas, timelines, and genealogies, and occasionally adapted the writings of ancient authors such as Pliny, Tacitus, Livy, Dio, Ovid, Plutarch, Gellius, Suetonius, etc.

  Unlike historical figures such as Julius Caesar, Octavian, and Livia—about whom we can glean a lot from various ancient sources, including their own words—we know little to nothing about the personalities, motivations, affections, struggles, or personal lives of most historical Vestals. Yet I’ve used what is available, along with some artistic license, to bring Pomponia to life. Her full name in the book, Pomponia Occia, is a composite of two real Vestals: Occia, the Vestalis Maxima who served during the late Republic and early Roman Empire, and Pomponia, who served later in the empire.

  I’ve done a similar thing with other Vestal characters, again those women we just don’t know that much about. The second names of Nona Fonteia and Caecilia Scantia are the names of real Vestals who lived around this time. As for Tuccia and the sieve, the account is true, although it happened earlier than in the book. The actual manner in which she performed her miracle remains a mystery. It is also true that a Vestal named Licinia was condemned to death circa 113 BCE, but I drew elements in the fabricated charges against her from other cases.

  The same holds true for other characters and circumstances. There is no note I could find of Livia having a sister, but Roman naming practices, which changed so much over the years, makes Claudia possible. Livia did publicly align herself with the Vestals, and her statuary shows her dressed similarly, modest stola and all. No doubt this was for the mutual benefit of the Vestal order and her political image, as she was in fact married previously with two sons by her first husband. It was also rumored that Livia poisoned her adversaries and supplied her husband with virgins to deflower.

  As for Octavian, the Vestal Virgins did intercede on behalf of his “divine father,” Julius Caesar, during the proscriptions of Sulla. Octavian was given the honorific Augustus, although this happened a couple of years later than in the book. The emperor Caesar Augustus was a powerful benefactor of the Vestals. Vesta and her priestesses are featured in two of the greatest monuments of his age: the literary epic The Aeneid and the marble Ara Pacis Augustae. He also mentions them in his autobiography the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a Latin copy of which today beautifully adorns the outside of the Ara Pacis museum in the Eternal City.

  Octavian did in fact enter Vesta’s sanctuary to take Antony’s will, possibly without too much opposition from the Vestals, and the will was damning to Antony. That event is something I drew on when creating the dynamic between Octavian and Pomponia. The idea of Pomponia providing Caesar with a copy, thereby assuring him the risky act would be worth it, is my imagining. To Octavian’s dismay, Antony and Cleopatra did commit suicide before he could execute them in his triumph.

  It’s important to know that there was never just one “Ancient Rome.” Like any nation or culture, it was always changing. The Roman Forum is a perfect example. New monuments and structures were continually being added or improved, while others were
removed, whether intentionally or through disaster. The Temple of Vesta and the House of the Vestals are no exception. I’ve spent hours wandering what remains of those, and I’ve taken elements from them in their grandest forms to use in this book series.

  While there are countless resources and books on ancient Rome, there are several specific and wonderful books that I have found relevant in different ways: Rome’s Vestal Virgins by Robin Lorsch Wildfang; Excavations in the Area Sacra of Vesta (1987–1996): edited by Russell T. Scott; Mythology by Edith Hamilton; Augustus by Pat Southern; and Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. Any deviations from fact in this story are mine, for artistic reasons, and not theirs. As mentioned earlier, I have also drawn from Suetonius’s irresistible The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.

  Classical historians, archaeologists, and avid readers of historical fiction will know where I have taken creative liberties. If that’s you, I hope you have found a fresh perspective in this novel and enjoyed revisiting a world we both love. If you are new to the world of ancient Rome, I hope you have enjoyed learning about this important time, as well as the remarkable people, places, and events that have fascinated so many of us for so long.

  I also hope you will go on to read the second book in this series, the even bolder sequel, To Be Wolves: A Novel of the Vestal Virgins.

  If you want to learn more about the Vesta religion and its priesthood, I invite you to visit VestaShadows.com for additional resources, including a gallery of images from my personal collection plus blogs, videos, and more.

  Thank you for reading and all the best.

  Dramatis Personae

  Agrippa Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, general and friend of Octavian

  Alexander Helios Son of Cleopatra and Marc Antony

  Ankhu Egyptian messenger slave owned by Quintus

  Apollonius Adviser to and slave of Cleo­patra

  Brutus Senator and assassin of Julius Caesar