During the winter which Quintus Servilius Caepio spent in Narbo grieving for his lost gold, he received a letter from the brilliant young advocate Marcus Livius Drusus, one of Aurelia’s most ardent—and most disappointed—suitors.
I was but nineteen when my father the censor died, and left me to inherit not only all his property, but also the position of paterfamilias. Perhaps luckily, my only onerous burden was my thirteen-year-old sister, deprived as she was of both father and mother. At the time, my mother, Cornelia, asked to take my sister into her household, but of course I declined. Though there was never any divorce, you are I know aware of the coolness between my parents that came to a head when my father agreed that my young brother should be adopted out. My mother was always far fonder of him than of me, so when my brother became Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, she pleaded his young age as an excuse, and went with him to his new household, where indeed she found a kind of life far freer and more licentious than ever she could have lived under my father’s roof. I refresh your memory about these things as a point of honor, for I feel my honor touched by my mother’s shabby and selfish behavior.
I have, I flatter myself, brought up my sister, Livia Drusa, as befits her great position. She is now eighteen years old, and ready for marriage. As, Quintus Servilius, am I, even at my young age of twenty-three. I know it is more customary to wait until after twenty-five to marry, and I know there are many who prefer to wait until after they enter the Senate. But I cannot. I am the paterfamilias, and the only male Livius Drusus of my generation. My brother, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, can no longer claim the Livius Drusus name or any share of the Livius Drusus fortune. Therefore it behooves me to marry and procreate, though I decided at the time of my father’s death that I would wait until my sister was old enough to marry.
The letter was as stiff and formal as the young man, but Quintus Servilius Caepio had no fault to find with that; he and the young man’s father had been good friends, just as his son and the young man were good friends.
Therefore, Quintus Servilius, I wish as the head of my family to propose a marriage alliance to you, the head of your family. I have not, incidentally, thought it wise to discuss this matter with my uncle, Publius Rutilius Rufus. Though I have nothing against him as husband of my Aunt Livia, nor as father of her children, I do not consider either his blood or his temperament sufficiently weighty to make his counsel of any value. Only recently, for instance, it came to my ears that he actually persuaded Marcus Aurelius Cotta to allow his stepdaughter, Aurelia, to choose her own husband. A more un-Roman act is hard to imagine. And of course she chose a pretty-boy Julius Caesar, a flimsy and impoverished fellow who will never amount to anything.
There. That disposed of Publius Rutilius’ Rufus. On ploughed Marcus Livius Drusus, sore of heart, but also sore of dignitas.
In electing to wait for my sister, I thought to relieve my own wife of the responsibility of housing my sister, and being answerable for her conduct. I can see no virtue in transmitting one’s own duties to others who cannot be expected to share the same degree of concern.
What I now propose, Quintus Servilius, is that you permit me to marry your daughter, Servilia Caepionis, and permit your son, Quintus Servilius Junior, to marry my sister, Livia Drusa. It is an ideal solution for both of us. Our ties through marriage go back many generations, and both my sister and your daughter have dowries of exactly the same size, which means that no money needs to change hands, an advantage in these times of cash-flow shortages.
Please let me know your decision.
There was really nothing to decide; it was the match Quintus Servilius Caepio had dreamed of, for the Livius Drusus fortune was vast, as was the Livius Drusus nobility. He wrote back at once:
My dear Marcus Livius, I am delighted. You have my permission to go ahead and make all the arrangements.
And so Drusus broached the matter with his friend Caepio Junior, anxious to prepare the ground for the letter he knew would soon arrive from Quintus Servilius Caepio to his son; better that Caepio Junior saw his coming marriage as desirable than the result of a direct order.
“I’d like to marry your sister,” he said to Caepio Junior, a little more abruptly than he had meant to.
Caepio Junior blinked, but didn’t answer.
“I’d also like to see you marry my sister,” Drusus went on.
Caepio Junior blinked several times, but didn’t answer.
“Well, what do you say?” asked Drusus.
Finally Caepio Junior marshaled his wits (which were not nearly as great as either his fortune or his nobility), and said, “I’d have to ask my father.”
“I already have,” said Drusus. “He’s delighted.”
“Oh! Then I suppose it’s all right,” said Caepio Junior.
“Quintus Servilius, Quintus Servilius, I want to know what you think!” cried Drusus, exasperated.
“Well, my sister likes you, so that’s all right.... And I like your sister, but...” He didn’t go on.
“But what?” demanded Drusus.
“I don’t think your sister likes me.”
It was Drusus’s turn to blink. “Oh, rubbish! How could she not like you? You’re my best friend! Of course she likes you! It’s the ideal arrangement, we’ll all stay together.”
“Then I’d be pleased,” said Caepio Junior.
“Good!” said Drusus briskly. “I discussed all the things which had to be discussed when I wrote to your father— dowry payments and the like. Nothing to worry about.”
“Good,” said Caepio Junior.
They were sitting on a bench under a splendid old oak tree growing beside the Pool of Curtius in the lower Forum Romanum, for they had just eaten a delicious lunch of unleavened bread pockets stuffed with a spicy mixture of lentils and minced pork.
Rising to his feet, Drusus handed his large napkin to his body servant, and stood while the man made sure his snowy toga was unsullied by the food.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” asked Caepio Junior.
“Home to tell my sister,” said Drusus. He lifted one sharply peaked black brow. “Don’t you think you ought to go home to your sister and tell her?”
“I suppose so,” said Caepio Junior dubiously. “Wouldn’t you rather tell her yourself? She likes you.”
“No, you have to tell her, silly! You’re in loco parentis at the moment, so it’s your job—just as it’s my job to tell Livia Drusa.” And off went Drusus up the Forum, heading for the Vestal Steps.
*
His sister was at home—where else would she be? Since Drusus was the head of the family and their mother, Cornelia, was forbidden the door, Livia Drusa could not leave the house for a moment without her brother’s permission. Nor would she ever have dared to sneak out, for in her brother’s eyes she was potentially branded with her mother’s shame, and seen as a weak and corruptible female creature who could not be allowed the smallest latitude; he would have believed the worst of her, even on no evidence at all beyond escape.
“Please ask my sister to come to the study,” he said to his steward when he arrived at his house.
It was commonly held to be the finest house in all Rome, and had only just been completed when Drusus the censor died. The view from the loggia balcony across the front of its top storey was magnificent, for it stood on the very highest point of the Palatine cliff above the Forum Romanum. Next door to it was the area Flacciana, the vacant block once containing the house of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, and on the far side of that was the house of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar.
In true Roman style, even on the side of the vacant block its outside walls were windowless, for when a house was built there again, its outside walls would fuse to Drusus’s. A high wall with a strong wooden door in it as well as a pair of freight gates fronted onto the Clivus Victoriae, and was actually the back of the house; the front of the house overlooked the view, was three storeys high, and was built out on piers fixed firmly in the slope of the cliff. The top floor, level with the Clivus Victoriae, housed the noble family; the storage rooms and kitchens and servants’ quarters were below, and did not run the full depth of the block because of its abrupt slope.
The freight gates in the wall along the street opened directly into the peristyle-garden, which was so large it contained six wonderful, fully grown lotus trees imported as saplings from Africa ninety years before by Scipio Africanus, who had owned the site at the time. Every summer they bloomed a drooping rain of blossom—two red, two orange, and two deep yellow—that lasted for over a month and filled the whole house with perfume; later they were gracefully provided with a thin cover of pale-green fernlike compound leaves; and in winter they were bare, permitting every morsel of sunlight tenure in the courtyard. A long thin shallow pool faced with pure-white marble had four beautiful matching bronze fountains by the great Myron, one on each corner, and other full-scale bronze statues by Myron and Lysippus ranged down the length of either side of the pool—satyrs and nymphs, Artemis and Actaeon, Dionysos and Orpheus. All these bronzes were painted in startlingly lifelike verisimilitude, so that the courtyard at first glance suggested a congress of woodsy immortals.
A Doric colonnade ran down either side of the peristyle-garden and across the side opposite the street wall, supported by wooden columns painted yellow, their bases and capitals picked out in bright colors. The floors of the colonnade were of polished terrazzo, the walls along its back vividly painted in greens and blues and yellows, and hung in the spaces between earth-red pilasters were some of the world’s greatest paintings—a child with grapes by Zeuxis, a “Madness of Ajax” by Parrhasius, some nude male figures by Timanthes, one of the portraits of Alexander the Great by Apelles, and a horse by Apelles so lifelike it seemed tethered to the wall when viewed from the far side of the colonnade.
The study opened onto the back colonnade to one side of big bronze doors; the dining room opened onto it to the other side. And beyond that was a magnificent atrium as large as the whole Caesar house, lit by a rectangular opening in the roof supported by columns at each of the four corners and on the long sides of the pool below. The walls were painted in trompe l’oeil realism to simulate pilasters, dadoes, entablatures, and between these were panels of black-and-white cubes so three-dimensional they leaped out at the beholder, and panels of swirling flowerlike patterns; the colors were vivid, mostly reds, with blues and greens and yellows.
The ancestral cupboards containing the wax masks of the Livius Drusus ancestors were all perfectly kept up, of course; painted pedestals called herms because they were adorned with erect male genitalia supported busts of ancestors, or gods, or mythical women, or Greek philosophers, all exquisitely painted to appear real. Full-length statues, each painted to simulate life, stood around the impluvium pool and the walls, some on marble plinths, some on the ground. Great silver and gold chandeliers dangled from the ornate plaster ceiling an immense distance above (it was painted to resemble a starlit sky between ranks of gilded plaster flowers), or stood seven and eight feet tall on the floor, which was a colored mosaic depicting the revels of Bacchus and his Bacchantes dancing and drinking, feeding deer, teaching lions to quaff wine.