At the end of February, Quintus Servilius Caepio left on his journey, having told Livia Drusa that she must not expect him back for at least a year, perhaps longer. That had surprised her until he explained that it was essential, having sunk all his money into this venture in Italian Gaul, that he stay there to supervise every aspect of it. His sexual attentions had been many and prolonged, for—he said—he wanted a son, and it would keep her occupied in his absence if she became pregnant. During the earlier years of her marriage these intimacies had distressed her greatly, but after she learned the name of her adored red-haired King Odysseus, Caepio’s lovemaking had simply become a boring inconvenience unattended by revulsion. Saying nothing to her husband of her own plans to fill in the time while he was away, she waved him off; she then waited one market interval of eight days before seeking an interview with her brother.
“Marcus Livius, I have a great favor to ask,” she began, seated in his client’s chair; she looked surprised, laughed. “Ye gods! Do you know this is the first time I’ve sat here since the day you persuaded me to marry Quintus Servilius?”
Drusus’s olive skin darkened. He looked down at his hands, folded on his desk. “Eight years ago,” he said neutrally.
“Yes, it was,” she said, then laughed again. “However, I did not sit myself here today to talk about what happened eight years ago, brother. I’m here to ask a favor.”
“If I can grant it, Livia Drusa, I would be very pleased,” he said, grateful that she was letting him off so lightly.
Many times he had longed to apologize to her, beg her to forgive him for that dreadful mistake; her constant unhappiness had not been lost on him, and it was he who had had to admit to himself that hers had been the true reading of Caepio’s dreary character. But pride had stoppered up his mouth, and always at the back of his mind had lurked the conviction that, in marrying her to Caepio, he had at least averted any possibility she might turn out like her mother. That frightful woman had embarrassed him for years by turning up—in conversation, at least—as someone’s butt after a particularly sordid love affair had foundered, as they always, always did.
“Well?” he prompted when Livia Drusa did not go on.
Frowning, she licked her lips, then raised her lovely eyes to look directly at him. “Marcus Livius, for a very long time I have been aware that my husband and I have outstayed our welcome.”
“You’re wrong,” he countered quickly, “but if in any way I have inadvertently given you that impression, then I apologize. Truly, sister, you have always been welcome— and you always will be welcome in my house.”
“I thank you. However, what I said is a fact. You and Servilia Caepionis have never had a chance to be alone, which may be one reason why she has failed to conceive.”
He winced. “I doubt it.”
“I do not.” She leaned forward earnestly. “Times are tranquil at the moment, Marcus Livius. You have no office in the government and you have had little Drusus Nero long enough to make the possibility of a child of your own much greater. So the old women say—and I believe them.”
Finding all this painful, he said, “Get to the point, do!”
“The point is that while Quintus Servilius is away, I would very much like to remove myself and my children to the country,” said Livia Drusa. “You have a little villa near Tusculum, which isn’t more than half a day’s journey from Rome. No one has lived in the house for years. Please, Marcus Livius, give it to me for a while! Let me live on my own!”
His eyes searched her face, looking for any evidence that she was planning some indiscretion. But he could find none.
“Did you ask Quintus Servilius?”
Keeping her eyes looking into his, Livia Drusa said steadily, “Of course I did.”
“He didn’t mention it to me.”
“How extraordinary!” She smiled. “But how like him!”
That provoked a laugh. “Well, sister, I can’t see why not, since Quintus Servilius said yes. As you say, Tusculum isn’t very far from Rome. I can keep an eye on you.”
Face transfigured, Livia Drusa thanked her brother profusely.
“When do you want to go?”
She rose to her feet. “At once. May I ask Cratippus to organize everything?”
“Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, Livia Drusa, you’ll be missed. So will your daughters.”
“After putting an extra tail on the horse and changing the bunch of grapes to rather lurid apples?”
“It could as easily have been Drusus Nero in a couple of years’ time,” he said. “If you think about it, we were lucky. The paint was still wet, no harm was done. Father’s works of art are quite safe in the cellar, and there they’ll stay until the last child is fully grown.”
He rose too; they walked together down the colonnade to the mistress’s sitting room, where Servilia Caepionis was busy on her loom, weaving blankets for little Drusus Nero’s new bed.
“Our sister wants to leave us,” said Drusus, entering.
There could be no mistaking his wife’s dismay—nor her guilty pleasure. “Oh, Marcus Livius, that’s too bad! Why?”
But Drusus beat a quick retreat, leaving his sister to do her own explaining.
“I’m taking the girls to the villa at Tusculum. We’re going to live there until Quintus Servilius comes home again.”
“The villa at Tusculum?” asked Servilia Caepionis blankly. “But my dear Livia Drusa, it’s a tumbledown wreck of a place! It belonged to the first Livius, I believe.
There’s no bath or latrine, no decent kitchen, and it won’t be big enough.”
“I don’t care,” said Livia Drusa. She lifted her sister-in-law’s hand and held it to her cheek. “Dear lady of this house, I would live in a hovel for the chance to be the lady of a house! I don’t say that to hurt you, nor is it a reproach. From the day your brother and I moved in here, you have been graciousness itself. But you must understand my position. I want my own house. I want servants who don’t call me dominilla and take no notice of anything I say because they’ve known me since I was a baby. I want a bit of land to walk on, a bit of freedom from the crush of this dreadful city. Oh, please, Servilia Caepionis, understand!”
Two tears rolled down the cheeks of the lady of the house, and her lip quivered. “I do understand,” she said.
“Don’t grieve, be happy for me!”
They embraced, in full accord.
“I shall find Marcus Livius and Cratippus at once,” said Servilia Caepionis briskly, putting away her work and covering the loom against dust. “I insist that builders be hired to turn that antique villa into something comfortably livable for you.”
*
But Livia Drusa would not wait. Three days later she had packed up her daughters, her many buckets of books, Caepio’s very few servants, and set out for the farm at Tusculum.
Though she hadn’t visited it since childhood, she found it quite unchanged—a small plastered house painted a bilious yellow, with no garden to speak of, no proper facilities, very little air or light inside, and no peristyle. However, her brother had not wasted time; the place already teemed with the employees of a local builder, who was there in person to greet her, and promised that within two months the house would be livable.
Thus Livia Drusa installed herself amid a controlled chaos—plaster dust, the noise of hammers and mallets and saws, a constant volley of instructions and queries shouted in the broad Latin of Tusculans who might live only fifteen miles from Rome, but rarely if ever went there. Her daughters reacted typically; half-past-four-year-old Lilla was entranced, whereas that composed and secretive child Servilia all too obviously loathed the house, the building activity, and her mother, not necessarily in that order. However, Servilia’s mood was unobtrusive; Lilla’s boisterous participation in everything only added to the chaos.
Having placed her daughters under the charge of their nurse and Servilia’s dour old tutor, Livia Drusa set out the next morning to walk through the peace and beauty of the deep winter countryside, hardly able to believe that she had thrown off the shackles of a long imprisonment.
Though the calendar said it was spring, deep winter it was. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus had not prodded the College of Pontifices he headed to do their duty and keep the shorter calendar year in time with the seasons. Not that Rome and her environs had endured a harsh winter that year; of snow there had been little, and the Tiber hadn’t frozen over at all. Thus the temperature was well above freezing, the wind was no more than an occasional breath, and there was good grass underfoot.
Happier than she had ever been in all her life, Livia Drusa wandered across the home field, clambered over a low stone wall, walked carefully around the perimeter of a field already under the plough, climbed another stone wall, and entered a place of grass and sheep. All bound up in their leather coats, the silly creatures galloped away from her when she tried to call them to her; shrugging and smiling, she walked on.
Beyond that field she found a boundary stone painted white, and beside it a little towered shrine, the ground before it still marked with the blood of some sacrifice. In the lowest branches of an overhanging tree there bobbed little woolen dolls, little woolen balls, and heads of garlic, all looking weatherworn and drab. Beyond the shrine was a clay pot turned upside down; curiously Livia Drusa lifted it, then dropped it back in a hurry; under it lay the decomposing body of a big toad.
Too citified to understand that if she went any further she would be trespassing—and that she was now on the land of someone scrupulous in his attentions to the gods of the soil and of boundaries—Livia Drusa strolled on. When she found the first crocus she knelt to look at its vivid yellow flower, rose again to gaze into the naked branches of the trees with an appreciation so new that trees might have been invented just for her.
An orchard of apples and pears came next, some of the pears still unpicked, a temptation to which Livia Drusa happily succumbed, finding her pear so sweet and juicy her hands became a sticky mess. Somewhere she could hear water running, so she walked through the carefully tended trees in the direction of the sound until she came upon a little brook. Its water was icy, but she didn’t care; she dabbled her hands and laughed softly to herself as she shook them dry in the sun, now high enough to have warmed the air. Off came her palla wrap; still kneeling beside the stream, she spread the huge piece of cloth out and folded it into a rectangle she could carry, then rose to her feet. And saw him.
He had been reading. The scroll was in his left hand, curled up again because he had quite forgotten it, so fixedly was he staring at this invader of his orchard. King Odysseus of Ithaca! Encountering his eyes, Livia Drusa caught her breath, for they were the very eyes of King Odysseus, large and grey and beautiful.
“Hello,” she called, smiling at him without shyness or any kind of discomfort. Having watched him for so many years from her balcony, he seemed indeed the wanderer returned at this moment, a man she knew at least as well as Queen Penelope had known her King Odysseus. So she threw the folded palla over her arm and began to walk toward him, still smiling, still talking.
“I stole a pear,” she said. “It was delicious! I didn’t know pears hung so long on trees. Whenever I go out of Rome, I go to the seaside in summer, and it isn’t the same.”
He said nothing, just followed her approach with those grey and luminous eyes.
I still love you, she was saying within herself. I still love you! I don’t care if you’re the progeny of a slave and a peasant. I love you. Like Penelope, I had forgotten love. But here you are again after so many years, and I still love you.
When she stopped, she was too close to him for this to be the chance encounter of two strangers; he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, and the big dark eyes looking now into his own were filled with recognition. With love. With welcome. It therefore seemed absolutely natural to step a very few inches closer to her, to put his arms around her. She put her face up and her arms about his neck, and both of them were smiling as they kissed. Old friends, old lovers, a husband and wife who had not seen each other for twenty years, torn apart by the machinations of others, divine and human. Triumphant in this reunion.
The sure strong touch of his hands was a recognition, she had no need to tell him where to go, what was fitting; he was the king of her heart, and always had been. As gravely as a child placed in charge of some precious treasure, she bared and offered him her breasts, went about him taking his clothes while he spread out her wrap upon the ground, then lay down beside him. Trembling her pleasure, she kissed his neck and sucked the lobe of his ear, held his face between her hands and found his mouth once more, caressed his body blissfully, mumbled a thousand endearments against his tongue.
Fruit, sweet and sticky—thin bare twigs tangled amid a bluest sky—the jerky pain of hair caught too tight—a tiny bird with stilled wings glued to the tendrils of a webby cloud—a huge lump of packed-down exultation struggling to be born, then suddenly soaring free, free—oh, in such an ecstasy!
They lay together on their clothing for hours, keeping each other warm with skin on skin, smiling foolishly at each other, amazed at finding each other, innocent of transgression, enmeshed in the deliciousness of all kinds of discoveries.
They talked too. He was married, she learned—to one Cuspia, daughter of a publicanus, and his sister was married to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the younger brother of the Pontifex Maximus; dowering his sister had been a staggering expense, one he had only managed to achieve by marrying his Cuspia, whose father was enormously wealthy. There were as yet no children, for he too could find nothing to admire or love in his spouse—she was, he said, already complaining to her father that he neglected her.
When Livia Drusa told him who she was, Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus grew very still.
“Are you angry?” she asked, lifting herself up to look down on him anxiously.
He smiled, shook his head. “How can I be angry when the gods have answered me? They set you down here on the lands of my forefathers for me. The moment I saw you at the stream, I knew it. And if you are connected to so many powerful families, it must be yet another sign that I am indeed favored.”
“Did you truly not have any idea who I am?”
“None at all,” he said, not quite happily. “I’ve never seen you in my life.”
“Not even once? Did you never walk out onto Gnaeus Domitius’s balcony and see me on my brother’s balcony above?”
“Never,” he said.
She sighed. “I saw you many times over many years.”
“I’m profoundly glad you liked what you saw.”
She cuddled into his shoulder. “I fell in love with you when I was sixteen years old,” she said.
“How perverse the gods are!” he said. “Had I looked up and seen you, I wouldn’t have rested until I married you. And we would have many children, and neither of us would be in this awful situation now.”
To turn and cling together was instinctive, a mixture of pleasure and pain.
“Oh, it will be terrible if they find out!” she cried.
“Yes.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“No.”
“Then they must never find out, Marcus Porcius.”
He writhed. “We should be together with honor, Livia Drusa, not guiltily.”
“There is honor,’’ she said gravely. “It’s only our present circumstances make it seem otherwise. I am not ashamed.”
He sat up, hugged his knees. “Nor I,” he said, and took her back into his arms and held her until she protested, for she wanted to look at him, so beautifully put together, long-armed and long-legged, skin cream and hairless, his scant body hair the same fiery color as on his head. His body was well knit and muscular, his face bony. Truly King Odysseus. Or her King Odysseus, anyway.
*
It was late afternoon when she left him, having arranged that they would meet at the same place and time on the morrow, and they took so long making their farewells that by the time she reached Drusus’s house, the builders had done with their work for the day. Her steward, Mopsus, was on the point of marshaling everyone to start looking for her. So happy and uplifted was she that realities of this nature hadn’t even occurred to her; standing in the fading light blinking stupidly at Mopsus, she had not the wits to think of reason or excuse.
Her appearance was appalling. The hair hung down her back in a tangle liberally larded with bits of twig and grass, great smears of mud marred her clothes, the sensible closed shoes she had worn now dangled by their straps from her hand, her face and arms were dirty, her feet covered in mud.
“Domina, domina, what happened?” cried the steward. “Have you had a fall?”
Her wits returned. “Indeed I have, Mopsus,” she answered cheerily. “In fact, I fell about as far as I could, and live.”
Surrounded by clucking servants, she was swept into the house. An old bronze tub was produced, put in her sitting room, filled with warm water. Lilla, who had been crying because Mama was missing, trotted off now in the wake of her nurse to eat a delayed dinner, but Servilia followed her mother unobtrusively and stood in the shadows while a girl unfastened the clasps of Livia Drusa’s gown, clicking her tongue at the state of Livia Drusa’s body, dirtier than her clothes.
When the girl turned away to see that the water was the right temperature, Livia Drusa, naked and unashamed, stretched her arms above her head so slowly and voluptuously that the unnoticed little girl beside the door understood the meaning of the gesture on some utterly primitive, atavistic level only time would elucidate. Down came the arms, up went their hands to cup the full but lovely breasts; Livia Drusa’s thumbs played with her nipples for a moment, while Livia Drusa’s mouth smiled and smiled and smiled. Then she stepped into her bath, turned so her girl could trickle water down her back from a sponge, and so didn’t see Servilia open the door and slip out.
At dinner—which Servilia was allowed to share with her mother—Livia Drusa chattered away happily about the pear she had eaten, the first crocus, the dolls in the tree above the boundary shrine, the little brook she had found, even details of an imaginary fall many feet down a steep and muddy bank. Servilia sat, eating daintily, her expression neutral. An outsider looking at them would have judged the mother’s face that of a happy child, and the child’s face that of a troubled mother.
“Does my happiness puzzle you, Servilia?” the mother asked.
“It’s very odd, yes,” said the child composedly.
Livia Drusa leaned forward across the small table at which both of them sat and tucked a strand of black hair out of her daughter’s face, genuinely interested for the first time in this miniature reproduction of herself. Back rushed the past, her own desolate childhood.
“When I was your age,” Livia Drusa said, “my mother never took any notice of me. It was Rome responsible. And just recently I realized Rome was having the same effect on me. That’s why I moved us to the country. That’s why we’re going to be living on our own until tata comes home. I’m happy because I’m free, Servilia! I can forget Rome.”
“I like Rome,” said Servilia, sticking out her tongue at the various plates of food. “Uncle Marcus has a better cook.”
“We’ll find a cook to please you, if that’s your worst complaint. Is it your worst complaint?”
“No. The builders are.”
“Well, they’ll be gone in a month or two, then things will be more peaceful. Tomorrow”—she remembered, shook her head, smiled—”no, the next day—we’ll go walking together.”
“Why not tomorrow?” asked Servilia.
“Because I have to have one more day all to myself.”
Servilia slipped from her chair. “I’m tired, Mama. May I go to bed now, please?”
*
And so began the happiest year of Livia Drusa’s life, a time when nothing really mattered save love, and love was called Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, with a little bit left over for Servilia and Lilla.
Very quickly they settled into a pattern, for of course Cato didn’t spend much time on his Tusculan farm—or hadn’t, until he met Livia Drusa. It was necessary that they find a more secure rendezvous, one where they wouldn’t be seen by a farm worker or a wandering shepherd, and one where Livia Drusa could keep herself clean, tidy, presentable. This Cato solved by evicting a family who lived in a tiny secluded cottage on his estate, and announcing to his world that he would use it as a retreat, as he wanted to write a book. The book became his excuse for everything, especially for protracted absences from Rome and his wife; following in the footsteps of his grandfather, this opus was to be an extremely detailed compendium about Roman rural life, and would incorporate every kind of country spell, rite, prayer, superstition, and custom of a religious nature, then would go on to explain modern farming techniques and activities. No one in Rome found its genesis at all surprising, given Cato’s family and background.
Whenever he could be in Tusculum they met at the same hour each morning, for Livia Drusa had established this as her own private and personal time because the children were doing their lessons, and they parted—an emotional business—at noon. Even when Marcus Livius Drusus came down to see how his sister was faring and how the renovations to the farmhouse were proceeding, Livia Drusa continued her “walks.” Of course she was so obviously happy in such a simple and artless way that Drusus could only applaud his sister for her good sense in relocating; had she displayed signs of nervousness or guilt, he might have wondered. But she never did, because she thought of her relationship with Cato as just, right, proper—deserved and deserving.
Naturally there were awkwardnesses, especially in the beginning. To Livia Drusa, the chief one was her beloved’s dubious ancestry. This no longer worried her to the extent it had when Servilia Caepionis had first explained who he was, but it did niggle at her still. Luckily she was too intelligent to tax him with it openly. Instead, she sought ways to bring the subject up that would not give him reason to think she looked down on him—though of course she did look down on him. Oh, not with patronization or malice! Only with a regret founded in the security of her own impeccable ancestry; a wish that he too could participate in this most Roman of all securities.
His grandfather was the illustrious Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius—Cato the Censor. Of wealthy Latin stock, the Porcii Prisci had been sufficiently prominent to have held the Public Horse of Roman knighthood for several generations when Cato the Censor was born; however, though they enjoyed the full citizenship and knight’s status, they lived in Tusculum rather than in Rome, and had harbored no aspirations of a public nature.
Her beloved, she quickly discovered, did not consider his ancestry dubious at all, for, as he said to her,
“The whole myth originated in my grandfather’s character—he masqueraded as a peasant after some rarefied patrician sneered at him when he was a seventeen-year-old cadet, early in Hannibal’s war. The peasant pose delighted him so much he never changed it—and we think he was quite right to do so, if for no other reason than that New Men come and go and are forgotten, but who could ever forget Cato the Censor?”
“The same might be said of Gaius Marius,” Livia Drusa ventured diffidently.
Her beloved reared back as if she had bitten him. “That man? Now he’s a genuine New Man—an outright peasant! My grandfather had ancestors! He was only a New Man in that he was the first of his family to sit in the Senate.1”
“How can you know your grandfather only posed as a peasant?’’
“From his private letters. We still have them.”
“Doesn’t the other branch of your family have his papers? After all, it’s the senior branch.”
“The Liciniani? Don’t even mention them!” said Cato in tones of disgust. “It is our branch, the Saloniani, who will shine the brighter when the historians of tomorrow write about the Rome of our time. We are the true heirs of Cato the Censor! We put on no airs and graces, we honor the kind of man Cato the Censor was—a great man, Livia Drusa!”
“Yet masqueraded as a peasant.”
“Indeed! Rough, bluff, outspoken, full of the old ways, a real Roman,” said Cato, eyes shining. “Do you know, he drank the same wine his slaves drank? He never plastered his farmsteads or his country villas, he wouldn’t have a piece of tapestry or purple cloth in his Roman house, and he never paid more than six thousand sesterces for a slave. We of the Saloniani have continued in his tradition, we live the same way.”
“Oh, dear!” said Livia Drusa.
But he didn’t notice this evidence of dismay, he was too involved in explaining to his little Livian love how wonderful a man Cato the Censor had been. “How could he really have been a peasant when he became the best friend of a Valerius Flaccus—and upon moving to Rome, was the best orator and advocate of his or any other time? To this day, even overrated experts like Crassus Orator and old Mucius Scaevola the Augur admit that his rhetoric was peerless, that no one has ever used aphorism and hyperbole better! And look at his written words! Superb! My grandfather was educated in the grand manner, and spoke and wrote a Latin so well thought out that he never needed to draft.”
“I can see I must read him,” said Livia Drusa, ever so slightly dryly; her tutor had deemed Cato the Censor beneath her attention.
“Do!” said Cato eagerly, putting his arms around her, drawing her body between his legs. “Start with his Carmen de Moribus, it will give you an idea of how moral a man he was, how properly Roman. Of course, he was the first Porcius to bear the cognomen Cato—until then, the Porcii had been cognominated Priscus—and doesn’t that tell you how ancient our stock is, that it was called Ancient? Why, my grandfather’s grandfather was paid the price of five Public Horses killed under him while fighting for Rome!”
“It’s the Salonianus concerns me, not the Priscus or the Cato. Salonius was a Celtiberian slave, was he not? Whereas the senior branch can claim descent from a noble Licinia, and from the third daughter of the great Aemilius Paullus and Scipio’s eldest Cornelia.”
He was frowning now; this statement definitely smacked of Livian snobbishness. But she was gazing up at him wide-eyed and adoring, and he was so very much in love with her; it wasn’t her poor little fault that she had not been properly informed about the Porcii Catones. It was up to him to convert her.
“Surely you know the story of Cato the Censor and Salonia,” he said, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“No, I don’t, meum mel. Tell me, please.”
“Well, my grandfather didn’t marry for the first time until he was forty-two. By then he had been consul, won a great victory in Further Spain, and celebrated a triumph— he wasn’t greedy! He never took a share of the spoils or sold the captured prisoners for his own pocket! He gave everything to his soldiers, and their descendants still love him for it,” said Cato, so enamored of his grandfather that he had forgotten the point of his story.
She proceeded to remind him. “So it was at the age of forty-two that he married the noble Licinia.”
“That’s right. He had one child by her, his son Marcus Licinianus, though it seems he was very attached to Licinia. I don’t know why there weren’t more children. Anyway, Licinia died when my grandfather was seventy-seven years old. After her death he took one of the household slave girls into his bed and kept her there. His son Licinianus and his son’s wife, the high-born lady you’ve already referred to, were living in his house, naturally. And they were outraged by his action. It appears he made no secret of it, and permitted the slave to strut around as if she owned the place. Soon all of Rome knew what was going on, because Marcus Licinianus and Aemilia Tertia told everybody. Everybody, that is, except Cato the Censor. But of course he found out what they were saying all over the city, and instead of asking them why they had said nothing to him of their outrage, my grandfather quietly dismissed the slave girl very early one morning, and set off for the Forum without telling them the girl was gone.”
“How very odd!” said Livia Drusa.
Cato chose not to comment upon her comment, but went on. “Now Cato the Censor had a freedman client named Salonius, a Celtiberian from Salo who had been one of his slave scribes.
“ ‘Ho there, Salonius!’ said my grandfather when he reached the Forum. ‘Have you found a husband for that pretty daughter of yours yet?’
“‘Why, no, domine,’ said Salonius, ‘but rest assured when I do find a good man for her, I shall bring him to you and ask for your judgment and consent.’
“ ‘There’s no need to look any further,’ said my grand father. ‘I have a good husband for her—a prince of fellows Comfortable fortune, stainless reputation, excellent family—everything desirable! Except—well, I’m afraid he’s a bit long in the tooth. Healthy, mind you! But even the most charitably inclined would have to say he’s a very old man.’
“ ‘Domine, if he is your choice, how can he do otherwise than please me?’ Salonius asked. ‘My daughter was born while I was your slave, and her mother was your slave too. When you put the cap of liberty on my head, you were kind enough to free my whole family. But my daughter is still your dependent—as I am, and my wife, and my son. Have no fear, Salonia is a good girl. She will marry any man you’ve taken the time and trouble to find for her, no matter what his age.’
“ ‘Oh, terrific, Salonius!’ cried my grandfather, clapping him on the back. ‘He’s me!’ “
Livia Drusa stirred. “That’s bad grammar,” she said. “I thought Cato the Censor’s Latin was perfect?”
“Mea vita, mea vita, have you no sense of humor at all?” asked Cato, staring. “He was joking! He wanted to make light of it, is all! Salonius was flabbergasted, of course. He couldn’t believe he was being offered a marriage alliance with a noble house which could boast a censor and a triumph!”
“I’m not surprised he was flabbergasted,” said Livia Drusa.
Cato hurried on. “My grandfather assured Salonius that he was absolutely serious, the girl Salonia was fetched, and she and my grandfather were married at once, as the day was auspicious.
“But when Marcus Licinianus heard of it an hour or two later—the word flew round Rome!—he gathered a host of his friends, and they went en masse to Cato the Censor.
“ ‘Is it because we disapproved of your slave girl mistress that you disgrace our house still further by offering me such a stepmother?’ asked Licinianus, very angry.
“ ‘How can I disgrace you, my son, when I am about to prove what a formidable man I am by siring more sons at my advanced age?’ asked my grandfather, his manner lordly. ‘Would you have me marry a noblewoman when I am closer to eighty than I am to seventy? An alliance like that would not be appropriate. In marrying the daughter of my freedman, I am making a marriage suitable to my age and needs.’”
“What an extraordinary thing to do!” said Livia Drusa. “He did it to vex Licinianus and Aemilia Tertia, of course.’’
“So we Saloniani think,” said Cato.
“And did they all continue to live in the same house?”
“Certainly. Marcus Licinianus died not long afterward, however—most people thought he suffered a broken heart. And that left Aemilia Tertia alone in the house with her father-in-law and his new wife, Salonia, a fate she richly deserved, in my opinion. Her father being dead, she couldn’t go home, you see.”
“Salonia, I gather, bore your father,” said Livia Drusa.
“She did indeed,” said Cato Salonianus.
“But don’t you feel it keenly, being the grandson of a woman who was born a slave?’ asked Livia Drusa.
Cato blinked. “What’s to feel so keenly?” he asked. “All of us have had to start somewhere! And it seems the censors agreed with my grandfather Cato the Censor, who maintained that his blood was noble enough to sanctify the blood of any slave. They’ve never tried to exclude the Saloniani from the Senate. Salonius came from good Gallic stock. If he had been Greek, now—that was something my grandfather would never have done! He hated Greeks.”
“Have you plastered the farmsteads?’’ asked Livia Drusa, beginning to move her hips against Cato.
“Of course not,” he answered, breathing quickening.
“And now I know why we have to drink such dreadful wine.”
“Tace, Livia Drusa!” said Cato, and turned her around.
*
To exist in the midst of a love so great its participants think it perfect usually leads to indiscretions, to careless remarks and eventual discovery; but Livia Drusa and Cato Salonianus pursued their affair with extraordinarily efficient secrecy. Had they been in Rome, of course, things would have been different; luckily sleepy Tusculum remained oblivious to the juicy scandal going on beneath its nose.
Within four weeks Livia Drusa knew she was pregnant, and knew too that the child was not Caepio’s. The very day on which Caepio had left Rome, she had menstruated. Two weeks later she was lying in the arms of Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus; and when the time came due, no period arrived. Two previous pregnancies had acquainted her with other signs that she was gravid, and now she was prey to them all. She was going to have the child of her lover, Cato, not the child of her husband, Caepio.
In a philosophical spirit, Livia Drusa decided to make no secret of her condition, relieved that the close proximity of Caepio to Cato in the time reference would protect her. What if she hadn’t fallen so quickly? Oh, best not to think of that!
Drusus professed himself quite delighted, as did Servilia Caepionis; Lilla thought a baby brother would be tremendous fun, whereas Servilia just looked even more wooden than usual.
Of course Cato had to be told—only how much, exactly what? The cool Livius Drusus head came to the fore; Livia Drusa sat down to think things out. Terrible to cheat Cato of his child if it were a boy. And yet... And yet. .. The baby would undoubtedly be born before Caepio returned, and all the world would assume the baby belonged to Caepio. And if Cato’s child were a boy, he would—did he bear the name Quintus Servilius Caepio—fall heir to the Gold of Tolosa. All fifteen thousand talents of it. He would be the richest man in Rome, and own a glorious name. More glorious by far than Cato Salonianus.
“I’m going to have a baby, Marcus Porcius,” she said to Cato when next they met in the two-roomed cottage she had come to regard as her true home.
Alarmed rather than overjoyed, he stared at her fixedly. “Is it mine, or is it your husband’s?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Livia Drusa. “Honestly, I don’t know. I doubt if I will when he’s finally born.”
“He?”
“I’m carrying a boy.”
Cato leaned back against the bedhead, closed his eyes, compressed his beautiful mouth. “Mine,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“So you’ll let everyone believe he’s your husband’s.”
“I don’t see what other choice I have.”
His eyes opened, he turned his head to look at her, his face sad. “None, I know. I can’t afford to marry you, even if you did have the opportunity to divorce. Which you won’t, unless your husband comes home sooner than you expect. I doubt that. There’s a pattern in all this. The gods are laughing their hardest.”
“Let them! In the end, it’s we men and women who win, not the gods,” said Livia Drusa, and pushed herself up in the bed to kiss him. “I love you, Marcus Porcius. I hope he’s yours.”
“I hope he’s not,” said Cato.
*
Livia Drusa’s condition made no difference to her routine; she continued to go for her morning walks, and Cato Salonianus continued to spend far more time on his grandfather’s old place near Tusculum than ever before. They made love passionately and without any consideration for the foetus curled up in her womb, Livia Drusa maintaining whenever Cato demurred that so much love could never harm her baby.
“Do you still prefer Rome to Tusculum?” she asked her little daughter Servilia on an idyllic day in late October.
“Oh, yes,” said Servilia, who had proven a hard nut to crack over the months—never forthcoming, never initiating a conversation, and answering her mother’s questions so briefly that the dinner hour was largely a solo effort on Livia Drusa’s part.
“Why, Servilia?”
Servilia eyed her mother’s belly, which was huge. “For one thing, there are good doctors and midwives there,” she said.
“Oh, don’t worry about the baby!” cried Livia Drusa, and laughed. “He’s very content. When his time comes, he’ll be easy. I have at least a month to go.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘he,’ Mama?”
“Because I know he’s a boy.”
“No one can really know until the baby comes out.”
“What a little cynic you are,” said Livia Drusa, amused. “I knew you were a girl and I knew Lilla was a girl. Why should I not be right this time too? I’m carrying him differently, and he talks to me differently.”
“Talks to you?”
“Yes. You all talked to me while you were inside me.”
The look Livia Drusa got was derisive. “Truly, Mama, you are queer! And getting queerer. How can a baby talk to you from the inside when babies don’t talk for at least a year after they’re born?”
“You’re just like your father,” said Livia Drusa, and pulled a hideous face.
“So you don’t like tata! I didn’t think you did,” said Servilia, her tone more detached than accusatory.
She was seven now; old enough, thought her mother, for some hard facts. Oh, not couched in a way which would prejudice her against her father, but... Wouldn’t it be lovely to make a real friend of this oldest child?
“No,” said Livia Drusa deliberately, “I don’t like tata. Do you want to know why?”
Servilia shrugged. “I daresay I’m going to be told why.’’
“Well, do you like him?”
“Yes, yes! He’s the best person in the world!”
“Oh... Then I have to tell you why I don’t like him. If I don’t, you’ll resent the way I feel. I have justification.”
“No doubt you think so.”
“Darling, I never wanted to marry tata. Your Uncle Marcus forced me to marry him. And that’s a bad start.”
“You must have had a choice,” said Servilia.
“None at all. We rarely do.”
“I think you ought to have accepted the fact that Uncle Marcus knows better than you about everything. I find nothing wrong with his choice of husband for you,” said the seven-year-old judge.
“Oh, dear!’’ Livia Drusa stared at her daughter in despair. “Servilia, we can’t always dictate whom we like and whom we dislike. I happened to dislike tata. I always had disliked him, from the time I was your age. But our fathers had arranged that we would marry, and Uncle Marcus saw nothing wrong in it. I couldn’t make him understand that lack of love need not imperil a marriage, whereas dislike must ruin it from the beginning.”
“I think you’re stupid,” said Servilia disdainfully.
Stubborn little mule! Livia Drusa labored on. “Marriage is a very intimate affair, child. To dislike one’s husband or wife is a frightful burden to carry. There’s a lot of touching in marriage. And when you dislike someone, you don’t want them to touch you. Can you understand that?”
“I don’t like anyone to touch me,” said Servilia.
Her mother smiled. “Hopefully that will change! Anyway, I was made to marry a man I don’t like to touch me. A man I dislike. I still dislike him. And yet, some sort of feeling does grow. I love you, and I love Lilla. How then can I not love tata with at least a part of me, when he helped make you and Lilla?”
A look of distaste spread across Servilia’s face. “Oh, really, Mama, you are stupid! First you say you dislike tata, then you say you love him. That’s nonsense!”
“No, it’s human, Servilia. Loving and liking are two utterly different emotions.”
“Well, I intend to like and love the husband my tata chooses for me,” Servilia announced in tones of great superiority.
“I hope time proves you right,” said Livia Drusa, and tried to shift the emphasis of this uncomfortable conversation. “I am very happy at the moment. Do you know why?”
The black head went over to one side as Servilia considered, then she shook it while she nodded it. “I know why, but I don’t know why you ought. You’re happy because you’re living in this awful place, and you’re going to have a baby.’’ The dark eyes gleamed.’’ And ... 1 think you have a friend.”
A look of terrible fear came into Livia Drusa’s face, a look so alive and haunted that the child shivered in sudden excitement, in surprise; for the shaft had not been aimed in earnest, it was pure instinct arising out of her own keenly felt lack of a friend.
“Of course I have a friend!” cried the mother, wiping all fear from her face. She smiled. “He talks to me from inside.”
“He won’t be my friend,” said Servilia.
“Oh, Servilia, don’t say such things! He will be the best friend you ever have—a brother is, believe me!”
“Uncle Marcus is your brother, but he forced you to marry my tata when you didn’t like him.”
“A fact which doesn’t make him any less my friend. Brothers and sisters grow up together. They know each other better than they ever know anyone else, and they learn to like each other,” said Livia Drusa warmly.
“You can’t learn to like someone you dislike.”
“And there you’re wrong. You can if you try.”
Servilia produced a rude noise. “In that case, why haven’t you learned to like tata?”
“He’s not my brother!” cried Livia Drusa, wondering where she could go next. Why wouldn’t this child cooperate? Why did she persist in being so obdurate, so obtuse? Because, the mother answered herself, she’s her father’s daughter. Oh, she is like him! Only cleverer by far. More cunning.
She said, “Porcella, all I want for you is that you be happy. And I promise you that I’ll never let your tata marry you to someone you dislike.”
“You mightn’t be here when I marry,” said the child.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, your mother wasn’t, was she?”
“My mother is a different case entirely,” said Livia Drusa, looking sorrowful. “She isn’t dead, you know.”
“I know that. She lives with Uncle Mamercus, but we don’t talk to her. She’s a loose woman,” said Servilia.
“Where did you hear that?”
“From tata.’”
“You don’t even know what a loose woman is!”
“I do so. She’s a woman who forgets she’s patrician.”
Livia Drusa suppressed a smile. “That’s an interesting definition, Servilia. Do you think you’ll ever forget you’re a patrician?’’
“Never!” said the child scornfully. “I shall grow up to be everything my tata wants me to be.”
“I didn’t know you’d talked to tata so much!”
“We talked together all the time,” lied Servilia, so well that her mother did not detect the lie. Ignored by both her parents, Servilia had aligned herself with her father early in her little life, as he seemed to her more powerful, more necessary than Livia Drusa. So her childish daydreams all revolved around enjoying a degree of intimacy with her father that common sense said would never happen; her father deemed daughters a nuisance, wanted a son. How did she know this? Because she slid like a wraith around her Uncle Marcus’s house, listening to everyone from hidden corners, and hearing much she ought not have heard. And always, it had seemed to Servilia, it was her father who spoke like a true Roman, not her Uncle Marcus—and certainly not that Italian nobody Silo. Missing her father desperately, the child now feared the inevitable—that when her mother produced a boy, all hope of becoming her father’s favorite would be over.
“Well, Servilia,” said Livia Drusa briskly, “I am very glad that you can like your tata. But you’ll have to display a little maturity when he comes home and you talk together again. What I’ve told you about my own dislike of him is a confidence. Our secret.”
“Why? Doesn’t he already know?”
Livia Drusa frowned, puzzled. “If you talk to your father so much, Servilia, you surely know he has not the slightest idea I dislike him. Your tata is not a perceptive kind of man. If he were, I may not have disliked him.”
“Oh, well, we never waste time discussing you,” said Servilia contemptuously. “We talk about important things.”
“For a seven-year-old, you’re very good at hurting people.”
“I’d never hurt my tata,” said the seven-year-old.
“Good for you! Remember what I said, however. What I’ve told you—or tried to tell you—today is our secret. I’ve honored you with a confidence, and I expect you to treat that confidence as a Roman patrician woman would—with respect.”
*
When Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Antonius Orator were elected censors in April, Quintus Poppaedius Silo arrived at Drusus’s house in a mood of great excitement.
“Oh, how wonderful to be able to talk without Quintus Servilius around!” exclaimed Silo with a grin; he never made any bones about his antipathy toward Caepio, any more than Caepio disguised his own antipathy.
Understanding this—and secretly agreeing with Silo even if family loyalties prevented his saying so—Drusus ignored the remark. “What’s brought you to the boil?” he asked.
“Our censors! They’re planning the most comprehensive census ever taken, and they’re going to change the way it’s taken.” Silo raised his arms above his head exultantly. “Oh, Marcus Livius, you have no idea how pessimistic I had become about the Italian situation! I had begun to see no other way out of our dilemma than secession and war with Rome.”
This being the first Drusus had heard of Silo’s fears, he sat very straight in his chair and looked at Silo in alarm. “Secession? War?” he asked. “Quintus Poppaedius, how can you even say such words? Truly, the Italian situation will be solved by peaceful means—I am dedicated to that end!”
“I know you are, my friend, and you must believe me when I say that secession and war are far from what I want. Italy doesn’t need these alternatives any more than Rome does. The cost in money and men would cripple our nations for decades afterward, no matter which side won. There are no spoils in civil wars.”
“Don’t even think of it!”
Silo wriggled on his chair, put his arms on Drusus’s desk and leaned forward eagerly. “That’s just it, I’m not thinking of it! Because I’ve suddenly seen a way to enfranchise enough Italians to make a big difference in how Rome feels about us.”
“You mean a mass enfranchisement?”
“Not total enfranchisement, that would be impossible. But great enough that once the thing is done, total enfranchisement will follow,” said Silo.
“How?” asked Drusus, feeling a little cheated; he had always thought of himself as ahead of Silo in the planning of full Roman citizenship for the Italians, but it now appeared his complacence had been mistaken.
“Well, as you know, the censors have always cared more about discovering who and what live inside Rome than anything else. The rural and provincial censuses have been tardy and completely voluntary. A rural man wanting to register has had to go to the duumviri of his municipality or town, or else journey to the nearest place with municipal status. And in the provinces, a man has had to go to the governor, which can be a long journey. Those who care make the trip. Those who don’t promise themselves they’ll do it next time and simply trust that the clerks of the census transfer their names from the old rolls to the new—which mostly they do.”
“I am quite aware of all this,” said Drusus gently.
“It doesn’t matter, I think you must hear it again right now. Our new censors, Marcus Livius, are a curious pair. I’ve never thought of Antonius Orator as particularly efficient, yet I suppose when you think about the kind of campaign he had to wage against the pirates, he must be. As for Lucius Valerius, flamen Martialis and consular, all I remember about him is what a mess he made of Saturninus’s last year in office, when Gaius Marius was too ill to govern. However, they do say that there’s no man born without a talent of some kind! Now it turns out that Lucius Valerius has a talent for—I suppose you’d have to call it logistics. I came in through the Colline Gate today, and I was walking across the lower Forum when Lucius Valerius appeared.” Silo opened his strange eyes wide, and heaved a theatrical gasp. “Imagine my surprise when he hailed me, asked me if I had any time to talk! An Italian! Naturally I said I was entirely his to command. Turns out he wanted me to recommend him the names of some Roman citizen Marsi who would be willing to take a census of citizens and Latin Rights citizens in Marsic territory. By dint of looking stupid, in the end I got the whole story out of him. They—he and Antonius Orator, that is—intend to employ a special staff of what they’re calling census clerks, and send them all over Italy and Italian Gaul late this year and early next year to conduct a census in the rural fastnesses. According to Lucius Valerius, your new censors are worried that the system as it has always been practised overlooks a large group of rural citizens and Latins who are unwilling to bestir themselves to register. What do you think of that?”
“What ought I to think?” asked Drusus blankly.
“First of all, that it’s clear thinking, Marcus Livius.”
“Certainly! Businesslike too. But what special virtue does it possess to have you wagging your tail so hard?”
“My dear Drusus, if we Italians can get at these so-called census clerks, we’ll be able to ensure that they register large numbers of deserving Italians as Roman citizens! Not rabble, but men who ought by rights to have been Roman citizens years and years ago,” said Silo persuasively.
“You can’t do that,” said Drusus, his dark face stern. “It’s as unethical as it is illegal.”
“It’s morally right!”
“Morality is not at issue, Quintus Poppaedius. The law is. Every spurious citizen entered on the Roman rolls would be an illegal citizen. I couldn’t countenance that, any more than you should. No, say no more! Think about it, and you’ll see I’m right,” said Drusus firmly.
For a long moment Silo studied his friend’s expression, then flung his hands up in exasperation. “Oh, curse you, Marcus Livius! It would be so easy!”
“And just as easy to unravel once the deed was done. In registering these false citizens, you expose them to all the fury of Roman law—a flogging, their names inscribed on a blacklist, heavy fines,” said Drusus.
A sigh, a shrug. “Very well then, I do see your point,” said Silo grudgingly. “But it was a good idea.”
“No, it was a bad idea.” And from that stand, Marcus Livius Drusus would not be budged.
Silo said no more, but when the house—emptier these days—was stilled for the duration of the night, he took an example from the absent Livia Drusa without being aware he did, by going to sit outside on the balustrade of the loggia.
It had not occurred to him for one moment that Drusus would fail to see matters in the same way he did; had it, he would never have brought the subject up to Drusus. Perhaps, thought Silo sadly, this is one of the reasons why so many Romans say we Italians can never be Romans. I didn’t understand Drusus’s mind.
His position was now invidious, for he had advertised his intentions; he saw that he could not rely upon Drusus’s silence. Would Drusus go to Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Antonius Orator on the morrow, tell them what had been said?
His only alternative was to wait and see. And he would have to work very hard—but very subtly!—to convince Drusus that what had been said was a bright idea conceived between the Forum and the lip of the Palatine, something foolish and unworthy that a night’s sleep had squashed flat.
For he had no intention of abandoning his plan. Rather, its simplicity and finality only made its attractions grow. The censors expected many thousands of additional citizens to register! Why then should they query a markedly increased rural enrollment? He must travel at once to Bovianum to see Gaius Papius Mutilus the Samnite, then they must both travel to see the other Italian Ally leaders. By the time that the censors started seriously looking for their small army of clerks, the men who led the Italian Allies must be ready to act. To bribe clerks, to put clerks in office prepared to work secretly for the Italian cause, to alter or add to any rolls made available to them. The city of Rome he couldn’t tamper with, nor did he particularly want to. Non-citizens of Italian status within the city of Rome were not worth having; they had migrated from the lands of their fathers to live more meanly or more fatly within the environs of a huge metropolis, they were seduced beyond redemption.
For a long time he sat on the loggia, thoughts chasing across his mind, ways and means and ends to achieve the ultimate end—equality for every man within Italy.
And in the morning he set out to erase that indiscreet talk from Drusus’s mind, suitably penitent yet cheerful with it, as if it didn’t really matter in the least to him now that Drusus had shown him the error of his ways.
“I was misguided,” he said to Drusus, but in light tones. “A night’s sleep told me you are absolutely right.”
“Good!” said Drusus, smiling.