The First Man in Rome

by Colleen McCullough

  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 cou
rtyard 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.

  Drusus didn’t notice any of the magnificence, for he was inured to it, and rather impervious to it as well; it had been his father and his grandfather who dabbled with perfect taste in works of art.

  The steward found Drusus’s sister outside on the loggia, which opened off the front of the atrium. She was always alone, Livia Drusa, and always lonely. The house was so big she couldn’t even plead that she needed the exercise of walking on the streets outside, and when she fancied a shopping spree, her brother simply summoned several whole shops and stalls to his house, and had the vendors spread out their wares in some of the suites along the colonnade, and ordered the steward to pay for whatever Livia Drusa chose. Where both the Julias had trotted all over the more respectable parts of Rome under the eye of their mother or trusted servants, and Aurelia visited relatives and school friends constantly, and the Clitumnas and Nicopolises of Rome lived so free a life they even reclined to dine, Livia Drusa was absolutely cloistered, the prisoner of a wealth and exclusivity so great it forbade its women any egress; she was also the victim of her mother’s escape, her mother’s present freedom to do as she liked.

  Livia Drusa had been ten years old when her mother— a Cornelia of the Scipios—had left the house the Livius Drusus family had then lived in; she had passed then into the complete care of her indifferent father—who preferred to walk slowly along his colonnades looking at his masterpieces—and a series of maidservants and tutors who were all far too afraid of the Livius Drusus power to make themselves her friends. Her older brother, fifteen at the time, she hardly saw at all. And three years after her mother had departed with her little brother, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, as he now had to be called, they had moved from the old house to this vast mausoleum; and she was lost, a tiny atom moving aimlessly amid an eternity of empty space, deprived of love, conversation, companionship, notice. When her father died almost immediately after the move, his passing made no difference.

  So unacquainted was she with laughter that when from time to time it floated up from the servants’ crowded airless cells below, she wondered what it was, why they did it. The only world she had found to love lay within the cylinders of books, for no one stopped her reading and writing. So she did both for a great deal of every one of her days, thrilling to the repercussions of the wrath of Achilles and the deeds of Greeks and Trojans, lit up by tales of heroes, monsters, gods, and the mortal girls they seemed to hanker after as more desirable than immortals. And when she had managed to deal with the awful shock of the physical manifestations of puberty—for there was no one to tell her what was the matter or what to do—her hungry and passionate nature discovered the wealth of poetry written about love. As fluent in Greek as in Latin, she discovered Alcman— who had invented the love poem (or so it was said)—and passed to Pindar’s maiden songs, and Sappho, and Asclepiades. Old Sosius of the Argiletum, who occasionally simply bundled up whatever he had and sent the buckets of books to Drusus’s house, had no idea who the reader was; he just assumed the reader was Drusus. So shortly after Livia Drusa turned seventeen, he began to send her the works of the new poet Meleager, who was very much alive and very much attracted to lust as well as love. More fascinated than shocked, Livia Drusa found the literature of eroticism, and thanks to Meleager sexually awoke at last.

  Not that it did her any good; she went nowhere, saw no one. In that house, it would have been unthinkable to make overtures to a slave, or for a slave to make overtures to Livia Drusa. Sometimes she met the friends of her brother Drusus, but only in passing. Except, that is, for his best friend, Caepio Junior. And Caepio Junior—short-legged, pimply faced, homely by any standard—she identified with the buffoons in Menander’s plays, or the loathsome Thersites whom Achilles slew with one blow from his hand after Thersites accused the great hero of making love to the corpse of the Amazon queen Penthesileia.

  It wasn’t that Caepio Junior ever did anything to remind her forcibly of either buffoons or Thersites; only that in her starved imagination she had gifted these types of men with the face of Caepio Junior. Her favorite ancient hero was King Odysseus (she thought of him in Greek, so gave him the Greek version of his name), for she liked his brilliant way of solving everybody else’s dilemmas, and found his wooing of his wife and then his wife’s twenty-year duel of wits with her suitors as she waited for Odysseus to come home the most romantic and satisfying of all the Homeric love stories. And Odysseus she had gifted with the face of the young man she had seen once or twice only on the loggia of the house below Drusus’s. This was the house of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had two sons; but neither of his sons was the young man on his loggia, for them she had met in passing when they came to visit her brother.

  Odysseus had red hair, and he was left-handed (though had she read a little more intently and discovered that he owned a pair of legs far too short for his trunk, she might have lost her enthusiasm for him, as short legs were Livia Drusa’s pet hate); so too the strange young man on Domitius Ahenobarbus’s loggia. He was very tall, his shoulders were wide, and his toga sat upon him in a way suggesting that the rest of his body was powerfully slender. In the sun his red hair glittered, and his head on its long neck was very proud, the head of a king like Odysseus. Even at the distance from which she had seen him, the young man’s masterfully beaked nose was apparent, but she could distinguish nothing else of his face—even so, she knew in her bones that his eyes would be large and luminous and grey, as were the eyes of King Odysseus of Ithaca.

  So when she read the scorching love poems of Meleager, she insinuated herself into the role of the girl or the young boy being assaulted by the poet, and always the poet was the young man on Ahenobarbus’s balcony. If she thought of Caepio Junior at all, it was with a grimace of distaste.

  *

  “Livia Drusa, Marcus Livius wants to see you in his study at once,” said the steward, breaking into her dream, which was of remaining on the lo
ggia long enough to see the red-haired stranger emerge onto the loggia thirty feet below.

  But of course the summons pre-empted her wishes; she turned and followed the steward inside.

  Drusus was studying a paper on his desk, but looked up as soon as his sister entered the room, his face displaying a calm, indulgent, rather remote interest.

  “Sit down,” he said, indicating the chair on the client’s side of his table.

  She sat and watched him with equal calm and equal lack of humor; she had never heard Drusus laugh, and rarely seen him smile. The same could he have said of her.

  A little alarmed, Livia Drusa realized that he was studying her with more intentness than usual. His interest was a proxy affair, an inspection of her carried out on Caepio Junior’s behalf, which of course she could not know.

  Yes, she was a pretty little thing, he thought, and though in stature she was small, she had at least escaped the family taint of short legs. Her figure was delightful, full and high of breast, narrow-waisted, nicely hipped; her feet and hands were quite delicate and thin—a sign of beauty—and she did not bite her nails, but kept them well manicured. Her chin was pointed, her forehead broad, her nose reasonably long and a little aquiline. In mouth and eyes she fulfilled every criterion of true beauty, for the eyes were very large and well opened, and the mouth was small, a rosebud. Thick and becomingly dressed, her hair was black, as were eyes, brows, and lashes.

  Yes indeed, Livia Drusa was pretty. No Aurelia, however. His heart contracted painfully; it still did whenever he thought of Aurelia. How very quickly he had written to Quintus Servilius once he learned of Aurelia’s impending marriage! It was all for the best; there was nothing wrong with the Aurelians, but neither in wealth nor in social standing could they equal the patrician Servilians. Besides which, he had always been fond of young Servilia Caepionis, and had no qualms about making her his wife.