by Rice, Anne
Five times my Father had stood in the atrium—the main enclosed courtyard, or peristyle, of our house with its pillars and stairs and grand marblework—five times he had stood there before the assembled family and held in his hands a newborn son, inspected it and then pronounced it perfect and fit to be reared as his own, as was his prerogative. Now, you know he had the power of life and death over his sons from that moment on.
If my Father hadn’t wanted these boys for any reason, he would have “exposed” them to die of starvation. It was against the law to steal such a child and make it a slave.
Having five boys already, my Father was expected by some to get rid of me immediately. Who needs a girl? But my Father never exposed or rejected any of my Mother’s children.
And by the time I arrived, I’m told, he cried for joy.
“Thank the gods! A little darling.” I heard the story ad nauseam from my brothers, who, every time I acted up—did something unseemly frisky and wild—said sneeringly, “Thank the gods, a little darling!” It became charming goad.
My Mother died when I was two, and all I recall of her are gentleness and sweetness. She’d lost as many children as she had birthed, and early death was typical enough. Her Epitaph was beautifully written by my Father, and her memory honored throughout my life. My Father never took another woman into the house. He slept with a few of the female slaves, but this was nothing unusual. My brothers did the same thing. This was common in a Roman household. My Father brought no new woman from another family to rule over me.
There is no grief in me for my Mother because I was simply too young for it, and if I cried when my Mother did not come back, I don’t remember it.
What I remember is having the run of a big old rectangular palatial Roman house, with many rectangular rooms built onto the main rectangle, one off another, the whole nestled in a huge garden high on the Palatine Hill. It was a house of marble floors and richly painted walls, the garden meandering and surrounding every room of it.
I was the true jewel of my Father’s eye, and I remember having a marvelous time watching my brothers practice outside with their short broadswords, or listening as their tutors instructed them, and then having fine teachers of my own who taught me how to read the entire Aeneid of Virgil before I was five years old.
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them. I couldn’t have told you that nights ago, David. You’ve brought back something to me and I must make the admission. And I must not write too fast in this mortal café, lest human beings notice!
Ah, so we continue.
My Father thought it was hysterical that I could recite verses from Virgil at so young an age and he liked nothing better than to show me off at banquets at which he entertained his conservative and somewhat old-fashioned Senatorial friends, and sometimes Caesar Augustus himself. Caesar Augustus was an agreeable man. I don’t think my Father ever really wanted him at our house, however. But now and then, I suppose, the Emperor had to be wined and dined.
I’d rush in with my nurse, give a rousing recital and then be whisked away to where I could not see the proud Senators of Rome glutting themselves on peacock brains and garum—surely you know what garum is. It’s the horrible sauce the Romans put on everything, rather like today’s ketchup. Definitely it defeated the purpose of having eels and squids on your plate, or ostrich brains or unborn lamb or whatever other absurd delicacies were being brought by the platterful.
The point is, as you know, the Romans seemed to have a special place in their hearts for genuine gluttony, and the banquets inevitably became a disgrace. The guests would go off to the vomitorium of the house to heave up the first five courses of the meal so that they could then swallow the others. And I would lie upstairs, giggling in my bed, listening to all this laughter and vomiting.
Then the rape of the entire catering staff of slaves would follow, whether they were boys or girls or a mixture of both.
Family meals were an entirely different affair. Then we were old Romans. Everyone sat at the table; my Father was undisputed Master of his house, and would tolerate no criticism of Caesar Augustus, who, as you know, was Julius Caesar’s nephew, and did not really rule as Emperor by law.
“When the time is right, he will step down,” said my Father. “He knows he can’t do it now. He is more weary and wise than ever he was ambitious. Who wants another Civil War?”
The times were actually too prosperous for men of stature to make a revolt.
Augustus kept the peace. He had profound respect for the Roman Senate. He rebuilt old Temples because he thought people needed the piety they had known under the Republic.
He gave free corn from Egypt to the poor. Nobody starved in Rome. He maintained a dizzying amount of old festivals, games and spectacles—enough to sicken one actually. But often as patriotic Romans we had to be there.
Of course there was great cruelty in the arena. There were cruel executions. There was the ever present cruelty of slavery.
But what is not understood by those today is that there coexisted with all this a sense of individual freedom on the part of even the poorest man.
The courts took time over their decisions. They consulted the past laws. They followed logic and code. People could speak their minds fairly openly.
I note this because it is key to this story: that Marius and I both were born in a time when Roman law was, as Marius would say, based on reason, as opposed to divine revelation.
We are totally unlike those blood drinkers brought to Darkness in lands of Magic and Mystery.
Not only did we trust Augustus when we were alive, we also believed in the tangible power of the Roman Senate. We believed in public virtue and character; we held to a way of life which did not involve rituals, prayers, magic, except superficially. Virtue was embedded in character. That was the inheritance of the Roman Republic, which Marius and I shared.
Of course, our house was overcrowded with slaves. There were brilliant Greeks and grunting laborers and a fleet of women to rush about polishing busts and vases, and the city itself was choked with manumitted slaves—freedmen—some of whom were very rich.
They were all our people, our slaves.
My Father and I sat up all night when my old Greek teacher was dying. We held his hands until the body was cold. Nobody was flogged on our estate in Rome unless my Father himself gave the order. Our country slaves loafed under the fruit trees. Our stewards were rich, and showed off their wealth in their clothes.
I remember a time when there were so many old Greek slaves in the garden that I could sit day after day and listen to them argue. They had nothing else to do. I learned much from this.
I grew up more than happy. If you think I exaggerate the extent of my education, consult the letters of Pliny or other actual memoirs and correspondence of the times. Highborn young girls were well educated; modern Roman women went about unhampered for the most part by male interference. We partook of life as did men.
For example, I was scarcely eight years old when I was first taken to the arena with several of my brothers’ wives, to have the dubious pleasure of seeing exotic creatures, such as giraffes, tear madly around before being shot to death with arrows, this display then followed by a small group of gladiators who would hack other gladiators to death, and then after that came the flock of criminals to be fed to the hungry lions.
David, I can hear the sound of those lions as if it were now. There’s nothing between me and the moment that I sat in the wooden benches, perhaps two rows up—the premium seats—and I watched these beasts devour living beings, as I was supposed to do, with a pleasure meant to demonstrate a strength of heart, a fearlessness in the face of death, rather than simple and utter monstrousness.
The audience screamed and laughed as men and women ran from the beasts. Some victims would give the crowd no such satisfaction. They merely stood there as the hungry lion attacked; those who were being devoured alive alm
ost invariably lay in a stupor as though their souls had already taken flight, though the lion had not reached the throat.
I remember the smell of it. But more than anything, I remember the noise of the crowd.
I passed the test of character, I could look at all of it I could watch the champion gladiator finally meet his end, lying there bloody in the sand, as the sword went through his chest.
But I can certainly remember my Father declaring under his breath that the whole affair was disgusting. In fact, everybody I knew thought it was all disgusting. My Father believed, as did others, that the common man needed all this blood. We, the highborn, had to preside over it for the common man. It had a religious quality to it, all this spectacular viciousness.
The making of these appalling spectacles was considered something of a social responsibility.
Also Roman life was a life of being outdoors, involved in things, attending ceremonies and spectacles, being seen, taking an interest, coming together with others.
You came together with all the other highborn and lowborn of the city and you joined in one mass to witness a triumphant procession, a great offering at the altar of Augustus, an ancient ceremony, a game, a chariot race.
Now in the Twentieth Century, when I watch the endless intrigue and slaughter in motion pictures and on television throughout our Western world, I wonder if people do not need it, do not need to see murder, slaughter, death in all forms. Television at times seems an unbroken series of gladiatorial fights or massacres. And look at the traffic now in video recordings of actual war.
Records of war have become art and entertainment.
The narrator speaks softly as the camera passes over the heap of bodies, or the skeletal children sobbing with their starving mothers. But it is gripping. One can wallow, shaking one’s head, in all this death. Nights of television are devoted to old footage of men dying with guns in their hands.
I think we look because we are afraid. But in Rome, you had to look so that you would be hard, and that applied to women as well as men.
But the overall point is—I was not closeted away as a Greek woman might have been in some old Hellenistic household. I did not suffer under the earlier customs of the Roman Republic.
I vividly remember the absolute beauty of that time, and my Father’s heartfelt avowal that Augustus was a god, and that Rome had never been more pleasing to her deities.
Now I want to give you one very important recollection. Let me set the scene. First, let’s take up the question of Virgil, and the poem he wrote, the Aeneid, greatly amplifying and glorifying the adventures of the hero Aeneas, a Trojan fleeing the horrors of defeat by the Greeks who came out of the famous Trojan horse to massacre Helen’s city of Troy.
It’s a charming story. I always loved it. Aeneas leaves dying Troy, valiantly journeys all the way to beautiful Italy and there founds our nation.
But the point is that Augustus loved and supported Virgil all of Virgil’s life, and Virgil was a respected poet, a poet fine and decent to quote, an approved and patriotic poet. It was perfectly fine to like Virgil.
Virgil died before I was born. But by ten I’d read everything he’d written, and had read Horace as well, and Lucretius, much of Cicero, and all the Greek manuscripts we possessed, and there were plenty.
My Father didn’t erect his library for show. It was a place where members of the family spent hours. It was also where he sat to write his letters—which he seemed endlessly to be doing—letters on behalf of the Senate, the Emperor, the courts, his friends, etc.
Back to Virgil. I had also read another Roman poet, who was alive still, and deeply and dangerously out of favor with Augustus, the god. This was the poet Ovid, the author of the Metamorphoses, and dozens of other earthy, hilarious and bawdy works.
Now, when I was too young to remember, Augustus turned on Ovid, whom Augustus had also loved, and Augustus banished Ovid to some horrible place on the Black Sea. Maybe it wasn’t so horrible. But it was the sort of place cultured city Romans expect to be horrible—very far away from the capital and full, of barbarians.
Ovid lived there a long time, and his books were banned all over Rome. You couldn’t find them in the bookshops or the public libraries. Or at the book stands all over the marketplace.
You know this was a hot time for popular reading; books were everywhere—both in scroll form and in codex, that is, with bound pages—and many booksellers had teams of Greek slaves spending all day copying books for public consumption.
To continue, Ovid had fallen out of favor with Augustus, and he had been banned, but men like my Father were not about to burn their copies of the Metamorphoses, or any other of Ovid’s work, and the only reason they didn’t plead for Ovid’s pardon was fear.
The whole scandal had something to do with Augustus’s daughter, Julia, who was a notorious slut by anyone’s standards. How Ovid became involved in Julia’s love affairs I don’t know. Perhaps his sensuous early poetry, the Amores, was considered to be a bad influence. There was also a lot of “reform” in the air during the reign of Augustus, a lot of talk of old values.
I don’t think anyone knows what really happened between Caesar Augustus and Ovid, but Ovid was banished for the rest of his life from Imperial Rome.
But I had read the Amores and the Metamorphoses in well-worn copies by the time of this incident which I want to recount. And many of my Father’s friends were always worried about Ovid.
Now to the specific recollection. I was ten years old, I came in from playing covered with dust from head to foot, my hair loose, my dress torn, and breezed into my Father’s large receiving room—and I plopped down at the foot of his couch to listen to what was being said, as he lounged there with all appropriate Roman dignity, chatting with several other lounging men who had come to visit.
I knew all of the men but one, and this one was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and very tall, and he turned, during the conversation—which was all whispers and nods—and winked at me.
This was Marius, with skin slightly tanned from his travels and a flashing beauty in his eyes. He had three names like everyone else. But again, I will not disclose the name of his family. But I knew it. I knew he was sort of the “bad boy” in an intellectual way, the “poet” and the “loafer.” What nobody had told me was that he was beautiful.
Now, on this day, this was Marius when he was alive, about fifteen years before he was to be made a vampire. I can calculate that he was only twenty-five. But I’m not certain.
To continue, the men paid no attention to me, and it became plain to my ever curious little mind that they were giving my Father news of Ovid, that the tall blond one with the remarkable blue eyes, the one called Marius, had just returned from the Baltic Coast, and he had given my Father several presents, which were in fact good copies of Ovid’s work, both past and current.
The men assured my Father that it was still far too dangerous to go crying to Caesar Augustus over Ovid, and my Father accepted this. But if I’m not mistaken, he entrusted some money for Ovid to Marius, the blond one.
When the gentlemen were all leaving, I saw Marius in the atrium, got a measure of his full height, which was quite unusual for a Roman, and let out a girlish gasp and then a streak of laughter. He winked at me again.
Marius had his hair short then, clipped military-Roman-style with a few modest curls on his forehead; his hair was long when he was later made a vampire, and he wears it long now, but then it was the typical boring Roman military cut. But it was blond and full of sunlight in the atrium, and he seemed the brightest and most impressive man I’d ever laid eyes upon. He was full of kindness when he looked at me.
“Why are you so tall?” I asked him. My Father thought this was amusing, of course, and he did not care what anyone else thought of his dusty little daughter, hanging onto his arms and speaking to his honored company.
“My precious one,” Marius said, “I’m tall because I’m a barbarian!” He laughed and was flirtatious when he laug
hed, with a deference to me as a little lady, which was rather rare.
Suddenly he made his hands into claws and ran at me like a bear.
I loved him instantly!
“No, truly!” I said. “You can’t be a barbarian. I know your Father and all your sisters; they live just down the hill. The family is always talking about you at the table, saying only nice things, of course.”
“Of that I’m sure,” he said, breaking into laughter.
I knew my Father was getting anxious.
What I didn’t know was that a ten-year-old girl could be betrothed.
Marius drew himself up and said in his gentle very fine voice, trained for public rhetoric as well as words of love, “I am descended through my mother from the Keltoi, little beauty, little muse. I come from the tall blond people of the North, the people of Gaul. My mother was a princess there, or so I am told. Do you know who they are?”
I said of course I knew and began to recite verbatim from Julius Caesar’s account of conquering Gaul, or the land of the Keltoi: “All Gaul is made up of three parts …”
Marius was quite genuinely impressed. So was everybody. So I went on and on, “The Keltoi are separated from the Aquitani by the river Garonne, and the tribe of the Belgae by the rivers Marne and Seine—”
My Father, being slightly embarrassed by this time, with his daughter glorying in attention, spoke up to gently assure everyone that I was his precious joy, and I was let to run wild, and please make nothing of it.
And I said, being bold, and a born troublemaker, “Give my love to the great Ovid! Because I too wish he would come home to Rome.”
I then rattled off several steamy lines of the Amores:
She laughed and gave her best, whole hearted kisses,
They’d shake the three pronged bolt from Jove’s hand.
Torture to think that fellow got such good ones!
I wish they hadn’t been of the same brand!
All laughed, except my Father, and Marius went wild with delight, clapping his hands. That was all the encouragement I needed to rush at him now like a bear, as he had rushed at me, and to continue singing out Ovid’s hot words: