by Rice, Anne
What’s more these kisses were better than I’d taught her,
She seemed possessed of knowledge that was new.
They pleased too well—bad sign! Her tongue was in them,
And my tongue was kissing too.
My Father grabbed me by the small of my upper arm, and said, “That’s it, Lydia, wrap it up!” And the men laughed all the harder, commiserating with him, and embracing him, and then laughing again.
But I had to have one final victory over this team of adults.
“Pray, Father,” I said, “let me finish with some wise and patriotic words which Ovid said:
“ ‘I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.’ ”
This seemed to astonish Marius more than to amuse him. But my Father gathered me close and said very clearly:
“Lydia, Ovid wouldn’t say that now, and now you, for being such a … a scholar and philosopher in one, should assure your Father’s dearest friends that you know full well Ovid was banished from Rome by Augustus for good reason and that he can never return home.”
In other words, he was saying “Shut up about Ovid.”
But Marius, undeterred, dropped on his knees before me, lean and handsome with mesmeric blue eyes, and he took my hand and kissed it and said, “I will give Ovid your love, little Lydia. But your Father is right. We must all agree with the Emperor’s censure. After all, we are Romans.” He then did the very strange thing of speaking to me purely as if I were an adult. “Augustus Caesar has given far more to Rome, I think, than anyone ever hoped. And he too is a poet. He wrote a poem called ‘Ajax’ and burnt it up himself because he said it wasn’t good.”
I was having the time of my life. I would have run off with Marius then and there!
But all I could do was dance around him as he went out of the vestibule and out the gate.
I waved to him.
He lingered. “Goodbye, little Lydia,” he said. He then spoke under his breath to my Father, and I heard my Father say:
“You are out of your mind!”
My Father turned his back on Marius, who gave me a sad smile and disappeared.
“What did he mean? What happened?” I asked my Father. “What’s the matter?”
“Listen, Lydia,” said my Father. “Have you in all your readings come across the word ‘betrothed’?”
“Yes, Father, of course.”
“Well, that sort of wanderer and dreamer likes nothing better than to betroth himself to a young girl of ten because it means she is not old enough to marry and he has years of freedom, without the censure of the Emperor. They do it all the time.”
“No, no, Father,” I said. “I shall never forget him.”
I think I forgot him the next day.
I didn’t see Marius again for five years.
I remember because I was fifteen, and should have been married and didn’t want to be married at all. I had wriggled out of it year after year, feigning illness, madness, total uncontrollable fits. But time was running out on me. In fact I’d been eligible for marriage since I was twelve.
At this time, we were all standing together at the foot of the Palatine Hill, watching a most sacrosanct ceremony—the Lupercalia—just one of so many festivals that were integral in Roman life.
Now the Lupercalia was very important to us, though there’s no way to relate its significance to a Christian’s concept of religion. It was pious to enjoy such a festival, to participate as a citizen and as a virtuous Roman.
And besides it was a great pleasure.
So I was there, not so far from the cave of the Lupercal, watching with other young women, as the two chosen men of that year were smeared with blood from a sacrifice of goats and then draped in the bleeding skins of the sacrificed animals. I couldn’t see all of this very well, but I had seen it many times, and when years before two of my brothers had run in this festival, I had pushed to the front to get a good look at it.
On this occasion, I did have a fairly good view when each of the two young men took his own company and began his run around the base of the Palatine Hill. I moved forward because I was supposed to do it. The young men were hitting lightly on the arm of every young woman with a strip of goatskin, which was supposed to purify us. Render us fertile.
I stepped forward and received the ceremonial blow, and then stepped back again, wishing I was a man and could run around the hill with the other men, not an unusual thought for me at any time in my mortal life.
I had some sarcastic inner thoughts about “being purified,” but by this age I behaved in public and would not on any account have humiliated my Father or my brothers.
These strips of goatskin, as you know, David, are called Februa, and February comes from that word. So much for language and all the magic it unwittingly carries with it. Surely the Lupercalia had something to do with Romulus and Remus; perhaps it even echoed some ancient human sacrifice. After all, the young men’s heads were smeared with goat blood. It gives me shivers, because in Etruscan times, long before I was born, this might have been a far more cruel ceremony.
Perhaps this was the occasion that Marius saw my arms. Because I was exposing them to this ceremonial lash, and was already, as you can see, much of a show-off in general, laughing with the others as the company of men continued their run.
In the crowd, I saw Marius. He looked at me, then back to his book. So strange. I saw him standing against a tree trunk and writing. No one did this—stand against a tree, hold a book in one hand and write with the other. The slave stood beside him with a bottle of ink.
Marius’s hair was long and most beautiful. Quite wild.
I said to my Father, “Look, there’s our barbarian friend Marius, the tall one, and he’s writing.”
My Father smiled and said, “Marius is always writing. Marius is good for writing, if for nothing else. Turn around, Lydia. Be still.”
“But he looked at me, Father. I want to talk to him.”
“You will not, Lydia! You will not grace him with one small smile!”
On the way home, I asked my Father, “If you’re going to marry me to someone—if there’s no way short of suicide that I can avoid this disgusting development—why don’t you marry me to Marius? I don’t understand it. I’m rich. He’s rich. I know his Mother was a wild Keltoi princess, but his Father has adopted him.”
My Father said witheringly, “Where have you learned all this?” He stopped in his tracks, always an ominous sign. The crowd broke and streamed around.
“I don’t know; it’s common knowledge.” I turned. There was Marius hovering about, glancing at me. “Father,” I said, “please let me speak to him!”
My Father knelt down. Most of the crowd had gone on. “Lydia, I know this is dreadful for you. I have caved to every objection you have raised to your suitors. But believe you me, the Emperor himself would not approve of you marrying such a mad wandering historian as Marius! He has never served in the military, he cannot enter the Senate, it is quite impossible. When you marry, you will marry well.”
As we walked away, I turned again, thinking only to pick Marius out from the others, but to my surprise he was stark still, looking at me. With his flowing hair, he much resembled the Vampire Lestat. He is taller than Lestat, but he has the same lithe build, the same very blue eyes and a muscular strength to him, and a squareness of face which is almost pretty.
I pulled away from my Father and ran up to him.
“Well, I wanted to marry you,” I said, “but my Father has said no.”
I’ll never forget the expression on his face. But before he could speak, my Father had gathered me up and gone into obliterating respectable conversation:
“How now, Marius, how goes it with your brother in the Army. And how is it with your history. I hear you have written thirteen volumes.”
My Father backed up, virtually carrying me away.
Marius did not move or answer. Soon we were with
others hurrying up the hill.
All the course of our lives was changed at that moment. But there was no conceivable way Marius or I could have known it.
Twenty years would pass before we would meet again.
I was thirty-five, then. I can say that we met in a realm of darkness in more respects than one.
For now, let me fill up the gap.
I was married twice, due to pressure from the Imperial House. Augustus wanted us all to have children. I had none. My husbands seeded plenty, however, with slave girls. So I was legally divorced and freed twice over, and determined then to retire from social life, just so the Emperor Tiberius, who had come to the Imperial throne at the age of fifty, would not meddle with me, for he was more a public puritan and domestic dictator than Augustus. If I kept to the house, if I didn’t go abroad to banquets and parties and hang around with the Empress Livia, Augustus’s wife and mother of Tiberius, perhaps I wouldn’t be pushed into becoming a stepmother! I’d stay home. I had to care for my Father. He deserved it. Even though he was perfectly healthy, he was still old!
With all due respect for the husbands I have mentioned, whose names are more than footnotes in common Roman histories, I was a wretched wife.
I had plenty of my own money from my Father, I listened to nothing, and yielded to the act of love only on my own terms, which I always obtained, being gifted with enough beauty to make men really suffer.
I became a member of the Cult of Isis just to spite these husbands and get away from them, so that I could hang around at the Temple of Isis, where I spent an enormous amount of time with other interesting women, some far more adventurous and unconventional than I dared to be. I was attracted to whores. I saw the brilliant, loose women as having conquered a barrier which I, the loving daughter of my Father, would never conquer.
I became a regular at the Temple. I was initiated at last in a secret ceremony, and I walked in every procession of Isis in Rome.
My husbands loathed this. Maybe that’s why after I came home to my Father I gave up the worship. Whatever, it was a good thing perhaps that I had. But fortune could not be so easily shaped by any decision of mine.
Now Isis was an imported goddess, from Egypt, of course, and the old Romans were as suspicious of her as they were of the terrible Cybele, the Great Mother from the Far East, who led her male devotees to castrate themselves. The whole city was filled with these “Eastern cults,” and the conservative population thought them dreadful.
These cults weren’t rational; they were ecstatic or euphoric. They offered a complete rebirth through understanding.
The typical conservative Roman was far too practical for that. If you didn’t know by age five that the gods were made-up creatures and the myths invented stories, then you were a fool.
But Isis had a curious distinction—something that set her far apart from the cruel Cybele. Isis was a loving mother and goddess. Isis forgave her worshipers anything. Isis had come before all Creation. Isis was patient and wise.
That’s why the most degraded woman could pray at the Temple. That’s why none were ever turned away.
Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is so well known today throughout the East and West, the Queen Isis had conceived her divine child by divine means. From the dead and castrated Osiris, she had drawn the living seed by her own power. And many a time she was pictured or sculpted holding her divine son, Horus, on her knee. Her breast was bare in all innocence to feed the young god.
And Osiris ruled in the land of the dead, his phallus lost forever in the waters of the Nile, where an endless semen flowed from it, fertilizing the remarkable fields of Egypt every year when the River overflowed its banks.
The music of our Temple was divine. We used the sistrum, a small rigid metal lyre of sorts, and flutes and timbrels. We danced, and we sang together. The poetry of Isis’s litanies was fine and rapturous.
Isis was the Queen of Navigation, much like the Blessed Virgin Mary would be called later, “Our Lady Star of the Sea.”
When her statue was carried to the shore each year, the procession was so splendid that all Rome turned out to see the Egyptian gods with their animal heads, the huge abundance of flowers and the statue of the Queen Mother herself. The air rang with hymns. Her Priests and Priestesses walked in white linen robes. She herself, made of marble, and carried high, holding her sacred sistrum, dressed regally in a Grecian gown with Grecian hair.
That was my Isis. I fell away from her after my last divorce. My Father didn’t like the worship, and I myself had enjoyed it long enough. As a free woman, I wasn’t infatuated with prostitutes. I had it infinitely better. I kept my Father’s house and he was just old enough, in spite of his black hair and his remarkably sharp vision, that the Emperor left me alone.
I can’t say I remembered or thought of Marius. No one had mentioned Marius for years. He had disappeared out of my mind after the Lupercalia. There was no force on Earth that could come between me and my Father.
My brothers all had good luck. They married well, had children and came home from the hard wars in which they fought, keeping the boundaries of the Empire.
My youngest brother, Lucius, I did not like much, but he was always a little anxious and given to drinking and apparently also to gambling, which very much annoyed his wife.
She I loved, as I did all my sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews. I loved it when they descended upon the house, these flocks of children, squealing and running rampant with “Aunt Lydia’s blessing,” as they were never allowed to do at home.
The eldest of my brothers, Antony, was in potential a great man. Fate robbed him of greatness. But he had been most ready for it, well schooled, trained and most wise.
The only foolish thing I ever knew Antony to do was say to me very distinctly once that Livia, Augustus’s wife, had poisoned him so that her son, Tiberius, would rise. My Father, the only other occupant of the room, told him sternly:
“Antony, never speak of that again! Not here, not anywhere!” My Father stood up, and without planning it, put in perspective the style of life which he and I lived. “Stay away from the Imperial Palace, stay away from the Imperial families, be in the front ranks of the games and always in the Senate, but don’t get into their quarrels and their intrigues!”
Antony was very angry, but the anger had nothing to do with my Father. “I said it only to those two to whom I can say it, you and Lydia. I detest eating dinner with a woman who poisoned her husband! Augustus should have re-established the Republic. He knew when death was coming.”
“Yes, and he knew that he could not restore the Republic. It was simply impossible. The Empire had grown to Britannia in the North, beyond Parthia in the East; it covers Northern Africa. If you want to be a good Roman, Antony, then stand up and speak your conscience in the Senate. Tiberius invites this.”
“Oh, Father, you are much deceived,” said Antony.
My Father put an end to this argument.
But he and I did live exactly the life he had described.
Tiberius was immediately unpopular with the noisy Roman crowds. He was too old, too dry, too humorless, too puritanical and tyrannical at the same time.
But he had one saving grace. Other than his extensive love and knowledge of philosophy, he had been a very good soldier. And that was the most important characteristic the Emperor had to possess.
The troops honored him.
He strengthened the Praetorian Guard around the Palace, hired a man named Sejanus to run things for him. But he didn’t bring legions into Rome, and he spoke a damned good line about personal rights and freedom, that is, if you could stay awake to listen. I thought him a brooder.
The Senate went mad with impatience when he refused to make decisions. They didn’t want to make the decisions! But all this seemed relatively safe.
Then a horrible incident occurred which made me positively detest the Emperor wholeheartedly and lose all my faith in the man and his ability to govern.
This
incident involved the Temple of Isis. Some clever evil man, claiming to be the Egyptian god Anubis, had enticed a highborn devotee of Isis to the Temple and gone to bed with her, fooling her completely, though how on Earth he did it I can’t imagine.
I remember her to this day as the stupidest woman in Rome. But there’s probably more to it.
Anyway, it had all happened at the Temple.
And then this man, this fake Anubis, went before the highborn virtuous woman and told her in the plainest terms that he had had her! She went screaming to her husband. It was a scandal of extraordinary flair.
It had been years since I had been at the Temple, and I was glad of it.
But what followed from the Emperor was more dreadful than I ever dreamed.
The entire Temple was razed to the very ground. All the worshipers were banished from Rome, and some of them executed. And our Priests and Priestesses were crucified, their bodies hung on the tree, as the old Roman expression goes, to die slowly, and to rot, for all to see.
My Father came into my bedroom. He went to the small shrine of Isis. He took the statue and smashed it on the marble floor. Then he picked up the larger pieces and smashed each of them. He made dust of her.
I nodded.
I expected him to condemn me for my old habits. I was overcome with sadness and shock at what had happened. Other Eastern cults were being persecuted. The Emperor was moving to take away the right of Sanctuary from various Temples throughout the Empire.
“The man doesn’t want to be Emperor of Rome,” said my Father. “He’s been bent by cruelty and losses. He’s stiff, boring and completely in terror for his life! A man who would not be Emperor cannot be Emperor. Not now.”
“Maybe he’ll step down,” I said sadly. “He has adopted the young General Germanicus Julius Caesar. This means Germanicus is to be his heir, does it not?”
“What good did it do to the earlier heirs of Augustus when they were adopted?” my Father asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.