The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “You married for love, Father.”

  “I could afford to,” he said, his voice ice-cold.

  “I will never be happy with Agrippa. All my life. All my life, Father.”

  “If you’ve made up your mind to be unhappy, then you will be,” Father said. “But you will marry him.”

  Was I selfish? Was I a young fool? Was I a bad daughter to rage inside myself at my father as I did?

  I think if I had not seen Livia sitting there beside him, if I did not know that to be together they had flouted all convention, shed two spouses, scandalized all of Rome, I might have acquiesced more easily to Father’s will.

  What mattered more in life than a loving marriage? Father had shown me by the way he lived that nothing mattered more. He would have walked through flames to be with Livia. He would have waged wars. He would have battled the gods themselves. So I believed, and I do not think I was in error.

  But he condemned me to a loveless desert when he insisted I marry Agrippa.

  Perhaps if I had been Julia’s mother, I would have wept for her when she was compelled to marry Agrippa. Or perhaps not.

  The person to whom my sympathies naturally flowed was Tavius. Tavius, whose actions were constrained by laws of iron necessity. He was not a sculptor chiseling stone. As First Citizen, he dealt with human beings, all of whom had their own aspirations and desires.

  One must face reality as it is, not as one would wish it to be. There are human feelings, and there are the necessities of state. Sometimes they war with each other. How easy it would be to govern an empire if one did not have to somehow accommodate the disparate passions of human beings.

  Agrippa had to be designated Tavius’s heir in order to keep Rome whole. Therefore it was necessary for him to marry Tavius’s daughter. I think Tavius was more upset by his daughter’s misery than he let show. But if Julia had a just complaint, it seemed she ought to bring it not to her father but to the gods.

  When I was a girl, my father betrothed me to Tiberius Nero. He thought it necessary in order to bind him close to the Republican cause. I had not liked the man Father chose for me. But I obediently went through with the marriage. I bore Tiberius Nero two sons. And then I escaped—only after the Republican cause was rubble, my father was dead, and the marriage served no political purpose. Tavius and I married when we could do it without bringing disaster on ourselves and the people to whom we were bound in loyalty.

  I understood what a hard blow had been dealt to Julia; I understood it in the depths of my soul. And yet . . . I had suffered what I had to, and I thought she must do the same.

  When Tavius contemplated marrying Julia to Agrippa, he had to give thought to another individual—his niece Marcella, Agrippa’s current wife. The fact that she and Agrippa had no affection for each other smoothed his path. But Tavius worried about how his sister, Marcella’s mother, would take the divorce. Octavia was still in deep mourning for her son—so deep that she was unwell, and distant and hostile in her dealings with Tavius and me.

  As we anticipated, Marcella did not try to cling to her marriage to Agrippa. The surprise was that she had chosen another husband for herself.

  She appeared at our house one day and demanded to see Tavius. Indeed she stalked into his study while he and I were alone talking about important matters. Tavius’s sputtering secretary was unable to keep her out.

  “Please, please, dear Uncle Tavius,” she begged. “Please let me marry Jullus Antony!”

  Tavius stared at her as if she were out of her mind.

  “He is a wonderful young man, and he wants to be of service to you. Oh, Uncle—”

  “He is Mark Antony’s son,” Tavius said flatly.

  “Oh, but he has been raised in the bosom of our family!” Marcella cried. “He has worshipped you since he was a little boy . . . as I do, Uncle. As I do!”

  I doubted that Marcella worshipped anyone at all, except the image she saw in her mirror. As for Jullus, he was an intelligent, charming young man who had every reason to be grateful to Tavius—but his father had been Tavius’s worst enemy.

  I don’t think Tavius would have seriously considered marrying Marcella to Jullus, except that Octavia wanted the two wed. She had raised Jullus. With Marcellus gone, he stood in the place of a son to her. She dreamed of seeing her daughter Marcella and Jullus bound together in a loving marriage. She made her feelings clear not by speaking to Tavius personally but by dispatching a letter. I did not see this missive. Tavius refused to show it to me. He was white-faced after he read it.

  “She is not well,” he said. “She could not have written to me in such terms if she were herself.”

  “She is struggling with terrible grief,” I agreed. “You must not take what she says now too seriously.”

  I had had different feelings toward Octavia at different times in our long acquaintance. She had disapproved of my marriage to Tavius, and I had thought her prim and overly moralistic. Then when she fought so valiantly to preserve her doomed marriage to Mark Antony, because a rupture meant civil war, I came to admire her. For some years, we were fast friends, but the fundamental differences in our approaches to life remained. Now—seeing the ravaged look on Tavius’s face—I felt anger. He had an abiding love and reverence for his sister, and she was one of the few people on earth who could wound him in a personal way. She hurt him, and I did not easily forgive that.

  In any case, he allowed Jullus and Marcella to marry. He acted against his better judgment, purely to soothe his sister at a time when she was half mad with grief.

  The past lives in us, and blood is blood. We cannot escape, though we may wish to. Jullus was Mark Antony’s son. Tavius had caused the death of his father and executed his elder brother.

  My husband himself had not rested until every one of the men responsible for the assassination of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was put to death. It was a question of honor.

  Could Jullus truly brush the past aside?

  It is expected that we exact blood vengeance for the slaying of our kin. This fact had accounted for some of my wariness toward Selene. But the duty to avenge falls much more heavily on a son than on a daughter. Looked at in these terms, was not Jullus a greater threat than his sister?

  The young man had been a member of our family from his earliest years—he had not set eyes on his father, Mark Antony, since he was a little boy. For that reason, I rarely thought of him with suspicion. Now, however, I suddenly saw what it would mean if he married Marcella, and I recoiled.

  “He will be your nephew by marriage,” I said to Tavius one night, shortly before the wedding. “He will expect to be treated as such. He will probably want high office.”

  The oil lamp that illuminated our bedchamber left half Tavius’s face in darkness. “He is a capable young man.”

  “So you will trust him?”

  “Only so far.”

  “There will be a line to tread with him. To keep him close and yet not leave yourself exposed to betrayal.”

  “Don’t you think I realize that?” Tavius said.

  Despite his lingering doubts, soon after her divorce, he gave his niece in marriage to Jullus. He made lavish gifts to the beaming pair.

  He could have killed Jullus and Selene when they were small. I reminded the gods—I will go on forever reminding them—that he let them live. Surely that deserves recompense in the final accounting.

  Caesar Augustus was a noble being. He spared them at the cost of great risk to himself. That should be remembered.

  In the eastern part of the empire at this time, a tiny vassal kingdom that bordered Parthia descended into chaos, while a king rose in Armenia who wished to throw off the Roman yoke. The Parthians’ emperor encouraged this dissension, perhaps with aggressive intent. Therefore Father did not attend my wedding to Agrippa. He was off to the East.

  Livia insisted on accompanying him on his journey. She wanted to guard Father’s health; I think she also wished to make sure he did not take it in hi
s head to personally lead any armies into battle should war break out. She brought along several highly skilled physicians and also many sealed jars of herbal remedies she brewed herself.

  I had grieved when Father had been absent from my first wedding. This time it mattered little to me that Maecenas, his friend, gave me away in his stead. In fact, it seemed entirely fitting that Father was far from me in body as well as in spirit.

  I still mourned Marcellus. But I had suffered another loss, more bitter than any clean grief. I felt a severance from the fount of my own being. It was almost as if Father had died, though of course he still lived.

  I saw how little I mattered to him, except as a vessel for his dynastic hopes. I wished it were possible to obliterate that knowledge, but I never could.

  There are wounds we do not recover from. I think I lost a piece of my soul at this time. I know I was desperately unhappy.

  “Does it seem strange to you that we should be married?” I said those words to Agrippa on our wedding night.

  The flower-decked bridal chamber was ablaze with candles. I saw a frown surface briefly on his face, then he shrugged. “Why would it be strange?”

  “You’ve always been like a brother to my father. I remember you that way from the time I was tiny.”

  “We have no blood connection at all,” Agrippa said.

  We said almost nothing more that night. Was it possible that being married to Augustus’s daughter had struck Agrippa dumb? People spoke of his brilliance as a strategist, his gift for commanding soldiers. He knew how to give orders in battle, but in our bedchamber, he lacked vocabulary.

  He kissed me once and, after that, silently caressed me with his huge hands. His body was big, hard and muscular, the body of a strong forty-two-year-old man, thick but not fat, solid like an oak tree. He had a great hairy pelt of hair on his chest, though the hair on his head was thinning. Father had said Agrippa would take care of me. I did not doubt this. He would put his hard, strong body between me and any harm; he would consider this his duty. But would we ever come to know each other in any true sense?

  He entered me like a ramrod. I did not feel pain, just a sense of invasion. And no desire at all, no hint of pleasure.

  I suspected on our wedding night that all our times together would be like this. Agrippa would make use of my body regularly, at least until he got me with child. I must have a son for him, for my father, for Rome. What I felt did not matter to anybody. Nobody cared that inside myself, I was weeping.

  I compared. I could not help comparing. I longed for Marcellus, his touch, his laughter. The music of our coming together. Instead, in his place, I had this taciturn soldier. There was no music to our lovemaking, no music and no joy.

  As days passed, I noticed that when my new husband did address me, he was always careful to be polite. I told myself it was no fault of his that he grappled with words and did not know what to say to me. But he touched my body as if he owned it. His hands were calloused like a workman’s, and sometimes when I felt his touch, I could not help remembering that he was descended from slaves.

  Marcellus had been in some ways still a boy, so it was easy to excuse him when he was not as attentive as I would have wished him to be. We were both young and learning from each other. Agrippa was a mature man, and I was his third wife. I did not imagine myself transforming him into someone I could love.

  After I had been married to Agrippa for three months, I became certain I had conceived. During my marriage to Marcellus, this would have elated me. Now I felt almost indifferent about the fact that I would bear my first child.

  I entered the study, where Agrippa was reading military dispatches, and said, “I am with child.”

  He looked up at me, unsmiling. “That is good,” he said.

  He had no son, only one daughter, a meek little thing named Vipsania, who was betrothed to Livia’s son Tiberius. Yet I saw no delight in his expression at the prospect of the coming child.

  I thought, He will be relieved when the baby comes, if it is a boy. Relieved as a man is when he has carried out his assigned task.

  I had heard that he and Vipsania’s mother had been fond of each other. Not wildly in love, but fond enough that their marriage, arranged by Livia, had been viewed as a great success, and that when she died, he sincerely mourned her. He had next married Marcella, who made her distaste for him obvious to all—and now he had me as his wife. The sort of passion Catullus had written about—had Agrippa experienced it? Had he ever desired it? I could not imagine asking him and so had no way of knowing. But I felt a kind of sympathy for him. It was as if we had both been robbed.

  Just days after I told him a child was on the way, he informed me that he was leaving to take charge of matters in Spain. There was constant trouble there, dissension among the tribes, and his guiding hand was needed. “Look after yourself and the child,” he said to me in parting. I do not think he was sad to go.

  For the first time, I was truly mistress of my own house. I was eighteen, young enough to take a pleasure in the feeling of independence this gave me. I could invite whomever I wished for dinner parties in my home, but at that time I had a narrow circle of friends—just people Father and my husband approved of. I did take the opportunity to invite Scribonia, my mother, to dine with me. She willingly accepted my invitations. “I have longed to be closer to you,” she said to me one evening. “Now perhaps that will be possible.”

  I remembered, of course, her weeping at my wedding to Marcellus. I also recalled the many years of my childhood when she had rarely if ever visited me. “You felt it was impossible before?” I said.

  “Do you think I wished to be in Livia’s presence?” she said. “In any case, it was better not to intrude on your life when I could not truly be a mother to you.”

  “That’s why you didn’t come to see me?”

  “I thought it best for your sake,” she said.

  “I thought—well, you have other children. I imagined they kept you busy.” She had two sons and a daughter from two ill-fated early marriages.

  She gave me a long, level look. “I did not forget you, Julia. Soon you will be a mother too, and you will see how impossible it is for a mother to forget a child.”

  Sadly, it was too late for us to develop the deepest natural bonds of mother and daughter. Likely that was my fault; I was not used to having a mother and never truly thought of Scribonia as a parent. Yet we did form a kind of friendship. I turned to Mother for advice on how to treat my thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, Vipsania. I found it rather odd to be charged with being a mother to a girl only five years younger than me. “Do not try to force a tie that is not there yet. Just be kind,” Mother said. She gave me a small, wistful smile. I suppose she was following this very course of action with me.

  The best I can say for myself as a stepmother is that I was never cruel to Vipsania. She was quiet and shy. Perhaps an older, more experienced woman would have known how to draw her out. As it was, we inhabited her father’s stately mansion together. We shared meals. We passed each other in the corridors, and I would see her with her tutor or sitting for hours in the garden, doing the embroidery she enjoyed. I gave her presents sometimes. But my efforts to make a friend of her failed. That was rather sad, for this was a lonely time for me and, I suppose, with no mother and her father away, for Vipsania too.

  I did find a friend at this time, under unlikely circumstances. I say unlikely because the boundaries between the mistress of a house and a slave are usually insurmountable. But that turned out not to be true when it came to me and Phoebe.

  She was a young woman of about my age, and she had striking looks, black hair, finely arched brows over huge dark-brown eyes, a proud hawkish profile, and a tall, statuesque figure. She might have been a beauty except that she had a clubfoot and an awkward, lurching gait.

  To me, in the earliest days of my marriage, she was just another of the maids in Agrippa’s household. Then, one day, not long after Agrippa left for the East, she st
umbled while bringing me a bowl of rose-scented water, with which it was my habit to wash before bed. The water mostly spilled on the floor tile, but a bit splashed me and my ornatrix, Becca, who stood behind me, brushing my hair.

  “Oh, I am sorry, mistress,” Phoebe said, dismay in her voice.

  “What a pity Augustus’s daughter must be served by a cripple,” Becca said. “You should get rid of her, mistress.”

  Many noble households would not keep any servants who had obvious physical imperfections. Probably Phoebe knew this. Perhaps she feared being sold. I saw her face turn white. But she did not lower her eyes, did not allow herself to be shamed. The eyes she turned on Becca burned with defiance. She did not speak, though. It was I who spoke.

  “Phoebe can’t help her stumbling foot. But you can curb your spiteful tongue, Becca, and if you wish to serve me, you had better do it.”

  Phoebe looked at me then, in a way that warmed my heart. Not with humble gratitude, which I might have expected, but rather with respect.

  Becca babbled apologies. I ignored her.

  I made it a point to give Phoebe personal chores to do for me after that—and at times when Becca would see it. Phoebe would smile faintly. Oddly enough, she never tripped again, at least when she waited on me.

  She had useful knowledge. When, due to my pregnancy, I was plagued by nausea in the mornings, she told me, “Women in my village boiled mint leaves in water. It helps with the sickness when you are with child, mistress.”

  I did not ask where her village was. I had learned it was better not to ask about the origins of slaves. The tale of enslavement was all one story—Roman soldiers arriving one day to enforce Roman order, the unequal battle, the dead men, the women and children carried off and sold. I never liked hearing this story, and slaves never liked telling it. It was enough to know about Phoebe that she was Greek, that she was utterly alone in the world, and that she was willing to offer me kindness along with loyalty.