The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel

by Phyllis T. Smith

  “This is not the time for Stoic platitudes.”

  “It is the time for you to show strength.”

  “Yes. There you are right.”

  We were silent for a few moments.

  Then Tiberius spoke again. “I have done everything you and Augustus wanted. I have fought, I have worked, I have sacrificed my own happiness. And what I have out of it is this dishonor, a wife I cannot discipline and cannot divorce, who behaves like a common prostitute. I am tired, Mother. Sick of it all. Sick of the army, sick of the sycophants who pretend to be my friends. There is not an aspect of my existence that gives me any pleasure.”

  I let out a long breath. “Oh, Tiberius . . .”

  “There’s only one thing to do, and that is walk away. So I’m leaving.”

  “You have been under great strain,” I said. “You are not yourself.”

  “Then who am I?” He gave a harsh laugh.

  “Dearest, think. You are the second most powerful man in Rome after Augustus.”

  “After Augustus,” he echoed. He laughed again. “I am no one, Mother.”

  “You can’t just leave,” I said.

  But he could.

  In the end, it proved impossible to get Tiberius to stay in Rome, or to continue a career of public service. Tavius asked him to reconsider, offered him every inducement. He would hear none of it. In their conversation, neither of them mentioned Julia.

  Tiberius left for Rhodes—ironically just where I had wanted him to go to continue his studies when he was seventeen. Rhodes was a pleasant place, a center of learning. It was also where Vipsania now lived with her husband. Tiberius said he wanted to be close to his son, whom Vipsania was rearing. But of course people whispered he wanted to renew his acquaintance with his former wife.

  Tavius was furious at Tiberius for what he called his “desertion.” But at the same time he harbored the hope that he would return, a hope that I also nurtured. “He is exhausted,” I told Tavius. “We should give him time to rest.”

  “He is exhausted? What should I say? How can a man simply walk away from his public responsibilities?”

  There was now a great silence in the heart of our marriage, subjects we did not talk about. It was understood between us, of course, that Tiberius and Julia’s estrangement had contributed to Tiberius’s leaving Rome. But we did not discuss the precise dimensions of their estrangement. I believe we were both afraid of what might be said. We were parents of a son and daughter who were married to each other but could not bear to even dwell in the same city. I feared that the collapse in our children’s union might do irreparable damage to our own. Perhaps Tavius feared that too, or perhaps he was more afraid of what I might in a moment of anger tell him about Julia. So we were silent.

  One year passed and then another and still one more. It was as if we were all frozen in a great block of ice: Tiberius in Rhodes, living the life of a gentleman of leisure, engaging in scholarly study in accord with his passing interests; Julia in Rome, living the life she chose; Tavius and I carrying the burden of ruling Rome’s empire. Sometimes it seemed we were absolutely alone in carrying that burden.

  Time passed and little changed.

  I accepted matters as they stood. For it seemed all too likely that any change would be for the worse.

  Part III

  One afternoon, I attended a poetry reading at the house of my friend Varilla. The reading was well attended because Varilla’s friends were numerous and diverse. The poet himself was a new friend of Varilla’s. He had auburn ringlets and milky white skin. “Poor boy,” Varilla said to me when the reading was finished. “His verses aren’t very good, are they?”

  I shrugged. Of course, Varilla had chosen him for talents that had little to do with literature.

  “The poetry was execrable,” Jullus Antony said, coming up beside us. “But your hospitality, Varilla, is as always superb.”

  She smiled at him. Smiled the way a gourmand smiles at a sumptuous banquet.

  Jullus was nearly forty; the gloss of youth was gone. Time had etched world-weary lines under his eyes. But he was attractive in a way I could not remember him being as a boy.

  “You should give a reading of your own poetry sometime,” Varilla said.

  “You write poetry, Jullus?” I said.

  He averted his eyes, just for an instant. I sensed a shyness that seemed not to go with his tall, strapping physique. “Oh, I dabble.”

  “Really, you ought to give a reading,” Varilla said.

  My cousin, Marcella, Jullus’s wife, stood beside him. “Jullus would never give a reading. He has published a few volumes, just among our friends. But he has never wanted to draw much attention to his work.”

  “Some poets never publish their poems while they are alive because they write about such private themes,” I said.

  Jullus gave me a small, deprecatory grimace. “My poetry is not all that private. It’s just not very good.”

  “You never admitted that before,” Marcella said with a laugh.

  “I felt no need to state the obvious, my dear,” Jullus said.

  Later that evening, after we had all dined, a few of us lingered before going home. I stood alone admiring a statue of a nymph, a recent addition to Varilla’s house, by an artist just coming into his full powers. I loved the pride conveyed in that nude carved figure, how the girl stood with head up and an open gaze, despite her nakedness. I studied the statue for a few moments, thinking I must make a point of buying a work by this new sculptor.

  I seemed to feel rather than hear someone coming up behind. There was an impression of warmth. Then I heard Jullus’s voice, low and mellow. “Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  I turned. “Absolutely beautiful.” I noticed how the tan of his skin contrasted with the white wool of his toga and that his eyes were not quite brown, not quite green. “Varilla has good taste in art,” I said.

  “If not always in poetry.”

  We discussed poetry for a while and discovered we were both fond of the work of a poet named Aulus. “But,” I said, “I wish his poems were more cheerful.”

  “How could they be, given the theme he has chosen?”

  “I would say he has taken love as his main theme.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You think love must always be painful?”

  He shrugged.

  “Aulus’s poems are almost all about tragic lovers,” I said. “Really, you would avoid falling in love at all costs if you took him as a guide. He seems to be deliberately warning us that love is more dangerous than war.”

  “I don’t think he intends to lead or warn anyone,” Jullus said. “He is lost in the woods, and supposes everyone else is too. What use is a guide where there are no paths?”

  “That’s how you think of love—being lost in the woods?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s been like that for you?”

  “No,” he said. “I have been very good at avoiding . . . getting lost. I’ve always been afraid that if I did, I might never find myself again.”

  “Oh, you have too dark a view of love.”

  “Well, my father’s experience you know . . . How many people had to die because he fell in love with the wrong woman?”

  “A great many, I would think.”

  “A great many,” Jullus repeated. “And the world we live in was altered because of that.”

  We were standing very close to each other, too close. I found I did not want to move away, but remembering that others were present, I did.

  I was suddenly looking at Jullus differently, as if I hadn’t known him all my life.

  He had been a boy on the fringes of our family, someone my aunt Octavia cared for, but no one else took much notice of. I thought of him as an object of my aunt’s charity and then my father’s. He had long been married to Marcella—my cousin whom I disliked and avoided when I could. He had become consul and had spent the last few years as the governor of Asia Minor—a post that sounded much more impor
tant than it actually was, for it came empty of independent power.

  He had muscular shoulders and arms and a handsome face with the most sensual-looking lips. Some men have an aura. He did, and it was strongly masculine and magnetic. How had I not noticed this before?

  “Is the theme of your own poetry love?” I asked him.

  “My poems aren’t worth talking about. Marcella could tell you that much.”

  “I’m not sure I would consider her an authority on poetry.”

  “She believes she is an authority on me.”

  “Is she?”

  He shook his head.

  “What a pity,” I said.

  “And you—how well does your husband know you?”

  “Did no one tell you? I scarcely have a husband. He’s fled to Rhodes to get away from me.”

  “Tiberius always did strike me as a fool.”

  “He is not that. He is something else entirely.”

  “If you say so. Well, enough of that unpleasant subject. Do you write poetry?”

  “No. I have no talent in that area. Or in any other.”

  “Oh, I think you do,” he said.

  Somehow we were standing close together again. And we were speaking in low voices, almost in whispers. I wondered if Marcella noticed and what she would make of it. I realized I did not care.

  “Suppose you did write poetry,” he said. “What would you choose as your theme?”

  I tossed my head. “Haven’t you heard about me? My theme would be passion, of course. Passion and all the delights of the flesh. If I were a poetess, I would write odes to pleasure.”

  “I doubt that,” Jullus said. “I think your theme is loneliness.”

  He spoke gently, with compassion. Suddenly, I had to fight back tears. “Most people who heard you say that, to me of all people, would want to laugh.”

  “Most people don’t see what is before their eyes,” he said.

  I could not remember a time I had not known him. Even in my earliest childhood, he had been there—the orphan boy who lived in my aunt’s house. Yet until this moment we had been strangers to each other.

  Now we stood so near each other I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  I said, “Maybe your father thought it was worth it . . . worth altering the world.”

  “To love Cleopatra? Maybe it was.”

  We met alone for the first time in an inn on the Appian Way. I borrowed an inconspicuous, plain litter to get there, went by a circuitous route. He was waiting for me in a small, ugly room. I had been in rooms like this before, rooms that served only one purpose.

  “It’s tawdry, I know,” he said.

  I felt a thickness in my throat. “What does it matter?”

  He tipped up my chin, looked into my eyes. “It matters. I will remember everything about this moment. For the rest of my life, I will remember this shabby room, but also true beauty. The beauty I see when I look at you.”

  I glanced away.

  “You don’t like to hear your beauty praised?”

  “Not especially.”

  I was used to having my looks extolled by sycophants and men who wished to bed me; it had no meaning for me. And what I saw when I looked in the mirror these days was a woman who had begun to show her years.

  “Most people don’t even see me when they look at me,” I said. “They see Augustus’s fortunate daughter. Or they see . . . shall I say what they see?”

  He shook his head.

  “They would say these are the perfect surroundings for me,” I said, glancing around the chamber. “I am just where they would expect to find me—in a room in a cheap inn with a man who is not my husband.”

  “Shall I tell you what they see when they look in my direction?” Jullus said. “A fortunate man. Lucky beyond all reckoning. Because of the great benevolence that has been extended to me, and which I have accepted, from the man who killed my father and my brother.”

  I found I had no words to say.

  “Not many men forfeit all claim to honor when they are ten years old. But I did.”

  I shook my head, disbelievingly. “How? How could you possibly think you did that at such an age?”

  “Your father told my older brother Antyllus and me that he was going to war with my father. Father had left us with Octavia to raise, but now he demanded that we be returned to him. I have always told everyone—even myself—that my father completely forgot about me on the day I was born, but that is not true. He remembered Antyllus and me, at the last possible moment. Now if your father were a dishonorable man, he would have slit both our throats. But he didn’t. He said we could go to join our father or remain with him and his sister, Octavia, according to our wish. And if we stayed with him, he would treat us as his kin, so long as we stayed loyal.”

  “That choice was left up to you? At the age of ten?”

  “It was Octavia’s idea. I believe left to himself, Augustus would have just sent us to our father. But Octavia thought we would choose to stay, out of attachment to her, and she, kind heart, thought that would be best for us.”

  “So you made that choice—at ten.”

  “Yes. My brother surprised Octavia—he did not surprise me—by demanding to be sent to Father. He even spoke defiant words to Augustus’s face. I, on the other hand, threw myself into your aunt’s arms and cried out that I wanted to remain with her.”

  “Of course you did that,” I said. “You were a little boy, and she had been the closest you had to a mother.”

  Jullus looked at me in silence, a cynical half smile on his lips.

  “Do you blame yourself . . . for a choice made as a child?”

  “I think the person we are at ten is the person we will always be, Julia. I certainly loved your aunt, but when I threw myself into her arms—was that an uncalculated action? Do you truly think so? If you do, I’ll tell you this—I distinctly remember thinking your father was going to win.”

  “Win the war between him and your father, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  “You believe you deliberately picked the winning side at ten years old?”

  “Does it seem so unlikely to you?”

  “Yes, it seems extremely unlikely. You were a child, Jullus, faced with a terrible choice, and you chose the only love and shelter you had ever known.”

  He moved his shoulders negligently.

  I reached up, touched his cheek. I could feel the stubble of his beard, his cheekbone.

  “All I’m sure of is this,” he said. “I am alive and my father and brother are long dead.”

  “Why blame yourself for what you cannot help?”

  “Yes, why blame yourself. Some women can live without love, but you cannot, Julia.” He drew me close and kissed me on the lips.

  Forever afterward, I would remember his strength and his tenderness, the hard and the soft of him. His mouth on my lips, on my breasts, on my thigh, the fire where he touched me. I became a well of need, and then the need was met. I cried out when he entered me. I gasped again and again clinging to him.

  Later, as night drew on, we lay pressed heart to heart. “I have wondered if there is love anywhere in the world for me,” I murmured. “I have searched and searched. And you were there all the time. Why did I not see you?”

  “Forget the past. Isn’t it enough that we are together now?”

  “Will you love me, Jullus? Or am I fool to expect that?”

  “I will love you. I love you now.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes, truly.” His lips brushed mine.

  We were two wounded and unhappy creatures who found each other. He was what I wanted. I knew it from that first night. He was what I had wanted all my life. And I was what he wanted.

  It would have been better if we had been members of the nameless Forum crowd. Then nobody would have cared what we did. But he was a former consul of Rome, Mark Antony’s son; I was Augustus’s daughter. And still nothing mattered as much as what we felt for each other.


  Everything changed for me. I wanted no other man but Jullus. As long as we could have our stolen hours together, that was enough. It was a time of bliss for me, a time of perpetual spring.

  Once after we made love, I asked, “Do you love me? Just me, the woman I am. Not Augustus’s daughter. Not . . . a way of getting something else. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Yes, I understand what you are saying, and I love you.” He spoke in a grave, measured voice.

  “I’m not who they think I am, Jullus. I’m not . . . some kind of filthy joke.”

  “No one thinks of you that way.”

  “Oh, but they do. Even many people who pretend to be my friends do. Jullus . . . do you know how many beds I’ve been in?”

  He nuzzled my neck. “Why are you talking about this now?”

  “I don’t understand how you can love me.”

  “I’ve lived off the charity of my own father’s killer all my life. All my life. Can you love me?”

  “I do love you,” I said.

  We came together with a tenderness I had never known before. I thought, Oh, this is what it is to make love. This. This man’s touch.

  At the end, there was pleasure that was almost unbearable to me, a pleasure that was almost pain.

  I whispered,

  “‘Suns can set and rise again;

  For us, once our brief light has set,

  There’s one unending night for sleeping.

  Give me a thousand kisses . . .’”

  He gave a low laugh and whispered back, “‘Then a hundred, Then another thousand, then a second hundred . . .’”

  We slept clasped in each other’s arms.

  “It is so strange,” I told Jullus once. “I have been looking for you all my life. And you were there but I didn’t see you. Did you see me?”

  “Yes and no. I saw your beauty—how could I not? You dazzled me. But it would have been foolish of me to raise my eyes to Augustus’s daughter. So I looked away.”

  “Foolish? Why?”

  “You know why. Your father would never consider me as your husband.”