Antony and Cleopatra

by Colleen McCullough

  He opened the piece of paper Octavian had given him and conned the few lines of its single column with painful slowness. Yes, yes, this would salve his pride! Religiously impeccable. For it was dawning upon him that if Livia Drusilla were damned as an unfaithful wife, he would wear the horns of a cuckold and be laughed at. Old man with luscious young wife, along comes young man, and…Oh, that would never do! Let the world make what it would of this fiasco; he for one was going to behave as if nothing more salacious than a religious impediment had occurred. He drew a piece of paper forward and began to write out the bill of divorcement, then, the deed done, he summoned Livia Drusilla.

  No one had thought to tell her that Octavian had visited, so she appeared looking exactly as she always did—submissive and demure, the quintessential good wife. Beautiful, he decided as he studied her. Yes, she was beautiful. But why had Octavian’s fancy alighted upon her? Upstart though he was, he could have his pick. Power drew women like moths to a flame, and Octavian had power. What on earth did she have that he had detected in one meeting, yet six years of marriage hadn’t revealed to a husband? Was he, Nero, blind, or was Octavian deluded? The latter, it had to be the latter.

  “Yes, domine?”

  He handed her the bill of divorcement. “I am divorcing you immediately, Livia Drusilla, on religious grounds. Apparently a verse in the new addition to the Sibylline Books has been interpreted by the Quindecimviri as pertaining to our marriage, which must be dissolved. You are to pack your belongings and go to the House of the Vestals at once.”

  Shock struck her mute, numbed her feelings, dazed her mind. But she stood her ground without swaying; the only outward sign of the blow was a suddenly pallid face.

  “May I see the children?” she asked when she could.

  “No. That would render you nefas.”

  “So I must give up the one still in my womb.”

  “Yes, the moment it is born.”

  “What is to happen to me? Will you refund my dowry?”

  “No, I will not refund your dowry or any part of it.”

  “Then how am I to live?”

  “How you manage to live is no longer my concern. I’ve been instructed to send you to the House of the Vestals, that is all.”

  She turned on her heel and went back to her tiny domain, so cluttered with things she detested, from her distaff to her loom, used to spin thread to weave fabric no one ever wore, for she was not an adept at either craft and had no wish to be one. The place was smelly at this time of year; she was expected to bind bunches of dried fleabane to keep pests at bay, and she was nundinae behind because she hated the job. Oh, for the days when Nero had given her a few sesterces to hire books from Atticus’s lending library! Now it had come down to spin, weave, and bind.

  The baby began to kick at her cruelly—his brother all over again. It might be an hour before he ceased his pummeling, getting his exercise at her expense. Soon her bowel would rebel, she would have to run for the latrine and pray no one was there to hear her. The servants considered her beneath their notice, smart enough to know that Nero considered her beneath his notice. Thoughts whirling, she sat on her weaving stool and looked through her window at the colonnade and the dilapidated peristyle garden beyond it.

  “Keep still, you—you thing!” she cried to the baby.

  As if by magic, the pounding ceased—why hadn’t she thought of doing that before? Now she could start to think.

  Freedom, and from a quarter no one could have dreamed of, she least of all. A verse in the latest Sibylline Book! She knew that fifty years ago Lucius Cornelius Sulla had commissioned the Quindecimviri to search the world for fragments of the partially burned Sibylline Books—what were fragments doing outside Rome? But she had always thought of this collection of abstruse couplets and quatrains as completely aethereal, having no relation to ordinary people or ordinary events. Earthquakes, wars, invasions, fires, the death of mighty men, the birth of children destined to save the world: that was what the prophetic books were all about.

  Though she had asked Nero what she would live on, Livia Drusilla wasn’t worried about that. If the gods had deigned to notice her—as clearly they had—and to relieve her of this ghastly marriage, then they would not let her descend to soliciting men outside Venus Erucina’s, or starve. The exile in the House of the Vestals must be a temporary thing; a Vestal was adlected at six or seven years of age, and had to maintain her virginity for the thirty years of her service, for her virginity represented Rome’s luck. Nor did the Vestals take women in—she must be special indeed! What lay in the future she couldn’t begin to guess, nor did she try to guess. It was enough that she was free, that her life was going somewhere at last.

  She had a small trunk in which she packed her few clothes whenever she traveled; by the time the steward came a short hour later to inquire if she was ready to make the walk from the Germalus of the Palatine down into the Forum Romanum, it was packed and roped, and she was wrapped in a warm mantle against the cold, the threatening snow. Wearing shoes with high cork soles to keep her feet out of occasional muck, she hurried as fast as the shoes let her in the wake of the servant hefting her trunk and complaining loudly of his woes to all and sundry. Getting down the Vestal Steps took some time, but after that it was a short, level walk past the little round Aedes Vestae to the side entrance of the Vestals’ half of the Domus Publica. There a servant woman handed her trunk to a brawny Gallic woman, and led her to a room that held a bed, a table, and a chair.

  “The latrines and baths are down that corridor,” said the housekeeper, for such she was. “You are not to dine with the holy ladies, but food and drink will be brought to you here. The Chief Vestal says that you may exercise in their garden, but not at an hour when they use it themselves. I am instructed to ask you if you like to read?”

  “Yes, I love to read.”

  “What books would you like?”

  “Anything in Latin or Greek that the holy ladies deem suitable,” said Livia Drusilla, well trained.

  “Have you any questions, domina?”

  “Just one. Do I have to share the bath water?”

  Three nundinae went by in a dreamy peace feathered by flakes of snow; understanding that her gravid presence must be against all Vestal precepts, Livia Drusilla made no attempt to see her hostesses, nor did any, even the Chief Vestal, come to visit her. She passed the time in reading, tramping up and down the garden, and bathing ecstatically in clean, hot water. The Vestals enjoyed better facilities than Nero’s domus had offered; the seats in their latrines were of marble, their baths were made of Egyptian granite, and their food was delicious. Wine, she discovered, was a part of the menu.

  “It was Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus who refurbished the Atrium Vestae sixty years ago,” the housekeeper explained, “and then Caesar Pontifex Maximus installed hypocaust heating in all the living areas as well as the record rooms.” She clicked her tongue. “Our basement was given over to the storage of wills, but Caesar Pontifex Maximus worked out how to take enough of it to make the best hypocaust in Rome. Oh, how we miss him!”

  A nundinum after the New Year, the housekeeper brought her a letter. Unfurling it and spreading it between two porphyry weights, Livia Drusilla settled to read, easy because of the dot above each new word. Why didn’t Atticus’s copyists do that?

  To Livia Drusilla, love of my life, greetings. As this tells you, I, Caesar Divi Filius, did not forget you after we met at Fregellae. It took some time to work out a way to get you free of Tiberius Claudius Nero without scandal or odium. I instructed my freedman, Helenus, to search the new Sibylline Book until he found a verse that could be held as pertaining to you and Nero. Of itself, this was insufficient. He also had to find a verse pertaining to you and me, more difficult. The excellent fellow—I was so pleased to have him back in my fold after a year’s imprisonment with Sextus Pompeius—is really a far better scholar than he is an admiral or a general. I am so happy to be able to write this that I feel like Icarus so
aring up into the aether. Please, my Livia Drusilla, do not cast me down! The disappointment would kill me, if the fall didn’t. Here is yours and Nero’s verse:

  Husband and wife, black as night

  Joined together are Rome’s blight

  Sundered they must be, and swift

  Or Rome’s forever set adrift

  Yours and mine is roses in Campania by comparison:

  The son of a god, fair and gold of hair

  Must take as bride the mother of two

  Black as night, of a foundered pair

  Together they will build Rome anew

  Do you like that? I did, when I read it. Helenus is a very clever fellow, an expert with manuscripts. I have raised him to the status of chief secretary.

  On the seventeenth day of this month, January, you and I are to be joined in wedlock. When I took the two verses to the Quindecimviri—I am one of the Fifteen Men—they agreed that my interpretation was the true one. All impediments and obstacles were swept aside and a lex curiata has been passed sanctioning your divorce from Nero and our union.

  The Chief Vestal, Appuleia, is my cousin, and agreed to shelter you until we could marry. I have agreed that, as soon as Rome is on her feet, I will separate the Vestals from the Pontifex Maximus in their own house. I love you.

  She removed the paperweights and let the scroll curl up, then got to her feet and slipped through her door. The stone stair to the basement wasn’t far away; she scurried along the corridor to it and was down it before anyone saw her. In the Atrium Vestae all the servants were female and free women, including those who chopped the wood and fed it to the furnaces that turned it into charcoal. Yes, she was lucky! The stoking had been done, but it was not yet time to rake the glowing coals into the hypocaust, there to heat the upper floors. Like a shadow she approached the nearest furnace and thrust the scroll into its flames.

  Now why did I do that? she asked herself when she was safe in her room, breathing hard from the effort. Oh, come, Livia Drusilla, you know why! Because he has chosen you, and no one must ever suspect that he has taken you into his confidence so early. This is a house of women, and everything is everyone’s business. They would not have dared to break his seal, but the moment my back was turned, they would be there reading my letter.

  Power! He will give me power! He wants me, he needs me, he will marry me! Together we will build Rome anew. The Sibylline Book speaks the truth, no matter whose pen wrote the verse. If my two verses are anything to go by, all the thousands of verses must be very silly. But no one has ever asked that an ecstatic prophet should be a Catullus or a Sappho. A well-trained mind can coin rubbish like that in a trice.

  Today are the Nones. In twelve days I will be the bride of Caesar Divi Filius; I can rise no higher. Therefore it behooves me to work for him with might and main, for if he falls, I fall.

  On the day of her wedding she finally saw the Chief Vestal, Appuleia. This awe-inspiring lady was not yet twenty-five years old, but that was how it sometimes went in the College of Vestals; several of the women reached the retiring age of thirty-five at much the same moment, leaving younger women as their successors. Appuleia could look forward to at least ten years as Chief Vestal, and was carefully molding herself into a gentle tyrant. No lovely young Vestal was going to be accused of being unchaste under her reign! The punishment if found guilty was to be buried alive with a jug of water and a loaf of bread, but it was a very long time since that had happened, for the Vestals prized their status and regarded men as more alien than a striped African horse.

  Livia Drusilla looked up; Appuleia was very tall.

  “I hope you realize,” said the Chief Vestal, looking grim, “that we six Vestals have put Rome at peril by taking a pregnant woman into our house.”

  “I do realize it, and I thank you.”

  “Thanks are irrelevant. We have made the offerings and all is well, but for no one except the son of Divus Julius would we have agreed to shelter you. It is a mark of your extreme virtue that no harm has come to us or to Rome, but I will rest easier when you are wed and out of here. Had Lepidus Pontifex Maximus been in residence, he might have refused you succor at our hands, but Vesta of the Hearth says you are necessary to Rome. Our own books say that too.” She produced an evil-smelling, straight robe of a depressing pale brown. “Dress now. The little Vestals have woven you this shift from wool that has never been fulled or dyed.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Not far. Just to the temple in the Domus Publica that we share with the Pontifex Maximus. It hasn’t been used for any public ceremony since Caesar Pontifex Maximus lay in state after his cruel death. Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus, the senior priest in Rome at the moment, will preside, but the Flamens will be there, as will the Rex Sacrorum.”

  Skin prickling uncomfortably from the dismal hair shirt, Livia Drusilla followed the white-clad form of Appuleia through the huge rooms where the Vestals toiled at their testamentary duties, for they had custody of several million wills belonging to Roman citizens all over the world, and could put their hands on a specific one within an hour.

  A giggling little Vestal about ten years old had done Livia Drusilla’s hair in the six locks and placed a crown of seven coils of wool upon her brow. Over that went a veil that rendered her nine parts blind, so thick and coarse was it. No flame and saffron cloth fine enough to draw through the eye of a darning needle for this bride! She was dressed to marry Romulus, not Caesar Divi Filius.

  Owning no windows, the temple was a tangle of blackness and pools of yellow light, terrifyingly holy, and, so Livia Drusilla fancied, haunted by the shades of every man who had molded Rome’s religion for a thousand years, right back to Aeneas. Numa Pompilius and Tarquinius Priscus lurked there arm in arm with Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Caesar Pontifex Maximus, watching silent as the tomb from the impenetrable darkness of every cranny.

  He was waiting, and had no friends to attend him. She only recognized him from the glitter of his hair, a flickering focal point under a huge gold chandelier that must have held a hundred wicks. Various men in particolored togas stood far back, some clad in laena and apex, shoes without laces or buckles. Her breath caught as she finally understood: this was to be a marriage in the oldest form, confarreatio. He was marrying her for life; their union could never be dissolved, unlike an ordinary union. Appuleia’s hands pressed her down upon a conjoined seat draped with a sheepskin while the Rex Sacrorum did the same to Octavian. Other people stood in the shadows, but who they were she couldn’t see. Then Appuleia, acting as pronuba, flung a huge veil over both of them. Clad in the glory of a toga striped in purple and crimson, Messala Corvinus bound their hands together and said a few words in an archaic language Livia Drusilla had never heard before. Then Appuleia broke a cake of mola salsa in half and gave it to them to eat—a cloying unpleasantness of salt and dry spelt flour.

  The worst part was the sacrifice that followed, a messy struggle between Messala Corvinus and a squealing, screaming pig that had not been properly drugged—whose fault was that, who didn’t want this marriage? It would have escaped had it not been for the groom, who leaped from under the veil and grabbed the pig by one hind trotter, quietly laughing to himself. He was jubilant.

  Somehow it was done. Those witnessing and verifying the act of confarreatio—five members of the Livii and five members of the Octavii—melted away when it was over. A faint cry of “Feliciter!” came on the heavy air, rank with blood.

  A litter was waiting outside on the Sacra Via; she was put into it by men holding torches, for the ceremony had dragged on into the night. Livia Drusilla put her head on a soft pillow and let her eyelids fall. Such a long day for one entering her eighth month! Had any other woman ever been subjected to this? Surely it was unique in the annals of Rome.

  So she dozed as the litter heaved and creaked its hilly way up onto the Palatine, and was deeply asleep when the curtains parted to admit the glare of torches.

  “What? Where?” she ask
ed, confused, as hands helped her out.

  “You are home, domina,” said a female voice. “Come, walk with me. A bath is ready. Caesar will join you afterward. I am the chief among your servants, and my name is Sophonisba.”

  “I am so hungry!”

  “There will be food, domina. But first, a bath,” Sophonisba said, easing her out of the smelly bridal regalia.

  It is a dream, she thought, as she was conducted to a huge room that contained a table, two chairs, and, pushed into the corners, three tattered, lumpy couches. Octavian came in as she sat on one of the chairs; he was followed by several servants bearing dishes and plates, napkins, finger bowls, spoons.

  “I thought we’d eat country style, sitting at a table,” he said, occupying the other chair. “If we use a couch, I can’t look into your eyes.” His own eyes, gone gold in the lamplight, shone eerily. “Dark blue, with little fawnish stripes. How amazing!” He reached out to take her hand, kissed it. “You must be starving, so tuck in,” he said. “Oh, this is one of the greatest days of my life! I have married you, Livia Drusilla, confarreatio. There is no escape.”

  “I don’t want to escape,” she said, biting into a boiled egg and following that up with a wedge of crisp white bread dipped in oil. “I am indeed starving.”

  “Have a baby chicken. The cook basted it in honey and water.”

  Silence fell while she ate and he made an attempt to eat, busy watching her and noting that she was a dainty eater with exquisite manners. And, unlike his ugly members, her hands were perfectly formed, fingers tapering to manicured oval nails; they floated when they moved. Lovely, lovely hands! Rings, she must wear superb rings.