Antony and Cleopatra (24 page)

The Pact of Puteoli was concluded with Sextus Pompey late in summer. What Antony thought he didn’t divulge, but Octavian knew that Sextus wouldn’t behave like an honorable man; at heart he was a Picentine warlord degenerated into a pirate, and incapable of keeping his word. In return for agreeing to allow the free passage of grain to Italia, Sextus received official acknowledgment of his governorships of Sicilia, Sardinia, and Corsica; he also received the Greek Peloponnese, a thousand silver talents, and the right to be elected consul in four years’ time, with Libo to follow him as consul the following year. A farce, as everybody understood who had a brain larger than a pea. How you must be laughing, Sextus Pompeius, thought Octavian, fresh from the fray.

In May, Octavian’s wife Scribonia gave birth to a girl whom Octavian named Julia. Late in June, Octavia gave birth to a daughter, Antonia.

One of the clauses of the contract with Sextus Pompey said that whatever exiles remained could come home. That included the exclusive Tiberius Claudius Nero, who hadn’t felt that the Pact of Brundisium offered him sufficient protection. So he had stayed on in Athens until now, when he decided he could go back to Rome with relative impunity. It was difficult, as Nero’s fortune had dwindled to an alarming low. Part of that was his own fault, as he had invested unwisely in the
publicani
companies that farmed the revenues of Asia Province and found themselves ejected after Quintus Labienus and his Parthian mercenaries invaded Caria, Pisidia, Lycia—their richest pickings. But part of it too was through no fault of his own, save that a cleverer man would have remained in Italy to foster his wealth rather than fled to leave it at the disposal of unscrupulous Greek freedmen and inert bankers.

Thus the Tiberius Claudius Nero who returned home in the early autumn was so financially chastened that he proved poor company for his wife. His pecuniary resources just stretched to the hire of one litter and an open cart for his baggage. Though he had given Livia Drusilla permission to share this conveyance, she declined without offering either of her reasons: one, that the bearers were a thin, sorry lot just able to lift the litter with Nero and his son aboard, and two, that she loathed being close to her husband and son. As the party traveled at walking pace, Livia Drusilla walked. The weather was idyllic—a warm sun, a cool breeze, plenty of shade, a haunting perfume of browned grass and the aromatic herbs farmers grew to discourage pests through winter. Nero preferred to go on the road, Livia Drusilla to use its verge, where daisies made a white carpet for her feet, and early apples and late pears could be plucked from wind-sown orchard escapees. As long as she didn’t stray out of sight of Nero in the litter, the world was her own.

At Teanum Sidicinum they left the Via Appia in favor of the inland Via Latina; those who continued to Rome on the Via Appia through the Pomptine Marshes risked their lives, for the region was riddled with the ague.

Just outside Fregellae they put up in a modest hostelry that could offer a proper bath, something Nero ordered avidly.

“Don’t empty the water after my son and I have finished,” he commanded. “My wife can use it.”

In their room he gazed at her with a frown; heart beating faster, she wondered what her face had betrayed, but stood, demure and complaisant, to receive what she knew from long experience was going to be a homily.

“We draw near to Rome, Livia Drusilla, and I shall require that you exert every possible effort not to overspend,” he instructed her. “Little Tiberius will need a pedagogue next year—an unwelcome expense—but it is up to you to economize sufficiently in the meantime to make that less of a burden. No new dresses, no jewelry, and definitely no special servants like hairdressers or cosmeticians. Is that quite clear?”

“Yes, husband,” Livia Drusilla answered dutifully, and with an internal sigh. Not because she yearned for hairdressers or their like, but because she hungered so desperately for peace, for a secure, uncritical life. She wanted a haven wherein she could read whatever she wanted, or choose a menu irrespective of cost, or not be held responsible for servile embezzlements. She wanted to be adored, to see ordinary faces light up at the mention of her name. Like Octavia, the exalted wife of Marcus Antonius, whose statues stood in the marketplaces of Beneventum, Capua, Teanum Sidicinum. What had she done, after all, except marry a Triumvir? Yet people hymned her as if she were a goddess, prayed that one day they would see her journey between Rome and Brundisium. People kept raving about her, attributing the peace to her. Oh, would that she were an Octavia! But who cared about the wife of a patrician nobleman if his name was Tiberius Claudius Nero?

He was staring at her, puzzled; Livia Drusilla came out of her reverie with a jolt, licked her lips.

“You have something you wish to say?” he asked coldly.

“Yes, husband.”

“Then speak, woman!”

“I am expecting another baby. Another son, I think. My symptoms are identical to those I had with Tiberius.”

First came shock, then, crowding on its heels, displeasure. His mouth turned down, he ground his teeth. “Oh, Livia Drusilla! Couldn’t you have managed things better? I can’t afford a second baby, especially another son! You’d better go to the Bona Dea and ask for the medicine as soon as we’re in Rome.”

“I fear it may be a little late for that,
domine
.”

“Cacat!”
he said savagely. “How long?”

“Almost two months, I think. The medicine should be taken within six
nundinae
, I am already seven.”

“Even so, you will take it.”

“Certainly.”

“Of all the nuisances!” he cried, throwing his clenched fists in the air. “Go away, woman! Go away and let me bathe in peace!”

“Do you still want Tiberius to join you?”

“Tiberius is my joy and consolation, of course I do!”

“Then may I go for a walk to see the old town?”

“As far as I’m concerned, wife, you can walk over a cliff!”

Fregellae had been a ghost town for eighty-five years, sacked by Lucius Opimius for rebelling against Rome in the days when the peninsula had been tesselated with Italian states interspersed with Roman “colonies” of citizens. The injustice of this cavalier treatment had finally led the Italian states to unite and attempt to throw off the Roman yoke. The bitter war that ensued had many causes, but it commenced with the assassination of Livia Drusilla’s adoptive grandfather, the tribune of the plebs Marcus Livius Drusus.

Perhaps because she knew all that, sore of heart and fighting tears, his granddaughter drifted among crumbled walls and old buildings still standing. Oh, how
dared
Nero treat her so! How could he blame her pregnancy on her, who, if given the opportunity, would never enter his bed? Detestation, she was discovering, had grown amain since Athens; the dutiful wife was no less dutiful, but she abominated every moment of that duty.

Of her grandfather she knew, but what she didn’t know was that fifty years earlier Lucius Cornelius Sulla had taken this same walk, pondering what the slaughter had been for, looking at the crimson poppies fertilized by Italian and Roman blood, the sleek domes of skulls with yellow daisies fluttering in their orbits like coquettish eyes, and asked himself the question no man has ever been able to answer—why do we go to war on our brothers? And, like him, as she walked Livia Drusilla saw a Roman advancing on her through the shimmer of tears, and wondered if he were real or surreal. At first she looked about furtively for a place to hide, but as he drew closer she subsided on to the selfsame column drum Gaius Marius had used as a seat, and waited for the man to reach her.

He was wearing a purple-bordered toga, and crowned with a cap of luxuriant gold hair; his gait was graceful and assured, the body under its capacious wrapping slender, young. Then when he was within scant paces of her his face swam into focus. Very smooth, beautiful, stern yet gentle, with silver eyes fringed in gold. Livia Drusilla looked, mouth falling open.

Octavian too had needed to escape; sometimes people wearied him, no matter how well meant their attentions or how indisputable their loyalty. And old Fregellae lay close by Fabrateria Nova, the town built to replace it. Soaking up the sun, he lifted his face to the cloudless sky and let his mind wander without direction, something he didn’t do very often. This ruined place held an odd seduction, perhaps because of its quietness; the hum of bees instead of human marketplace chatter, the faint song of some lyrical bird rather than a marketplace busker. Peace! How beautiful, how needed!

It may have been because he allowed his mind this grace of liberty that a loneliness invaded him; for once in his busy life he became conscious that no one in it was there just for
him
—oh, yes, Agrippa, yet that wasn’t what he meant. Someone just for
him
in the way a mother or a wife should be, that delicious compound of femininity and selfless devotion Octavia gave to Antonius or—curse her!—Mama had given to Philippus Junior. But no, he wouldn’t think of Atia and her unchastity! Better to think of his sister, the sweetest Roman woman who ever lived. Why should so much contentment be given to a boor like Antonius? Why didn’t he have his own Octavia, different though she would be from his sister?

He became aware that someone was walking the desolate stone stumps of Fregellae, a woman who, upon sight of him, looked ready to flee; then she sank onto a column drum and sat, the tears on her cheeks glinting in the strong light. At first he thought her a visitation, then, pausing, acknowledged that she was real. The most bewitching little face turned first to him, then stared at the ground. A pair of beautiful hands fluttered, were folded on her lap; no jewels adorned them, but nothing else about her spoke of humble origins. This was a great lady, he knew it in his bones. Some instinct within him leaped free of its cage and shrieked so ecstatically that suddenly he understood its godly message: she had been sent to him, a divine gift he couldn’t—wouldn’t!—spurn. He almost cried aloud to his divine father, then shook his head. Speak to
her,
break the spell!

“Do I disturb you?” he asked, smiling a wonderful smile.

“No, no!” she gasped, wiping the last of the tears from her face. “No!”

He sat down at her feet, gazing up at her with a quizzical expression, those amazing eyes suddenly tender. “For a moment I thought you were the goddess of the marketplace,” he said, “and now I see grief that might be mourning for the fate of Fregellae. But you aren’t a goddess—yet. One day I’ll turn you into one.”

Heady stuff! She didn’t understand, deemed him slightly mad. Yet in an instant, in less time than it takes lightning to strike, she fell in love. “I had a little leisure,” she said, throat tight, “and I wanted to see the ruins. They’re so peaceful—how I long for peace!” The last was said with passion.

“Oh, yes, once men are finished with a place, it’s shorn of all its terrors. It emanates the peace of death, but you’re too young to be preparing for death. My great-great uncle, Gaius Marius, once met another of my great-great uncles, Sulla, here amid the desolation. A kind of respite. Both of them were busy making other places as dead as Fregellae, you see.”

“And have you done that too?” she asked.

“Not deliberately. I’d rather build than destroy. Though I will never rebuild Fregellae. It’s my monument to you.”

More madness! “You joke, and I am an undeserving object.”

“How could I joke, when I’ve seen your tears? Why weep?”

“Self-pity,” she said honestly.

“The answer of a good wife. You are a good wife, aren’t you?”

She looked at her plain gold wedding ring. “I try to be, but sometimes it’s hard.”

“It wouldn’t be, were I your husband. Who is he?”

“Tiberius Claudius Nero.”

His breath hissed. “Ah! That one. And you are?”

“Livia Drusilla.”

“Of a fine old family. An heiress too.”

“Not anymore. My dowry is gone.”

“Nero spent it, you imply.”

“After we fled, yes. I’m really a Claudian of the Nerones.”

“So your husband is your first cousin. Have you children?”

“One, a boy aged four.” Her black lashes dropped. “And one in my womb. I am to take the medicine,” she said—
Ecastor
, what made her tell a complete stranger that?

“Do you want to take the medicine?”

“Yes, and no.”

“Why yes?”

“I don’t like my husband or my first born.”

“And why no?”

“Because I have a feeling there will be no more children from my womb. Bona Dea spoke to me when I offered to her in Capua.”

“I’ve just come from Capua, but I didn’t see you there.”

“Nor I, you.”

A silence fell, honeyed and serene, its periphery of larks singing and small insects chirruping in the grass an intrinsic part of it, as if even silence was layered.

I am in the grip of an enchantment, Livia Drusilla thought. “I could sit here forever,” she said huskily.

“And I, but only if you were with me.”

Fearing that he would move to touch her and she would not have the strength to push him away, she broke the mood in a brisk voice. “You wear the
toga praetexta
, but you’re too young. Does that mean you’re one of Octavianus’s minions?”

“I am not a minion. I am Caesar.”

She jumped to her feet. “Octavianus? You are Octavianus?”

“I decline to answer to that name,” he said, but not angrily. “I am Caesar, Divi Filius. One day I will be Caesar Romulus by a decree of the Senate ratified by the People. When I’ve conquered my enemies and have no peer.”

“My husband is your avowed enemy.”

“Nero?” He laughed, genuinely amused. “Nero is a nothing.”

“He is my husband and the arbiter of my fate.”

“You mean you are his property, more like. I know him! Too many men lump their wives in with their beasts and their slaves. A great pity, Livia Drusilla. I think a wife should be a man’s most precious colleague, not a chattel.”