“Yes, but…!” Antony kept shaking his head like a boxer on the receiving end of too many punches.
“Oh, come, Antonius, you know my brother! Though I love him dearly, I can see his faults. He’s too conscious of his status to want a half sister twenty years his junior—so undignified! Also, he feels Rome won’t take him seriously if his youth is reinforced by a baby sister who is public knowledge. It didn’t help that Marcia was conceived so soon after our poor stepfather’s death. Rome has long forgiven Mama her slip, but Caesar never will. Besides, Marcia came to me before she could walk, and people lose count.” She chuckled. “Those who meet the members of my nursery assume she’s mine because she looks like me.”
“Do you love children so much?”
“Love is too small a word, too abused and misused. I would give my life for a child, literally.”
“Without caring whose the child is.”
“Exactly. I have always believed that children are people’s chance to do something heroic with their lives—try to see that all their own mistakes are rectified rather than repeated.”
Next morning the late Marcellus Minor’s servants took the children to Pompey the Great’s marble palace on the Carinae, those doomed to stay and mind Marcellus Minor’s house weeping because they were losing the lady Octavia. The house they now had to care for belonged to little Marcellus, but he would not be able to live in it for years to come. Antony, who was executor of the will, had decided not to rent it out in the meantime, but his secretary, Lucilius, was a strict superviser and caretaker. No chance to idle and let the place decay.
At twilight Antony carried his new bride over the threshold of Pompey’s palace, a house that had seen Pompey carry Julia over the same threshold into six years of bliss that had ended with her death in childbirth. Let that not be my fate, Octavia thought, a little breathless at the ease with which her husband scooped her up, then set her down to receive the fire and the water, pass her hands through them, and thereby assume her station as mistress of the household. What seemed like a hundred servants watched, sighing and cooing, breaking into soft applause. The lady Octavia’s reputation as the kindest and most understanding of women had gone before her. The older among them, especially the steward Egon, dreamed that the place would bloom as it had under Julia; to them, Fulvia had been demanding, yet uninterested in domestic matters.
It hadn’t escaped Octavia’s attention that her brother looked as pleased as complacent, though precisely why was beyond her. Yes, he hoped to heal the breach by masterminding this marriage, but what could he possibly gain from it if it foundered, as all who attended the ceremony privately judged it would? Yet more frightening was Octavia’s presentiment that Caesar was counting on its collapse. Well, she vowed, it won’t fail because of me!
Her first night with Antony was sheer pleasure, a far greater pleasure than all her nights with Marcellus Minor combined. That her new husband liked women was evident in the way he touched her, rumbled his own delight in being close to her. Somehow he stripped her of a lifetime’s inhibitions, welcomed her caresses and small purrs of astonished joy, let her explore him as if he had never been explored before. For Octavia he was a perfect lover, sensuous as well as sensual, and not, as she had expected, concerned only with his own desires. Words of love and acts of love fused into a fiery continuum of bliss so wonderful she wept. By the time she fell into a dazed and ecstatic sleep, she would have died for him as cheerfully as she would have for a child.
And in the morning she learned that Antony too was affected in equal measure; when she tried to leave the bed to see to her duties, it all began again, more beautifully because of the slight sense of familiarity, and more satisfying because of her increased awareness of what she needed and he was so happy to provide.
Oh, excellent! thought Octavian when he saw the couple two days later at a dinner given by Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. I was right, they are so opposite that they have enchanted each other. Now I just have to wait for him to grow tired of her. He will. He will! I must offer to Quirinus so that he leaves her for an alien love, not a Roman one, and to Jupiter Best and Greatest that Rome will profit from his inevitable disenchantment with my sister. Look at him, oozing love, sloppy with it! As full of sentimentality as a fifteen-year-old girl. How I despise people who succumb to such a trivial, unappealing disease! It will never happen to me, so much I know. My mind rules my emotions, I am not vulnerable to this saccharine business. How can Octavia fall for his act? She’ll hold him in thrall for at least two years, but longer than that—hardly likely. Her goodness and sweetness of nature are a novelty to him, but as he’s neither good nor sweet-natured, his fascination with virtue will pall, then pass in a typically Antonian tempest of revulsion.
I will work indefatigably to spread word of this marriage far and wide, set my agents to talking of it incessantly in every city, town, and municipium in Italia and Italian Gaul. Until now I have kept them pleading my own case, enumerating the perfidies of Sextus Pompeius, describing the indifference of Marcus Antonius to his homeland’s plight. But during this coming winter they will cease most of that in favor of singing the praises not of this union per se, but of the lady Octavia, sister of Caesar and the personification of everything a Roman matron should be. I will erect those statues of her, as many as I can afford, and keep adding to them until the peninsula groans under their weight. Ah, I can see it now! Octavia, chaste and virtuous as Lucretia the dishonored; Octavia, more worthy of respect than a Vestal Virgin; Octavia, tamer of the irresponsible lout Marcus Antonius; Octavia, the person who single-handedly saved her country from the evils of civil war. Yes, Octavia Pudica must have all the credit! By the time my agents get through with the business, Octavia Pudica will be as close to a goddess as Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi! So that when Antonius abandons her, every Roman and Italian will condemn him as a brute, a heartless monster ruled by lust.
Oh, if only I could see into the future! If only I knew the identity of the woman for whom Antonius will desert Octavia Pudica! I will offer to every Roman god that she be someone every Roman and Italian can hate, hate, hate. If possible, shift the blame of Antonius’s conduct to her influence over him. I will paint her as wicked as Circe, as vain as Helen of Troy, as malignant as Medea, as cruel as Clytemnestra, as lethal as Medusa. And if she is none of those, I will make her seem all of those. Set my agents to a new whispering campaign, create a demon out of this unknown woman in the same way as I am about to create a goddess out of my sister.
There are more ways to bring a man down than to go to war against him—how wasteful that is in lives and prosperity! How much money it costs! Money that should be going to the greater glory of Rome.
Watch out for me, Antonius! But you won’t, because you think me as ineffectual as effeminate. I am not Divus Julius, no, but I am a worthy heir to his name. Veil your eyes, Antonius, be blind. I’ll get you, even at the cost of my beloved sister’s happiness. If Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi had not had a life pervaded by pain and disappointment, Roman women would not lay flowers on her tomb. So will it be for Octavia Pudica.
9
Dazzled by the vision of the Triumvir Antony and the Triumvir Octavian walking around together like old and dear friends, Rome rejoiced that winter, hailing it as the beginning of the Golden Age the prognosticators kept insisting was knocking on humanity’s door. Helped by the fact that both the Triumvir Antony’s wife and the Triumvir Octavian’s wife were pregnant. Having ascended so high into the aether of creative transfiguration that he didn’t know how to get down again, Virgil wrote his Fourth Eclogue and predicted the birth of the child who would save the world. The more cynical were laying bets on whether the Triumvir Antony’s son or the Triumvir Octavian’s son was the Chosen Child, and nobody stopped to think of daughters. The Tenth Era would not be ushered in by a girl, so much was sure.
Not that all was really well. The secret trial of Quintus Salvidienus Rufus was talked about, even if no one but the members of
the Senate knew what evidence was presented and what Salvidienus said as he and his advocates conducted his defense. The verdict shocked; it was a relatively long time since a Roman had been put to death for treason. Exiles aplenty, yes, proscription lists aplenty, yes, but not a formal trial in the Senate that exacted the death penalty, which could not be levied upon a Roman citizen, hence the fiasco of first removing the citizenship, then the head. There had been a treason court, and though it had not functioned in some years, it was still on the tablets. So why secrecy, and why the Senate?
No sooner had the Senate disposed of Salvidienus than Herod was seen flaunting his Tyrian purple and gold outfit on the streets of Rome. He put up at the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius, quite the most expensive hostelry in town, where from its best suite of rooms he began to distribute largesse to certain needy senators. His petition to the Senate to appoint him King of the Jews was properly presented in the Senaculum before a senatorial gathering that numbered slightly over a quorum only because of his liberal largesse and the presence of Mark Antony at his side. The whole business was hypothetical anyway, since Antigonus was King of the Jews with the sanction of the Parthians and unlikely to be dethroned at any time in the foreseeable future; Parthians or no, the vast majority of the Jews wanted Antigonus.
“Where did you get all this money?” Antony asked as they went into the Senaculum, a tiny building adjacent to the temple of Concord at the foot of the Capitoline Mount. Here the Senate saw foreigners, who were not permitted into the House.
“From Cleopatra,” said Herod.
The massive hands clenched. “Cleopatra?”
“Yes, and what’s so amazing about that?”
“She’s too stingy to give money to anyone.”
“But her son isn’t, and he rules her. Besides, I had to agree to pay her the revenues from Jericho balsam when I’m King.”
“Ah!”
Herod got his senatus consultum, which officially confirmed him as King of the Jews.
“Now all you have to do is win your kingdom,” said Quintus Dellius over a delicious dinner; the inn’s cooks were famous.
“I know, I know!” Herod snapped.
“It wasn’t I who pinched Judaea,” Dellius said reproachfully, “so why take it out on me?”
“Because you’re here under my nose shoveling sow’s udder into your maw at the rate of one drop of Jericho balsam per bite! Do you think Antonius will ever get off his arse to fight Pacorus? He hasn’t even mentioned a Parthian campaign.”
“He can’t. He needs to be within watching distance of that sweet boy, Octavianus.”
“Oh, the whole world knows that!” Herod said impatiently.
“Speaking of sweet things, Herod, what’s happened to your hopes of Mariamne? Won’t Antigonus have her married already?”
“He can’t marry her himself, he’s her uncle, and he’s too afraid of his relatives to give her to one of them.” Herod grinned and flopped over on his back, flapping pudgy hands. “Besides, he doesn’t have her. I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I took her away and hid her just before Jerusalem fell.”
“Aren’t you the clever one?” Dellius spotted a new delicacy. “How many drops of Jericho balsam are there in these stuffed wrens?”
These and various other incidents paled before the true, ongoing problem Rome had faced ever since the death of Caesar: the grain supply. Having promised faithfully to be good, Sextus Pompey was back raiding the sea lanes and making off with shipments of wheat before the wax on the Pact of Brundisium was fully cured. He grew bolder, actually sending detachments of men ashore on to Italian soil wherever there was a concentration of granaries, and stole wheat no one had dreamed vulnerable. When the price of public grain soared up to forty sesterces for a six-day ration, rioting broke out in Rome and every Italian city of any size. There was a free grain dole available to the poorest citizens, but Divus Julius had halved it to one hundred and fifty thousand recipients by introducing a means test. But that, screamed the furious crowds, was when wheat fetched ten sesterces the modius, not forty! The free grain dole list should be expanded to include people who couldn’t afford to pay quadruple the old price. When the Senate refused this demand, the rioting grew more serious than at any time since the days of Saturninus.
An awkward situation for Antony, obliged to witness at first hand how critical an issue the grain supply had become, and aware that he, and no one else, had enabled Sextus Pompey to continue operating.
Stifling a sigh, Antony abandoned all thought of using two hundred talents he had put aside for his pleasures on those same pleasures; instead, he used it to buy sufficient grain to feed an extra hundred and fifty thousand citizens, thereby earning an unmerited adulation from the Head Count. Where had this windfall come from? No less than Pythodorus of Tralles. Antony had offered this plutocrat his daughter Antonia Minor—homely, obese, and mentally dull—in return for two hundred talents of hard cash. Pythodorus, still in his prime, had jumped at the offer; bawling like a motherless calf, Antonia Minor was already on her way to Tralles and something called a husband. Bawling like a calfless cow, Antonia Hybrida proceeded to let all of Rome know what had happened to her daughter.
“What a despicable thing to do!” Octavian cried, seeking his inimicus Antony out.
“Despicable? Despicable? First of all, she’s my daughter and I can marry her to whomsoever I please!” roared Antony, taken aback at this new manifestation of Octavian’s temerity. “Secondly, the price I got for her has fed twice as many citizens for a month and a half! Talk about ingratitude! You can criticize, Octavianus, when you produce a daughter capable of doing a tenth as much for the Head Count paupers as mine has!”
“Gerrae,” said Octavian scornfully. “Until you got to Rome and saw for yourself what’s going on, you had every intention of keeping the money to pay your ever-mounting bills! The poor girl hasn’t a particle of sense to help her understand her fate—you might at least have sent her mother with her instead of leaving the woman in Rome to mourn her loss into any ear willing to listen!”
“Since when have you grown feelings? Mentulam caco!”
While Octavian retched with disgust at this obscenity, Antony stormed off in a rage even Octavia found it difficult to mollify.
At which point Gnaeus Asinius Pollio, a fully fledged consul at last by virtue of his having assumed his regalia, made his offering, and taken his oath of office, stepped into the picture. He had wondered what he might do to ennoble two months’ worth of office, and now he had the answer: bring Sextus Pompey to his senses. A certain fairness of mind told him that this lesser son of a greater man had a modicum of right on his side; seventeen when his father was murdered in Egypt, not yet twenty when his older brother died after Munda, he had had to stand by impotent while a vindictive Senate and People forced him into a life of outlawry by refusing to allow him an opportunity to repair the fortunes of his family. All it would have taken to avoid this present ghastly situation was a senatorial decree allowing him to come home and inherit his father’s position and wealth. But the former was deliberately tarnished to enhance the reputation of his enemies, and the latter had long disappeared into the bottomless pit of funding civil war.
Still, thought Pollio, summoning Antony, Octavian, and Maecenas to a meeting at his house, I can attempt to make our Triumvirs see that something positive has to be done.
“If it isn’t,” he said over watered wine in his study, “it will not be very long before everyone present in this room will be dead at the hands of the mob. Since the mob has no idea how to rule, a new set of masters of Rome will come into being—men whose names I cannot even guess, they will rise so high from such depths. Now this is not what I want as an end to my life. What I want is to retire, my brow wreathed in laurels, to write a history of our turbulent times.”
“Such a beautiful turn of phrase,” Maecenas murmured when his two superiors said nothing at all.
“What are y
ou saying exactly, Pollio?” Octavian asked after a long pause. “That we who have suffered this irresponsible thief for years, seen the Treasury’s coffers depleted because of his activities, should now turn around and laud him? Tell him that all is forgiven and he can come home? Pah!”
“Here, now,” said Antony, looking statesmanlike, “that’s a little harsh, isn’t it? Pollio’s contention that Sextus isn’t all bad has some justice. Personally, I’ve always felt Sextus was hard done by, hence my reluctance, Octavianus, to stamp on the boy—young man, I mean.”
“You hypocrite!” Octavian cried, angrier than anyone there had ever seen him. “Easy for you to be kind and understanding, you lump of inertia, idling away your winters in debauchery while I struggle to feed four million people! And where is the money I need to do that? Why, in that pathetic, dispossessed, incredibly wronged boy’s vaults! For vaults he must have, he’s squeezed me of so much! And when he squeezes me, Antonius, he squeezes Rome and Italia!”
Maecenas reached out and laid his hand on Octavian’s shoulder; it looked gentle, but the fingers bit in so hard that Octavian winced, shrugged it off.
“I didn’t ask you to come here today to listen to what are essentially personal differences,” Pollio said strongly. “I’ve asked you in order to see if between us we can work out a way to deal with Sextus Pompeius that will be considerably cheaper than a war on the sea. The answer is negotiation, not conflict! And I expected you for one to see that, Octavianus.”
“I’d sooner make a pact with Pacorus that gave him all the East,” said Octavian.
“You’re beginning to sound as if you don’t want a solution,” Antony said.
“I do want a solution! The only one! Namely, to burn every last one of his ships, execute his admirals, sell his crews and soldiers into slavery, and leave him free to emigrate to Scythia! For until we admit that is what we have to do, Sextus Pompeius will continue to starve Rome and Italia at his whim! The wretch has neither substance nor honor!”