I Am Livia (44 page)

I did everything I could to bolster Tavius’s political position at this time, using the ties I had built up over years with senators and senators’ wives.
When Tavius was away from Rome, I kept in close touch with my web of informants and guarded his back.

Few senators loved Antony, but some thought he would rule with a looser rein than Tavius did, and preferred that. Others took Antony’s bribes.

When the two consuls, who favored Antony, plotted to arrange a Senate vote censuring Tavius—rebuking him for provoking war—I heard of it. I did not hesitate; I knew these men intended Tavius’s overthrow, and I immediately sent him warning. He came marching back to Rome, at the head of his legions. Indeed, he marched right into a Senate session. His opponents scattered. There was brawling in the streets, two days of uproar, though the outcome was never in doubt.
When the dust cleared, one-third of the Senate had raced off to join Antony.

At first I looked around me in disbelief. The harmony I had helped to cultivate had shattered. Then I felt relieved that at least we had held two-thirds of the Senate.

“I must know who is for me and who is against me,”
Tavius said.
We sat together in his study. His face was set in grim lines.

“Don’t you know by who has fled and who has no
t
?” I said, acid in my voice.

“I want my supporters to take a loyalty oath,” he said. “They must swear to back me in case of war.”

“Dearest, listen to me,” I said. “I don’t think Cleopatra and Antony have any intention of attacking now. It’s too great a risk. If they are looking anywhere for conquest, they are looking east.”

He shifted his shoulders. “Sooner or later they will want it all,” he said.

“Sooner or later? Sooner or later none of us will be alive!” I caught myself and spoke more calmly. “Why rush into a war that may not be necessary? When no one can say which side will win?”

He looked at me, his eyes guarded and opaque. “I have made no final decision.”

Up and down the length of Italy the armies took an oath of allegiance to him. Soon civilians were hustled into town squares, to take the oath too, because Caesar demanded it.

I hid what I thought of this oath-taking business even from my best friends, but not from Tavius. He knew I hated it as he knew I hated the thought of war. I had acted to protect him when the consuls plotted against him, but I could not give him the approval he wanted now.

I saw the horror of civil war coming closer and closer, and it was clear that my beloved husband planned to unleash it. He wished to preempt the possibility of war in the future, when he might be weaker and Antony stronger. He itched to avenge his sister’s wrongs. And most fundamentally, he was possessed by a vision. He believed he was meant to hold all of the Roman empire in his hands.

He and I had never been so separate.
When we talked of war and peace, my voice became more and more charged with desperation, his replies more and more curt.

If you are afraid, you will snatch eagerly at anything that might promise rescue.
When Octavia suddenly received a letter from Antony, my heart leaped with wild hope. I imagined a contrite missive, saying that he had parted from Cleopatra. But no. The letter concerned his children.

He had remembered he had left two sons in Tavius’s hands. Plainly he feared that in case of war they could be used against him as hostages, or that Tavius might simply murder them
.
A
ntony gave permission for his daughters to remain with Octavia, but he wanted his sons sent to him in Alexandria.

Tavius said, “Put them on the first ship out.” But Octavia pleaded that the boys be given a choice.

So, we had another of our grim family gatherings—Tavius, Octavia, and me, in a sitting room in the house in Rome, next to our own, that Tavius had bestowed on his sister.
We were joined by Antyllus, then not quite fifteen, and ten-year-old Jullus. They both came from the schoolroom, where they had been at work with their tutor. Jullus had been learning to write Greek letters on papyrus and had ink smeared on his fingers.

Tavius spoke somberly. “You two are not yet men,” he told the boys, “but—there’s no help for it—you each have to make a man’s decision now.”

He wanted them to realize that this was a choice of the gravest kind, that it might determine their whole future. The older boy understood. But little Jullus?

“You must either join your father or stay here with us. If you stay, I’ll treat you as my sister’s sons,”
Tavius said. “So long as you’re loyal to me, you’ll be members of my family. It’s up to you.”

“I want to go to my father!” Antyllus cried.

I saw Octavia shut her eyes in pain. But she said not a word.

Tavius turned to Jullus.

Looking at that boy, seeing his whole body tense, his eyes go wide, I pitied him. He shook and opened his mouth, but no words came out. Then he looked at Octavia, who had been a mother to him for as long as he could remember, and said, “I want to stay with you.”

“Traitor!” Antyllus cried.

Jullus flung himself into Octavia’s arms, and she held him while he sobbed.

“Miserable traitor! Father will win, and then you’ll be sorry! You’re siding with the enemy, don’t you know i
t
? You’re not my brother anymore. You—”

“Enough,”
Tavius said.

Antyllus clamped his mouth shut.

“Since you are your father’s son,”
Tavius said, “I don’t suppose you feel any gratitude toward my sister, who cared for you all these years?”

Antyllus straightened. “I do,” he said with a pained dignity. Looking at Octavia, he said, “I will always say you treated me as kindly as if you were my own mother.” She nodded to him and tried to smile. She still held his brother in her arms.
Antyllus turned back to Tavius. He sneered, and I saw a trace of Fulvia in his features. “When can I take ship for Alexandria? It can’t be soon enough.”

A former friend of Antony’s fled to our side, and whispered in Tavius’s ear that something in Antony’s will—which he claimed to have seen—was gravely discrediting. Following traditional practice, Antony had placed his will in the protection of the Vestal Virgins. Tavius said he meant to seize it.

“That would violate all custom,” I said. I almost added that it would violate all decency too.

“Do you love me?”

We were in our bedchamber when this conversation took place. “What a strange question for you to ask,” I said.

I remembered when in the early days of our marriage I had said I liked Sextus Pompey. How warily Tavius had regarded me, and how carefully I had chosen my words to convince him he had my deepest loyalty. He was looking at me now just as he looked at me then.

“Do you love me?” he asked again.

I drew closer to him. I stroked his cheek, and then traced the outline of his lips with my forefinger. He suffered this, an impassive expression on his face
.
A
t that moment, I ached with tenderness for him as I had not for a long time. I took his face in my hands and kissed him. “Of course I love you.”

“Then why are you seeking to protect my enemy?”

“I’m not. I’m afraid of war.”

“I have work still to do. I’ll come back and sleep later,” he said and walked out of the room.

I lay down on the bed
.
A
candle flickered on the bedside table.
When it died and plunged the room into darkness, he had still not returned.

The next day, he demanded Antony’s will from the Vestal Virgins. They refused to give it to him, so he led soldiers into their temple to confiscate it. In the will, Antony had directed that wherever he died, even if it were in Rome, his body was to be given to Cleopatra, and laid to rest not in Rome but in Alexandria.

You cannot say the words “foreign queen” often enough,
I had told Tavius. In the attack he made on Antony, standing before the Senate and holding up the will, he spoke those words again and again. His following my advice had a certain irony, for he excoriated Antony for being a woman’s obedient slave. He had been unmanned by Cleopatra! When Cleopatra ruled Rome, as she clearly meant to do, we would be governed not by consuls and generals but by hairdressers and perfumers, not to mention eunuchs. Antony, Tavius said, was a foreign queen’s plaything. He was no man, and he was certainly no patriot if he wanted to be buried away from Rome.

“Civil war again.” I choked on the words.

Tavius was on his feet, leaning back against the writing table in his study. I sat across from him on the couch.
We had had so many fruitful discussions in this room, had worked for Rome’s good here. “I won’t declare war on Antony but on Egypt—on Cleopatra,” he said.

As if that mattered. “My love, please don’t do this.”

Tavius sat down beside me and took my hands in his. “Livia, it has to be one empire. Has to be. How can I share rule with a man like Antony? It is unworkable.”

“But what if you lose?”

He looked at me as if he did not understand the language I spoke. He let go of my hands.

“What is all this to you?” I said. “Just another toss of the dice?”

“You know better than that,” he said. “I feel the weight of responsibility every moment of the day. But I have a destiny. I know what I can do for Rome, for the whole empire, how well I can govern.”

“My beloved, you
can
lose, you know
.
A
nd even if you don’t—think of the slaughter.”

“To have a destiny like mine is not always pleasant,” he said. “I would not recommend it to anyone who had a free choice. For one thing, it’s often lonely.”

“Oh, Tavius—
”
T
he distance between us seemed so great. It was all mixed together, our differences on the matter of war and peace, our inability to comfort each other after our baby died, the fact that he had lain with other women. All the accumulated discords and hurts of seven years of marriage formed a gulf at this moment.

I wanted to reach out to him, to take his hand again, but I did not. For some reason I could not.

“When I mention my destiny, you look at me as if I’m half-mad. I’m not. I see what is required of me, for Rome’s sake.” He spoke in a measured voice. I had the feeling he was striving to show me a serene surface.
Look how calm I am as we discuss this,
he was saying.
How can you possibly think I’m half-mad?

As if I were gazing at a stranger, I was struck by his flawless visage, his blue eyes and golden hair, the fine molding of his features. Even after years of marriage, there were moments when I would catch my breath looking at him, when his beauty still seemed almost godlike to me. I thought,
If he is a god, he is a god of destruction.
No, he was not mad, but he was about to ignite civil war.

Since our marriage, I had thought myself powerful. But now I saw that no real power had been mine. It had always all been his. I had possessed only a knack for wheedling favors.

“You’ll see,” he said. “I’ll win.”

“Tavius, please, please, if civil war must come again, let it be on Antony’s head. Not yours. Father Jupiter sees what we do. Do you doubt tha
t
? We have enough to pay for already, both of us. Beloved—” A well of grief and terror had opened inside me, and tears burned my eyes. Could no words reach him? “We’ve already been punished with the loss of a child. Do you want Julia and my boys to suffer too?”