The First Man in Rome (64 page)
In true Roman style, even on the side of the vacant block its outside walls were windowless, for when a house was built there again, its outside walls would fuse to Drusus's. A high wall with a strong wooden door in it as well as a pair of freight gates fronted onto the Clivus Victoriae, and was actually the back of the house; the front of the house overlooked the view, was three storeys high, and was built out on piers fixed firmly in the slope of the cliff. The top floor, level with the Clivus Victoriae, housed the noble family; the storage rooms and kitchens and servants' quarters were below, and did not run the full depth of the block because of its abrupt slope.
The freight gates in the wall along the street opened directly into the peristyle-garden, which was so large it contained six wonderful, fully grown lotus trees imported as saplings from Africa ninety years before by Scipio Africanus, who had owned the site at the time. Every summer they bloomed a drooping rain of blossom—two red, two orange, and two deep yellow—that lasted for over a month and filled the whole house with perfume; later they were gracefully provided with a thin cover of pale-green fernlike compound leaves; and in winter they were bare, permitting every morsel of sunlight tenure in the courtyard. A long thin shallow pool faced with pure-white marble had four beautiful matching bronze fountains by the great Myron, one on each corner, and other full-scale bronze statues by Myron and Lysippus ranged down the length of either side of the pool—satyrs and nymphs, Artemis and Actaeon, Dionysos and Orpheus. All these bronzes were painted in startlingly lifelike verisimilitude, so that the courtyard at first glance suggested a congress of woodsy immortals.
A Doric colonnade ran down either side of the peristyle-garden and across the side opposite the street wall, supported by wooden columns painted yellow, their bases and capitals picked out in bright colors. The floors of the colonnade were of polished terrazzo, the walls along its back vividly painted in greens and blues and yellows, and hung in the spaces between earth-red pilasters were some of the world's greatest paintings—a child with grapes by Zeuxis, a "Madness of Ajax" by Parrhasius, some nude male figures by Timanthes, one of the portraits of Alexander the Great by Apelles, and a horse by Apelles so lifelike it seemed tethered to the wall when viewed from the far side of the colonnade.
The study opened onto the back colonnade to one side of big bronze doors; the dining room opened onto it to the other side. And beyond that was a magnificent atrium as large as the whole Caesar house, lit by a rectangular opening in the roof supported by columns at each of the four corners and on the long sides of the pool below. The walls were painted in trompe l'oeil realism to simulate pilasters, dadoes, entablatures, and between these were panels of black-and-white cubes so three-dimensional they leaped out at the beholder, and panels of swirling flowerlike patterns; the colors were vivid, mostly reds, with blues and greens and yellows.
The ancestral cupboards containing the wax masks of the Livius Drusus ancestors were all perfectly kept up, of course; painted pedestals called herms because they were adorned with erect male genitalia supported busts of ancestors, or gods, or mythical women, or Greek philosophers, all exquisitely painted to appear real. Full-length statues, each painted to simulate life, stood around the
impluvium
pool and the walls, some on marble plinths, some on the ground. Great silver and gold chandeliers dangled from the ornate plaster ceiling an immense distance above (it was painted to resemble a starlit sky between ranks of gilded plaster flowers), or stood seven and eight feet tall on the floor, which was a colored mosaic depicting the revels of Bacchus and his Bacchantes dancing and drinking, feeding deer, teaching lions to quaff wine.
Drusus didn't notice any of the magnificence, for he was inured to it, and rather impervious to it as well; it had been his father and his grandfather who dabbled with perfect taste in works of art.
The steward found Drusus's sister outside on the loggia, which opened off the front of the atrium. She was always alone, Livia Drusa, and always lonely. The house was so big she couldn't even plead that she needed the exercise of walking on the streets outside, and when she fancied a shopping spree, her brother simply summoned several whole shops and stalls to his house, and had the vendors spread out their wares in some of the suites along the colonnade, and ordered the steward to pay for whatever Livia Drusa chose. Where both the Julias had trotted all over the more respectable parts of Rome under the eye of their mother or trusted servants, and Aurelia visited relatives and school friends constantly, and the Clitumnas and Nicopolises of Rome lived so free a life they even reclined to dine, Livia Drusa was absolutely cloistered, the prisoner of a wealth and exclusivity so great it forbade its women any egress; she was also the victim of her mother's escape, her mother's present freedom to do as she liked.
Livia Drusa had been ten years old when her mother— a Cornelia of the Scipios—had left the house the Livius Drusus family had then lived in; she had passed then into the complete care of her indifferent father—who preferred to walk slowly along his colonnades looking at his masterpieces—and a series of maidservants and tutors who were all far too afraid of the Livius Drusus power to make themselves her friends. Her older brother, fifteen at the time, she hardly saw at all. And three years after her mother had departed with her little brother, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus, as he now had to be called, they had moved from the old house to this vast mausoleum; and she was lost, a tiny atom moving aimlessly amid an eternity of empty space, deprived of love, conversation, companionship, notice. When her father died almost immediately after the move, his passing made no difference.
So unacquainted was she with laughter that when from time to time it floated up from the servants' crowded airless cells below, she wondered what it was, why they did it. The only world she had found to love lay within the cylinders of books, for no one stopped her reading and writing. So she did both for a great deal of every one of her days, thrilling to the repercussions of the wrath of Achilles and the deeds of Greeks and Trojans, lit up by tales of heroes, monsters, gods, and the mortal girls they seemed to hanker after as more desirable than immortals. And when she had managed to deal with the awful shock of the physical manifestations of puberty—for there was no one to tell her what was the matter or what to do—her hungry and passionate nature discovered the wealth of poetry written about love. As fluent in Greek as in Latin, she discovered Alcman— who had invented the love poem (or so it was said)—and passed to Pindar's maiden songs, and Sappho, and Asclepiades. Old Sosius of the Argiletum, who occasionally simply bundled up whatever he had and sent the buckets of books to Drusus's house, had no idea who the reader was; he just assumed the reader was Drusus. So shortly after Livia Drusa turned seventeen, he began to send her the works of the new poet Meleager, who was very much alive and very much attracted to lust as well as love. More fascinated than shocked, Livia Drusa found the literature of eroticism, and thanks to Meleager sexually awoke at last.
Not that it did her any good; she went nowhere, saw no one. In that house, it would have been unthinkable to make overtures to a slave, or for a slave to make overtures to Livia Drusa. Sometimes she met the friends of her brother Drusus, but only in passing. Except, that is, for his best friend, Caepio Junior. And Caepio Junior—short-legged, pimply faced, homely by any standard—she identified with the buffoons in Menander's plays, or the loathsome Thersites whom Achilles slew with one blow from his hand after Thersites accused the great hero of making love to the corpse of the Amazon queen Penthesileia.
It wasn't that Caepio Junior ever did anything to remind her forcibly of either buffoons or Thersites; only that in her starved imagination she had gifted these types of men with the face of Caepio Junior. Her favorite ancient hero was King Odysseus (she thought of him in Greek, so gave him the Greek version of his name), for she liked his brilliant way of solving everybody else's dilemmas, and found his wooing of his wife and then his wife's twenty-year duel of wits with her suitors as she waited for Odysseus to come home the most romantic and satisfying of all the Homeric love stories. And Odysseus she had gifted with the face of the young man she had seen once or twice only on the loggia of the house below Drusus's. This was the house of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who had two sons; but neither of his sons was the young man on his loggia, for them she had met in passing when they came to visit her brother.
Odysseus had red hair, and he was left-handed (though had she read a little more intently and discovered that he owned a pair of legs far too short for his trunk, she might have lost her enthusiasm for him, as short legs were Livia Drusa's pet hate); so too the strange young man on Domitius Ahenobarbus's loggia. He was very tall, his shoulders were wide, and his toga sat upon him in a way suggesting that the rest of his body was powerfully slender. In the sun his red hair glittered, and his head on its long neck was very proud, the head of a king like Odysseus. Even at the distance from which she had seen him, the young man's masterfully beaked nose was apparent, but she could distinguish nothing else of his face—even so, she knew in her bones that his eyes would be large and luminous and grey, as were the eyes of King Odysseus of Ithaca.
So when she read the scorching love poems of Meleager, she insinuated herself into the role of the girl or the young boy being assaulted by the poet, and always the poet was the young man on Ahenobarbus's balcony. If she thought of Caepio Junior at all, it was with a grimace of distaste.
"Livia Drusa, Marcus Livius wants to see you in his study at once," said the steward, breaking into her dream, which was of remaining on the loggia long enough to see the red-haired stranger emerge onto the loggia thirty feet below.
But of course the summons pre-empted her wishes; she turned and followed the steward inside.
Drusus was studying a paper on his desk, but looked up as soon as his sister entered the room, his face displaying a calm, indulgent, rather remote interest.
"Sit down," he said, indicating the chair on the client's side of his table.
She sat and watched him with equal calm and equal lack of humor; she had never heard Drusus laugh, and rarely seen him smile. The same could he have said of her.
A little alarmed, Livia Drusa realized that he was studying her with more intentness than usual. His interest was a proxy affair, an inspection of her carried out on Caepio Junior's behalf, which of course she could not know.
Yes, she was a pretty little thing, he thought, and though in stature she was small, she had at least escaped the family taint of short legs. Her figure was delightful, full and high of breast, narrow-waisted, nicely hipped; her feet and hands were quite delicate and thin—a sign of beauty—and she did not bite her nails, but kept them well manicured. Her chin was pointed, her forehead broad, her nose reasonably long and a little aquiline. In mouth and eyes she fulfilled every criterion of true beauty, for the eyes were very large and well opened, and the mouth was small, a rosebud. Thick and becomingly dressed, her hair was black, as were eyes, brows, and lashes.
Yes indeed, Livia Drusa was pretty. No Aurelia, however. His heart contracted painfully; it still did whenever he thought of Aurelia. How very quickly he had written to Quintus Servilius once he learned of Aurelia's impending marriage! It was all for the best; there was nothing
wrong
with the Aurelians, but neither in wealth nor in social standing could they equal the patrician Servilians. Besides which, he had always been fond of young Servilia Caepionis, and had no qualms about making her his wife.
"My dear, I've found a husband for you," he said without preamble, and looking highly pleased with himself.
It obviously came as a shock to her, though she kept her face impassive enough. She licked her lips, then managed to ask, "Who, Marcus Livius?"
He became enthusiastic. "The very best of good fellows, a wonderful friend! Quintus Servilius Junior."
Her face froze into a look of absolute horror; she parted her dry lips to speak, but couldn't.
"What's the matter?" he asked, genuinely puzzled.
"I can't marry him," Livia Drusa whispered.
"Why?"
"He's disgusting—revolting!"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
She began to shake her head, and kept on shaking it with increasing vehemence. "I won't marry him, I won't!"
An awful thought occurred to Drusus, ever conscious of his mother; he got up, came round the table, and stood over his sister. "Have you been meeting someone?"
The motion of her head ceased, she lifted it to stare up at him, outraged.
"Me?
How could I possibly meet anyone, stuck in this house every single day of my life? The only men I see come here with you, and I don't even get the opportunity to converse with them! If you have them to dinner, you don't ask me—the only time I'm permitted to come to dinner is when you have that frightful oaf Quintus Servilius Junior!"
"How dare you!" he said, growing angry; it had never occurred to him that she would judge his best friend differently than he did.
"I won't marry him!" she cried. "I'd rather be dead!"
"Go to your room," he said, looking flinty.
She got up at once, and walked toward the door which opened onto the colonnade.
"Not your sitting room, Livia Drusa. Your bedroom. And there you will stay until you come to your senses."
A burning look was her only answer, but she turned around and left by the door to the atrium.
Drusus remained by her vacant chair, and tried to deal with his anger. It was preposterous! How dare she defy him!
After some moments his emotions quietened; he was able to grasp the tail of this spitting cat, even though he had no idea what to do with it. In all his life no one had ever defied him; no one had ever put him in a position from which he could see no logical way out. Used to being obeyed, and to being treated with a degree of respect and deference not normally accorded to one so young, he had no idea what to do. If he had known his sister better—and he now had to admit that he knew her not at all—if his father were alive—if his mother—oh, what a pickle! And what to do?
