I Am Livia by Phyllis T. Smith Page B

would withdraw to confer for long hours.
    One evening at dinner, I heard Lucius say something that terrified me. “That little swine Caesar wants to act like he’s the third Gracchi brother. It’s too much.” Looking intently at my husband, he added, “I’ve written to my brother that he can absolutely depend on you.”
    “Of course he can, ” T iberius Nero hastened to say.
    Caesar was almost never in the city of Rome, and he shared the governing of it with Antony’s men. His priority was to hold the loyalty of his soldiers, and so he was settling his veterans on small farms. Since the time of the Gracchi, it had been considered a great injustice for Roman soldiers to return from the wars to nothing. Their commander was expected to see to it that when they mustered out they got small plots of land.
    Like the Gracchi, my father had loathed the latifundia, the great estates worked by slaves, which ate up so much Italian land. He said the latifundia owners often drove poor citizens off the land by foul, illegal means. If he approved of nothing else that Caesar did, he would approve of this—that he was going about Italy, breaking up latifundia so he could give his veterans small farms.
    “What is Antony depending on you to do about Caesar and the latifundia?” An edge in my voice, I asked the question of my husband that night as we prepared for bed.
    “There are legal matters that fall under my jurisdiction,” Tiberius Nero said. His duties as praetor were largely those of a judge.
    “He wants you to rule in favor of the latifundia’s owners? Just to thwart Caesar?”
    Tiberius Nero did not reply.
    “He does, doesn’t he?” I gasped for breath as if all the air had drained out my lungs. “The question of land—it drips blood. It always has.” Strife in Italy had first started nearly a century ago over this very matter.
    “Now, dear, calm yourself.”
    The guttering candle on the table beside our bed flickered feebly. I could not see my husband’s face. “This is ruination.”
    “It would be ruination for me not to do what Antony requires,” Tiberius Nero said. “I have no choice. Not if I want my head to stay attached to my neck. Do you think I like this business?”
    “Caesar and his men won’t stand for this,” I said.
    The carnage, the civil war, would all begin again. This present lull was only a brief holiday from the Roman habit of self-destruction. What made matters worse—what had me sick with despair—was that my husband’s allegiance, and therefore mine, had to be with Antony in a battle in which right and justice were with Caesar.

    I wonder how many women from time immemorial have thought that if only women could rule the world it would be better than it is. Really, has any woman not, some time or other, thought tha t ? Of course I thought it too. I believed women were unquestionably less bloodthirsty than men. Then I met Fulvia.
    She was Mark Antony’s wife. Her husband, whom she was said to love passionately, had assumed control of the eastern empire, gone to Egypt, and fallen into the snares of Cleopatra. One might, as a woman, have sympathized with her if she had had a shred of decent human feeling. She did not.
    When Tiberius Nero and I went to have dinner at her home, the mourning period for my father and mother had not yet elapsed, and I wore white. Fulvia looked me up and down and said, “Oh, you poor creature, you just lost your parents, didn’t you? What a pity they chose the wrong side.”
    She was about forty years old, tall and full-busted. Her bright makeup was just this side of grotesque. I did not reply to her remark about my parents but returned her gaze steadily, while wishing her in the hottest corner of Tartarus.
    She ushered Tiberius Nero and me into her dining room. Murals depicting Dionysian revels adorned the walls. Her brother-in-law Lucius was already eating dinner, along with a raven-haired girl of ten or eleven.
    “That slimy little beast has divorced