Free I Am Livia by Phyllis T. Smith Page A

better of the idea of being born and declined to join the dance of folly. Tiberius Nero and I went to bed, and in the middle of the night I awoke in pain, as if someone were driving a knife into my belly. The miscarriage was an ugly, bloody business, and the midwife could do nothing to make it easier for me. For several days afterward, my husband and my father and mother feared that I would die. As for me, I never realized my danger but lay in a stupor of pain. Then I began to recover.
    I had felt little pleasurable excitement anticipating the birth of my child, perhaps because I was sick so often or because of the worries that occupied my mind. Yet I felt the loss keenly, as if a part of me had been ripped away.
    As I lay in bed, feverish and ill, I thought of how it would have been to hold my baby in my arms, to guide his steps as he grew. I imagined a son, a small boy running through the garden to me, shouting, “Mother!” and grieved for the child who would never be born.
    I was still confined to bed when I learned that Caesar’s army had paused, a day’s march from Rome. He exchanged no messages with the Senate, made no threats. Silently, he waited.
    The Senate capitulated and made Caesar consul.

    I sat up in bed, my back resting against a pile of pillows. Tiberius Nero entered the bedchamber, dressed in his senator’s toga with its purple trim. He sat down on the bed beside me. For many nights, sleep had eluded him, and his eyes were hollow with exhaustion. But he gave me a reassuring smile.
    So, I thought. We will all go on living .
    I struggled to frame a question that would not be humiliating for my husband to answer. “How did Caesar ac t ?” I asked finally.
    “Oh, he was very polite, very reasonable. No boyish arrogance—he could have been a fifty-year-old magistrate, the way he acted. He thanked us all for coming to the Appian Way to greet him and escort him into the city—”
    “The whole Senate was there?”
    “Yes, certainly. The whole Senate.”
    My father too? I almost asked. But Tiberius Nero had already said The whole Senate.
    “Well, we welcomed him warmly, of course. Many men kissed him on the cheek. I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Perhaps he’ll remember that I didn’t and hold it against me. But in any case, he said how moved he was by our wonderful welcome. He sacrificed at the Temple of Jupiter officially as consul. And then we escorted him to the Forum, to show himself to the people. All along the way, there were cheering throngs. He made a speech from the Rostra, quite a smooth speech, about what he intends to do.”
    A consul’s role while in Rome was to preside over the Senate and carry out senatorial decisions. But everyone knew that with an army at his back, Caesar would do more than preside. He would dictate . W ith the Senate’s acquiescence, he would do just as he wished.
    “And what does he intend?” I asked in a taut voice.
    “First, to set up tribunals to try the killers of his ‘father’—”
    I clutched Tiberius Nero’s arm.
    “No, dearest, he doesn’t mean the mere accomplices, just the men who actually wielded the knives. They’ve all left Rome anyway. There’ll be one-day tribunals, which will return a directed verdict—‘guilty, guilty, guilty.’ Brutus and the others will be condemned in absentia.”
    “Not you and my father?”
    “No, certainly not. Didn’t I say how reasonable Caesar is? He asked us to allocate public funds for a statue of his great-uncle, to be built in the Forum, but only if we—the Senate, that is—thought it fitting. That statue will be built, believe me, posthaste.” Tiberius patted my hand. “The day after tomorrow, Caesar will march off, with his army—he’s up to eleven legions now, he happened to mention. He will defend the Republic from Antony, who—Caesar informed us—is a considerable threat to its stability. Gods above, we ate gall and wormwood, but Caesar has no plans to kill anybody, and he acted as if he