Cleopatra’s Daughter

(her arms were whiter than the Sithonian snow),

and gave me greedy kisses, thrusting her fluttering tongue,

and laid her eager thigh against my thigh,

and whispering fond words, called me the lord of her heart

and everything else that lovers murmur in joy.

And yet, as if chill hemlock were smeared upon my body,

my numb limbs would not act out my desire.

I lay there like a log, a fraud, a worthless weight;

my body might as well have been a shadow.

What will my age be like, if old age ever comes,

when even my youth cannot fulfill its role?

The audience laughed uproariously, and Ovid continued:

Ah, I’m ashamed of my years. I’m young and a man: so what?

I was neither young nor a man in my girlfriend’s eyes.

She rose like the sacred priestess who tends the undying flame,

or a sister who’s chastely lain at a dear brother’s side.

But not long ago blonde Chlide twice, fair Pitho three times,

and Libas three times I enjoyed without a pause.

Corinna, as I recall, required my services

nine times in one short night—and I obliged!

Has some Thessalian potion made my body limp,

injuring me with noxious spells and herbs?

Did some witch hex my name scratched on crimson wax

and stab right through the liver with slender pins?

He went on to describe the shame of not performing, and I stared at my brother in disbelief. When Ovid was finished, the entire audience was on its feet.

Alexander turned to me. “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s disgusting and crass. Is this all that he does?”

“You didn’t like it?” Lucius exclaimed, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. “He has other material, too,” he promised. “Entire odes to his mistress Corinna.”

“The one he took nine times?” I asked dryly.

“It’s meant to be satire,” my brother said. “I thought you’d find it funny.”

“Perhaps I’m not in the mood.”

“But the theater is handsome, isn’t it?” he asked.

Grudgingly, I admitted that it was. For a little stone building crushed between two shops in the Campus Martius, it had a certain charm. It wasn’t anything our mother would have frequented in Alexandria, and she would never have condoned our enjoying coarse Latin poetry in a Roman theater with golden bullae around our necks. But then, our mother was gone, and Egypt had been swept up in Augustus’s new empire. Marcellus had been all that made my exile bearable. When I listened to him laughing in the halls of the villa or shouting at the teams in the Circus Maximus, I could forget for a while that Charmion and Ptolemy were dead, that I would never return to the Egypt of my childhood, and that my father’s memory had been expunged from Rome.

Alexander and Lucius tried their best to cheer me, and for a while there was news from Egypt that seemed hopeful. Cornelius Gallus, the poet and politician whom Augustus had set up as prefect over my mother’s kingdom, had fallen from favor and committed suicide. What better time to turn to me and Alexander than now, when Egypt was without a leader? But news arrived just as swiftly from Gaul that a new prefect had been found. So even as Saturnalia came and went, I found little to be happy about.

When my brother and I had our fourteenth birthday on the first of January, Julia presented me with a beautiful pair of gold-and-emerald earrings, but her generosity did nothing but irk me.

“We should go to the Forum,” she said eagerly, “and pick out a silk tunic to match them.”

“And who would I wear it for?” I demanded, ruining the light mood in the triclinium, where Octavia had hung Saturn’s sacred holly branches from the ceiling, and their waxy leaves reflected the lamplight.

Julia frowned. “What do you mean? For yourself. For Lucius.”

“All Lucius does is stare at my brother.”

Julia looked at the pair of them rolling dice in the corner of the triclinium. “So do you think they’re more than friends?” she asked.

I looked at her aghast. “Of course not!”

“They spend all their time together,” she pointed out.

“So do we,” I whispered. “And I’m not your lover. Marcellus is.”

She glanced swiftly at Octavia. “Please don’t tell her, Selene. She would never forgive me if she knew. Please.”

I wanted to reply with something cutting, to tell her that Octavia knew already, but the need in her eyes was too urgent. And why was it her fault that she was the one destined for Marcellus, and not I?

“So you don’t like the earrings?” she asked hesitantly.

“Of course I do.” I attempted a smile. “They’re beautiful.”

“Then we’ll shop for something to match them tomorrow!”

I tried to be in a better mood when we went to the Forum. Even though the weather was grim and a cold mist hung over the streets, I followed Gallia down the Via Sacra in my warmest cloak.

“At least it’s not snowing,” Julia said. “Imagine what it must be like in the mountains of Gaul.”

“How cold does it get there?” I asked Gallia.

“Very bitter,” she replied. “When the snow falls, even the animals go into hiding. Every year there are children who starve for lack of food, and the old women without families are prey for the wolves.”

Julia shivered. “No wonder my father’s letters are so pitiful. He’s sick all the time. And weak.”

“The Gallic winters can do that. If he is wise,” Gallia said, “he will leave his most hearty men there and take the rest south toward Cantabria.”

Julia looked at me, and I knew she was thinking of Marcellus. Somewhere in the cold mountain ranges of Gaul, he was suffering with Juba, Augustus, and Tiberius. Their men were probably wishing for the comforts of