My arm was grasped from behind. I turned and saw that it was the young man who’d gotten me together with the lady in the first place. He was pleased at the outcome.
“You really turned her on.” He grinned at me. “I don’t know how you did it. Believe me, I know it isn’t easy. Congratulations.”
I shrugged it off and turned back to look at the lady. She was on her feet now, her hands concealing her face, her gown spattered with the horse’s tribute. She clapped her hands loudly.
Immediately an entourage appeared. It consisted of six Roman guards and four slaves. The slaves carried an ornate litter. The lady was helped aboard. She drew the curtains and they moved off with her. As they passed us I did a double take at the insignia on the conveyance.
“Isn’t that the coat-of-arms of the Caesars?” I exclaimed.
“Shh! Not so loud. Yes, it is. But how is it that you, a Carthaginian, recognize it?’
“It’s the seal of authority in Carthage.” I lied glibly.
Actually I remembered it because it had been pointed out to me by the same artist friend who showed me the statue of Marsyas back (or do I mean forward?) in 1963. “Is the lady a member of the royal household then?”
“She is the Princess Julia.”
“The Emperor’s daughter?” I whistled. “How come she offers her body in such a public place?”
“It is her way of defying her father. For eleven years she has flaunted his Lex Julia.”
That clicked. As a budding sex investigator the Lex Julia de Adulteris—to give it its full name—had been one of the basic codes I’d studied. It consisted of a set of sex laws passed by the Emperor Augustus in 18 B.C., when his daughter Julia was just twenty-one years old. The “Julia,” however, didn’t refer to the chick, but to Emperor Julius Caesar, Augustus’ predecessor and uncle.
According to the historian Suetonius, Uncle Julius was a switch-hitter who batted a thousand with Augustus when the latter was a mere boy. In the intimacy of their buggery, Uncle Julius promised to make Augie heir to his throne. What with chicanery, assassination and war, the promise had ultimately been kept.
By then Augie had long since decided it was better to give than to receive, swapped the fairy wand of his boyhood for the straight torch of manhood and dipped his wick often enough to erase the memory of sharing Unc’s bunk while racking up an impressive score in the Hetero-Dept. He married the stepdaughter of Mark Antony for political reasons, then divorced her after Antony’s death. His second spouse was Scribonia, mother of the too juicy Julia. Throughout both marriages Augie fondled anything female that moved and upended a series of femmes ranging from ladies of the court to ladies of the night.
Then he met Livia, a married woman with a bun in the oven. Despite her bellyful, Augie was smitten. He forced her hubby to divorce her, himself ditched Scribonia, and wed Livia shortly after her baby was born. It was Livia who nagged him into morality and finally into promulgating the fanatic Lex Julia de Adulteris13 .
There’s no greater moralist than a reformed roué. The Lex Julia reflected this. It covered all aspects of sex, defined moral conduct and decreed stiff punishments for those who violated it. The roughest spank was reserved for kanoodling wives, but husbandly wanderings as well as so-called “sexual deviations” were covered in it.
This much I knew from my studies. Now my companion filled in the rest of the picture. A wellspring of information, he seemed privy to the innermost secrets of the royal household. He leaked them with the gusto of a gossip who enjoys his work.
His hatchetry hewed the rep out from under the Princess Julia. By the time she was fourteen, according to my informant, Julia had taken to sex like a quacker to H20. Even at that early age her round heels were rocking the throne and so Augustus married her off to calm her down.
The groom was M. Claudius Marcellus, a nobleman of strong appetite and weak bowels. The two combined and he died of acute diarrhea shortly after Julia’s eighteenth birthday. When the winsome widow spent her mourning period bouncing from bed to bed, Augustus arranged a second splicing.
Number Two was Marcus Vispanius Agrippa, the famous general, age fifty plus. From the first Julia pinned horns on him, but Agrippa was evidently too old to give a hoot. He ignored her series of mattress romps even when they became so blatant that some of the Emperor’s supporters dared call on Julia to plead with her to stop embarrassing Pops with her sexcapades. The Princess’ comeback was typicaclass="underline"
“If he forgets that he is Caesar, I will not forget that I am Caesar’s daughter!” she told them haughtily.
Augustus, like Agrippa, played deaf-mute to tales of Julia’s extramarital meanderings -- and for the same reason. There were signs of fidelity, five of them, five children produced during the first five years of her second marriage, and each of them the spitting image of her hubby. Once, asked how she managed to keep her offspring all in the family when she shared so many sheets with so many different sets of feet, Julia came up with a simple explanation:
“I only take on passengers,” she revealed, “when the boat is already full.”
The “boat” was empty when Agrippa died. Julia was twenty-seven and once again a widow. But once again Daddy was quick to mate his nymphy offspring.
Third batter was Tiberius, son of Livia by her first marriage. One day he would be Roman Emperor. But before that day his wife’s antics would almost bench him politically.
Tiberius at home plate didn’t stop Julia from running the bases. She stole so many of them so flagrantly that political enemies of the Emperor Augustus tried to pick her off with a quick pitch to the Senate demanding that the Lex Julia be invoked against the Princess. This force play found Augustus umpiring a game in which Tiberius was set up for a sacrifice. Going by the Lex Julia rule-book, a cuckolded husband was bound to go to bat before the Forum and peg his wife unfaithful, or have the book thrown at him for failing to blow the whistle. Thus Tiberius was caught in a squeeze between sliding down the razor blade of the Lex Julia, or tagging up to face the royal ump’s rage by calling a foul on his daughter and scoring her an adulteress.
The game was called on account of reign. The Emperor umpire sent Tiberius to the showers before inning one could open. It was Rhodes, the minor leagues, for Tiberius, and he stayed there, a self-exile on a royal pass-play, for five years, successfully ducking the Forum lineup. He was still there and showed no sign of returning to play Roman ball as long as his wife went on throwing the game with her open amours.
But now, with Tiberius out of action, it was open season on the ump and the word was that pretty soon the pop bottles would really start flying from the grandstand. The Lex Julia rulebook said that if a hubby refused to call the strikes on a balling wife, it was up to her father to holler “Foul!” and pitch against her. So right now the Emperor Augustus was faced with spiking his own offspring or being ruled off the diamond himself.
“It’s quite a pickle.” Having run down, my companion summed up the situation.
“You sure seem to be in the know,” I observed.
“I’m very close to the royal household. In some instances, you might say intimate.” He smiled. “You know, it just occurred to me that I don’t even know your name, man of Carthage.”
“Victor.”
“Hello, Victor. I am Ovid.”
“Ovid? The poet? Author of the Ars Amatoria?14 ”