New Tales of the Vampires
By Anne Rice
 
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Revelations of Divine Love
 
 
I
 
Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the cafe, since I said 
No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal 
life, how I became a vampire – how I came upon Marius only years after he had 
lost his human life.
Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal 
ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the 
expensive and flawless white paper.
Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This 
notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tooled with a design of 
rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final 
analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and 
handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover.
The thick pages are ruled in light blue – you are practical, so thoughtful, and 
you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all.
Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp
scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to 
parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own 
laments... ah, that sound. The only thing missing here is the smell of ink, but 
we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine 
and deep a black mark as I choose to make.
I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from 
me. I find myself yielding to it, almost as one of our human victims yields to 
us, discovering perhaps as the rain continues to fall outside, as the cafe 
continues with its noisy chatter, to think that this might not be the agony I 
presumed – reaching back over the two thousand years – but almost a pleasure, 
like the act of drinking blood itself.
I reach now for a victim who is not easy for me to overcome: my own past. 
Perhaps this victim will flee from me with a speed that equals my own. Whatever, 
I seek now a victim that I have never faced. And there is the thrill of the hunt 
in it, what the modern world calls investigation.
Why else would I see those times so vividly now? You had no magic potion to give 
me to loosen my thoughts. There is but one potion for us and it is blood.
You said at one point as we walked towards the cafe, “You will remember 
everything."
You, who are so young amongst us yet were so old as a mortal, and such a scholar 
as a mortal. Perhaps it
is natural that you so boldly attempt to collect our stories.
But why seek to explain here such curiosity as yours, such bravery in face of 
blood-drenched truth?
How could you have kindled in me this longing to go back, two thousand years, 
almost exactly – to tell of my mortal days on Earth in Rome, and how I joined 
Marius, and what little chance he had against Fate.
How could origins so deeply buried and so long denied suddenly beckon to me. A 
door snaps open. A light shines. Come in.
I sit back now in the cafe.
I write, but I pause and look around me at the people of this Paris cafe. I see 
the drab unisex fabrics of this age, the fresh American girl in her olive green 
military clothes, all of her possessions slung over her shoulder in a backpack; 
I see the old Frenchman who has come here for decades merely to look at the bare 
legs and arms of the young, to feed on the gestures as if he were a vampire, to 
wait for some exotic jewel of a moment when a woman sits back laughing, 
cigarette in hand, and the doth of her synthetic blouse becomes tight over her 
breasts and there the nipples are visible.
Ah, old man. He is gray-haired and wears an expensive coat. He is no menace to 
anyone. He lives entirely in vision. Tonight he will go back to a modest but 
elegant apartment which he has maintained since the last Great World War, and he 
will watch films of the young beauty Brigitte Bardot. He lives in his eyes. He 
has not touched a woman in ten years.
I don’t drift, David. I drop anchor here. For I will not have my story pour 
forth as from a drunken oracle.
I see these mortals in a more attentive light. They are so fresh, so exotic and 
yet so luscious to me, these mortals; they look like tropical birds must have 
looked when I was a child; so full of fluttering, rebellious life, I wanted to 
clutch them to have it, to make their wings flap in my hands, to capture flight 
and own it and partake of it. Ah, that terrible moment in childhood when one 
accidentally crushes the life from a bright-red bird.
Yet they are sinister in their darker vestments, some of these mortals: the 
inevitable cocaine dealer – and they are everywhere, our finest prey – who waits 
for his contact in the far corner, his long leather coat styled by a noted 
Italian designer, his hair shaved dose on the side and left bushy on the top to 
make him look distinctive, which it does, though there is no need when one 
considers his huge black eyes, and the hardness of what nature intended to be a 
generous mouth. He makes those quick impatient gestures with his cigarette 
lighter on the small marble table, the mark of the addicted; he twists, he 
turns, he cannot be comfortable. He doesn’t know that he will never be 
comfortable in life again. He wants to leave to snort the cocaine for which he 
burns and yet he must wait for the contact. His shoes are too shiny, and his 
long thin hands will never grow old.
I think he will die tonight, this man. I feel a slow gathering desire to kill 
him myself. He has fed so much poison to so many. Tracking him, wrapping him in 
my arms, I would not even have to wreathe him with visions. I would let him know 
that death has come in the form of a woman too white to be human, too smoothed 
by the centuries to be anything but a statue come to life. But those for whom he 
waits plot to kill him. And why should I intervene?
What do I look like to these people? A woman with long wavy dean brown hair that 
covers me much like a nun’s mantle, a face so white it appears cosmetically 
created, and eyes, abnormally brilliant, even from behind golden glasses.
Ah, we have a lot to be grateful for in the many styles of eyeglasses in this 
age – for if I were to take these off, I should have to keep my head bowed, not 
to startle people with the mere play of yellow and brown and gold in my eyes, 
that have grown ever more jewel-like over the centuries, so that I seem a blind 
woman set with topaz for her pupils, or rather carefully formed orbs of topaz, 
sapphire, even aquamarine.
Look, I have filled so many pages, and all I am saying is Yes, I will tell you 
how it began for me.
Yes, I will tell you the story of my mortal life in ancient Rome, how I came to 
love Marius and how we came to be together and then to part.
What a transformation in me, this resolution.
How powerful I feel as I hold this pen, and how eager to put us in sharp and 
dear perspective before I begin fulfilling your request.
This is Paris, in a time of peace. There is rain. High regal gray buildings with 
their double windows and iron balconies line this boulevard. Loud, tiny, 
dangerous automobiles race in the streets. Cafes, such as this, are overflowing 
with international tourists. Ancient churches are crowded here by tenements, 
palaces turned to museums, in whose rooms I linger for hours gazing at objects 
from Egypt or Sumer which are even older than me. Roman architecture is 
everywhere, absolute replicas of Temples of my time now serve as banks. The 
words of my native Latin suffuse the English language. Ovid, my beloved Ovid, 
the poet who predicted his poetry would outlast the Roman Empire, has been 
proved true.
Walk into any bookstore and you find him in neat, small paperbacks, designed to 
appeal to students.
Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern 
forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.
It is easy here – as always – to find an embraceable evil, a despair worth 
tender fulfillment.
And with me there must always be some love of the victim, some mercy, some 
self-delusion that the death I bring does not mar the great shroud of 
inevitability, woven of trees and earth and stars, and human events, which 
hovers forever around us ready to close on all that is created, all that we 
know.
Last night, when you found me, how did it seem to you? I was alone on the bridge 
over the Seine, walking in the last dangerous darkness before dawn.
You saw me before I knew you were there. My hood was down and I let my eyes in 
the dim light of the bridge have their little moment of glory. My victim stood 
at the railing, no more than a child, but bruised and robbed by a hundred men. 
She wanted to die in the water. I don’t know if the Seine is deep enough for one 
to drown there. So near the Ile St.Louis. So near Notre Dame. Perhaps it is, if 
one can resist a last struggle for life.
But I felt this victim’s soul like ashes, as though her spirit had been cremated 
and only the body remained, a worn, disease-ridden shell. I put my arm around 
her, and when I saw the fear in her small black eyes, when I saw the question 
coming, I wreathed her with images. The soot that covered my skin was not enough 
to keep me from looking like the Virgin Mary, and she sank into hymns and 
devotion, she even saw my veils in the colors she had known in churches of 
childhood, as she yielded to me, and I – knowing that I needn’t drink, but 
thirsting for her, thirsting for the anguish she could give forth in her final 
moment, thirsting for the tasty red blood that would fill my mouth and make me 
feel human for one instant in my very monstrosity – I gave in to her visions, 
bent her neck, ran my fingers over her sore tender skin, and then it was, when I 
sank my teeth into her, when I drank from her – it was then that I knew you were 
there. You watched.
I knew it, and I felt it, and I saw the image of us in your eye, distractingly, 
as the pleasure nevertheless flushed through me, making me believe I was alive, 
somehow connected to fields of clover or trees with roots deeper in the earth 
than the branches they raise to the welkin above.
At first I hated you. You saw me as I feasted. You saw me as I gave in. You knew 
nothing of my months of starvation, restraint, wandering. You saw only the 
sudden release of my unclean desire to suck her very soul from her, to make her 
heart rise in the flesh inside her, to drag from her veins every precious 
particle of her that still wanted to survive.
And she did want to survive. Wrapped in saints, and dreaming suddenly of the 
breasts that nursed her, her young body fought, pumping and pumping against me, 
she so soft, and my own form hard as a statue, my milkless nipples enshrined in 
marble, no comfort. Let her see her mother, dead, gone and now waiting. Let me 
glimpse through her dying eyes the light through which she sped towards this 
certain salvation.
Then I forgot about you. I would not be robbed. I slowed the drinking, I let her 
sigh, I let her lungs fill with the cold river air, her mother drawing closer 
and closer so that death now was as safe for her as the womb. I took every drop 
from her that she could give.
She hung dead against me, as one I'd rescued, one I would help from the bridge, 
some weakened, sickened, drunken girl. I slid my hand into her body, breaking 
the flesh so easily even with these delicate fingers, and I dosed my fingers 
around her heart and brought it to my lips and sucked it, my head tucked down by 
her face, sucked the heart like fruit, until no blood was left in any fiber or 
chamber, and then slowly – perhaps for your benefit – I lifted her and let her 
fall down into the water she had so desired.
Now there would be no struggle as her lungs filled with the river. Now there 
would be no last desperate thrashing. I fed from the heart one last time, to 
take even the color of blood out of it, and then sent it after her – crushed 
grapes – poor child, child of a hundred men.
Then I faced you, let you know that I knew you watched from the quay. I think I 
tried to frighten you. In rage I let you know how weak you were, that all the 
blood given to you by Lestat would make you no match should I choose to 
dismember you, pitch a fatal heat into you and immolate you, or only punish you 
with penetrating scar – simply for having spied upon me.
Actually I have never done such a thing to a younger one. I feel sorry for them 
when they see us, the ancient ones, and quake in terror. But I should, by all 
the knowledge of myself I possess, have retreated so quickly that you could riot 
follow me in the night.
Something in your demeanor charmed me, the manner in which you approached me on 
the bridge, your young Anglo-Indian brown-skinned body gifted by your true 
mortal age with such seductive grace. Your very posture seemed to ask of me, 
without humiliation:
“Pandora, may we speak?”
My mind wandered. Perhaps you knew it. I don’t remember whether I shut you out 
of my thoughts, and I know that your telepathic abilities are not really very 
strong. My mind wandered suddenly, perhaps of itself, perhaps at your prodding. 
I thought of all the things I could tell you, which were so different from the 
tales of Lestat, and those of Marius through Lestat, and I wanted to warn you, 
warn you of the ancient vampires of the Far East who would kill you if you went 
into their territory, simply because you were there.
I wanted to make certain you understood what we all had to accept – the Fount of 
our immortal vampiric hunger did reside in two beings – Mekare and Maharet – so 
ancient they are now both horrible to look upon, more than beautiful. And if 
they destroy themselves we will all die with them.
I wanted to tell you of others who have never known us as a tribe or known our 
history, who survived the terrible fire brought down on her children by our 
Mother Akasha. I wanted to tell you that there were things walking the Earth 
that look like us but are not of our breed any more than they are human. And I 
wanted suddenly to take you under my wing.
It must have been your prodding. You stood there, the English gentleman, wearing 
your decorum more lightly and naturally than any man I’d ever seen. I marveled 
at your fine clothes that you’d indulged yourself in a light black cloak of 
worsted wool,
that you had even given yourself the luxury of a gleaming red silk scarf – so 
unlike you when you
were newly made.
Understand, I was not aware the night that Lestat transformed you into a 
vampire. I didn’t feel that moment.
All the preternatural world shimmered weeks earlier, however, with the knowledge 
that a mortal
had jumped into the body of another mortal; we know these things, as if the 
stars tell us. One preter
natural mind picks up the ripples of this sharp cut in the fabric of the 
ordinary, then another mind re-
ceives the image, and on and on it goes.
David Talbot, the name we all knew from the venerable order of psychic 
detectives, the Talamasca, had managed to move his entire soul and etheric body 
– into that of another man. That body itself was in the possession of a body 
thief whom you forced from it. And once anchored in the young - body, you, with 
all your scruples and values, all your knowledge of seventy-four years, remained 
an chored in the young cells.
And so it was David the Reborn, David with the high-gloss India beauty, and raw 
well-nourished strength of British lineage, that Lestat had made into a vampire, 
bringing over both body and soul, compounding miracle with the Dark Trick, 
achieving once more a sin that should stun his contemporaries and his elders. 
And this, this was done to you by your best friend!
Welcome to the darkness, David. Welcome to the domain of Shakespeare’s 
"inconstant moon.”
Bravely you came up the bridge towards me.
"Forgive me, Pandora,” you said so quietly. Flawless British upper-class accent, 
and the usual beguiling British rhythm that is so seductive it seems to say that 
“we will all save the world."
You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last 
century, and you didn’t want to alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.
I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat – 
against Marius’s injunction – had dared to make. I saw the components of you as 
a man: an immense human soul, fearless, yet half in love with despair, and a 
body which Lestat had almost injured himself to render powerful. He had given 
you more blood than he could easily give in your transformation. He had tried to 
give you his courage, his cleverness, his cunning; he had tried to transport an 
armory for you through the blood.
He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother 
Akasha’s blood was mixed with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had 
given him blood as well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say, they say that he may 
even have drunk the blood of the Christ.
It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to 
scan the world for knowledge is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.
"Tell me the truth of it," I said. "This story Memnoch the Devil. Lestat claimed 
he went to Heaven and to Hell. He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The 
face of Christ was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity, it cured 
alienation and succored bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to 
:throw up their arms to the deadly morning light, as if the sun were in fact the 
fire of God."
"Yes, it's all happened, as I described it," you said, lowering your head with a 
polite but unexaggerated modesty. “And you know a few... of us perished in this 
fervor, whilst newspapers and scientists collected our ashes for examination.”
I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind 
dominated by an incalculable wealth of information, and quick of tongue with an 
intellect devoted to swiftness, synthesis, probabilities, and all this against 
the backdrop of horrid experiences, wars, massacres, the worst perhaps the world 
has ever seen.
“It all happened," you said. “And I did meet with Mekare and Maharet, the 
ancient ones, and you needn’t fear for me that I don't know how fragile is the 
root. It was kind of you to think so protectively of me."
I was quietly charmed.
“What did you think of this Holy Veil yourself?" I asked.
"Our Lady of Fatima," you said softly. “The Shroud of Turin, a cripple rising 
from the Miraculous Waters of Lourdes! What a consolation it must be to accept 
such a thing so easily."
“And you did not?”
You shook your head. “And neither did Lestat, really. It was the mortal girl, 
Dora, snatching the Veil from him, who took it out into the world. But it was a 
most singular and meticulously made thing, I’ll tell you that, more worthy of 
the word 'relic' perhaps than any other I’ve ever seen.”
You sounded dejected suddenly.
"Some immense intent went into its making," you said.
“And the vampire Armand, the delicate boylike Armand, he believed it?” I asked. 
“Armand looked at it and saw the face of Christ,” I said, seeking your 
confirmation.
"Enough to die for it," you said solemnly. "Enough to open his arms to the 
morning sun.”
You looked away, and you closed your eyes. This was a simple unadorned plea to 
me not to make you speak of Armand and how he had gone into the morning fire.
I gave a sigh – surprised and gently fascinated to find you so articulate, 
skeptical, yet so sharply and frankly connected to the others.
You said in a shaken voice, "Armand." And still looking away from me. “What a 
Requiem. And does he know now if Memnoch was real, if God Incarnate who tempted 
Lestat was in fact the Son of the God Almighty? Does anyone'?"
I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. 
There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, 
these questions you posed,
"They locked up the Veil, you know,” you said. "It’s in the Vatican. There were 
two weeks of frenzy on Fifth Avenue in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in which people 
came to look into the eyes of The Lord, and then they had it, gone, taken to 
their vaults. I doubt there is a nation on the Earth with the power to gain even 
a glimpse of it now.”
“And Lestat,” I said. "Where is he now?"
“Paralyzed, silent,” you said. “Lestat lies on the floor of a chapel in New 
Orleans. He doesn't move. He says nothing. His Mother has come to him. You knew 
her, Gabrielle, he made a vampire of her.”
"Yes, I remember her.”
"Even she draws no response from him. Whatever he saw, in his journey to Heaven 
and Hell, he doesn’t know the truth of it one way or the other – he tried to 
tell this to Dora! And eventually, after I’d written down the whole story for 
him, he passed within a few nights into this state.
“His eyes are fixed and his body pliant. They made a curious Pietá, he and 
Gabrielle, in this abandoned convent and its chapel. His mind is dosed, or worse 
– it's empty."
I found I liked very much your manner of speaking. In fact, I was taken off 
guard.
“I left Lestat because he was beyond my help and my reach,” you said. "And I 
must know if there are old ones who want to put an end to me; I must make my 
pilgrimages and my progresses to know the dangers of this world to which I’ve 
been admitted."
"You’re so forthright. You have no cunning.”
“On the contrary, I conceal my keenest assets from you.” You gave me a slow, 
polite smile. “Your beauty rather confuses me. Are you used to this?”
“Quite,” I said. “And weary of it. Come beyond it. Let me just warn, there are 
old ones, ones no one knows or can explain. It’s rumored you’ve been with 
Maharet and Mekare, who are now the E1dest and the Fount from which we all 
spring. Obviously they've drawn back from us, from all the world, into some 
secret place, and have no taste for authority.”
“You're so very correct,” you said, “and my audience with them was beautiful but 
brief. They don't want to rule over anyone, nor will Maharet, as long as the 
history of the world and her own physical descendants are in it – her own 
thousands of human descendants from a time so ancient there is no date for it – 
Maharet will never destroy herself and her sister, thereby destroying all of 
us.”
“Yes,” I said, “in that she believes, the Great Family, the generations she has 
traced for thousands of years. I saw her when we all gathered. She doesn’t see 
us as evil – you, or me, or Lestat – she thinks that we’re natural, rather like 
volcanoes or fires that rage through forests, or bolts of lightning that strike 
a man dead.”
“Precisely," you said. “There is no Queen of the Damned now. I fear only one 
other immortal, and that’s your lover, Marius. Because it was Marius who laid 
down the strict rule before he left the others that no more blood drinkers could 
be made. I’m baseborn in the mind of Marius. That is, were he an Englishman, 
those would be his words.”
I shook my head. "I can’t believe he would harm you. Hasn't he come to Lestat'? 
Did he not come to see the Veil with his own eyes?”
You said No to both questions.
“Heed this advice: whenever you sense his presence, talk to him. Talk to him as 
you have to me. Begin a conversation which he won't have the confidence to bring 
to a dose."
You smiled again. “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” you said.
“But I don’t think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth, 
you’d be gone. What we have to fear is the same things humans fear – that there 
are others of our same species, of varying power and belief, and we are never 
entirely sure where they are or what they do. That's my advice to you.”
"You are so kind to take your time with me,” you said.
I could have wept. “On the contrary. You don’t know the silence and solitude in 
which I wander, and pray you never know it, and here you’ve given me heat 
without death, you’ve given me nourishment without blood. I’m glad you’ve come.”
I saw you look up at the sky, the habit of the young ones.
“I know, we have to part now."
You turned to me suddenly. “Meet me tomorrow night," you said imploringly. "Let 
this exchange continue! I’ll come to you in the cafe where you sit every night 
musing. I'll find you. Let us talk to each other.”
“So you’ve seen me there.”
“Oh, often,” you said. “Yes." You looked away again. I saw it was to conceal 
feeling. Then your dark eyes turned back to me.
"Pandora, we have the world, don’t we'?" you whispered.
"I don’t know, David. But I’ll meet you tomorrow night. Why haven’t you come to 
me there? Where it was warm and lighted?"
"It seemed a far more outrageous intrusion, to move in on you in the sanctified 
privacy of a crowded cafe. People go to such places to be alone, don’t they? 
This seemed somehow more proper. And I did not mean to be the voyeur. Like many 
fledglings, I have to feed every night. It was an accident that we saw each 
other at that moment.”
“That is charming, David,” I said. “It is a long time since anyone has charmed 
me. I’ll meet you there... tomorrow night.”
And then a wickedness possessed me. I came towards you and embraced you, knowing 
that the hardness and coldness of my ancient body would strike the deepest chord 
of terror in you, newborn as you were, passing so easily for mortal.
But you didn’t draw back. And when I kissed your cheek, you kissed mine.
I wonder now, as I sit here in the cafe, writing... trying to give you more with 
these words perhaps than you ask for... what I would have done had you not 
kissed me, had you shrunk back with the fear that is so common in the young.
David, you are indeed a puzzle.
You see that I have begun to chronicle not my life here, but what has passed 
these two nights between you and me.
Allow this, David. Allow that I speak of you and me, and then perhaps I can 
retrieve my lost life.
When you came into the cafe tonight, I thought nothing much about the notebooks. 
You had two. They were thick.
The leather of the notebooks smelled good and old, and when you set them down on 
the table, only then did I detect a glimmer from your disciplined and restrained 
mind that they had to do with me.
I had chosen this table in the crowded center of the room, as though I wanted to 
be in the middle of the whirlpool of mortal scent and activity. You seemed 
pleased, unafraid, utterly at home.
You wore another stunning suit of modern cut with a full cape of worsted wool, 
very tasteful, yet Old World, and with your golden skin and radiant eyes, you 
turned the head of every woman in the place and you turned the heads of some of 
the men.
You smiled. I must have seemed a snail to you beneath my cloak and hood, gold 
glasses covering well over half my face, and a trace of commercial lipstick on 
my lips, a soft purple pink that had made me think of bruises. It had seemed 
very enticing in the mirror at the store, and I liked that my mouth was 
something I didn’t have to hide, My lips are now almost colorless. With this 
lipstick I could smile.
I wore these gloves of mine, black lace, with their sheared-off tips so that my 
fingers can feel, and I had sooted my nails so they would not sparkle like 
crystal in the cafe. And I reached out my hand to you and you kissed it.
There was your same boldness and decorum. And then the warmest smile from you, a 
smile in which l think your former physiology must have dominated because you 
looked far too wise for one so young and strong of build. I marveled at the 
perfect picture you had made of yourself.
“You don’t know what a joy it is to me," you said, "that you've come, that 
you’ve let me join you here at this table."
"You have made me want this,” I said, raising my hands, and seeing that your 
eyes were dazzled by my crystalline fingernails, in spite of the soot.
I reached towards you, expecting you to pull back, but you entrusted to my cold 
white fingers your warm dark hand.
"You find in me a living being?" I asked you.
"Oh, yes, most definitely, most radiantly and perfectly a living being.”
We ordered our coffee, as mortals expect us to do, deriving more pleasure from 
the heat and aroma than they could ever imagine, even stirring our little cups 
with our spoons. I had before me a red dessert. The dessert is still here of 
course. I ordered it simply because it was red – strawberries covered in syrup – 
with a strong sweet smell that bees would like.
I smiled at your blandishments. I liked them.
Playfully, I mocked them. I let my hood slip down and I shook out my hair so 
that its fullness and dark brown color could shimmer in the light.
Of course it's no signal to mortals, as is Marius’s blond hair or that of 
Lestat. But I love my own hair, I love the veil of it when it is down over my 
shoulders, and I loved what I saw in your eyes.
"Somewhere deep inside me there is a woman,” I said.
To write it now – in this notebook as I sit here alone – it gives architecture 
to a trivial moment, and seems so dire a confession.
David, the more I write, the more the concept of narrative excites me, the more 
I believe in the weight of a coherence which is possible on the page though not 
in life.
But again, I didn’t know I meant to pick up this pen of yours at all. We were 
talking:
“Pandora, if anyone does not know you’re a woman, then he is a fool,” you said.
“How angry Marius would be with me for being pleased by that," I said. “Oh, no. 
Rather he would seize it as a strong point in favor of his position. I left him, 
left him without a word, the last time we were together – that was before Lestat 
went on his little escapade of running around in a human body, and long before 
he encountered Memnoch the Devil – I left Marius, and suddenly I wish I could 
reach him! I wish I could talk with him as you and I are talking now.”
You looked so troubled for me, and with reason. On some level, you must have 
known that I had not evinced this much enthusiasm over anything in many a dreary 
year.
“Would you write your story for me, Pandora'?” you asked suddenly.
I was totally surprised.
“Write it in these notebooks?” you pressed. "Write about the time when you were 
alive, the time when you and Marius came together, write what you will of 
Marius. But it’s your story that I most want.”
I was stunned.
“Why in the world would you want this of me?”
You didn’t answer.
“David, surely you've not returned to that order of human beings, the Talamasca, 
they know too much –”
You put up your hand.
“No, and I will never; and if there was ever any doubt of it, I learnt it once 
and for all in the archives kept by Maharet.”
“She allowed you to see her archives, the books she’s saved over the course of 
time”
“Yes, it was remarkable, you know... a storehouse of tablets, scrolls, 
parchments – books and poems from cultures of which the world knows nothing, I 
think, Books lost from time. Of course she forbade me to reveal anything I found 
or speak in detail of our meeting. She said it was too rash tampering with 
things, and she confirmed your fear that I might go to the Talamasca – my old 
mortal psychic friends. I have not. I will not. But it is a very easy vow to 
keep."
“Why so?”
"Pandora, when I saw all those old writings – I knew I was no longer human. I 
knew that the history lying there to be collected was no longer mine! I am not 
one of these!” Your eyes swept the room. "Of course you must have heard this a 
thousand times from fledgling vampires! But you see, I had a fervent faith that 
philosophy and reason would make a bridge for me by which I could go and come in 
both worlds. Well, there is no bridge. It’s gone.”
Your sadness shimmered about you, flashing in your young eyes and in the 
softness of your new flesh.
"So you know that," I said. I didn’t plan the words. But out they came. “You 
know.” I gave a soft bitter laugh.
“Indeed I do. I knew when I held documents from your time, so many from your 
time, Imperial Rome, and other crumbling bits of inscribed rock I couldn’t even 
hope to place. I knew. I didn’t care about them, Pandora! I care about what we 
are, what we are now.”
“How remarkable,” I said. “You don’t know how much I admire you, or how 
attractive is your disposition to me.”
“I am happy to hear this,” you said. Then you leaned forward towards me: “I 
don’t say we do not carry our human souls with us, our history; of course we do.
“I remember once a long time ago, Armand told me that he asked Lestat, ‘How will 
I ever understand the human race?' Lestat said, ‘Read or see all the plays of 
Shakespeare and you will know all you ever need to know about the human race.' 
Armand did it. He devoured the poems, he sat through the plays, he watched the 
brilliant new films with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo 
DiCaprio. And when Armand and I last spoke together, this is what he said of his 
education:
" 'Lestat was right. He gave me not books but a passage into understanding. This 
man Shakespeare writes,' – and I quote both Armand and Shakespeare now as Armand 
spoke it, as I will to you – as if it came from my heart:
 
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
 
“ ‘This man writes this,’ said Armand to me, ‘and we all know that it is 
absolutely the truth and every revelation has sooner or later fallen before it, 
and yet we want to love the way he has said it, we want to hear it again! We 
want to remember it! We want to never forget a single word.’ ”
We were both silent for a moment. You looked down, you rested your chin on your 
knuckles. I knew the whole weight of Armand’s going into the sun was on you, and 
I had so loved your recitation of the words, and the words themselves.
Finally, I said, “And this gives me pleasure. Think of it, pleasure. That you 
recite these words to me now.”
You smiled.
"I want to know now what we can learn," you said. “I want to know what we can 
see! So I come to you, a Child of the Millennia, a vampire who drank from the 
Queen Akasha herself, one who has survived two thousand years. And I ask you, 
Pandora, please will you write for me, write your story, write what you will.”
For a long moment I gave you no answer.
Then I said sharply that I could not. But something had stirred in me. I saw and 
heard arguments and tirades of centuries ago, I saw the poet's lifted light 
shine on eras I had known intimately out of love. Other eras I had never known, 
wandering, ignorant, a wraith.
Yes, there was a tale to be written. There was. But at the moment I could not 
admit it.
You were in misery, having thought of Armand, having remembered his walking into 
the morning sun. You mourned for Armand.
"Was there any bond between you?” you asked. "Forgive me my boldness, but I mean 
was there any bond between you and Armand when you met, because Marius had given 
you both the Dark Gift? I know no jealousy exists, that I can feel, I wouldn’t 
bring up the very name Armand if I detected a hurt in you, but all else is an 
absence, a silence. Was there no bond'?”
“The bond is only grief. He went into the sun. And grief is absolutely the 
easiest and safest of bonds.”
You laughed under your breath.
“What can I do to make you consider my request? Have pity on me, Gracious Lady, 
entrust to me your song.”
I smiled indulgently, but it was impossible, I thought.
“It’s far too dissonant, my dear,” I said. “It’s far  too –
I shut my eyes.
I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.
Suddenly your eyes moved upwards. Your expression changed. It was almost as if 
you were deliberately trying to appear to enter a trance. Slowly you turned your 
head. You pointed, with your hand close to the table, then let your hand go lax
“What is it, David?” I said. “What are you seeing?"
“Spirits, Pandora, ghosts.”
You shuddered as if to dear your head.
“But that’s unheard of,” I said. Yet I knew that he was telling the truth. "The 
Dark Gift takes away that power. Even the ancient witches, Maharet and Mekare, 
told us this, that once Akasha’s blood entered them, and they became vampires, 
they never heard or saw the spirits again. You’ve recently been with them. Did 
you tell them of this power?”
He nodded. Obviously some loyalty bound him
not to say that they did not have it. But I knew they
did not. I saw it in his mind, and I had known it
myself when I had encountered the ancient twins, the twins who had struck down 
the Queen of the Damned.
"I can see spirits, Pandora," you said with the most troubled expression. “I can 
see them anywhere if I try, and in some very specific places when they choose. 
Lestat saw the ghost of Roger, his victim in Memnoch the Devil.”
“But that was an exception, a surge of love in – the man’s soul that somehow 
defied death, or delayed the soul’s termination – something we can’t 
understand.”
“I see spirits, but I haven't come to burden you with this or frighten you.”
"You must tell me more about this,” I said. “What did you see right now?"
"A weak spirit. It couldn’t harm anyone. It's one of those sad humans who does 
not know he's dead. They are an atmosphere around the planet. The 'earthbound’ 
is the name for them. But Pandora, I have more than that in myself to explore."
You continued:
“Apparently each century yields a new kind of vampire, or let us say that our 
course of growth was not set in the beginning any more than the course of human 
beings, Some night perhaps I will tell you everything I see – these spirits who 
were never clear to me when I was mortal – I'll tell you about something Armand 
confided to me, about the colors he saw when he took life, how the soul left 
body in waves of radiating color!”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“I too see this," you said.
I could see it hurt you almost too much to speak of Armand.
“But whatever possessed Armand to believe in the Veil'?” I asked, suddenly 
amazed at my own passion. “Why did he go into the sun? How could such a thing 
kill Lestat’s reason and will? Veronica. Did they know the very name means Vera 
Ikon, that there was never any such person, that she could not be found by one 
drawn back to ancient Jerusalem on the day Christ carried his cross; she was a 
concoction of Priests. Didn’t they know?"
I think I had taken the two notebooks in hand, for I looked down and I saw that 
I did indeed hold them. In fact, I clutched both of them to my breast and 
examined one of the pens.
“Reason," I whispered. “Oh, precious reason! And consciousness within a void.” I 
shook my head, smiling kindly at you, “And vampires who speak now with spirits! 
Humans who can travel from body to body.”
I went on with a wholly unfamiliar energy.
“A lively fashionable modern cult of angels, devotion thriving everywhere. And 
people rising from operating tables to speak of life after death, a tunnel, an 
embracing love! Oh, you have been created perhaps in an auspicious time! I don’t 
know what to make of it.”
You were obviously quite impressed by these words, or rather the way that my 
perspective had been drawn from me. So was I.
“I’ve only started,” you said, "and will keep company alike with brilliant 
Children of the Millennia and street-corner fortune tellers who deal out the 
cards of the Tarot. I’m eager to gaze into crystal balls and darkened mirrors. 
I’ll search now among those whom others dismiss as mad, or among us – among 
those like you, who have looked on something that they do not believe they 
should share! That's it, isn’t it? But I ask you to share it. I’m finished with 
the ordinary human soul. I am finished with science and psychology, with 
microscopes and perhaps even with the telescopes aimed at the stars.”
I was quite enthralled. How strongly you meant it. I could feel my face so warm 
with feeling for you as I looked at you. I think my mouth was slack with wonder.
“I am a miracle unto myself,” you said. “I am immortal, and I want to learn 
about us! You have a tale to tell, you are ancient, and deeply broken. I feel 
love for you and cherish that it is what it is and nothing more.”
“What a strange thing to say!”
“Love.” You shrugged your shoulders. You looked up and then back at me for 
emphasis. “And it rained and it rained for millions of years, and the volcanoes 
boiled and the oceans cooled, and then there was love?” You shrugged to make a 
mock of the absurdity.
I couldn’t help but laugh at your little gest. Too perfect, I thought. But I was 
suddenly so torn.
“This is very unexpected," I said. “Because if I do have a story, a very small 
story –”
“Yes?”
“Well, my story – if I have one – is very much to the point. It’s linked to the 
very points you've made."
Suddenly something came over me. I laughed again softly.
“I understand you.” I said. “Oh, not that you can see spirits, for that is a 
great subject unto itself.
"But I see now the source of your strength. You have lived an entire human life. 
Unlike Marius, unlike me, you weren’t taken in your prime. You were taken near 
the moment of your natural death, and you will not settle for the adventures and 
faults of the earthbound! You are determined to forge ahead with the courage of 
one who has died of old age and then finds himself risen from the grave. You’ve 
kicked aside the funeral wreaths. You are ready for Mount Olympus, aren’t you?”
“Or for Osiris in the depths of the darkness," you said. “Or for the shades in 
Hades. Certainly I am ready for the spirits, for the vampires, for those who see 
the future and claim to know past lives, for you who have a stunning intellect 
encased beautifully, to endure for so many years, an intellect which has perhaps 
all but destroyed your heart.”
I gasped.
“Forgive me. That was not proper of me," you said.
“No, explain your meaning.”
“You always take the hearts from the victims, isn’t it so? You want the heart.”
“Perhaps. Don’t expect wisdom from me as it might come from Marius, or the 
ancient twins."
“You draw me to you,” you said.
“Why ?”
“Because you do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be 
written – behind your silence and your suffering.”
"You are too romantic, friend,” I said.
You waited patiently. I think you could feel the tumult in me, the shivering of 
my soul in the face of so much new emotion.
"It’s such a small story," I said. I saw images, memories, moments, the stuff 
that can incite souls to action and creation. I saw the very faintest 
possibility of faith.
I think you already knew the answer.
You knew what I would do when I did not.
You smiled discreetly, but you were eager and waiting.
I looked at you and thought of trying to write it, write it all out...
“You want me to leave now, don't you'?” you said. You rose, collected your 
rain-spattered coat and bent over gracefully to kiss my hand.
My hands were clutching the notebooks.
"No,” I said, "I can’t do it.”
You made no immediate judgment.
“Come back in two nights,” I said. "I promise you will have your two notebooks 
for you, even if they are completely empty or only contain a better explanation 
of why I can’t retrieve my lost life. I won’t disappoint you. But expect 
nothing, except that I will come and I will put these books in your hands.”
"Two nights,” you said, "and we meet here again.”
In silence I watched you leave the cafe.
And now you see it has begun, David.
And now you see, David, l have made our meeting the introduction to the story 
you asked me to tell.
 
 
2
 
PANDORA'S STORY
 
I was born in Rome, during the reign of Augustus Caesar, in the year that you 
now reckon to have been 15 B.C., or fifteen years “before Christ."
All the Roman history and Roman names I give here are accurate; I have not 
falsified them or made up stories or created false political events. Everything 
bears upon my ultimate fate and the fate of Marius. Nothing is included for love 
of the past. I have omitted my family name. I did this because my family has a 
history, and I cannot bring myself to connect their ancient reputations, deeds, 
epitaphs to this tale. Also Marius, when he confided in Lestat, did not give the 
full name of his Roman family. And I respect this and that also is not revealed.
Augustus had been Emperor for over ten years, and it was a marvelous time to be 
an educated woman in Rome, women had immense freedom, and I had a rich Senator 
for a father, five prosperous brothers, and grew up Motherless but cherished by 
teams of Greek tutors and nurses who gave me everything I wanted.
Now, if I really wanted to make this difficult for you, David, I’d write it in 
classical Latin. But I won’t. And I must tell you that, unlike you, I came by my 
education in English haphazardly, and certainly I never learnt it from 
Shakespeare’s plays.
Indeed I have passed through many stages of the English language in my 
wanderings and in my reading, but the great majority of my true acquaintance 
with it has been in this century, and I am writing for you in colloquial 
English.
There’s another reason For this, which I’m sure you’ll understand if you’ve read 
the modern translation of Petronius's Satyricon or Juvenal’s satires. Very 
modern English is a really true equivalent to the Latin of my time.
The formal letters of Imperial Rome won’t tell you this. But the graffiti 
scratched on the walls of Pompeii will make it obvious. We had a sophisticated 
tongue, countless clever verbal shortcuts and common expressions.
I'm going to write, therefore, in the English which feels equivalent and natural 
to me.
Let me say here quickly – while the action is at a halt – that I was never, as 
Marius said, a Greek Courtesan. I was living with such a pretense when Marius 
gave me the Dark Gift, and perhaps out of consideration for old mortal secrets 
he so described me. Or maybe it was contemptuous of him to style me this way. I 
don't know.
But Marius knew all about my Roman family, that it was a Senatorial family, as 
purely aristocratic and privileged as his own mortal family, and that my people 
dated back to the time of Romulus and Remus, the same as Marius’s mortal line. 
Marius did not succumb to me because I had “beautiful arms,” as he indicated to 
Lestat. This trivialization was perhaps provocative.
I don’t hold anything against either of them, Marius or Lestat. I don't know who 
got what wrong.
My feeling for my Father is so great to this very night, as I sit in the cafe, 
writing for you, David, that I am astonished at the power of writing – of 
putting words to paper and bringing back so vividly to myself my Father’s loving 
face.
My Father was to meet a terrible end. He did not deserve what happened to him. 
But some of our kinsmen survived and re-established our family in later times.
My Father was rich, one of the true millionaires of that age, and his capital 
was invested widely. He was a soldier more often than required of him, a 
Senator, a thoughtful and quiet man by disposition. And after the terrors of the 
Civil War, he was a great supporter of Caesar Augustus and very much in the 
Emperor’s good graces.
Of course he dreamed that the Roman Republic would come back; we all did. But 
Augustus had brought unity and peace to the Empire.
I met Augustus many times in my youth, and it was always at some crowded social 
function and of no consequence. He looked like his portraits; a lean man with a 
long thin nose, short hair, average face; he was rather rational and pragmatic 
by nature and not invested with any abnormal cruelty. He had no personal vanity.
The poor man was really blessed that he couldn't see into the future – that he 
had no inkling of all the horrors and madness that would begin with Tiberius, 
his successor, and go on for so long under other members of his family.
Only in later times did I understand the full singularity and accomplishment of 
Augustus's long reign. Was it forty-four years of peace throughout the cities of 
the Empire?
Alas, to be born during this time was to be born during a time of creativity and 
prosperity, when Rome was caput mundi, or capital of the world. And when I look 
back on it, I realize what a powerful combination it was to have both tradition 
and vast sums of money; to have old values and new power.
Our family life was conservative, strict, even a little dusty. And yet we had 
every luxury. My Father grew more quiet and conservative over the years. He 
enjoyed his grandchildren, who were born while he was still vigorous and active.
Though he had fought principally in the Northern campaigns along the Rhine, he 
had been stationed in Syria for a while. He had studied in Athens. He had served 
so much and so well that he was being allowed an early retirement in the years 
during which I grew up, an early withdrawal from the social life that whirled 
around the Imperial Palace, though I did not realize this at the time.
My five brothers came before me. So there was no "ritual Roman mourning” when I 
was born, as you hear tell of in Roman families when a girl comes into the 
world. Far from it.
Five times my Father had stood in the atrium – the main enclosed courtyard, or 
peristyle, of our house with its pillars and stairs and grand marble-work – five 
times he had stood there before the assembled family and held in his hands a 
newborn son, inspected it and then pronounced it perfect and fit to be reared as 
his own, as was his prerogative. Now, you know he had the power of life and 
death over his sons from that moment on.
If my Father hadn’t wanted these boys for any reason, he would have “exposed” 
them to die of starvation. It was against the law to steal such a child and make 
it a slave.
Having five boys already, my Father was expected by some to get rid of me 
immediately. Who needs a girl? But my Father never exposed or rejected any of my 
Mother’s children.
And by the time I arrived, I'm told, he cried for joy.
"Thank the gods! A little darling.", I heard the story ad nauseam from my 
brothers, who, every time I acted up – did something unseemly, frisky and wild – 
said sneeringly, “Thank the gods, a little darling!” It became a charming goad.
My Mother died when I was two, and all I recall of her are gentleness and 
sweetness. She’d lost as many children as she had birthed, and early death was 
typical enough. Her Epitaph was beautifully written by my Father, and her memory 
honored throughout my life. My Father never took another woman into the house. 
He slept with a few of the female slaves, but this was nothing unusual. My 
brothers did the same thing. This was common in a Roman household. My Father 
brought no new woman from another family to rule over me.
There is no grief in me for my Mother because I was simply too young for it, and 
if I cried when my Mother did not come back, I don't remember it.
What I remember is having the run of a big old rectangular palatial Roman house, 
with many rectangular rooms built onto the main rectangle, one off another, the 
whole nestled in a huge garden high on the Palatine Hill. It was a house of 
marble floors and richly painted walls, the garden meandering and surrounding 
every room of it.
I was the true jewel of my Father's eye, and I remember having a marvelous time 
watching my brothers practice outside with their short broadswords, or listening 
as their tutors instructed them, and then having fine teachers of my own who 
taught me how to read the entire Aeneid of Virgil before I was five years old.
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I 
have fallen into the joy of writing them. I couldn’t have told you that nights 
ago, David. You’ve brought back something to me and I must make the admission. 
And I must not write too fast in this mortal cafe, lest human beings notice!
Ah, so we continue.
My Father thought it was hysterical that I could recite verses from Virgil at so 
young an age and he liked nothing better than to show me off at banquets at 
which he entertained his conservative and somewhat old-fashioned Senatorial 
friends, and sometimes Caesar Augustus himself. Caesar Augustus was an agreeable 
man. I don't think my Father ever really wanted him at our house, however. But 
now and then, I suppose, the Emperor had to be wined and dined.
I’d rush in with my nurse, give a rousing recital and then be whisked away to 
where I could not see the proud Senators of Rome glutting themselves on peacock 
brains and garum – surely you know what garum is. It’s the horrible sauce the 
Romans put on everything, rather like today’s ketchup. Definitely it defeated 
the purpose of having eels and squids on your plate, or ostrich brains or unborn 
lamb or whatever other absurd delicacies were being brought by the platterful.
The point is, as you know, the Romans seemed to have a special place in their 
hearts for genuine gluttony, and the banquets inevitably became a disgrace. The 
guests would go off to the vomitorium of the house to heave up the first five 
courses of the meal so that they could then swallow the others. And I would lie 
upstairs, giggling in my bed, listening to all this laughter and vomiting. Then 
the rape of the entire catering staff of slaves would follow, whether they were 
boys or girls or a mixture of both.
Family meals were an entirely different affair. Then we were old Romans. 
Everyone sat at the table; my Father was undisputed Master of his house, and 
would tolerate no criticism of Caesar Augustus, who, as you know, was Julius 
Caesar's nephew, and did not really rule as Emperor by law.
“When the time is right, he will step down," said my Father. "He knows he can’t 
do it now. He is more weary and wise than ever he was ambitious. Who wants 
another Civil War?"
The times were actually too prosperous for men of stature to make a revolt.
Augustus kept the peace. He had profound respect for the Roman Senate. He 
rebuilt old Temples because he thought people needed the piety they had known 
under the Republic.
He gave free corn from Egypt to the poor. Nobody starved in Rome. He maintained 
a dizzying amount of old festivals, games and spectacles – enough to sicken one 
actually. But often as patriotic Romans we had to be there.
Of course there was great cruelty in the arena. There were cruel executions. 
There was the ever present cruelty of slavery.
But what is not understood by those today is that there coexisted with all this 
a sense of individual freedom on the part of even the poorest man.
The courts took time over their decisions. They consulted the past laws. They 
followed logic and code. People could speak their minds fairly openly.
I note this because it is key to this story: that Marius and I both were born in 
a time when Roman law was, as Marius would say, based on reason, as opposed to 
divine revelation.
We are totally unlike those blood drinkers brought to Darkness in lands of Magic 
and Mystery.
Not only did we trust Augustus when we were alive, we also believed in the 
tangible power of the Roman Senate. We believed in public virtue and character; 
we held to a way of life which did not involve rituals, prayers, magic, except 
superficially. Virtue was embedded in character. That was the inheritance of the 
Roman Republic, which Marius and I shared.
Of course, our house was overcrowded with slaves. There were brilliant Greeks 
and grunting laborers and a fleet of women to rush about polishing busts and 
vases, and the city itself was choked with manumitted slaves – freedmen – some 
of whom were very rich.
They were all our people, our slaves.
My Father and I sat up all night when my old Greek teacher was dying. We held 
his hands until the body was cold. Nobody was flogged on our estate in Rome 
unless my Father himself gave the order. Our country slaves loafed under the 
fruit trees. Our stewards were rich, and showed off their wealth in their 
clothes.
I remember a time when there were so many old Greek slaves in the garden that I 
could sit day after day and listen to them argue. They had nothing else to do. I 
learned much from this.
I grew up more than happy. If you think I exaggerate the extent of my education, 
consult the letters of Pliny or other actual memoirs and correspondence of the 
times. Highborn young girls were well educated; modern Roman women went about 
unhampered for the most part by male interference. We partook of life as did 
men.
For example, I was scarcely eight years old when I was first taken to the arena 
with several of my brothers' wives, to have the dubious pleasure of seeing 
exotic creatures, such as giraffes, tear madly around before being shot to death 
with arrows, this display then followed by a small group of gladiators who would 
hack other gladiators to death, and then after that came the flock of criminals 
to be fed to the hungry lions.
David, I can hear the sound of those lions as if it were now. There’s nothing 
between me and the moment that I sat in the wooden benches, perhaps two rows up 
– the premium seats – and I watched these beasts devour living beings, as I was 
supposed to do, with a pleasure meant to demonstrate a strength of heart, a 
fearlessness in the face of death, rather than simple and utter monstrousness.
The audience screamed and laughed as men and women ran from the beasts. Some 
victims would give the crowd no such satisfaction. They merely stood there as 
the hungry lion attacked; those who were being devoured alive almost invariably 
lay in a stupor as though their souls had already taken flight, though the lion 
had not reached the throat.
I remember the smell of it. But more than anything, I remember the noise of the 
crowd.
I passed the test of character, I could look at all of it. I could watch the 
champion gladiator finally meet his end, lying there bloody in the sand, as the 
sword went through his chest.
But I can certainly remember my Father declaring under his breath that the whole 
affair was disgusting. In fact, everybody I knew thought it was all disgusting. 
My Father believed, as did others, that the common man needed all this blood. 
We, the highborn, had to preside over it for the common man. It had a religious 
quality to it, all this spectacular viciousness.
The making of these appalling spectacles was considered something of a social 
responsibility.
Also Roman life was a life of being outdoors, involved in things, attending 
ceremonies and spectacles, being seen, taking an interest, coming together with 
others.
You came together with all the other highborn and lowborn of the city and you 
joined in one mass to witness a triumphant procession, a great offering at the 
altar of Augustus, an ancient ceremony, a game, a chariot race.
Now in the Twentieth Century, when I watch the endless intrigue and slaughter in 
motion pictures and on television throughout our Western world, I wonder if 
people do not need it, do not need to see murder, slaughter, death in all forms. 
Television at times seems an unbroken series of gladiatorial fights or 
massacres. And look at the traffic now in video recordings of actual war.
Records of war have become art and entertainment.
The narrator speaks softly as the camera passes over the heap of bodies, or the 
skeletal children sobbing with their starving mothers. But it is gripping. One 
can wallow, shaking one's head, in all this death. Nights of television are 
devoted to old footage of men dying with guns in their hands.
I think we look because we are afraid. But in Rome, you had to look so that you 
would be hard, and that applied to women as well as men.
But the overall point is – I was not closeted away as a Greek woman might have 
been in some old Hellenistic household. I did not suer under the earlier customs 
of the Roman Republic.
I vividly remember the absolute beauty of that time, and my Father's heartfelt 
avowal that Augustus was a god, and that Rome had never been more pleasing to 
her deities.
Now I want to give you one very important recollection. Let me set the scene. 
First, let’s take up the question of Virgil, and the poem he wrote, the Aeneid, 
greatly amplifying and glorifying the adventures of the hero Aeneas, a Trojan 
fleeing the horrors of defeat by the Greeks who came out of the famous Trojan 
horse to massacre Helen’s city of Troy.
It's a charming story. I always loved it, Aeneas leaves dying Troy, valiantly 
journeys all the way to beautiful Italy and there founds our nation.
But the point is that Augustus loved and supported Virgil all of Virgil's life, 
and Virgil was a respected poet, a poet fine and decent to quote, an approved 
and patriotic poet. It was perfectly fine to like Virgil.
Virgil died before I was born. But by ten I’d read everything he’d written, and 
had read Horace as well, and Lucretius, much of Cicero, and all the Greek 
manuscripts we possessed, and there were plenty.
My Father didn’t erect his library for show. It was a place where members of the 
family spent hours. It was also where he sat to write his letters – which he 
seemed endlessly to be doing – letters on behalf of the Senate, the Emperor, the 
courts, his friends, etc.
Back to Virgil. I had also read another Roman poet, who was alive still, and 
deeply and dangerously out of favor with Augustus, the god. This was the poet 
Ovid, the author of the Metamorphoses, and dozens of other earthy, hilarious and 
bawdy works.
Now, when I was too young to remember, Augustus turned on Ovid, whom Augustus 
had also loved, and Augustus banished Ovid to some horrible place on the Black 
Sea. Maybe it wasn't so horrible. But it was the sort of place cultured city 
Romans expect to be horrible – very far away from the capital and full of 
barbarians.
Ovid lived there a long time, and his books were banned all over Rome. You 
couldn't find them in the bookshops or the public libraries. Or at the book 
stands all over the marketplace.
You know this was a hot time for popular reading; books were everywhere – both 
in scroll form and in codex, that is, with bound pages – and many booksellers 
had teams of Greek slaves spending all day copying books for public consumption.
To continue, Ovid had fallen out of favor with Augustus, and he had been banned, 
but men like my Father were not about to burn their copies of the Metamorphoses, 
or any other of Ovid's work, and the only reason they didn’t plead for Ovid's 
pardon was fear.
The whole scandal had something to do with Augustus’s daughter, Julia, who was a 
notorious slut by anyone’s standards. How Ovid became involved in Julia’s love 
affairs I don’t know. Perhaps his sensuous early poetry, the Amores, was 
considered to be a bad influence. There was also a lot of “reform” in the air 
during the reign of Augustus, a lot of talk of old values.
I don’t think anyone knows what really happened between Caesar Augustus and 
Ovid, but Ovid was banished for the rest of his life from Imperial Rome.
But I had read the Amores and the Metamorphoses in well-worn copies by the time 
of this incident which I want to recount. And many of my Father’s friends were 
always worried about Ovid.
Now to the specific recollection. I was ten years old, I came in from playing, 
covered with dust from head to foot, my hair loose, my dress torn, and breezed 
into my Father’s large receiving room – and I plopped down at the foot of his 
couch to listen to what was being said, as he lounged there with all appropriate 
Roman dignity, chatting with several other lounging men who had come to visit.
I knew all of the men but one, and this one was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and 
very tall, and he turned, during the conversation – which was all whispers and 
nods – and winked at me.
This was Marius, with skin slightly tanned from his travels and a flashing 
beauty in his eyes. He had three names like everyone else. But again, I will not 
disclose the name of his family. But I knew it. I knew he was sort of the “bad 
boy” in an intellectual way, the “poet" and the “loafer.” What nobody had told 
me was that he was beautiful.
Now, on this day, this was Marius when he was alive, about fifteen years before 
he was to be made a vampire. I can calculate that he was only twenty-five. But 
I’m not certain.
To continue, the men paid no attention to me, and it became plain to my ever 
curious little mind that they were giving my Father news of Ovid, that the tall 
blond one with the remarkable blue eyes, the one called Marius, had just 
returned from the Baltic Coast, and he had given my Father several presents, 
which were in fact good copies of Ovid’s work, both past and current.
The men assured my Father that it was still far too dangerous to go crying to 
Caesar Augustus over Ovid, and my Father accepted this. But if I’m not mistaken, 
he entrusted some money for Ovid to Marius, the blond one.
When the gentlemen were all leaving, I saw Marius in the atrium, got a measure 
of his full height, which was quite unusual for a Roman, and let out a girlish 
gasp and then a streak of laughter. He winked at me again.
Marius had his hair short then, dipped military-Roman-style with a few modest 
curls on his forehead; his hair was long when he was later made a vampire, and 
he wears it long now, but then it was the typical boring Roman military cut. But 
it was blond and full of sunlight in the atrium, and he seemed the brightest and 
most impressive man I’d ever laid eyes upon. He was full of kindness when he 
looked at me.
“Why are you so tall?” I asked him. My Father thought this was amusing, of 
course, and he did not care what anyone else thought of his dusty little 
daughter, hanging onto his arms and speaking to his honored company.
“My precious one,” Marius said, "I’m tall because I’m a barbarian!” He laughed 
and was flirtatious when he laughed, with a deference to me as a little lady, 
which was rather rare.
Suddenly he made his hands into claws and ran at me like a bear.
I loved him instantly!
"No, truly.” I said. “You can't be a barbarian. I know your Father and all your 
sisters; they live just down the hill. The family is always talking about you at 
the table, saying only nice things, of course.”
“Of that I’m sure,” he said, breaking into laughter.
I knew my Father was getting anxious.
What I didn’t know was that a ten-year-old girl could be betrothed.
Marius drew himself up and said in his gentle very fine voice, trained for 
public rhetoric as well as words of love, “I am descended through my mother from 
the Keltoi, little beauty, little muse. I come from the tall blond people of the 
North, the people of Gaul. My mother was a princess there, or so I am told. Do 
you know who they are?”
I said of course I knew and began to recite verbatim from Julius Caesar’s 
account of conquering Gaul, or the land of the Keltoi: “All Gaul is made up of 
three parts...”
Marius was quite genuinely impressed. So was everybody So I went on and on, “The 
Keltoi are separated from the Aquitani by the river Garonne, and the tribe of 
the Belgae by the rivers Marne and Seine –"
My Father, being slightly embarrassed by this time, with his daughter glorying 
in attention, spoke up to gently assure everyone that I was his precious joy, 
and I was let to run wild, and please make nothing of it.
And I said, being bold, and a born troublemaker, "Give my love to the great 
Ovid! Because I too wish he would come home to Rome.”
I then rattled off several steamy lines of the Amores:
 
She laughed and gave her best, whole hearted kisses, They’d shake the three 
pronged bolt from Jove’s hand. Torture to think that fellow got such good ones!
I wish they hadn’t been of the same brand!
 
All laughed, except my Father, and Marius went wild with delight, clapping his 
hands. That was all the encouragement I needed to rush at him now like a bear, 
as he had rushed at me, and to continue singing out Ovid’s hot words:
 
What’s more these kisses were better than I’d taught her,
She seemed possessed of knowledge that was new.
They pleased too well – bad sign! Her tongue was in them,
And my tongue was kissing too.
 
My Father grabbed me by the small of my upper arm, and said, “That’s it, Lydia, 
wrap it up." And the men laughed all the harder, commiserating with him, and 
embracing him, and then laughing again.
But I had to have one final victory over this team of adults.
“Pray, Father,” I said, “let me finish with some wise and patriotic words which 
Ovid said:
" 'I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present 
time. This age suits my taste.’ ”
This seemed to astonish Marius more than to amuse him. But my Father gathered me 
close and said very dearly:
“Lydia, Ovid wouldn’t say that now, and now you, for being such a... a scholar 
and philosopher in one, should assure your Father's dearest friends that you 
know full well Ovid was banished from Rome by Augustus for good reason and that 
he can never return home.”
In other words, he was saying “Shut up about Ovid.”
But Marius, undeterred, dropped on his knees before me, lean and handsome with 
mesmeric blue eyes, and he took my hand and kissed it and said, “I will give 
Ovid your love, little Lydia. But your Father is right. We must all agree with 
the Emperor’s censure. After all, we are Romans.” He then did the very strange 
thing of speaking to me purely as if I were an adult. “Augustus Caesar has given 
far more to Rome, I think, than anyone ever hoped. And he too is a poet. He 
wrote a poem called ‘Ajax’ and burnt it up himself because he said it wasn’t 
good.”
I was having the time of my life. I would have run off with Marius then and 
there!
But all I could do was dance around him as he went out of the vestibule and out 
the gate.
I waved to him.
He lingered. "Goodbye, little Lydia,” he said. He then spoke under his breath to 
my Father, and I heard my Father say:
"You are out of your mind!”
My Father turned his back on Marius, who gave me a sad smile and disappeared.
“What did he mean? What happened?” I asked my Father. “What's the matter?”
“Listen, Lydia,” said my Father. "Have you in all your readings come across the 
word ‘betrothed’?”
“Yes, Father, of course.”
“Well, that sort of wanderer and dreamer likes nothing better than to betroth 
himself to a young girl of ten because it means she is not old enough to marry 
and he has years of freedom, without the censure of the Emperor. They do it all 
the time.”
“No, no, Father," I said. “I shall never forget him.”
I think I forgot him the next day.
I didn’t see Marius again for five years.
I remember because I was fifteen, and should have been married and didn't want 
to be married at all. I had wriggled out of it year after year, feigning 
illness, madness, total uncontrollable fits. But time was running out on me. In 
fact I’d been eligible for marriage since I was twelve.
At this time, we were all standing together at the foot of the Palatine Hill, 
watching a most sacrosanct ceremony – the Lupercalia – just one of so many 
festivals that were integral in Roman life.
Now the Lupercalia was very important to us, though there's no way to relate its 
significance to a Christian’s concept of religion. It was pious to enjoy such a 
festival, to participate as a citizen and as a virtuous Roman.
And besides it was a great pleasure.
So I was there, not so far from the cave of the Lupercal, watching with other 
young women, as the two chosen men of that year were smeared with blood from a 
sacrifice of goats and then draped in the bleeding skins of the sacrificed 
animals. I couldn’t see all of this very well, but I had seen it many times, and 
when years before two of my brothers had run in this festival, I had pushed to 
the front to get a good look at it.
On this occasion, I did have a fairly good view when each of the two young men 
took his own company and began his run around the base of the Palatine Hill. I 
moved forward because I was supposed to do it. The young men were hitting 
lightly on the arm of every young woman with a strip of goatskin, which was 
supposed to purify us. Render us fertile.
I stepped forward and received the ceremonial blow, and then stepped back again, 
wishing I was a man and could run around the hill with the other men, not an 
unusual thought for me at any time in my mortal life.
I had some sarcastic inner thoughts about “being purified," but by this age I 
behaved in public and would not on any account have humiliated my Father or my 
brothers.
These strips of goatskin, as you know, David, are called Februa, and February 
comes from that word. So much for language and all the magic it unwittingly 
carries with it. Surely the Lupercalia had something to do with Romulus and 
Remus; perhaps it even echoed some ancient human sacrifice. After all, the young 
men’s heads were smeared with goat blood. It gives me shivers, because in 
Etruscan times, long before I was born, this might have been a far more cruel 
ceremony.
Perhaps this was the occasion that Marius saw my arms. Because I was exposing 
them to this ceremonial lash, and was already, as you can see, much of a 
show-off in general, laughing with the others as the company of men continued 
their run.
In the crowd, I saw Marius. He looked at me, then back to his book. So strange. 
I saw him standing against a tree trunk and writing. No one did this – stand 
against a tree, hold a book in one hand and write with the other. The slave 
stood beside him with a bottle of ink.
Marius’s hair was long and most beautiful. Quite wild.
I said to my Father, “Look, there’s our barbarian friend Marius, the tall one, 
and he’s writing."
My Father smiled and said, “Marius is always writing. Marius is good for 
writing, if for nothing else. Turn around, Lydia. Be still.”
"But he looked at me, Father. I want to talk to him."
"You will not, Lydia! You will not grace him with one small smile!”
On the way home, I asked my Father, "If you’re going to marry me to someone – if 
there’s no way short of suicide that I can avoid this disgusting development – 
why don’t you marry me to Marius? I don’t understand it. I’m rich. He’s rich. I 
know his Mother was a wild Keltoi princess, but his Father has adopted him."
My Father said witheringly, "Where have you learned all this?” He stopped in his 
tracks, always an ominous sign. The crowd broke and streamed around.
“I don't know; it’s common knowledge.” I turned. There was Marius hovering 
about, glancing at me. “Father," I said, “please let me speak to him.”
My Father knelt down. Most of the crowd had gone on. “Lydia, I know this is 
dreadful for you. I have caved to every objection you have raised to your 
suitors. But believe you me, the Emperor himself would not approve of you 
marrying such a mad wandering historian as Marius! He has never served in the 
military, he cannot enter the Senate, it is quite impossible. When you marry, 
you will marry well.”
As we walked away, I turned again, thinking only to pick Marius out from the 
others, but to my surprise he was stark still, looking at me. With his flowing 
hair, he much resembled the Vampire Lestat. He is taller than Lestat, but he has 
the same lithe build, the same very blue eyes and a muscular strength to him, 
and a squareness of face which is almost pretty.
I pulled away from my Father and ran up to him.
“Well, I wanted to marry you,” I said, “but my Father has said no.”
I’ll never forget the expression on his face. But before he could speak, my 
Father had gathered me up and gone into obliterating respectable conversation:
“How now, Marius, how goes it with your brother in the Army. And how is it with 
your history. I hear you have written thirteen volumes.”
My Father backed up, virtually carrying me away.
Marius did not move or answer. Soon we were with others hurrying up the hill.
All the course of our lives was changed at that moment. But there was no 
conceivable way Marius or I could have known it.
Twenty years would pass before we would meet again.
I was thirty-five, then. I can say that we met in a realm of darkness in more 
respects than one.
For now, let me fill up the gap.
I was married twice, due to pressure from the Imperial House. Augustus wanted us 
all to have children. I had none. My husbands seeded plenty, however, with slave 
girls. So I was legally divorced and freed twice over, and determined then to 
retire from social life, just so the Emperor Tiberius, who had come to the 
Imperial throne at the age of fifty, would not meddle with me, for he was more a 
public puritan and domestic dictator than Augustus. If I kept to the house, if I 
didn’t go abroad to banquets and parties and hang around with the Empress Livia, 
Augustus’s wife and mother of Tiberius, perhaps I wouldn't be pushed into 
becoming a stepmother! I’d stay home. I had to care for my Father. He deserved 
it. Even though he was perfectly healthy, he was still old!
With all due respect for the husbands I have mentioned, whose names are more 
than footnotes in common Roman histories, I was a wretched wife.
I had plenty of my own money from my Father, I listened to nothing, and yielded 
to the act of love only on my own terms, which I always obtained; being gifted 
with enough beauty to make men really suffer.
I became a member of the Cult of Isis just to spite these husbands and get away 
from them, so that I could hang around at the Temple of Isis, where I spent an 
enormous amount of time with other interesting women, some far more adventurous 
and unconventional than I dared to be. I was attracted to whores. I saw the 
brilliant, loose women as having conquered a barrier which I, the loving 
daughter of my Father, would never conquer.
I became a regular at the Temple. I was initiated at last in a secret ceremony, 
and I walked in every procession of Isis in Rome.
My husbands loathed this. Maybe that’s why after I came home to my Father I gave 
up the worship. Whatever, it was a good thing perhaps that I had. But fortune 
could not be so easily shaped by any decision of mine.
Now Isis was an imported goddess, from Egypt, of course, and the old Romans were 
as suspicious of her as they were of the terrible Cybele, the Great other from 
the Far East, who led her male devotees to castrate themselves. The whole city 
was filled with these “Eastern cults,” and the conservative population thought 
them dreadful.
These cults weren’t rational; they were ecstatic or euphoric. They offered a 
complete rebirth through understanding.
The typical conservative Roman was far too practical for that. If you didn't 
know by age five that the gods were made-up creatures and the myths invented 
stories, then you were a fool.
But Isis had a curious distinction – something that set her far apart from the 
cruel Cybele. Isis was a loving mother and goddess. Isis forgave her worshipers 
anything. Isis had come before all Creation. Isis was patient and wise.
That’s why the most degraded woman could pray at the Temple. That's why none 
were ever turned away.
Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is so well known today throughout the East and 
West, the Queen Isis had conceived her divine child by divine means. From the 
dead and castrated Osiris, she had drawn the living seed by her own power. And 
many a time she was pictured or sculpted holding her divine son, Horus, on her 
knee. Her breast was bare in all innocence to feed the young god.
And Osiris ruled in the land of the dead, his phallus lost forever in the waters 
of the Nile, where an endless semen flowed from it, fertilizing the remarkable 
fields of Egypt every year when the River overflowed its banks.
The music of our Temple was divine. We used the sistrum, a small rigid metal 
lyre of sorts, and flutes and timbrels. We danced, and we sang together. The 
poetry of Isis’s litanies was fine and rapturous.
Isis was the Queen of Navigation, much like the Blessed Virgin Mary would be 
called later, “Our Lady Star of the Sea.”
When her statue was carried to the shore each year, the procession was so 
splendid that all Rome turned out to see the Egyptian gods with their animal 
heads, the huge abundance of flowers and the statue of the Queen Mother herself. 
The air rang with hymns. Her Priests and Priestesses walked in white linen 
robes. She herself, made of marble, and carried high, holding her sacred 
sistrum, dressed regally in a Grecian gown with Grecian hair.
That was my Isis. I fell away from her after my last divorce. My Father didn’t 
like the worship, and I myself had enjoyed it long enough. As a free woman, I 
wasn't infatuated with prostitutes. I had it infinitely better. I kept my 
Father’s house and he was just old enough, in spite of his black hair and his 
remarkably sharp vision, that the Emperor left me alone.
I can’t say I remembered or thought of Marius. No one had mentioned Marius for 
years. He had disappeared out of my mind after the Lupercalia. There was no 
force on Earth that could come between me and my Father.
My brothers all had good luck. They married well, had children and came home 
from the hard wars in which they fought, keeping the boundaries of the Empire.
My youngest brother, Lucius, I did not like much, but he was always a little 
anxious and given to drinking and apparently also to gambling, which very much 
annoyed his wife.
She I loved, as I did all my sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews. I loved 
it when they descended upon the house, these flocks of children, squealing and 
running rampant with “Aunt Lydia’s blessing,” as they were never allowed to do 
at home.
The eldest of my brothers, Antony, was in potential a great man. Fate robbed him 
of greatness. But he had been most ready for it, well schooled, trained and most 
wise.
The only foolish thing I ever knew Antony to do was say to me very distinctly 
once that Livia, Augustus’s wife, had poisoned him so that her son, Tiberius, 
would rise. My Father, the only other occupant of the room, told him sternly:
"Antony, never speak of that again! Not here, not anywhere!" My Father stood up, 
and without planning it, put in perspective the style of life which he and I 
lived, “Stay away from the Imperial Palace, stay away from the Imperial 
families, be in the front ranks of the games and always in the Senate, but don’t 
get into their quarrels and their intrigues!"
Antony was very angry, but the anger had nothing to do with my Father. “I said 
it only to those two to whom I can say it, you and Lydia. I detest eating dinner 
with a woman who poisoned her husband! Augustus should have re-established the 
Republic. He knew when death was coming.”
“Yes, and he knew that he could not restore the Republic. It was simply 
impossible. The Empire had grown to Britannia in the North, beyond Parthia in 
the East; it covers Northern Africa. If you want to be a good Roman, Antony, 
then stand up and speak your conscience in the Senate. Tiberius invites this.”
“Oh, Father, you are much deceived,” said Antony.
My Father put an end to this argument.
But he and I did live exactly the life he had described.
Tiberius was immediately unpopular with the noisy Roman crowds. He was too old, 
too dry, too humorless, too puritanical and tyrannical at the same time.
But he had one saving grace. Other than his extensive love and knowledge of 
philosophy, he had been a very good soldier. And that was the most important 
characteristic the Emperor had to possess.
The troops honored him.
He strengthened the Praetorian Guard around the Palace, hired a man named 
Sejanus to run things for him. But he didn’t bring legions into Rome, and he 
spoke a damned good line about personal rights and freedom, that is, if you 
could stay awake to listen. I thought him a brooder.
The Senate went mad with impatience when he refused to make decisions. They 
didn't want to make the decisions! But all this seemed relatively safe.
Then a horrible incident occurred which made me positively detest the Emperor 
wholeheartedly and lose all my faith in the man and his ability to govern.
This incident involved the Temple of Isis. Some clever evil man, claiming to be 
the Egyptian god Anubis, had enticed a highborn devotee of Isis to the Temple 
and gone to bed with her, fooling her completely, though how on Earth he did it 
I can’t imagine.
I remember her to this day as the stupidest woman in Rome. But there’s probably 
more to it.
Anyway, it had all happened at the Temple.
And then this man, this fake Anubis, went before the highborn virtuous woman and 
told her in the plainest terms that he had had her! She went screaming to her 
husband. It was a scandal of extraordinary flair.
It had been years since I had been at the Temple, and I was glad of it.
But what followed from the Emperor was more dreadful than I ever dreamed.
The entire Temple was razed to the very ground. All the worshipers were banished 
from Rome, and some of them executed. And our Priests and Priestesses were 
crucified, their bodies hung on the tree, as the old Roman expression goes, to 
die slowly, and to rot, for all to see.
My Father came into my bedroom. He went to the small shrine of Isis. He took the 
statue and smashed it on the marble floor. Then he picked up the larger pieces 
and smashed each of them. He made dust of her.
I nodded.
I expected him to condemn me for my old habits. I was overcome with sadness and 
shock at what had happened. Other Eastern cults were being persecuted. The 
Emperor was moving to take away the right of Sanctuary from various Temples 
throughout the Empire.
“The man doesn’t want to be Emperor of Rome,” said my Father. "He’s been bent by 
cruelty and losses. He’s stiff, boring and completely in terror for his life! A 
man who would not be Emperor cannot be Emperor. Not now.”
"Maybe he’ll step down,” I said sadly. "He has adopted the young General 
Germanicus Julius Caesar. This means Germanicus is to be his heir, does it 
not'?”
“What good did it do to the earlier heirs of Augustus when they were adopted?" 
my Father asked.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
“Use your head,” said my Father. “We cannot continue pretending we are a 
Republic. We must define the office of this Emperor and the limits of his power! 
We must outline a form of succession other than murder!”
I tried to calm him.
“Father, let's leave Rome. Let’s go to our house in Tuscany. It's always 
beautiful there, Father.”
“That's just it, we can’t, Lydia," he said. “I have to remain here. I have to be 
loyal to my Emperor. I must do so for all my family. I must stand in the 
Senate."
Within months, Tiberius sent off his young and handsome nephew Germanicus Julius 
Caesar to the East, just to get him away from the adulation of the Roman public. 
As I said, people spoke their minds.
Germanicus was supposed to be Tiberius’s heir! But Tiberius was too jealous to 
listen to the crowds screaming praise of Germanicus for his victories in battle. 
He wanted the man far from Rome.
And so this rather charming and seductive young general went to the East, to 
Syria; he vanished from the loving eyes of the Roman people, from the core of 
the Empire where a city crowd could determine the fate of the world.
Sooner or later there would be another campaign in the North, we all figured. 
Germanicus had hit hard at the German tribes in his last campaign.
My brothers vividly described it to me over the dinner table,
They told how they had gone back to avenge the hideous massacre of General Varus 
and his troops in the Teutoburg Forest. They could finish the job, if called up 
again, and my brothers would go. They were exactly the kind of old-fashioned 
patricians who would go!
Meantime there were rumors that the Delatores, the notorious spies of the 
Praetorian Guard, pocketed one-third of the estate of those against whom they 
informed. I found it horrible. My Father shook his head, and said, “That started 
under Augustus.”
“Yes, Father," I said, "but then treason was considered a matter of what one 
did, not what one said.”
“Which is all the more reason to say nothing.” He sat back wearily. “Lydia, sing 
to me. Get your lyre. Make up one of your comic epics. It’s been a long time.”
"I’m too old for that,” I said, thinking of the silly, bawdy satires on Homer 
which I used to make up so quickly and freely that everyone marveled. But I 
jumped at that idea. I remember that night so palpably that I cannot tear myself 
loose now from the writing of this story, even though I know what pain I must 
confess and explore.
What does it mean to write? David, you’ll see this question repeated, because 
with each page I understand more and more – I see the patterns that have before 
eluded me, and driven me to dream rather than live.
That night I did make a very funny epic. My Father laughed. He fell asleep on 
his couch. And then, as if from a trance state, he spoke, “Lydia, don't live out 
your life alone on account of me. Marry for love! You must not give up!"
By the time I turned around, he was breathing deeply again,
Two weeks later, or maybe it was a month, our life came abruptly to an end.
I came home one day, found the house completely empty except for two terrified 
old slave men – men who actually belonged to the household of my brother Antony 
– who let me in and bolted the door ferociously.
I walked through the huge vestibule and then into the peristyle and into the 
dining room. I beheld an amazing sight.
My Father was in full battle dress, armed with sword and dagger, lacking only 
his shield. He even wore his red cloak. His breastplate was polished and 
gleaming.
He stared at the floor and with reason. It had been dug up. The old Hearth from 
generations ago had been dug up. This had been the first room of this house in 
the very ancient days of Rome, and it was around this Hearth that the family 
gathered, worshiped, dined.
I had never even seen it, We had our household Shrines, but this, this giant 
circle of burnt stones! There were actually ashes there, uncovered. How ominous 
and sacred it appeared.
“What in the name of the gods is going on?" I asked. "Where is everybody?”
"They are gone,” he said. “I have freed the slaves, sent them packing. I’ve been 
waiting for you. You have to leave here now!”
“Not without you!”
“You will not disobey me, Lydia!” I had never seen such an imploring yet 
dignified expression in his face. "There's a wagon out back, ready to take you 
to the coast, and a Jewish merchant who is my most trusted friend who will take 
you by ship out of Italy! I want you to go! Your money’s been loaded on board 
the ship. Your clothing. Everything. These are men I trust. Nevertheless take 
this dagger.”
He picked up a dagger from the nearby table and gave it to me. “You’ve watched 
your brothers enough to know how to use it,” he said, “and this.” He reached for 
a sack. "This is gold, the currency that all the world accepts. Take it and go.”
I always carried a dagger, and it was in the sling on my forearm but I could not 
shock him with this just now, so I put the dagger in my girdle and took the 
purse.
“Father, I'm not afraid to stand by you! Who’s turned on us? Father, you are 
Senator of Rome. Accused of any crime, you are entitled to a trial before the 
Senate.”
“Oh, my precious quick-witted daughter! You think that evil Sejanus and his 
Delatores bring charges out in the open? His Speculatores have already surprised 
your brothers and their wives and children. These are Antony’s slaves. He sent 
them to warn me as he fought, as he died. He saw his son dashed against the 
wall. Lydia, go.”
Of course I knew this was a Roman custom – to murder the entire family, to wipe 
out the spouse and offspring of the condemned. It was even the law. And in 
matters such as this, when word got out that the Emperor had turned his back on 
a man, any of his enemies could precede the assassins.
“You come with me,” I said. “Why do you stay here?”
“I will die a Roman in my house,” he said. "Now go if you love me, my poet, my 
singer, my thinker. My Lydia. Go! I will not be disobeyed. I have spent the last 
hour of my life arranging for your salvation! Kiss me and obey me.”
I ran to him, kissed him on the lips and at once the slaves led me through the 
garden.
I knew my Father. I could not revolt against him in this final wish. I knew 
that, in old-fashioned Roman style, he would probably take his life before the 
Speculatores broke down the front door.
When I reached the gate, when I saw the Hebrew merchants and their wagon, I 
couldn’t go.
This is what I saw.
My Father had cut both his wrists and was walking around the household hearth in 
a circle, letting the blood flow right down onto the floor. He had really given 
his wrists the slash. He was turning white as he walked. In his eyes there was 
an expression I would only come to understand later.
There came a loud crash. The front door was being bashed in. My Father stopped 
quite still. And two of the Praetorian Guard came at him, one making sneering 
remarks, “Why don’t you finish yourself off, Maximus, and save us the trouble. 
Go on.”
“Are you proud of yourselves!” my Father said. “Cowards. You like killing whole 
families? How much money do you get? Did you ever fight in a true battle. Come 
on, die with me!"
Turning his back on them, he whipped around with sword and dagger, and brought 
down both of them, as they came at him, with unanticipated thrusts. He stabbed 
them repeatedly.
My Father wobbled as if he would faint. He was white. The blood flowed and 
flowed from his wrists. His eyes rolled up into his head.
Mad schemes came to me. We must get him into the wagon. But a Roman like my 
Father would never have cooperated.
Suddenly the Hebrews, one young and one elderly, had me by the arms and were 
carrying me out of the house.
“I vowed I would save you,” said the old man. “And you will not make a liar of 
me to my old friend.”
"Let go of me!” I whispered. “I will see him through it!”
Throwing them off in their polite timidity I turned and saw from a great 
distance my Father’s body by the hearth. He had finished himself with his own 
dagger.
I was thrown into the wagon, my eyes dosed, my hands over my mouth. I fell among 
soft pillows, bolts of fabric, tumbling as the wagon began to roll very slowly 
down the winding road of the Palatine Hill.
Soldiers shouted at us to get the hell out of the way.
The elderly Hebrew said, “I am nearly deaf, sir, what did you say?"
It worked perfectly. They rode past us.
The Hebrew knew exactly what he was doing. As crowds rushed past us he kept to 
his slow pace.
The one young one came into the back of the wagon. “My name is Jacob,” he said. 
“Here, put on all these white mantles. You look now like an Eastern woman. If 
questioned at the gate, hold up your veil and pretend you do not understand.”
We went through the Gates of Rome with amazing ease. It was “Hail David and 
Jacob, has it been a good trip?”
I was helped aboard a large merchant vessel, with galley slaves and sails, 
nothing unusual at all, and then into a small barren wooden room.
“This is all we have for you," said Jacob. "But we are sailing now.” He had long 
wavy brown hair and a beard. He wore striped robes to the ground.
“In the dark?” I asked. "Sailing in the dark?”
This was not usual.
But as we moved out, as the oars began to dip, and the ship found its proper 
distance and began to move South, I saw what we were doing.
All the beautiful Southwestern coast of Italy was well lighted by her hundreds 
and hundreds of palatial villas. Lighthouses stood on the rocks.
“We will never see the Republic again," said Jacob wearily, as though he were a 
Roman citizen, which I think in fact he was. “But your Father‘s last wish is 
fulfilled. We are safe now."
The old man stepped up to me. He told me that his name was David.
The old man apologized profusely that there were no female attendants for me. I 
was the only woman on board.
“Oh, please, banish any such thoughts from your mind! Why have you taken these 
risks?”
"For years we have done business with your Father,” said David. "Years ago, when 
pirates sank our ships, your Father carried the debt. He trusted us again, and 
we repaid him fivefold. He has laid up riches for you. They are all stowed, 
among cargo we carried, as if they were nothing."
I went into the cabin and collapsed on the small bed. The old man, averting his 
eyes, brought a cover for me.
Slowly I realized something. I had fully expected them to betray me.
I had no words. I had no gestures or sentiments inside me. I turned my head to 
the wall. "Sleep, lady,” he said.
A nightmare came to me, a dream such as I have never had in my life. I was near 
a river. I wanted to drink blood. I waited in high grass to catch one of the 
villagers, and when I had this poor man, I took him by his shoulders, and I sank 
two fang teeth into his neck. My mouth filled with delicious blood. It was too 
sweet and too potent to be described, and even in the dream I knew it. But I had 
to move on. The man was nearly dead. I let him fall. Others who were more 
dangerous were after me. And there was another terrible threat to my life.
I came to the ruins of a Temple, far from the marsh. Here it was desert – just 
with the snap of the fingers, from wetland to sand. I was afraid. Morning was 
coming. I had to hide. Besides, I was also being hunted. I digested this 
delicious blood, and I entered the Temple. No place to hide! I lay my whole body 
on the cold walls! They were graven with pictures. But there was no small room, 
no hiding place for me.
I had to make it to the hills before sunrise, but that wasn’t possible. I was 
moving right towards the sun!
Suddenly, there came above the hills a great fatal light. My eyes hurt 
unbearably. They were on fire. “My eyes," I cried and reached to cover them. 
Fire covered me. I screamed. “Amon Ra, I curse you!" I cried another name. I 
knew it meant Isis, but it was not that name, it was another title for her that 
flew from my lips.
I woke up. I sat bolt upright, shivering.
The dream had been as sharply defined as a vision. It had a deep resonance in me 
of memory. Had I lived before?
I went out on the deck of the ship. All was well enough. We could see the 
coastline dearly still, and the lighthouses, and the ship moved on. I stared at 
the sea, and I wanted blood.
“This is not possible. This is some evil omen, some twisted grief,” I said. I 
felt the fire. I could not shut out the taste of the blood, how natural it had 
seemed, how good, how perfect for my thirst. I saw the twisted body of the 
villager again in the marshes.
This was a horror; it was no escape from what I had just witnessed. I was 
incensed, and feverish.
Jacob, the tall young one, came to me. He had with him a young Roman. The young 
man had shaved his first beard, but otherwise he seemed a flushed and glistening 
child.
I wondered wearily if I were so old at thirty-five that everyone young looked 
beautiful to me.
He cried, “My family, too, has been betrayed. My Mother made me leave!”
“To whom do we owe this shared catastrophe'?" I asked. I put my hands on his wet 
cheeks. He had a baby’s mouth, but the shaven beard was rough. He had broad 
strong shoulders, and wore only a light, simple tunic. Why wasn't he cold out 
here on the water? Perhaps he was.
He shook his head. He was pretty still and would be handsome later. He had a 
nice curl to his dark hair. He didn’t fear his tears, or apologize for them.
"My Mother stayed alive to tell me. She lay gasping until I came. When the 
Delatores had told my Father that he plotted against the Emperor, my Father had 
laughed. He had actually laughed. They had accused him of plotting with 
Germanicus! My Mother wouldn’t die until she'd told me. She said that all my 
Father was accused of doing was talking with other men about how he would serve 
under Germanicus again if they were sent North.”
I nodded wearily. “I see. My brothers probably said the same thing. And 
Germanicus is the Emperor’s heir and Imperium Maius of the East. Yet this is 
treason, to speak of serving Rome under a pretty general.”
I turned to go. To understand gave no consolation.
“We are taking you to different cities,” said Jacob, “to different friends. 
Better that we not say.”
"Don’t leave me,” said the boy. “Not tonight.”
“All right,” I said. I took him into the cabin and closed the door, with a 
polite nod to Jacob, who was watching all with a guardian’s conscience.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The boy stared at me. He shook his head. He flung his hands out. He turned and 
drew dose to me and kissed me. We went into a rampage of kisses.
I took off my shift and sank into the bed with him. He was a man all right, 
tender face or no.
And when I came to the moment of ecstasy, which was quite easy, given his 
phenomenal stamina, I tasted blood. I was the blood drinker in the dream. I went 
limp, but it didn’t matter. He had all he needed to finish the rites to his 
satisfaction.
He rose up. “You’re a goddess," he said.
“No,” I whispered. The dream was rising. I heard the wind on the sand. I smelled 
the river. “I am a god... a god who drinks blood.”
We did the rites of love until we could do them no more.
"Be circumspect and very proper with our Hebrew hosts," I said. “They will never 
understand this sort of thing.”
He nodded. “I adore you.”
"Not necessary. What is your name'?”
“Marcellus.”
“Fine, Marcellus, go to sleep.”
Marcellus and I made a night of every night after that until we finally saw the 
famous lighthouse of Pharos and knew we had come to Egypt.
It was perfectly obvious that Marcellus was being left in Alexandria. He 
explained to me that his maternal grandmother was still alive, a Greek, and 
indeed her whole dan.
“Don’t tell me so much, just go,” I said. "And be wise and safe.”
He begged me to come with him. He said he had fallen in love with me. He would 
marry me. He didn’t care if I bore no children. He didn’t care that I was 
thirty-five. I laughed softly, mercifully.
Jacob noted all this with lowered eyes. And David looked away.
Quite a few trunks followed Marcellus into Alexandria.
“Now," I said to Jacob, “will you tell me where I’m being taken? I might have 
some thoughts on the matter, though I doubt I could improve on my Father's 
plan.”
I still wondered. Would they deal honestly with me? What about now that they had 
seen me play the whore with the boy? They were such religious men.
"You’re headed to a great city," Jacob said. “It couldn’t be a better place. 
Your Father has Greek friends there!"
“How could it be better than Alexandria?” I said.
“Oh, it is far and away better,” Jacob said. “Let me talk to my Father before I 
talk to you further.”
We had put out to sea. The land was going away. Egypt. It was growing dark.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jacob said. “You look as though you are terrified.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “It’s only that I have to lie in my bed and think and 
remember and dream.” I looked at him, as he shyly looked away. “I held the boy 
like a Mother, against me, night after night.”
This was about the biggest lie I've told in my life.
“He was a child in my arms." Some child! “And now I fear nightmares. You must 
tell me – what is our destination? What is our fate?”
 
 
3
 
Antioch,” said Jacob, “Antioch on the Orontes. Greek friends of your Father 
await you. And they are friends with Germanicus. Perhaps in time ... but they 
will be loyal to you. You are to be married to a Greek of breeding and means."
Married! To a Greek, a provincial Greek? A Greek in Asia! I stifled my laughter 
and my tears. That was not going to happen to me. Poor man! If he really was a 
provincial Greek, he was going to have to experience the conquest of Rome all 
over again.
We sailed on, from port to port. I mulled all this over.
It was nauseating trivia like this which of course protected me from my full and 
inevitable grief and shock over what happened. Worry about whether your dress is 
properly girdled. Don’t see your Father lying dead with his own dagger in his 
chest.
As for Antioch, I had been far too embroiled in the life of Rome to know or hear 
much about this city. If Tiberius had stationed his “heir,” Germanicus, there to 
get him away from Roman popularity, then I thought: Antioch must be the end of 
the civilized world.
Why in the name of the gods had I not run away in Alexandria, I thought? 
Alexandria was the greatest city in the Empire, next to Rome. It was a young 
city, built by Alexander, for whom it was named, but it was a marvelous port. No 
one would ever dare raze the Temple of Isis in Alexandria. Isis was an Egyptian 
goddess, wife of the powerful Osiris.
But what had that to do with things? I must have been plotting in the back of my 
mind already, but I didn’t allow any conscious plot to surface and blemish my 
highborn Roman moral character.
I quietly thanked my Hebrew guardians for this intelligence, for keeping it even 
from the young Roman Marcellus, the other man they had rescued from the 
Emperor's assassins, and I asked for frank answers to my questions regarding my 
brothers.
“All taken by surprise,” said Jacob. “The Delatores, those spies of the 
Praetorian Guard, are so swift. And your Father had so many sons. It was your 
eldest brother’s slaves who jumped the wall at their Master’s command and ran to 
warn your Father.”
Antony. I hope you shed their blood. I know you fought with your last breath. 
And my niece, my little niece Flora, had she run screaming from them, or did 
they do it with mercy'? The Praetorian Guard doing anything with mercy! Stupid 
to even think so.
I didn’t say anything aloud. Just sighed.
After all, when they looked at me, these two Jewish merchants beheld the body 
and face of a woman; naturally my protectors should think a woman was inside of 
me. The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had 
disturbed me all my life. Why disturb Jacob and David? On to Antioch.
But I had no intention of living in any oldfashioned Greek family, if such still 
existed in the Greek city of Antioch, a family in which women lived apart from 
the men, and wove wool all day, never going out, having no part in the life of 
the world whatsoever.
I’d been taught all the virtuous female arts by my nurses and I could indeed do 
anything with yarn or thread or loom that any other woman could do, but I knew 
well what the “Old Greek Ways” had been, and I remembered vaguely my Father’s 
Mother, who had died when I was very young – a virtuous Roman matron who was 
always making wool. So they had said of her in her Epitaph, and in fact, they 
had said in my Mother’s Epitaph: “She kept the House. She made wool.”
And so they had said of my Mother! The very same tiresome words.
Well, no one was going to say that on mine. (How humorous to reflect on the fact 
now, thousands of years later, that I have no Epitaph!)
What I failed to realize in my overall dejection was that the Roman world was 
enormous, and the Eastern portion of it differed dramatically from the Northern 
barbarian lands, where my brothers had fought.
The entire of Asia Minor, towards which we sailed, had been conquered by 
Alexander of Macedon hundreds of years before. As you know, Alexander had been 
the pupil of Aristotle. Alexander had wanted to spread Greek culture everywhere. 
And in Asia Minor Greek ideas and styles found not mere country towns or 
farmers, but ancient cultures, like the Empire of Syria, willing to receive the 
new ideas, the grace and beauty of the Greek enlightenment, and willing to bring 
in tune with it their own centuries-old literature, religion, styles of life and 
dress.
Antioch had been built by a general of Alexander the Great who sought to rival 
the beauty of other Hellenistic cities, with splendid Temples, administrative 
buildings and libraries of books in the Greek language, its schools where Greek 
philosophy was taught. A Hellenistic government was established – quite 
enlightened compared to ancient Eastern despotism, and yet there lay beneath all 
this the knowledge and customs and possibly the wisdom of the mysterious East.
The Romans had conquered Antioch early on because it was a huge trade center. It 
was unique in this way, as Jacob showed to me, drawing a crude map with his wet 
finger on the wooden table. Antioch was a port of the great Mediterranean 
because she was only twenty miles up the Orontes River.
Yet on the Eastern side she was open to the desert: all the old caravan routes 
came to Antioch, the camel merchants who brought fantastic wares from fabled 
lands – lands we know now to have been India and China – silk, carpet and jewels 
which never reached the markets of Rome.
Countless other traders came and went to Antioch. Fine roads connected it in the 
East with the Euphrates River and the Parthian Empire beyond, and to the South 
you could go to Damascus and Judea, and to the North, of course, lay all the 
cities made by Alexander, which had flowered under Roman rule.
Roman soldiers loved it there. It was an easy and interesting life. And Antioch 
loved the Romans because the Romans protected the trade routes, and the 
caravans, and kept peace in the port.
"You will find open places, arcades, Temples, all that you seek and such markets 
you would not believe. There are Romans everywhere. I hope to One Most High that 
you are not recognized by someone from your own background! That is one danger 
of which your Father had no time to plan.”
I waved it away.
“Does it have teachers now, and markets of books?”
"From everywhere. You will find books which no one can read. And Greek is spoken 
by everyone. You have to go out in the country to find some poor farmer who does 
not understand Greek. Latin has now become common.
“The philosophers never stop; they speak of Plato and Pythagoras, names that 
don’t mean much to me; they talk about Chaldean magic from Babylon. Of course 
there are Temples to every imaginable god.”
He went on, reflecting as he spoke:
“The Hebrews? I think personally they are too worldly – they want to hang around 
in short tunics with the Greeks and go to the public baths. They are too 
interested in the Greek philosophy. It invades everything, all this thinking 
that Greeks did. Not good. But a Greek city is an inviting world.”
He glanced up. His Father was watching over us, and we were too dose together, 
at this table on the deck.
He hastily filled me in on other facts:
Germanicus Julius Caesar, heir to the Imperial throne, the official adopted son 
of Tiberius, had been granted the Imperium Maius in Antioch. That is, he 
controlled all of this territory. And Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso was the governor of 
Syria.
I assured him that they would know nothing of me or my old-fashioned family or 
our quiet, old house on the Palatine Hill, squeezed between so many other 
extravagant new mansions.
“It’s all Roman-style,” Jacob protested. “You’ll see. And you come with money! 
And forgive me, but you are still beautiful at your age; you have fresh skin and 
you move your limbs like a girl.”
I sighed and gave Jacob thanks. Time for him to break away unless we wanted his 
Father coming down upon us.
I watched the ever rolling blue waves.
I was thankful in secret that our family had withdrawn from the parties and 
banquets at the Imperial Palace, but then I blamed myself for such thankfulness, 
knowing that our reclusiveness must have paved the way for our downfall.
I’d seen Germanicus on his triumphal procession through Rome, a gorgeous young 
man, much as Alexander had been, and I knew from my Father and my brothers that 
Tiberius, fearing the popularity of his appointed heir, had sent him off to the 
East to get him away from the Roman crowds.
The Governor Piso? I had never laid eyes on him. The gossip was that he was sent 
East to devil Germanicus. Oh, such a waste of talent and thought.
Jacob returned to me.
“Well, you go nameless and unknown into this vast city," said Jacob. “And you 
have protectors of high character who are beloved of Germanicus. He’s young and 
sets a tone of vitality and gaiety in the city."
“And Piso?” I asked.
“Everyone hates him. Especially the soldiers, and you know what that means in a 
Roman province.”
You can look at the crashing, undulating sea from the railing of a deck forever, 
or just for so long.
That night I had my second blood dream. It was keenly similar to the first. I 
was thirsty for blood. And enemies were after me, enemies that knew I was a 
demon and must be destroyed. I was running. My own kind had forsaken me, thrust 
me out unprotected to the superstitions of the people. Then I saw the desert and 
knew I would die; I awoke, sitting up and crying out, but covering my mouth 
quickly so no one heard it.
What disturbed me so terribly was the thirst for blood. I could not imagine such 
a thing when I was awake, but in these dreams I was the monster that Romans 
called the Lamia. Or so it seemed. Blood was sweet, blood was all. Was the old 
Greek Pythagoras right? Souls do migrate from body to body? But my soul in this 
past life had been that of a monster.
During the day, I dosed my eyes now and then and found myself dangerously on the 
edge of the dream, as if it were a trap in my mind, waiting to engulf my 
consciousness. But at night, that is when they came most strongly. You have 
served me before! What could this mean? Come to me.
Blood thirst. I closed my eyes, curled up in bed and prayed, “Mother Isis, 
Cleanse my Mind of this Blood madness.”
Then I resorted to plain old ordinary eroticism. Get Jacob into bed! No such 
luck. Little did I know that Hebrews had been, and would be forever, the most 
difficult of men to seduce!
It was all made dear with great grace and tact.
I considered all the slaves. Out of the question. First off were the galley 
slaves, among whom no great "Ben Hur” was chained, waiting for me to rescue him. 
They were just the dregs of the criminal poor, fastened Roman-style, so they 
would drown if the ship went down, and they were dying, as all galley slaves do 
from the monotony and the whip. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to go down into the 
hold of a galley ship and see those men bending their backs.
But my eyes were as cold as those of an American watching color television 
pictures of the starving babies of Africa, little black skeletons with big heads 
screaming for water. News Break, Commercial Break, Sound Bite, CNN now switches 
to Palestine: rock throwing, rubber bullets. Television blood.
The rest on board were boring sailors, and two old pious merchant Hebrews who 
stared at me as if I were a whore, or worse, and turned their heads whenever I 
came out on deck in my long tunic with my long hair swinging free.
Such a disgrace I must have seemed! But what a fool I was then, really, living 
in numbness, and how pleasant that voyage – all because true grief and rage had 
not yet taken hold of me. Things had happened too fast.
I gloated over my last glimpse of my Father dispatching those soldiers of 
Tiberius, those cheap assassins sent by a cowardly, indecisive Emperor. And the 
rest – I banished it from my mind, affecting the attitude of the hardened Roman 
man or woman.
A modern Irish poet, Yeats, best characterizes the official Roman attitude 
towards failure and tragedy.
 
Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
 
There was never a Roman born who would not have agreed with that.
That was my stance – sole survivor of a great house, commanded by her Father to 
“live.” I didn’t dare to dwell on the fate of my brothers, their lovely wives, 
their little children. I couldn’t envision the slaughter of the children – 
little boys being run through by broadswords, or babies bashed against the wall. 
Oh, Rome, you and your bloody old wisdom. Be sure to kill the offspring. Kill 
the whole family!
Lying alone at night, I found myself amid more horrid blood dreams. They seemed 
fragments of a lost life, a lost land. Deep echoing vibrant tones of music 
dominated the dreams, as though someone were striking a gong, and others beside 
him beat solemnly on deep drums with soft coverings. I saw in a haze a world of 
stiff and flat alien paintings on the walls. Painted eyes around me. I drank 
blood! I drank it from a small shuddering human being, who knelt before me as if 
I were Mother Isis.
I woke to take the big jug of water by my bed and drink all of it down. I drank 
water to defy and satisfy this dream thirst. I was almost sick from drinking 
water.
I racked my mind. Had I ever had such dreams as a child?
No. And now these dreams had the heat of recollection! Of initiation into the 
doomed Temple of Isis, when it had been still the fashion. I had been 
intoxicated, and drenched in the blood of a bull, and dancing wildly in circles. 
My head was filled with the litanies of Isis. We were promised rebirth! “Never 
tell, never tell, never tell...” How could an initiate tell anything of the 
rites, when you were so drunk you could hardly remember them?
Isis brought me memories now of lovely music of lyres, flutes, timbrels, of the 
high magical sound of the metal strings of the sistrum, which the Mother Herself 
held in her hand. There were only fleeting recollections of that naked blood 
dance, that night of rising into the stars, of seeing the scope of life in its 
cycles, of accepting perfectly just for a little while that the moon would 
always be changing, and the sun would set as it always rose. Embraces of other 
women. Soft cheeks and kissing and bodies rocking in unison. “Life, death, 
rebirth, it’s no series of miracles,” said the Priestess. "To understand it and 
accept it, that is the miracle. Make the miracle within your own breast."
Surely we had not drunk blood! And the bull – it was a sacrifice only for the 
initiation. We did not bring helpless animals to her flower-laden altars, no, 
our Blessed Mother did not ask that of us.
Now, at sea, alone, I lay awake to avoid these blood dreams.
When exhaustion won out, a dream came with sleep as if it had been waiting for 
my eyes to close.
I lay in a gold chamber. I was drinking blood, blood from the throat of a god, 
or so it seemed, and choruses were singing or chanting – it was a dull, 
repetitive sound not quite worthy of being called music, and when I had had my 
fill of blood, this god or whoever this was, this silken-skinned proud thing, 
lifted me and placed me on an altar.
Vividly, I could feel the cold marble beneath me. I realized I wore no clothes. 
I felt no modesty.
Somewhere far off echoing through these great halls, came the weeping of a 
woman. I was full of blood. Those who chanted approached with little clay oil 
lamps. Faces around me were dark, dark enough to be from far faraway Ethiopia or 
India. Or Egypt. Look. Painted eyes! I looked at my hands and arms. They were 
dark. But I was this person who lay on the altar, and I say person now because 
it had come clear to me with no disturbance during the dream itself that I was a 
man lying there. Pain tore at me. The god said, “This is merely the passage. You 
will now drink from each of us, only a little blood."
Only when I woke did the brief transition in the masculine gender leave me as 
puzzled as everything else. I was drenched with a sense of Egyptian art, 
Egyptian mystery – as I’d seen it in golden statues for sale in the marketplace, 
or when the Egyptian dancers performed at a banquet, like walking sculptures 
with their black-lined eyes, and black plaited wigs, whispering in that 
mysterious tongue. What had they thought of our Isis in Roman dress?
A mystery taunted me; something attacked my reason. The very thing the Roman 
Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: 
mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law.
My Isis had been a Roman goddess, really, a universal goddess, the Mother of us 
all, her worship spreading out in a Greek and Roman world long before it had 
come into Rome itself. Our Priests were Greeks and Roman, poor men. We the 
congregation were all Greeks and Romans.
Something scratched at the back of my mind. It said, “Remember." It was a tiny 
desperate voice within my own brain that urged me to “remember” for my own sake.
But remembering only led to confused and jumbled thoughts. Suddenly a veil would 
fall between the reality of my cabin on the ship, and the tumbling of the sea – 
between that and some dim and frightening world, of Temples covered in words 
that made magic! Long narrow beautifully bronzed faces. A voice whispered, 
“Beware the Priests of Ra; they lie!”
I shivered. I closed my eyes. The Queen Mother was bound and chained to her 
throne! She wept! It had been her crying. Unspeakable. "But you see, she has 
forgotten how to rule. Do as we say.”
I shook myself awake. I wanted to know and I did not want to know. The Queen 
wept beneath her monstrous fetters. I couldn’t see her clearly. It was all in 
progress. It was busy. "The King is with Osiris, you see. You see how he stares; 
each one whose blood you drink, you give to Osiris; each one becomes Osiris.”
“But why did the Queen scream?” '
No, this was madness. I couldn’t let this confusion overcome me. I couldn’t 
deliberately slip from reason into these fantasies or recollections supposing 
they had a true root.
They had to be nonsense, twisted images of grief and guilt, guilt that I had not 
rushed to the hearth and driven the dagger into my breast.
I tried to remember the calming voice of my Father, explaining once how the 
blood of the gladiators satisfied the thirst of the dead, the Manes,
“Now, some say that the Dead drink blood,” spoke my Father from some long ago 
dinner talk. “That’s why we are so fearful on all these unlucky days, when the 
Dead are supposed to be able to walk the Earth. I personally think this is 
nonsense. We should revere our ancestors...”
“Where are the Dead, Father?” my brother Lucius asked.
Who had piped up from the other side of the table, to quote Lucretius in a sad 
little female voice that nevertheless commanded silence of all these men'? 
Lydia:
 
Of earth return to earth, but any part
Sent down from heaven, must ascend again
Recalled to the high temples of the sky
And death does not destroy the elements
Of matter, only breaks the combinations.
 
“No,” my Father had replied to me quite gently. “Rather quote Ovid: ‘The ghosts 
ask for but little; they value piety more than a costly gift.' ” He drank his 
wine. “The ghosts are in the Underworld where they can’t harm us.”
My eldest brother Antony had said, “The Dead are nowhere and are nothing.”
My Father had raised his cup. “To Rome,” he said, and it was he this time who 
had quoted Lucretius: “ ‘Too many times, religion mothers crimes and 
wickedness.’ ”
Shrugs and sighs all around. The Roman attitude. Even the Priests and 
Priestesses of Isis would have joined Lucretius when he wrote:
 
Our terrors and our darknesses of mind
Mast be dispelled, then, not by sunshine’s rays,
Not by those shining arrows of Light,
But by insight into nature, and a scheme
Of systematic contemplation.
 
Drunk? Drugged? Bull’s blood? Systematic? Well, it all came down to the same 
thing. Know! Twist the poetry as you will. And the phallus of Osiris lives 
forever in the Nile, and the water of the Nile inseminates the Mother Egypt 
eternally, death giving birth to life with the blessing of Mother Isis. Merely a 
particular scheme and a sort of systematic form of contemplation.
The ship sailed on.
I languished some eight more days in this torment, often lying awake in the 
dark, and sleeping only in the day to avoid the dreams.
Suddenly, in the early morning, Jacob pounded my door.
We were midway up the Orontes to the city.
Twenty miles now from Antioch. I did up my hair as best I could (I’d never done 
it without a slave) into a chignon on the back of my head, then covered my Roman 
gowns with a great black cloak and prepared to disembark – an Eastern woman, her 
face draped, protected by Hebrews.
When the city came into view – when the immense harbor greeted us and then 
embraced us with all its masts and racket and odors and cries, I ran to the deck 
of the ship and looked out at this city. It was splendid.
“You see,” Jacob said.
Taken from the ship by litter I found myself carried rapidly through vast 
waterfront markets, and then into a great open square, crowded with people. I 
saw everywhere the Temples, porticoes, booksellers, even the high walls of an 
amphitheater – all that I could have expected in Rome. No, this was no town.
The young men were crowded about the barbershops ready to have their obligatory 
shave and the inevitable fancy curls on their foreheads, which Tiberius with his 
own hairstyle had made fashionable. There were wine shops all over. The slave 
markets were jammed. I glimpsed the entrances to the streets devoted to crafts – 
the street of the tentmakers, the street of the silversmiths.
And there in all its glory, in the very center of Antioch, stood the Temple of 
Isis!
My goddess, Isis, with her worshipers coming and going, undisturbed, and in huge 
numbers. A few very proper-looking linen-clad Priests stood at the doors! The 
Temple was aswarm.
I thought, I can run away from any husband in this place!
Gradually I realized a great commotion had come upon the Forum, the center of 
the city. I heard Jacob ordering the men to hurry out of the broad market street 
and into the back streets. My bearers were running. The curtains were brought 
shut by Jacob’s hand so I couldn’t see out.
News was being shouted out in Latin, in Greek, in Chaldean: Murder, Murder, 
Poison, Treachery.
I peeped out of the curtain.
People were weeping and cursing the Roman Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, cursing him 
and his wife, Placina. Why? I didn’t much like either one of them, but what was 
all this?
Jacob shouted again at my bearer to hurry.
We were rushed through the gates and into the vestibule of a sizable house no 
different in design or color than my own in Rome, only much smaller. I could see 
the same refinements, the distant peristyle, clusters of weeping slaves.
The litter was promptly set down and I stepped out, deeply concerned that they 
had not stopped me at the doors to wash my feet, as was proper. And my hair, it 
had all fallen down in waves.
But no one noticed me. I turned round and round, amazed at the Oriental curtains 
and tassels that hung over the doorways, the caged birds everywhere singing in 
their little prisons. The woven carpets lying all over the floor, one heaped 
upon another.
Two obvious ladies of the house came towards me.
“What’s the matter!" I asked.
They were as fashionable as any rich woman in Rome, drenched in bracelets and 
wearing goldtrimmed gowns.
“I implore you,” said one of the women, “for your own sake, go! Get back into 
the litter!"
They tried to push me inside the curtained cell of the litter. I wouldn’t go. I 
became furious.
“I don’t know where I am,” I said. “And I don't know who you are! Now, stop 
pushing me!"
The Master of the House, or someone who certainly appeared to be such, came 
dashing towards me, with tears streaming down his cheeks and his short tousled 
gray hair a mess – torn as if in mourning. He’d ripped his long tunic. He'd 
smeared dirt on his face! He was old with a bent back and a massive head, loaded 
with skin and wrinkles.
“Your Father was my young colleague,” he said to me in Latin. He grabbed me by 
the arms. “I dined in your house when you were a baby. I saw you when you 
crawled on all fours."
“Tender,” I said quickly.
“Your Father and I studied in Athens, slept under the same roof."
The women stood panic-stricken with their hands over their mouths.
“Your Father and I fought with Tiberius on his first campaign. We fought those 
lurid barbarians.”
"Very brave,” I said.
My black outer cloak fell down, revealing my unkempt wild long hair and plain 
dress. Nobody cared.
“Germanicus dined in this house because your Father spoke of me!"
“Oh dear, I see," I said.
One of the women motioned for me to get in the litter. Where was Jacob? The old 
man wouldn’t let me go.
“I stood with your Father and with Augustus when news came to us of the massacre 
of our troops in the Teutoburg Forest, that General Varus and all his men were 
slain. My sons fought with your brothers in the legions of Germanicus when he 
punished those Northern tribes! Oh, God!”
“Yes, very marvelous, indeed,” I said gravely.
“Get back in the litter and get out,” said one of the women.
The old man clutched me.
"We fought the madman, King Arminius!” said the old man. “We could have won! 
Your brother Antony wasn’t for giving up and coming back, was he?”
“I... no...”
“Get her out of here!” screamed a young patrician man, who had also been 
weeping. He came forward and shoved me towards the litter.
“Stand back, you imbecile!” I said to him. I slapped his face.
All this while, Jacob had been talking to the slaves, getting the scoop.
Jacob appeared beside me, as the gray-haired Greek sobbed and kissed my cheeks.
Jacob took over, guiding me into the litter.
,– “Germanicus has just been murdered,” Jacob said in my ear. “Everybody loyal 
to him is convinced that the Emperor Tiberius put the Roman Governor Piso up to 
the murder. It was done with poison. Word is spreading through the city like 
fire,”
"Tiberius, you idiot!” I whispered, rolling my eyes. “One cowardly step after 
another!”
I sank back into the darkness. The litter was being lifted.
Jacob went right on: “Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso has allies here, naturally. 
Everybody’s fighting everybody else. Settling scores. Mayhem. This Greek family 
traveled with Germanicus to Egypt. There are riots already. We go!”
"Farewell, friend," I cried to the old Greek, as I was carried from the house. 
But I don’t think he heard me. He had gone down on his knees. He cursed 
Tiberius. He screamed of suicide and begged for the dagger.
We were outside once more, hurrying through the street.
I lay askew in the litter, thinking dully in the darkness. Germanicus dead. 
Poisoned by Tiberius!
I knew that this recent trip of Germanicus to Egypt had made Tiberius very 
angry. Egypt was like no other Roman province. Rome was so dependent upon it for 
grain that Senators could not go there. But Germanicus had gone, “just to see 
the ancient relics," his friends had said in the streets of Rome.