Pandora by Anne Rice

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 brotherin 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 Mother 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