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 -"