“Well, yes, I believe I have. But why...?”
“And that my other grandfather, the Emperor Augustus, had him killed when he got Mother pregnant with me and then banished her to that damnably barren Pandateria?”
“I may have heard something about it, Claudia, but what of it? What difference does it make?”
“Do you mean to tell me that it makes no difference to you that I’m a bastard, Longinus, and the discarded plaything of a lecherous old man, even though that lecherous old man happens to be the second Emperor of Rome? Does it make no difference to a son of the distinguished Tullius clan...?”
“And isn’t your slave maid, too, a member of this distinguished Tullius clan?”
His quick parrying of the question amused her. “It’s funny,” she said, “I hadn’t thought of Tullia that way. Her grandfather belonged to one of the Tullii, no doubt. But Tullia is actually not Roman; she’s Jewish. Her grandfather was one of those Jews brought as slaves from Jerusalem by Pompey. Tullia is even faithful to the Jewish religion. But that’s her only fault, and it’s one I’m glad to overlook. Sometimes I allow her to go to one of the synagogues over in the Janiculum Hill section.”
Longinus reached for her hand. “Nevertheless, Claudia, you must know that many so-called distinguished Romans are legitimate only because their mothers happened to be married, though not to their fathers, when they were conceived?”
“Yes, I suppose so. No doubt you’ve heard the story of what Mother said to a friend who asked her one day how all five of the children she had during the time she was married to General Agrippa happened to look so much like him.”
“If I have, I don’t recall it. What was her answer?”
“‘I never take on a passenger unless the vessel is already full.’”