The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "Nemesis?"

  "I was thinking of another goddess: Cybele. It was one ofher priests who accompanied Dio to my house, and the same priest who came for me yesterday. Do you think it's only a coincidence that the trial will be held during the Great Mother festival—the celebration consecrated to Cybele? You know, it was one of Clodia's ancestresses who saved the statue of Cybele from being lost in the Tiber when it was brought from the East long ago. Do you sense the link?"

  "Papa, you grow more religious as you grow older," said Eco quietly.

  "Perhaps. More fearful of the gods, anyway, if not more respectful. Leave them out of it, then. Say that this is merely between myself and the shade of Dio. My sense of obligation runs deeper than my misgivings."

  Eco nodded gravely. As usual, he understood me completely. "What do you want from me, Papa?"

  "I'm not sure yet. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps only to listen to my doubts, and nod if I say something that remotely makes sense."

  He took my hand in his. "Tell me if you need more than that, Papa. Promise me."

  "I promise, Eco."

  He released me and sat back. From elsewhere in the house I heard one of the twins shrieking. Surely it was time for them to be in bed, I thought. Through the gaps in the shutters I could see that the world outside was dark.

  "What does Bethesda think?" said Eco. I smiled. "What makes you think I told her anything?" "You must have told her something when you ate dinner with her tonight."

  "Yes — a somewhat expurgated version of my visit to Clodia's horti."

  "Ha! Bethesda would have appreciated the detail of the naked bath-ers, I think." Eco laughed.

  "Perhaps, but I left them out of it. Just as I left out the description of the dress which seems to have intrigued you so much."

  "I think it intrigued you first, Papa. And Clodius's emergence from the river, as naked as a fish from the sea?"

  "Omitted—though I did leave in the siblings' embrace."

  "And their kiss?"

  "And the kiss. Well, I had to give Bethesda some grist for gossip." "And what does she think of the accusation against Marcus Cae-

  lius?"

  "Bethesda stated quite flatly that it was absurd." "Really?"

  'Impossible!' she said. 'Marcus Caelius could never have committed the crime. The woman is defaming him!' I asked her upon what she based her opinion, but the Medusa look was the only answer I got. Bethesda has always had a weakness for our dashing young neighbor. Or ex-neighbor, I should now say."

  "She'll miss having him living just up the street."

  "We shall all miss the occasional spectacle of watching Caelius stumble out his front door in the middle of the day with tousled hair and bloodshot eyes, or seeing him carouse through the street with a prostitute from the Subura, or hearing his drunk friends recite obscene poetry from his window at night—"

  "Papa, stop!" Eco choked with laughter.

  "It's no joking matter, I suppose," I said, suddenly grim. "The young man's whole future is at stake. If he's convicted, the best that Marcus Caelius can hope for will be a chance to flee into exile. His family will be shamed, his career ended, all his prospects ruined."

  "It hardly seems punishment enough, if he's guilty."

  "If he's guilty," I said. "Which it's up to me to find out."

  "And if you find that he's not guilty?"

  "I'll report that to Clodia."

  "And will that make any difference to her?" said Eco shrewdly. "You know as well as I do, Eco, that Roman trials are only incidentally about guilt and innocence."

  "You mean that Clodia may be more interested in destroying Caelius than in punishing Dio's killer?"

  "That thought has crossed my mind. A woman scorned—"

  "Unless it was she who scorned him, Papa."

  "I suppose that's one of the things I'll need to find out."

  "If you believe the rumors, Caelius wouldn't be the first man she's destroyed," said Eco. "Though I suppose exile and humiliation are more merciful than poison."

  "You refer to the gossip that she murdered her husband three years

  ago."

  He nodded. "They say that Quintus Metellus Celer was healthy one day and dead the next. They say that his marriage to Clodia was always stormy—and moreover that Celer and her brother Clodius had become fierce enemies. The rift was ostensibly over politics—but what man could abide having a brother-in-law for a rival in his bed?"

  "But which brother-in-law was the usurper—Clodius ... or Celer?"

  He shrugged. "I suppose that was up to Clodia to decide. Celer was the loser; he lost his life. And now Caelius? Perhaps any man who comes between this brother and sister is risking more than he realizes."

  I shook my head. "You repeat these scandalous charges as if you knew them to be true, Eco."

  "Only because I think you should consider very carefully what sort of people you're dealing with. You've made up your mind to go through with this, then?"

  "To try to find the truth about Dio's murder, yes."

  "Under Clodia's auspices?"

  "It was she who hired me. Circumstance led her to me—circum-stance, or Cybele."

  "But the political danger of associating yourself in any way with Clodius—"

  "I've made up my mind."

  He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Then I think at the very least we should review what we know about these Clodii, before you go off pursuing their interests or pocketing any more of their silver."

  "Very well, what do we know about them? And let us be careful to separate fact from slander."

  Eco nodded. He spoke deliberately, carefully framing his thoughts. "They are patricians. They come from a very old, very distinguished family. They have many renowned ancestors, many of whom served as consuls, whose public works are scattered all over Italy—roads, aque-ducts, temples, basilicas, gates, porticoes, arches. Their relatives are intermarried with families of equal stature in such a tangle that even a silkmaker could never unravel all the threads. The Clodii are at the heart of Rome's ruling class."

  "As fractured and at odds with itself as that class may be. Yes, the respectability of their ancestry and their connections is beyond question," I agreed. "Though one always has to wonder how the rich and powerful became so in the first place."

  Eco shook his finger at me. "Now, Papa, you've already bent your own rule—mixing facts with innuendo."

  "Facts only," I conceded. "Or at least, anything not a fact must be clearly identified as hearsay," I amended, realizing that it might otherwise be impossible to talk about Clodia and Clodius at all.

  "Well then," Eco continued, "to begin with, there's the spelling of their name. The patrician form is Claudius, and their father was Appius Claudius. But Clodius and all three of his sisters changed their spelling of the family name to the more common form some years ago, with an o, not the posh-sounding au. That must have been when Clodius decided to cast his lot as a populist politician and a rabble-rouser. I suppose it helps to give him the common touch when he's consorting with his hired strong-armers and brick throwers, or canvassing for votes among those who live off the grain dole he established."

  "Yes, but what advantage does it give to Clodia?" I wondered.

  "From your description of the goings-on at her horti this afternoon, I'd imagine she craves the common touch as well. Gossip, I confess!" Eco hurriedly added, as I raised a finger.

  "Another fact, then," I said. "They're not full-blooded siblings."

  "I thought they were."

  "No, Clodia is the eldest of the lot, and she had a different mother from the rest. Her mother died giving birth to her, I believe. Soon after, Appius Claudius married his second wife and sired three boys and two more girls, the youngest of the boys being Publius Claudius, now Clodius. Clodius must be about your age, Eco, thirty-five or so, and Clodia is about five years older than him."

  "They're only half siblings, then," Eco said. "So any copulation— conjectural or otherwise—would be on
ly half incest, I suppose."

  "Not that such a distinction would matter to anyone this side of Egypt," I said. "Actually—more gossip—one hears that Clodius has been the lover of all three of his sisters, the two full-blooded, younger ones as well as his big sister Clodia. Just as one hears that Clodius was groomed as a catamite by his older brothers when he was a boy, to sell his sexual favors to wealthy rakes."

  "But I thought Clodius and his family were wealthy to begin with."

  "Fabulously wealthy by our standards, Eco, but not by those of their peers. During the civil wars, when Clodia and Clodius were children, their father Appius was on the side of Sulla. When Sulla's fortunes ebbed, Appius had to flee Rome for several years. His children had to fend for themselves in a city full of enemies. Clodia, the oldest, was barely into her teens. It can't have been easy for those children. Those were hard years for everyone." This was something I hardly needed to tell Eco; it was in those years of chaotic civil strife that his own father had died and his mother had been reduced to such poverty that she eventually abandoned him to fend for himself in the streets, until I took him into my home and adopted him.

  "When Sulla eventually triumphed and became dictator, Appius Claudius returned and for a short while thrived. He was elected consul in the year that Sulla retired. Then he took his reward, a provincial governorship—of Macedonia, I think—where he could bleed the locals for taxes, collect tribute from their chieftains and thus provide his sons back home with silver to start their political careers and his daughters with dowries. So it goes for a Roman with a successful political career. But not in the case of Appius Claudius. He died in Macedonia. The taxes and tributes were collected by his successor, and the only thing the children of Appius Claudius got back from Macedonia were the ashes of their father. They must have gone through a bad patch after that. They were never so poor that they dropped from sight, but one can imagine them scrimping and cutting corners to keep up appearances— the kind of petty humiliations that privileged patricians find so galling.

  "And without a father in the house, the children must have made their own rules. Did young Clodius and his sisters carry on like rutting sheep without a shepherd to separate them? I don't know, but growing up in a turbulent, often hostile city with their father absent for years at a time, and then losing him while they were still quite young, must have brought the siblings close together—perhaps uncommonly or even un-naturally close. And while I seriously doubt that young Clodius was ever a prostitute in the strictly commercial sense—that kind of talk reeks of slander—given the circumstances, it's not hard to imagine him using whatever attributes he possessed to curry favor with those who could help him and his brothers get ahead. It's also not hard to imagine that there were those who found him desirable. Even now Clodius still has the look of a boy—sleek-limbed, slender-hipped, broad-chested. Smooth skin. A face like his sister's ... "

  "Yes, I was forgetting that you've just seen him naked," said Eco, raising his eyebrows.

  I ignored his teasing. "The third name attached to their branch of the Claudian line is Pulcher, you know—'beautiful.' Clodius's full name is Publius Clodius Pulcher, and his sister is Clodia Pulcher. I don't know how far back the name goes, or which of their ancestors was vain enough to add it, but it certainly fits the current generation. Pulcher, indeed! And yes, I speak advisedly, having just seen both of them naked, or near enough—fact, not gossip! You know, I can well imagine that there are those, having seen the two of them together, who rather like to picture Clodia and Clodius making love, whether it's true or not." "Papa, your eyes are glazing over!"

  "They most certainly are not. But never mind all that. Everyone knows that the Clodii are good-looking, and everyone suspects that they both have far too much sex for anyone's good. What else do we know about them? I think the first time that I ever heard of Clodius was when he acted as a prosecutor in the trials of the Vestal Virgins."

  "Ah, yes, when he accused Catilina of seducing the Vestal Fabia."

  "But when both Catilina and the Vestal were acquitted, things got so hot for Clodius in Rome that he had to flee down to Baiae until the furor cooled down. He burned his fingers on that one. I don't suppose he was even twenty at the time. I could never make out what his object was, except to stir up trouble. Perhaps he wasn't quite sure himself, just testing his powers."

  "The next thing I remember about him happened a few years later," said Eco. "Something about stirring up that mutiny among the troops."

  "Ah, yes, when he went off to serve in the East as a lieutenant under his brother-in-law Lucullus. Clodius styled himself as the soldiers' champion. They were already dissatisfied with the way Lucullus was driving them from campaign to campaign with no end in sight and no sure prospect of a reward, while Pompey's troops were already receiving farms and settlements for fewer years of service. Clodius made a famous speech to the troops, saying they deserved more from their general than the chance to lay down their lives protecting his personal caravan of camels laden with gold. 'If we must never have an end to fighting, shouldn't we reserve what's left of our bodies and souls for a commander who will reckon his chief glory to be the wealth of his soldiers?' "

  "Papa, what a head you've always had for remembering speeches, even those you've heard only secondhand!"

  "Such a memory is as much a curse as a blessing, Eco. Anyway, you can see that Clodius was a rabble-rouser even then, making himself the advocate of the masses against their rulers, setting himself up in opposition to the status quo. No wonder he switched to the plebeian form of his name."

  "And then more scandal," said Eco. "The affair of the Good God-

  dess."

  "Yes. Was it only six years ago? Ironic that the man who started out by prosecuting a Vestal Virgin and her alleged lover should have gotten himself into such a sacrilegious scandal. The hearsay—gossip, not fact—was that Clodius was carrying on with Caesar's wife, Pompeia, but Caesar had caught on and set his mother to watch Pompeia like a hawk, so that it became impossible for the lovers to meet. Never one to let his appetites be denied, Clodius concocted a scheme to reach Pompeia. He decided to sneak into the women's festival of the Good Goddess, Fauna, which was being held that year in Caesar's house. No men allowed, of course. How could Clodius get in? By dressing up as a woman! Imagine him all fancied up as a singing girl in a saffron robe with purple hose and slippers—I wonder if his sisters helped dress him up."

  "Perhaps it wasn't his first time in a stola," said Eco.

  "I suppose he couldn't resist the idea of taking Pompeia in Caesar's own bed, with Caesar's own mother and scores of other women chanting and lighting incense in the next room. I wonder if Clodius planned to keep his stola on while he did it?"

  "Papa, I object! You're letting your lurid imagination seduce you into accepting hearsay, and then compounding the slander."

  "Granted, Eco. I shall try to get back to the facts. The story goes that Clodius almost pulled it off. In the haze of the incense and the confusion of the chanting and dancing—who knows what sort of rituals these women engage in behind closed doors?—Clodius managed to make his way into the house and to find one of Pompeia's slave girls, who was expecting him. She went to fetch her mistress, but when she failed to return, Clodius became impatient and started wandering through the house on his own, staying out of the light as much as he could, observing the proceedings."

  "Wouldn't you love to know what he saw?"

  "Wouldn't every man, Eco? But it was Clodius's bad fortune to be spotted by another serving girl, who saw his hesitant manner and innocently asked him who he was looking for. He told her he was looking for Pompeia's serving girl, but he was unable to disguise his deep voice. The girl let out a shriek. Clodius managed to hide in a storage room, but the women lit torches and searched the house until they rooted him out and drove him into the street."

  "Well," said Eco wryly, "if nothing else, Clodius disproved the old superstition we all learned as boys, that any man who witnesse
s the secret ceremonies of the Good Goddess will be instantly struck blind."

  "Clodius could still see, granted, but he might have wished to be struck deaf, so as not to hear the clamor he set off. The women went home and told their husbands, and you know how men are with gossip. By the next morning, the scandal was the talk of every tavern and street comer in Rome. The pious were outraged, the impious were amused, and I have no doubt that some from both camps were more than a little envious. The matter was much talked about for a season and then put aside for months, until some of Clodius's enemies decided to bring him to trial for sacrilege.

  "At the trial, Clodius claimed that he was innocent and that the women were mistaken, because during the festival of the Good Goddess he had been fifty miles from Rome. Clodius and Cicero were still on friendly terms back then, and when the prosecution called Cicero to testify, Clodius expected him to back up his alibi. Instead, Cicero dutifully affirmed that he had seen Clodius in Rome on the day in question. Clodius was infuriated. That was the beginning of the bad blood between them."

  "But Clodius was acquitted nonetheless," said Eco.

  "Yes, by a slim majority of the fifty-odd jurors. Some say there was outright bribery by both sides; others say that the jurors simply voted along political lines. At any rate, Clodius was vindicated and emerged stronger than ever. He became bolder about using the street gangs he had been organizing to swell his retinue and intimidate his enemies. As for Caesar, the cuckolded husband, his only response was to divorce Pompeia, even though he publicly insisted that nothing untoward had occurred between her and Clodius. When the paradox was pointed out to him—why divorce Pompeia if she had been faithful?—he said, 'I have no doubt whatsoever about her fidelity, but Caesar's wife cannot be tainted even by suspicion!' Well, Caesar can't have been too offended by Clodius. The two of them have turned out to be close allies."

  "As demonstrated by the way Caesar helped Clodius get his tribunate."

  "Exactly. Clodius wanted to be elected tribune, but was barred from doing so, since it's a strictly plebeian office, off-limits to patricians. What was Clodius's solution? With Caesar pushing the paperwork, he managed to get himself adopted by a plebeian almost young enough to be his son, and so got himself officially enrolled as a plebeian—which outraged his fellow patricians and delighted the mob, who elected him tribune. At last Clodius was a commoner in fact as well as in name."