The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "He stirred the crowd to a frenzy. Appius Claudius called for armed lictors to keep order, and threatened to have the young orator arrested for starting a riot. But to keep the situation from getting completely out of hand, Appius Claudius agreed to let the girl go home with her uncle for the night and made the man post a huge bond in silver to make sure Verginia would show up for her hearing.

  "At dawn the next morning the city woke in a fever of excitement. Verginius, back from his military duty, appeared in the Forum leading his daughter by the hand — he in mourning, she in rags, followed by all the women of the family making lamentations. There was a trial, or something resembling a trial, with each of the sides presenting arguments and Appius Claudius presiding as sole judge. Evidence and common sense counted for nothing. The verdict was decided before the trial began. As soon as the arguments were finished, Appius Claudius announced that Verginia was the slave of Marcus, not the daughter of Verginius. Marcus was free to claim his property.

  "The crowd was stupefied. Nobody uttered a word. Marcus began pushing his way through the crowd, heading for Verginia. The women around her burst into tears. Verginius shook his fist at Appius and cried out, 'I meant my daughter for a bridal bed, not for your brothel! No man who owns a sword will put up with this sort of outrage!'

  "Appius Claudius was prepared for this. He'd received alarming reports of an uprising being planned against the decemvirs, he claimed, and so just happened to have a troop of armed lictors on hand to keep order. He called them out and told them to draw their swords and clear the way so that Marcus could claim his property. Anyone who obstructed this act of justice would be killed on the spot as a disturber of the peace. Marcus strode forward through the cordon of steel and laid his hands on Verginia.

  "Verginius finally seemed to lose heart. With tears in his eyes he called to Appius Claudius: 'Perhaps I have been terribly mistaken all these years. Yes, perhaps you're right and the girl isn't really my daughter after all. Let me take the child and her nurse aside for just one moment so that I can talk to them both privately. If I can reconcile myself to this mistake, I can give her up without violence.' Appius granted this request, though in retrospect one has to wonder why. Perhaps he wanted to savor the actual moment of acquiring the girl, of seeing her fall into Marcus's clutches, and didn't mind an excuse for stretching out the ordeal just a bit longer.

  "Verginius took his daughter to a little street off the Forum. He ran into a butcher's shop, grabbed a knife, and ran back to Verginia. Before anyone could stop him, he stabbed her in the heart. She died in his arms, convulsing and spitting blood, while he stroked her hair and whispered to her over and over, 'It was the only way to set you free, my child, the only way.' He staggered back into the Forum carrying her body. The crowd parted for him, stunned into silence, so that Verginius's cries echoed through the Forum.

  'This blood is on your hands, Appius Claudius! The curse of my virgin daughter's blood is on your head!' "

  Catullus fell silent. I stared into the darkness above us. "Quite a story," I finally said. "What happened next?"

  "Verginius and the young man who was to have been his son-in-law led an uprising. The decemvirs were brought down. Appius Claudius was arrested."

  "Was he punished?"

  "He killed himself in prison, awaiting trial."

  "No wonder the Clodii don't brag about him. But I don't see how the story relates to your Lesbia."

  "Don't you? You see, there's this particular strain of madness in their blood. Yes, the Clodii have a heritage of building, creating, rising to glory and triumph. But there's also this other aspect, this unwholesome tendency to obsess, this inability to see beyond a thing they desire but cannot have. If they come to want a thing, they'll do anything to get it. Anything! And if their skewed judgment takes them down the wrong path, don't expect them to realize the error and turn back. Oh no, once set upon it, they'll run the course, even straight into disaster. And all in the name of love! They'll wager everything on the slim chance that when the dice are cast they'll score the Venus Throw."

  "Are you sure you're speaking of Clodia? Or could it be yourself you're describing, Catullus?"

  He was silent for a long moment. "I suppose I wouldn't love her as I do if we weren't alike in certain ways."

  He was quiet then for so long that I thought he must have fallen asleep, until he murmured, "Cicero speaks tomorrow."

  "What?"

  "At the trial."

  "Yes."

  "She should have known better than to take him on. Cicero is a dangerous man."

  "I know. I saw what he did to Catilina when he made up his mind to destroy him. All it took were words."

  "Clodia thinks everything comes down to bodies, and sex. She doesn't understand the power of words. It's why she thinks my poetry is weak." He was quiet, then said, "Cicero was in love with her once. Did you know that?"

  "I once heard a very vague rumor of some such thing, but it sounded like nonsense to me. Cicero, in love with anyone but himself?"

  "Infatuated, anyway. He was great friends with her husband, Quintus. Always visiting their house, back when Quintus was alive and the place was . . . well, respectable enough for a man like Cicero to feel at home. Clodia was a lot more restrained back then; more discreet, anyway. I think she rather liked having to carry on her affairs behind someone else's back—the secret meetings, the danger of getting caught, the wicked thrill of cuckolding her husband. And of course, a married woman can simply turn her back on a lover the moment she tires of him ... "

  "But Cicero? Preposterous. He despises people like her."

  "Are there other people like Clodia?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "Perhaps he despises her now, but back then . . . this was during the worst part of Clodia's marriage, the last few years before Quintus died, when the two of them fought all the time, even in front of company. Especially in front of company. They fought about everything—Clodia's affairs, her brother's career, money, politics. I've always thought that's what intrigued Cicero—seeing her at her most argumentative. He could ignore the fact that she was beautiful, but she was also clever and sharp-tongued. A voluptuous beauty who could argue a man like Quintus into the ground—well, Cicero developed quite a fascination for her. That happens to men like him sometimes, who keep their natural appetites all bottled up. Suddenly they find themselves madly in love with the most inappropriate person. I suspect Clodia was a bit intrigued by him— the perverse attraction of opposites. I'm not sure whether they ever did anything about it. She told me they did, but I figured she was just lying to hurt me. This was years ago, but it makes him all the more dangerous to her now."

  "Dangerous?" I said, not quite sure what he meant. I was getting very sleepy.

  "Men like Cicero don't like to dwell on that sort of memory. They see it as weakness. They prefer to stamp it out."

  I tried to imagine Cicero as a lover—prim, dyspeptic Cicero—but I was too sleepy to make the mental effort, or too afraid it would give me bad dreams.

  "Tomorrow—oh, no, light's coming through the shutters. The sky's beginning to lighten already," Catullus groaned. "Not tomorrow, then: today. Today the Great Mother festival begins, and down in the Forum, someone will be destroyed."

  "How can you be certain?"

  He tapped his earlobe. "The gods whisper in a poet's ear. Today, someone will be publicly annihilated. Humiliated. Ruined forever." "You mean Marcus Caelius."

  "Do I?"

  "Who else?"

  He stretched his body in a paroxysm of yawning. "Things could go one way or the other. Even the gods will have to wait and see."

  "What do you mean?" I murmured. Then I must have fallen asleep or else Catullus did, because I never heard him answer.

  PART FOUR

  NEXUS

  Chapter Twenty Four

  After a fitful hour or two of sleep I opened my eyes. Morning

  I light was creeping in around the shuttered windows, but 1 thin
k it was Catullus's snoring that woke me. I crept to the anteroom, kicked Belbo awake, and told him to run home as fast as he could and fetch my best toga. He was back before I had finished washing my face.

  "I suppose someone was minding the door," I said, while he helped me dress. "Yes, Master."

  "Was there any word of Eco?" "No, Master."

  "Nothing at all?"

  "Nothing, Master." "Was your mistress up?"

  "Yes, Master."

  "What did she have to say? Any message for me?"

  "No, Master. She didn't say a word. But she looked —" "Yes, Belbo?"

  "She looked more displeased than usual, Master."

  "Did she? Come, Belbo, we'll need to hurry to catch the start of the trial. I'm sure we can find something to eat on the way. There'll be plenty of vendors out for the festival." As we were leaving, Catullus appeared from the bedroom, looking haggard and bleary-eyed. He assured me he would be down at the Forum before the trial started, but he looked to me as if he would have to be raised from the dead first.

  Belbo and I arrived just as the defense was beginning its arguments With no slaves sent ahead to hold a chair for me, I found myself near the back of the crowd, which was even larger than the day before. I had to stand on tiptoes to see, but I had no trouble hearing. The well-trained orator's voice of Marcus Caelius rang through the square.

  As Atratinus, the youngest of the prosecutors, had begun their case the day before, so young Caelius began his own defense; as Atratinus had dwelled on the defendant's character, so did Caelius. Was this the morally depraved, sensation-seeking, too-handsome young murderer that the prosecution had portrayed? One would never have known it from Caelius's appearance and manner. He was dressed in a toga so old and faded that even a poor man might have thrown it out. It must have come from a musty chest in his father's storage room.

  His manner was as humble as his clothes were shabby. The fiery young orator famous for his rapid delivery and biting invectives spoke on this day in a calm, measured, thoughtful cadence, oozing with respect for the judges. He declared himself innocent of all charges; these horrible, spurious accusations had been lodged against him by people who had once been his friends but were now his enemies, and their only goal was to destroy him for their personal satisfaction. A man could hardly be blamed for the treachery of false friends; still, Caelius regretted his poor judgment in ever having associated with such people, for he could see the pain and suffering it had caused his father and mother, who were with him again today, dressed in mourning and barely controlling their tears. He regretted, too, the burden that the trial had placed on his loyal friends, beloved mentors and trusted advocates, Marcus Crassus and Marcus Cicero, two truly great Romans whose example he had admittedly failed to live up to, but to whom he would turn again for renewed inspiration when this ordeal had passed, provided the judges in their wisdom saw fit to give him that chance.

  Caelius was deferential but not servile; modest but not cringing; adamant about his innocence, but not self-righteous; saddened by the wickedness of his enemies but not vindictive. He was the model of an upstanding citizen falsely accused and confidently looking to the revered institutions of the law to give him justice.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see the bloodshot eyes of Catullus. "I don't suppose I've missed much blood and gore yet," he said.

  "Milk and honey is more like it," quipped a man nearby. "This fellow Caelius wouldn't harm a fly!" There was a ripple of laughter, then a round of shushing from those who wanted to hear every word of the speech.

  "Milk can curdle," Catullus whispered in my ear, "and sometimes you find a bee drowned in the honey, with its stinger intact." "What do you mean?"

  "Caelius fights better with a sword than with a shield. Wait and listen."

  Sure enough, the tone of Caelius's speech began to change, as if, having gotten the necessary business of humbling himself out of the way, it was time for him to go on the offensive. The shift was so gradual, the insinuations of sarcasm so subtle, that it was impossible to say exactly when the speech was transformed from a meek protestation of innocence into a biting invective against his accusers. He attacked the speeches that had been made against him, pointing out their reliance on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, their lapses of logic, their obvious intent to besmirch his character. The prosecutors were made to look not just vindictive, but petty as well, and slightly absurd, not least because Caelius himself managed to maintain an aura of impeccable dignity while he insulted their logic and motives and assaulted them with vicious puns.

  "Stingers in the honey," whispered Catullus.

  "How did you know?"

  He shrugged. "You forgot how well I know Caelius. I could lay out the entire course of his speech for you. For example, he'll be turning to her next." He looked toward the bench where Clodia sat, and the sardonic smile on his lips faded until he looked as grim as she did.

  Sure enough, Caelius proceeded to make a veiled attack on Clodia, though not by name. Behind the prosecution and its sham arguments, he said, there was a certain person intent on doing him harm — not the other way around, as she had charged. The judges would know whom he meant—"Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans." The crude joke, implying that Clodia was both a husband-killer and a cheap whore, elicited a wave of raucous laughter. Where had I heard it before?

  "I make no claim to being ignorant of the lady," said Caelius. "Yes, I know her—or knew her—quite well. To my discredit, alas, and to my dismay. But little to my profit; sometimes Cos in the dining room turns out to be Nola in the bedroom." This elicited more laughter and even some appreciative applause. The pun was multiple and all the more stinging for its wicked intricacy. Cos suggested the island from which Clodia's transparent silks had come, and therefore the open, vulgar allure of sex; Nola was famous for its impregnable fortress, which had resisted not just Hannibal but a siege by Clodia's own father. Cos also punned with coitus, sex, and Nola with nolo, or no sex. In other words, what the lady lewdly promised at dinner was later frigidly withheld in the bedroom. With a single turn of phrase, and without saying anything explicit, Caelius had managed to suggest that Clodia was not just a temptress but a tease (likely to give poor value even for a quadrans!), to suggest that he had never actually slept with her, and to remind the court of one of her father's military defeats, the siege of Nola. After a moment's pause there was another smattering of applause, as more listeners realized just what a gem of compression Caelius had delivered.

  Catullus didn't laugh or applaud, I noticed. "Wickedly clever," I said, wondering if he had missed the pun.

  "Thank you," he muttered, apparently not listening. His eyes were on Clodia, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. Catullus smiled sadly.

  Caelius expanded on the metaphor. Just as a man could be in the vicinity of Nola without breaching her walls (more laughter from those finally getting the joke), so one could be in the vicinity of Neapolis or Puteoli without being guilty of staging an attack on foreign visitors; or take an innocent stroll across the Palatine at night without dropping in to murder an ambassador. "Has it come to this?" said Caelius. "Not guilt by association, but guilt by geographical proximity? Shall a man's enemies follow his footsteps, note any crimes which happen to take place in the immediate area, and then accuse him so that he has no alibi? It seems hardly credible that even the most inept of advocates could expect a panel of Roman judges to take this kind of 'evidence' seriously. Assumptions should be based on what is seen, not unseen; known, not merely 'suspected.' "

  He pulled a small object from the folds of his toga. A few spectators in the front rows laughed out loud when they saw what it was. "For instance," he went on, holding up the object so that it glinted in the sunlight, "when one sees a simple little pyxis such as this, what does one assume that it contains? A medicinal unguent of some sort, or a cosmetic powder, or a perfume infused into wax, perhaps—the sort of thing that anybody might take along to the baths. Or so a reasonable person might assume. A
person of a more morbid state of mind might guess that something else was in the box—poison, perhaps. Especially if that person was herself well acquainted with using poison." From my distant vantage, there was no way I could be sure of what the pyxis looked like. It must have been only my imagination that perceived it to be made of bronze, with little raised knobs and inlays of ivory that caught the sunlight—identical to the pyxis that Caelius's confederate Licinius had brought to the Senian baths, and that had been left, filled with something unspeakable, on Clodia's doorstep as she lay poisoned in her house.

  More laughter spread through the crowd. I looked at Clodia. Her eyes were aflame and her jaw like granite.

  "An imagination of a particularly lewd bent might imagine something even more outrageous in such an innocent little pyxis—a token of spent desire, perhaps, deposited by a frustrated lover weary of trying to shimmy up Nola's walls." At this there were outright hoots of laughter. Somehow the story of the pyxis and its obscene contents must already have spread through the city. Who had repeated such a scandalous story— a slave in Clodia's household? Or the man who had sent her the box? It was clear from the look on Clodia's face that Caelius's brazen allusion to the indecent gift had taken her completely by surprise, and the callous amusement of the spectators appalled her even more. Caelius, never once looking at her, put the pyxis away and smiled blandly.

  "Master!" Belbo tugged at my toga.

  "Belbo, I'm trying to listen."

  "But Master, he's here!"

  I turned about, prepared to snap at him, then felt a surge of joy. Not far away, at the edge of the crowd, Eco stood on his toes peering into the sea of heads.

  "Belbo, you sharp-eyed lookout! Come, he'll never spot us in this crowd. We'll go to him."

  "You're not leaving, are you?" said Catullus.

  "I'll be back."

  "But the best is yet to come." "Memorize the jokes for me," I said.

  We came upon Eco just as he was beginning to push his way into the throng. His tunic was dirty and his brow pasted with sweat, as might be expected of a man who had just finished a hard ride up from Puteoli. His face was haggard but when he saw us his eyes lit up and he managed a weary smile.