SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance

by John Maddox Roberts

  On the third-?oor gallery, I caught up with him. Scaurus was leaning against a wall, a hand clasped to his brow, which was bleeding freely. During one of the theater’s lurches, he had struck his head on something, slowing him enough for me to catch up to him.

  “Marcus Aemilius Scaurus,” I called, “come with me to the praetor!” His eyes widened with disbelief at hearing the old formula for arrest.

  “Why didn’t those fools kill you? There were four of them! And what business have you arresting anyone? We have to be away from here! We can sort out the legalities at another time.”

  “Sorry, it has to be now,” I said, lurching along toward him, my feet trying to slide out from under me on the slanting fioorboards. “You leave here only as my prisoner, and now I have yet another capital charge to lay against you, plotting the murder of a Roman official in the course of his—”

  At that moment the theater gave its biggest lurch of all, and it began to slide. I dropped my dagger and wrapped my arms around a wooden pillar to keep from falling as there began a sickening, indescribable sense of unnatural motion, accompanied by the greatest cacophony of noises that had ever assaulted my ears. It was a blend of screaming, rending wood, pops, smashes and snaps, grindings, and, above all, a tremendous roar of rushing, hurling water.

  The sliding seemed to go on forever; then it metamorphosed into a sort of whirling, rocking, leaping motion, and I saw the opposite bank of the river rising and falling as if in an earthquake. Then I realized what had happened: The theater wasn’t collapsing, it was ?oating!

  Before my amazed eyes the scene began to turn and the Sublician Bridge moved slowly into view from my left. It was almost as if I were at the still center of things, and the world was moving around me. The people on the bridge were applauding in openmouthed joy, leaping into the air and cheering, as if this whole spectacle had been put on just for them.

  Next to me I saw a pair of hands emerging from a hole in the fioor. It was Hermes, dragging himself up the last of the stairs. He clawed his way along the fioor and hauled himself up beside me.

  “See what you’ve done!” he cried. “We could have got away!”

  “Where is Scaurus?”

  “Who cares! In a few seconds, we’re going to smash into the bridge; and if we’re going to live, we’ll need to be better acrobats than those Greek women last night!”

  “They were Spanish!” I saw that he was right. Slowly and majestically, the theater of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was bearing down on the bridge like a ship about to ram. The people on the bridge were waking up to the fact and scrambling off it at both ends. But everyone on the embankments and the nearby rooftops was cheering and shouting as if the Greens were about to score the upset of the year in the Circus.

  “Let’s get up on the railing,” Hermes advised, “but hug this pillar until the last moment.”

  It seemed like a good idea, so the two of us stood barefoot on the rail while the bridge drew closer. I was sure we were going too fast and we would be hurled off the railing to our messy deaths, but I had forgotten about the breakwaters that protected the bridge supports. They were submerged, and when the underwater part of the theater struck them, its forward motion slowed, and through the soles of my feet I could feel the timbers of the building part like bones splintering in a numbed limb.

  A moment before the face of the theater hit the bridge proper I shouted, “Now!” We hurled ourselves off the railing and landed on the bridge, ten feet below us, plowing into a few citizens who were still trying to push their way off the bridge through the panicked crowd. Stars fiashed before my face as I was knocked almost unconscious.

  But I had no leisure for oblivion, knowing what was coming. I located Hermes and hauled him to his feet. “Come on!” I bawled. “We have to be away from here!” He shook his head for a while, glanced toward the theater building, and wasted no more time. We forced our way through the crowd fieeing the bridge. Hermes drew his stick from beneath his belt and I still had my caestus on my left hand. These helped.

  When we were atop the bridge abutment, we paused and looked back. The theater was jammed against the bridge, and it was folding up. Between the power of Father Tiber and the immovable massiveness of the old stone bridge, it was like a bird’s nest being crushed between the hands of a giant. The siding split and peeled away as huge beams shot out, piled against each other, crowding and fiying as the immense building fiattened, pieces of it rising, almost toppling over onto the bridge, all of it accompanied by a noise audible for miles.

  Then, just as it seemed that the bridge had to give way or the no longer recognizable theater fall on top of it, the shattered hulk began to sag, falling back into the water as fioating timbers shot out from beneath the arches on the downriver side. The river was shredding the building and washing it out beneath the bridge.

  Slowly, as the wreckage subsided beneath the bridge rail, we walked back out onto the Sublician. By the time I reached the middle, the theater, so vast and imposing just minutes before, was a pile of miscellaneous wood, getting smaller by the second as its pieces washed away. Suddenly, in the whirling eddies below me, surrounded by splintered timbers, a white, terrified face stared up at me. Then I saw Marcus Aemilius Scaurus disappear into Father Tiber as the fragments of his folly closed over his head.

  All around me I heard the crowd chanting something over and over, again as if they were watching a chariot race or a fight between champions. I raised my eyes to the eastern bank, which looked like a jawbone with a tooth knocked out of it. Gradually, I understood what the people were shouting: “Ti-ber! Ti-ber! Ti-ber!” Yes, first and forever champion, Father Tiber was victorious once more.

  JULIA FOUND ME AT THE TEMPORARY aedile’s headquarters I had established on the terrace before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. I had been hearing the reports of my fellow officeholders even while Asklepiodes bandaged my many small wounds. Cato had Justus under guard, his searchers had a good lead on Harmodias and expected to bring him in soon, and he had men watching the dwellings of all the rest of the men on Lucilius’s list. Not the least of my satisfactions was that I would be clearing a good man’s name.

  Julia had brought my best toga and a barber to shave me. I had already managed to wash up a bit in a horse trough.

  “Why must you do these things, dear?” she asked, as Hermes helped her make me presentable. She threw her arms around me, and I protested.

  “You know how our peers frown on public displays of affection,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes, old Cato will fall down in an apoplectic fit.”

  “Well, in that case—” I grabbed her and planted a very sound kiss, to the horrified astonishment of half the Senate.

  “The strangest thing,” I said, as she tried combing my hair in different styles, “is that with all the crime and fraud and greed these loathsome men perpetrated, it was the love of a slave that brought them all down.”

  This brought her up short. “What do you mean?”

  “Love and despair,” I said. “It was the slave who called himself Antaeus. When we found him, he could scarcely speak. He finally said something like, ‘Gala—Gala,’ and then ‘accursed.’ He was trying to speak the name of that poor girl, Galatea. He loved her, it seems. One of these men, Scaurus or Messala or Folius or all three, put the two of them up to the murder of Lucilius; and after that she was kept like a prisoner in the house of Folius. She must have tried to run because she was wearing a runaway’s collar when we saw her body.

  “Antaeus tried to get Scaurus to buy the two of them out of that house, but he wouldn’t. The girl became the latest toy in that couple’s games. So the slave decided to murder them and disguise it as an insula collapse. He drilled holes in the support beams, and plugged them with candles in case someone should come into the cellar before he was finished. Maybe Messala promised the man his freedom if he would get rid of the Folii. They were an embarrassment to everyone. Or maybe he did it on his own. He may have planned to carry th
e girl off as the building collapsed behind them.

  “But that night they let their games go a little too far, and the girl died under their whips. Antaeus decided to finish it. First he broke their necks, which as a wrestler he knew how to do efficiently, on the off chance that they might survive. Then he just kept drilling until it was over. He must have been very surprised to learn that he was alive.”

  “How horrible!” she said, grimacing. Then, more practically, “Is this going to alienate you from your family?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care greatly. Their plan for Pompey will go through with or without Messala. If some of them turn out to be entangled in this, too bad. They’ve never been reluctant to use me to their advantage; I’m not going to let affection get in my way.”

  Just then Cato approached and saluted the pair of us. “We have them, Decius Caecilius. We’ll bag the lot of them. Valerius Messala will be tough; it will take some time, but we will bring him down, too. Unfortunate that Scaurus won’t stand trial, but that was the finest manifestation of divine will in my lifetime.”

  “Yes,” I said, standing as senators began to drift into the temple, “Father Tiber is the one god we see every day. We neglect him at out peril.” The setting sun gleamed from a cluster of white buildings out on the Campus Martius. I draped an arm around my wife’s shoulders. “Julia, it looks as if it will have to be Pompey’s Theater for my plays after all.”

  Cato scowled first at my unseemly display, and then at the theater out there on Campus Martius. “And that’s another thing: That building is an abomination! Pompey stooped to every shameless subterfuge to build a permanent theater in Rome! Oh, I grant you that he built it outside the walls and put a temple on top of it, but still—”

  That was Cato for you, a deeply tiresome man. He died splendidly, though. There are times that I wish I had died with him all those years ago in Utica.

  These are the events of four days in the year 701 of the City of Rome, during the Interregnum of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica.

  GLOSSARY

  (Definitions apply to the year 701 of the Republic.)

  Arms Like everything else in Roman society, weapons were strictly regulated by class. The straight, double-edged sword and dagger of the legions were classed as “honorable.”

  The gladius was a short, broad, double-edged sword borne by Roman soldiers. It was designed primarily for stabbing.

  The caestus was a boxing glove, made of leather straps and reinforced by hands, plates, or spikes of bronze. The curved, single-edged sword or knife called a sica was “infamous.” Sicas were used in the arena by Thracian gladiators and were carried by street thugs. One ancient writer says that its curved shape made it convenient to carry sheathed beneath the armpit, showing that gangsters and shoulder holsters go back a long way.

  Carrying of arms within the pomerium (the ancient city boundary marked out by Romulus) was forbidden, but the law was ignored in troubled times. Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons within the City, but those used as bodyguards could carry staves or clubs. When street fighting or assassinations were common, even senators went heavily armed and even Cicero wore armor beneath his toga from time to time.

  Shields were not common in the City except as gladiatorial equipment. The large shield (scutum) of the legions was unwieldy in Rome’s narrow streets but bodyguards might carry the small shield (parma) of the light-armed auxiliary troops. These came in handy when the opposition took to throwing rocks and roof tiles.

  Balnea Roman bathhouses were public and were favored meeting places for all classes. Customs differed with time and locale. In some places there were separate bathhouses for men and women. Pompeii had a bathhouse with a dividing wall between the men’s and women’s sides. At some times women used the baths in the mornings, men in the afternoon. At others, mixed bathing was permitted. The balnea of the republican era were far more modest than the tremendous structures of the later Empire, but some imposing facilities were built during the last years of the Republic.

  Basilica A meeting place of merchants and for the administration of justice.

  Campus Martius A field outside the old city wall, formerly the assembly area and drill field for the army, named after its altar to Mars. It was where the popular assemblies met during the days of the Republic.

  Cerialia The annual festival in honor of the goddess Ceres, the Greek Demeter, who was imported to Rome in accordance with an interpretation of the Sybilline Books.

  Circus The Roman racecourse and the stadium that enclosed it. The original, and always the largest, was the Circus Maximus. A later, smaller circus, the Circus Flaminius, lay outside the walls on the Campus Martius.

  Cloaca Maxima The chief sewer of Rome. Built when Rome had kings, it was at first a mere channel dug to drain the swampy Forum Romanum. Later it was lined with stone, then roofed over with massive stonework. It was a sewer until the nineteenth century and drains the underground springs of the Forum to this day.

  Curia The meetinghouse of the Senate, located in the Forum, also applied to a meeting place in general. Hence Curia Hostilia, Curia Pompey, and Curia Julia. By tradition they were prominently located with position to the sky to observe omens.

  Cursus Honorum “Course of Honor”: The ladder of office ascended by Romans in public life. The cursus offices were quaestor, praetor, and consul. Technically, the office of aedile was not part of the cursus honorum, but by the late Republic it was futile to stand for praetor without having served as aedile. The other public offices not on the cursus were censor and dictator.

  Curule A curule office conferred magisterial dignity. Those holding it were privileged to sit in a curule chair—a folding camp chair that became a symbol of Roman officials sitting in judgment.

  Equestrian Eques (pl. equites) literally meant “horseman.” In the early days of the military muster soldiers supplied all their own equipment. Every five years the censors made a property assessment of all citizens and each man served according to his ability to pay for arms, equipment, rations, etc. Those above a certain minimum assessment became equites because they could afford to supply and feed their own horses and were assigned to the cavalry. By the late Republic, it was purely a property class. Almost all senators were equites by property assessment, but the Dictator Sulla made senators a separate class. After his day, the equites were the wealthy merchants, moneylenders, and tax farmers of Rome. Collectively, they were an enormously powerful group, equal to the senators in all except prestige and control of foreign policy.

  Families and Names Roman citizens usually had three names. The given name (praenomen) was individual, but there were only about eighteen of them: Marcus, Lucius, etc. Certain praenomens were used only in a single family: Appius was used only by the Claudians, Mamercus only by the Aemilians, and so forth. Only males had praenomens. Daughters were given the feminine form of the father’s name: Aemilia for Aemilius, Julia for Julius, Valeria for Valerius, etc.

  Next came the nomen. This was the name of the clan (gens). All members of a gens traced their descent from a common ancestor, whose name they bore: Julius, Furius, Licinius, Junius, Tullius, to name a few. Patrician names always ended in ius. Plebeian names often had different endings.

  The stirps was a subfamily of a gens. The cognomen gave the name of the stirps, i.e., Caius Julius Caesar. Caius of the stirps; Caesar of gens Julia.

  Then came the name of the family branch (cognomen). This name was frequently anatomical: Naso (nose), Ahenobarbus (bronzebeard), Sulla (splotchy), Niger (dark), Rufus (red), Caesar (curly), and many others. Some families did not use cognomens. Mark Antony was just Marcus Antonius, no cognomen.

  Other names were honorifics conferred by the Senate for outstanding service or virtue: Germanicus (conqueror of the Germans), Africanus (conqueror of the Africans), Pius (extraordinary filial piety).

  Freed slaves became citizens and took the family name of their master. Thus the vast majority of Romans named, for instance, Cor
nelius would not be patricians of that name, but the descendants of that family’s freed slaves. There was no stigma attached to slave ancestry.

  Adoption was frequent among noble families. An adopted son took the name of his adoptive father and added the genetive form of his former nomen. Thus when Caius Julius Caesar adopted his great-nephew Caius Octavius, the latter became Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus.

  All these names were used for formal purposes such as official documents and monuments. In practice, nearly every Roman went by a nickname, usually descriptive and rarely complimentary. Usually it was the Latin equivalent of Gimpy, Humpy, Lefty, Squint-Eye, Big Ears, Baldy, or something of the sort. Romans were merciless when it came to physical peculiarities.

  Fasces A bundle of rods bound around with an ax projecting from the middle. They symbolized a Roman magistrate’s power of corporal and capital punishment and were carried by the lictors who accompanied the curule magistrates, the Flamen Dialis, and the proconsuls and propraetors who governed provinces.

  First Citizen In Latin: Princeps. Originally the most prestigious senator, permitted to speak first on all important issues and set the order of debate. Augustus, the first emperor, usurped the title in perpetuity. Decius detests him so much that he will not use either his name (by the time of the writing it was Caius Julius Caesar) or the honorific Augustus, voted by the toadying Senate. Instead he will refer to him only as the First Citizen. Princeps is the origin of the modern word “prince.”

  Flamines see priesthoods.

  Forum An open meeting and market area. The premier forum was the Forum Romanum, located on the low ground surrounded by the Capitoline, Palatine, and Caelian Hills. It was surrounded by the most important temples and public buildings. Roman citizens spent much of their day there. The courts met outdoors in the Forum when the weather was good. When it was paved and devoted solely to public business, the Forum Romanum’s market functions were transferred to the Forum Boarium, the Cattle Market near the Circus Maximus. Small shops and stalls remained along the northern and southern peripheries, however.