"The blood is as described," Agrippa reported to those outside the door.
"This statue," I indicated the crocodile-headed god, "is not the one that stood here last night. Its base is round and the blood was stopped in its sticky progress by a square pedestal."
"I can confirm that," Agrippa reported.
"Now this god has a fearsome aspect with his reptilian head, but he is actually a Nile fertility god and quite benevolent. I suspect he is left over from an earlier enthusiasm of the late Tubero, who had a taste for the exotic, not to mention the unwholesome. He has a coating of dust, whereas the altar is quite clean. If you will institute a search of the house, you should find a statue of Cybele, along with certain paraphernalia associated with the worship of that goddess: cymbals, a scourge studded with knucklebones, a sickle and so forth. You may even discover the . . . ah . . . items missing from the gentleman here."
"Find them!" Livia barked. There was a rustling and clinking from without.
"Why Cybele?" the First Citizen asked.
"Allow me to wax pedantic. Almost two hundred years ago, Hannibal was still romping about in Italy. Our ancestors were frightened by a shower of stones that fell from the heavens. The Sybilline Books were consulted and it was revealed that the danger would be averted by this Phrygian goddess. From King Attalus the Senate received certain cult objects and the goddess was installed in the temple built for her on the Palatine. Hannibal was duly driven out and her worship continues to this day, but only in a decorous and lawful form.
"However," I continued, relishing this part, "there is another side to her worship; an alien, oriental and wholly disreputable side. It has long been forbidden in Rome, but it enjoys a certain vogue among those bored by the decorum of the State religion. The Corybantes, the ecstatic followers of the goddess in her more daemonic aspect, are noted for practicing flagellation, hence the studded scourge. In their religious transports, candidates for priesthood castrate themselves and throw their severed members upon the altar."
"Barbarous!" Octavius muttered.
"Last night poor Tubero, spurned by Julia, solaced himself with a good session of holy flagellation. You notice the whip marks? They are almost vertical, quite unlike the horizontal and diagonal stripes one sees when a slave is whipped by a second party. This is because Tubero was lashing himself, slinging the thongs over his left shoulder."
"That's what it looks like," Agrippa affirmed.
"I suspect that Tubero was a man who liked these private games. He allowed fantasy to become reality. In any case, having drunk himself silly and then inflamed his senses with the dubious pleasures of self-flagellation, he performed the final rite. He probably intended merely to mime the actions. After all, the lack of an audience would deprive the ritual of half the fun. But he was not in a steady state of mind and he went too far. The expression on his face when he realized what he was holding must have been worth seeing. This was not a conventional orgy of Cybele, so no one was there to stanch the blood and he perished."
"Disgusting!" Octavius shouted. "And to implicate my family!" The widow was already bawling and begging for mercy. Nobody paid any attention.
"Actually," I said, "it was rather clever. Julia had conveniently placed herself on the scene, and everyone knows what a stickler you are for the purity of Roman family life. The woman did not want it to come out that her husband, the new-minted patrician, was an idiotic loon. She figured that, by implicating Julia, she would trick you into covering up the whole squalid mess."
"To suspect me of such perfidy! I’ll search the law tables until I find a charge under which she can be executed!" The woman blubbered even more vociferously.
"That would mean a court trial," Livia pointed out. "You don't want your name associated with such a squalid mess. There was no murder and trying to put one over on you doesn't really constitute treason. You are pontifex maximus. Charge her with some sort of sacrilege—desecration of a corpse or something. Exile her to one of those dreadful little islands we keep for the ones we can't condemn to death."
"If you say so, my dear," Octavius grumbled. "It's better than the treacherous bitch deserves."
"You've never seen those islands," I told him.
We left the house amid much wailing, the formidable escort all around us. Octavius placed a hand on my shoulder. "I can't tell you how grateful I am, Decius Caecilius. You really must accept a promotion to the patricianship."
Another hand came to rest on my other shoulder. "Decius," Livia purred, "we truly need a new Rex Sacrorum.''
I closed my eyes wearily. "I don't suppose you have another of those islands handy?"
These things happened in the year 734 of the city of Rome, during the unconstitutional dictatorship of Caius Octavius, surnamed Augustus.
John Maddox Roberts - The King Of Sacrifices Page 3
