John Maddox Roberts - [SPQR Roman Mysteries 8.6]-Mightier Than The Sword

by John Maddox Roberts

  The wonderful thing about being Aedile is that you get to spend your days poking through every foul, dangerous, rat-infested, pestilential cellar in Rome. Building inspection is part of the job, and you can spend your whole year just prosecuting violations of the building codes, never mind putting on the Games and inspecting all the whorehouses, also part of the job. And I'd landed the office in a year when a plebeian couldn't be Curule Aedile. The Curule got to wear a purple border on his toga and sat around the markets all day in a folding chair, attended by a lictor and levying fines for violations of the market laws. No, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus got that job. Well, he never amounted to anything, so there is justice in the world, after all. Mind you, he got to be Triumvir some years later, but considering that the other two were Antony and Octavian, he might as well have been something unpleasant adhering to the heel of Octavian's sandal.

  And the worst thing was, you didn't have to serve as Aedile to stand for higher office! It was just that you had not a prayer of being elected Praetor unless, as Aedile, you put on splendid Games as a gift to the people. If you gave them enough chariot races, and plays and pageants and public feasts and Campanian gladiators by the hundred, then, when you stood for higher office, they would remember you kindly. Of course the State only provided a pittance for these Games, so you had to pay for them out of your own pocket, bankrupting yourself and going into debt for years. That was what being Aedile meant.

  That was why I was in a bad mood when I found the body. It wasn't as if bodies were exactly rare in Rome, especially that year. It was one of the very worst years in the history of the City. The election scandals of the previous year had been so terrible that our two Consuls almost weren't allowed to assume office in January, and the year got worse after that. My good friend, Titus Annius Milo, politician and gang leader, was standing for Consul for the next year, as was the equally disreputable Plautius Hypsaeus. Milo's deadly enemy and mine, Publius Clodius Pulcher, was standing for Praetor. Their mobs battled each other in the streets day and night, and bodies were as common as dead pigeons in the Temple of Jupiter.

  But that was in the streets. Another plebeian Aedile, whose name I no longer recall, had charge of keeping the streets clean. I resented finding them in my nice, peaceful if malodorous cellars. And it wasn't in one of the awful, disgusting tenement cellars, either, uninspected for decades and awash with the filth of poverty and lax enforcement of the hygienic laws.

  Instead, it was in the clean, new basement of a town house just built on the Aventine. I was down there inspecting because in Rome honest building contractors are as common as volunteer miners in the Sicilian sulphur pits. My slave Hermes preceded me with a lantern. He was a fine, handsome, strapping young man by this time, and very good at controlling his criminal tendencies. Unlike so many, the basement smelled pleasantly of new-cut timber and the dry, dusty scent of stone fresh from the quarry. There was another, less pleasant smell beneath these, though.

  Hermes stopped, a yellow puddle of light around his feet spilling over a shapeless form.

  "There's a stiff here, Master."

  "Oh, splendid. And I thought this was going to be my only agreeable task all day. I don't suppose it's just some old beggar, come down here to get out of the weather and died of natural causes?"

  "Not unless there's beggars in the Senate, these days," Hermes said.

  My scalp prickled. There were few things I hated worse than finding a high-ranking corpse. "Well, some of us are poor enough to qualify. Let's see who we have."

  I squatted by the body while Hermes held the lantern near the face. Sure enough, the man wore a tunic with a senator's wide, purple stripe. He was middle-aged, bald and beak-nosed, none of which were distinctions of note. And he had had at least one enemy, who had stabbed him neatly through the heart. It was a tiny wound, and only a small amount of blood had emerged to form a palm-sized blot on his tunic, but it had done the job. Three thin streaks of blood made stripes paralleling the one that proclaimed his rank.

  "Do you know him?" Hermes asked.

  I shook my head. Despite all the exiles and purges by the Censors, there were still more than four hundred Senators, and I couldn't very well know all of them.

  "Hermes, run to the Curia and fetch Junius the secretary. He knows every man in the Senate by sight. Then inform the Praetor Varus. He's holding court in the Basilica Aemilia today and by this hour he's dying for a break in the routine. Then go find Asklepiodes at the Statilian School."

  "But that's across the river!" Hermes protested.

  "You need the exercise. Hurry, now. I want Asklepiodes to have a look at him before the Libitinarü come to take him to the undertaker's."

  He dashed off, leaving the lantern. I continued to study the body but it told me nothing. I sighed and scratched my head, wishing I had thought to bring along a skin of wine. Not yet half over, and it was one of the worst years of my life. And it had started out with such promise, too. The Big Three were out of Rome for a change: Caesar was gloriously slaughtering barbarians in Gaul, Crassus was doing exactly the opposite in Syria, and Pompey was sulking in Spain while his flunkies tried to harangue the Senate into making him Dictator. Their excuse this time was that only a Dictator could straighten out the disorder in the city.

  It needed the straightening, although making a Dictator was a little drastic. My life wasn't worth a lead denarius after dark in my own city. The thought made me nervous, all alone with only a corpse for company. I was so deeply in debt from borrowing to support my office that I couldn't even afford a bodyguard. Milo would have lent me some thugs but the family wouldn't hear of it. People would think the Metelli were taking the Milo side in the great Clodius-Milo rivalry. Better to lose a Metellus of marginal value than endanger the family's vaunted neutrality.

  After an hour or so Varus appeared, escorted by his lictors. Junius was close behind, his stylus tucked behind his ear, accompanied by a slave carrying a satchel full of wax tablets.

  "Good afternoon, Aedile," Varus said. "So you've found a murder to brighten my day?"

  "You didn't happen to bring any wine along, did you?" I said, without much hope.

  "You haven't changed any, Metellus. Who do we have?" His lictors carried enough torches to light the place like noon in the Forum. The smoke started to get heavy, though.

  Junius bent forward. "It's Aulus Cosconius. He doesn't attend the Senate more than three or four times a year. Big holdings in the City. This building is one of his, I think. Extensive lands in Tuscia as well." He held out a hand and his slave opened the leaves of a wooden tablet, the depressions on their inner sides filled with the finest beeswax, and slapped it into the waiting palm. Junius took his stylus from behind his ear and used its spatulate end to scrape off" the words scratched on the wax lining. It was an elegant instrument of bronze inlaid with silver, befitting so important a scribe, as the high-grade wax befitted Senate business. With a dextrous twirl he reversed it and began to write with the pointed end. "You will wish to make a report to the Senate, Praetor?"

  Varus shrugged. "What's to report? Another dead Senator. It's not like a visitation from Olympus, is it?"

  Yes, the times were like that.

  "I've sent for Asklepiodes," I said. "He may be able to tell something from the condition of the body."

  "I doubt he'll be able to come up with much this time," Varus said, "but if you want, I'll appoint you to investigate. Make a note of it, Junius."

  "Will you lend me a lictor?" I asked. "I'll need to summon people."

  Varus pointed
to one of his attendants and the man sighed. The days of cushy duty in the basilica were over. I said, "Go and inform the family of the late Senator Auius Cosconius that they have just been bereaved and that they can claim the body here. Junius should be able to tell you where they live. Then go to the contractor who built this place. His name is…" I opened one of my own wax tablets. "… Manius Varro. He has a lumber yard by the Circus Flaminius, next to the temple of Bellona. Tell him to call on me first thing tomorrow morning, at my office in the Temple of Ceres."

  The man handed his torch to a companion and conferred with Junius, then he shouldered his fasces and marched importantly away.

  Asklepiodes arrived just as Junius and Varus were leaving, trailed by two of his Egyptian slaves, who carried his implements and other impedimenta. Hermes was with him, carrying a wineskin. I had trained him well.

  "Ah, Decius," the Greek said. "I can always count upon you to find something interesting for me." He wore a look of bright anticipation. Sometimes I wondered about Asklepiodes.

  "Actually, this looks rather squalid, but the man was of some importance and somebody left him in a building I was inspecting. I don't like that sort of thing." Hermes handed me a full cup and I drained it and handed it back.

  Asklepiodes took the lantern and ran the pool of light swiftly over the body, then paused to examine the wound. "He died within the last day, I cannot be more precise than that, from the thrust of a very thin-bladed weapon, its blade triangular in cross-section."

  "A woman's dagger?" I asked. Prostitutes frequently concealed such weapons in their hair, to protect themselves from violent customers and sometimes to settle disputes with other prostitutes.

  "Quite possibly. What's this?" He said something incomprehensible to one of his slaves. The man reached into his voluminous pouch and emerged with a long, bronze probe decorated with little golden acanthus leaves and a stoppered bottle, rather plain. Asklepiodes took the instrument and pried at the wound. It came away with an ugly little glob of something no bigger than a dried pea. This the Greek poked into the little bottle and restoppered it. He handed the probe and the bottle to the slave, who replaced it in his pouch.

  "It looks like dried blood to me," I said.

  "Only on the surface. I'll take it to my surgery and study it in the morning, when there is light."

  "Do you think he was killed somewhere else and dragged down here? That's not much blood for a skewered heart."

  "No, with a wound like this most of the bleeding is internal, I believe he died on this spot. His clothing is very little disarranged."

  He poked at the feet. "See, the heels of his sandals are not scuffed, as usually happens when a body is dragged."

  I was willing to take his word for it. As physician to the gladiators he had seen every possible wound to the human body, hundreds of times over. He left promising to send me a report the next day.

  Minutes later the family arrived, along with the Libitinarii to perform the lustrations to purify the body. The dead man's son went through the pantomime of catching his last breath and shouted his name loudly, three times. Then the undertaker's men lifted the body and carried it away. The women set up an extravagant caterwauling. It wasn't a patch on the howling the professional mourners would raise at the funeral, but in the closed confines of the cellar it was sufficiently loud.

  I approached the young man who had performed the final rites. "I am Decius Caecilius Metellius the Younger, plebeian Aedile. I found your father's body and I have been appointed investigator by the Praetor Varus. Would you come outside with me?"

  "Quintus Cosconius," he said, identifying himself, "only son of Aulus." He was a dark, self-possessed young man. He didn't look terribly put out by the old man's passing: not an uncommon attitude in a man who has just found out that he has come into his inheritance. Something about the name ticked at my memory.

  "Quintus Cosconius? Aren't you standing for the tribuneship for next year?"

  "I'm not alone in that," he said. Indeed he wasn't. Tribune was the office to have, in those years. They got to introduce the laws that determined who got what in the big game of empire. Since the office was restricted to plebeians, Clodius, a patrician, had gone to the extremity of having himself adopted into a plebeian family just so he could serve as tribune.

  "Did your father have enemies? Did any of the feuding demagogues have it in for him?" I was hoping he would implicate Clodius.

  "No, in recent years he avoided the Senate. He had no stomach for a faction fight." I detected a faint sneer in his words.

  "Who did he support?"

  "Crassus, when he supported anyone. They had business dealings together." That made sense. Crassus held the largest properties in Rome. If you dealt in real estate, you probably dealt with Crassus.

  "I take it you don't support Crassus yourself?"

  He shrugged. "It's no secret. When I am Tribune I shall support Pompey. I've been saying that in the Forum since the start of the year. What has this to do with my father's murder?"

  "Oh, politics has everything to do with murder, these days. The streets are littered with the bodies of those who picked the wrong side in the latest rivalries for office. But, since your father was a lukewarm member of the Crassus faction at best, it probably has no bearing upon his death."

  "I should think not. What you need to do something about is the unchecked and unpunished violence in the City. It strikes me as ludicrous that our Senatorial authorities can pacify whole provinces but are helpless to make Rome a safe city." He looked as if a new thought had occurred to him. "Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger? A friend of Milo's are you not?" It wasn't the first time that association had been held against me.

  "Yes, but, like your father's political connections, it has no bearing here. If Milo should prove to be responsible, I shall hale him before the Praetor like any other malefactor."

  "Rome needs a genuine police force!" he said, heatedly. "And laws with teeth!"

  I was getting tired of this. "When did you last see your father?"

  "Yesterday morning. He spoke to me in the Forum. He had been out of the City, touring his country estates—" I saw that look of satisfaction cross his face. They were his estates now. "—but he came back to inspect one of his town properties. This one, I think."

  "He certainly seems to have ended up here. What plans did he have for this building?"

  He shrugged again. "The usual, I suppose: Let out the ground floor to some well-to-do tenant and the upper floors to the less affluent. He owned many such properties." He smoothed a fold of his exceptionally white toga. "Will there be anything else?"

  "Not at present. But I may wish to speak with you again."

  "Anything for one on the service of the Senate and People of Rome," he said, none too warmly.

  With the crowd gone, I went back to my inspection duties, giving them less than half of my attention. Much as I disliked the man's attitude, Quintus Cosconius had spoken nothing but the truth when he said that Rome needed a police force. Our ancient laws forbade the presence of armed soldiers within the sacred walls, and that extended to any citizen bearing arms in the City. From time to time someone would suggest forming a force of slave-police, on the old Athenian model, but that meant setting slaves in power over citizens, and that was unthinkable.

  The trouble was that any force of armed men in the City would quickly become a private army for one of the political criminals who plagued the body politic in those days. In earlier times we had done well enough without police, because Romans were a mostly law-abiding people with a high respect for authority and civic order. Ever since the Gracchi, though, mob action had become the rule in Rome, and every aspiring politician curried favor with a criminal gang, to do his dirty work in return for protection in the courts.

  The Republic was very sick and, despite my fondest hopes, there was to be no cure.

  "You've been drinking," Julia said when I got home.

  "It's been that sort of day." I told he
r about the dead Senator while we had dinner in the courtyard.

  "You have no business investigating while you're in another office," she said. "Varus should appoint a Iudex."

  "It may be years before a Court for Assassins is appointed to look into this year's murders. They're happening by the job lot. But this one occurred on my territory."

  "You just like to snoop. And you're hoping to get something on Clodius."

  "What will one more murder laid at his doorstep mean? No, for once, I doubt that Clodius had anything to do with it." Luckily for me, my Julia was a favourite niece of the great Caius Julius Caesar, darling of the Popular Assemblies. Clodius was Caesar's man and dared not move against me openly, and by this time he considered himself the veritable uncrowned king of Rome, dispensing largesse and commanding his troops in royal fashion. As such, sneaky, covert assassination was supposedly beneath his dignity. Supposedly.

  At that time, there were two sorts of men contending for power: The Big Three were all that were left of the lot that had been trying to gain control of the whole Empire for decades. Then there were men like Clodius and Milo, who just wanted to rule the City itself. Since the great conquerors had to be away from the City for years at a time, all of them had men to look after their interests in Rome. Clodius represented Caesar. Milo had acted for Crassus, although he was also closely tied in with Cicero and the star of Crassus was rapidly fading, to wink out that summer, did we but know it at the time. Plautius Hypsaeus was with the Pompeian faction, and so it went.

  "Tell me about it," Julia said, separating an orange into sections. She always believed her woman's intuition could greatly improve upon the performance of my plodding reasoning. Sometimes she was right, although I carefully refrained from telling her so.

  "So you think a prostitute killed him?" she said when she had heard me out.

  "I only said that was in keeping with the weapon. I have never known a man to use such a tool to rid himself of an enemy."

  "Oh, yes. Men like sharp edges and lots of blood."

  "Exactly. This little skewer bespeaks a finesse I am reluctant to credit to our forthright cutthroats."