Under Vesuvius

by John Maddox Roberts

I’d won my bet. It was bold-eyed Charmian. “Nothing else? No costly perfumes, for instance?”

  “Perfume? No, I thought of it, but the Greek girl warned me not to. She said the old priest might notice such a thing, since Gorgo used only rose water.”

  “I see.” I arranged my toga in an imposing manner and gave him a brimming measure of Roman gravitas. “Gelon, I am giving you an unusual measure of attention because I think this is a very unusual case. Hear me now: I am giving you freedom of this villa, although you will be watched at all times. If you try to run, that will be construed as an admission of guilt. You will be tried in public, prosecuted by one advocate, defended by another, and your guilt or innocence decided by a jury. As praetor, I merely preside over the court and pronounce sentence should the jury return a verdict of guilty.”

  “But I did not—”

  “Should the verdict be guilty,” I went on, “there will be calls for your crucifixion. Roman citizens may not be crucified, but slaves and foreigners may. I can promise you only this: If you are found guilty, I will not condemn you to the cross nor to the arena nor any other degrading death. A quick beheading will suffice. Do you understand?”

  He swallowed hard. “Yes. Thank you, Praetor.”

  “Very well, then. I will go now and try to set this district in order. Rome is a riotous city, but we don’t like to see disorder in the municipalities and provinces.”

  I left him in a miserable heap and went outside. Julia was waiting.

  “I thought you were supposed to be a praetor,” she said. “Why are you behaving like a defense attorney?”

  “I find it difficult to believe that boy murdered the girl.”

  “It’s not your job. You are to preside over the trial.”

  “But I always like to know when I’m being lied to,” I pointed out. “The more I investigate, the better I am able to determine that.”

  “You just like to snoop. So do I. I was listening while you questioned the boy. Did you notice that he said ‘you cannot believe I would kill a woman I loved,’ not the woman.”

  “The distinction did not escape me. It needn’t mean too much. His father has at least two wives we know of. The boy may not consider his affections to be exclusive to any one woman.”

  “That is an attitude he shares with the entire male species. What do you plan to do now?”

  “Would you like to pay a visit to the Temple of Apollo?”

  “Not to sacrifice, surely?”

  “No. I want to search the girl’s quarters before anyone thinks to hide evidence.”

  She smiled. “That is exactly what I would like to do.”

  So, arm in arm, we walked down the pleasant garden paths to the beautiful little temple. When we arrived, the temple slaves were draping it in dark wreaths to signify mourning. The remains of a sizable fire smoldered on the altar, small tongues of flame leaping from time to time amid the crackling of resinous wood. It formed a miniature of smoldering Vesuvius, visible in the distance behind the temple.

  We climbed the steps and a slave rushed into the temple. Moments later Diocles the priest emerged. He looked drawn but dignified. “Praetor, my lady, welcome to Apollo’s temple.”

  “We’ve come to pay our respects, Diocles,” I told him.

  He bowed. “I am honored. My daughter is honored.”

  So we tossed a handful of incense on the fire and passed within. Gorgo lay on a simple couch, covered with a thin shroud, at the base of the statue of Apollo. At her feet two of her slave girls, red eyed and still weeping, sat on the marble floor, their garments torn in token of mourning. They were fair-haired Leto and German Gaia.

  “Her pyre is being prepared before the family tomb,” the priest said. “Her ashes will be interred with those of her ancestors.”

  “We shall attend, of course,” Julia said.

  “And now, Diocles,” I said, “I would like a look at Gorgo’s quarters.”

  His bowed head snapped up. “What?”

  I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Just a little formality, in preparation for the trial. I know you would prefer that I do this personally, rather than some appointed iudex.”

  “I— yes, of course, Praetor. I appreciate your, ah, delicacy in this matter.”

  We followed him through a door behind the statue of Apollo and into a fine garden, beyond which lay a modest house built in the austere Greek fashion. Inside, the priest led us to a room opening off the courtyard. It was no more than a cubicle, with a narrow bed, a clothes chest, a chair, and a small vanity table. While Julia examined the vanity, I felt the thin pallet. I looked over the sill of the small window but found no loose bricks or any other sort of hiding place.

  I would have liked to ask Diocles to step outside, but I had no decent way to do so. He watched without expression as Julia opened the lid of the chest and went through its contents. She looked at me and shook her head.

  “Is all satisfactory?” the priest said formally.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Now, where do her slave girls sleep?”

  He seemed astonished. “Why, in the next room. Why do you ask?”

  “All part of the investigation. I would like to see it.”

  “Very well.”

  We went into another small room, this one crowded with three sleeping pallets and a single large clothes chest. We repeated the earlier search.

  “Where is Charmian?” I asked as I checked the pallets.

  “That one is being disciplined,” Diocles said.

  I felt a stab of guilt. I should have spoken to him sooner. “Last night, I told the girls you would not punish them so long as they told me exactly what happened. It is not my practice to tell a man how to discipline his own household, but this is a criminal investigation.”

  “No, Praetor, it is not about— what happened last night. It concerned another matter entirely.”

  “I see. Well, I think we are done here. Diocles, I apologize and I thank you for your forbearance. This had to be done.”

  He inclined his head gracefully. “You need not apologize for performing your duty, Praetor, and, again, I thank you for your discretion.”

  We took our leave of him. On our way back to the villa, we compared notes.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  Julia took out a small scroll tied with ribbon. “Just this. It was in the bottom of the slave girls’ chest, tucked into an old purse. I stuck it beneath my stola while you distracted the priest. You?”

  “There was a hard lump in Gorgo’s pallet. I’ll send Hermes to find out what it is this evening. He’s an accomplished burglar, and the household will all be at the funeral.”

  “You noticed the altar?” she said.

  “Oh, yes. There was a big fire burning on it just an hour or two ago, and it’s past midafternoon. Apollo’s sacrifices are performed just at sunrise and just at sunset.”

  “Exactly. Afternoon sacrifices to Apollo occur only during an eclipse and I don’t recall one today. So what was being burned with such haste?”

  “I’ll have Hermes go through the ashes. Maybe something will be left. Now, let’s have a look at that scroll.”

  We sat on the parapet of one of the smaller fish pools. The fat inhabitants swam up in hopes of food and then, disappointed, resumed their endless circling around a statue of Neptune in the pool’s center.

  Julia untied the ribbon and unrolled the scroll. It was made of the finest Egyptian papyrus, the writing done with a reed pen using red ink of excellent quality. It was in Greek, the writing precise, arranged in short lines. I read a few verses aloud and glanced at Julia to see if her face had reddened, but she was too sophisticated for that.

  “This,” she commented, “is some of the most heated erotic verse since Sappho.”

  I frowned in fake puzzlement. “So it seems, but why would one want to lick a doe’s hoof?”

  “As you know perfectly well,” she said, “in erotic verse, the doe’s hoof is a traditional symbol for the female genitals.
All these other symbols are similarly inclined. Rather too many of them for good taste, but the verse is excellent.”

  “Do you think it’s original or a copy of some poet’s work?”

  “I don’t recognize the poem, but the style resembles the Corinthian.”

  “It’s addressed to one Chryseis,” I said.

  “Of course. It’s traditional to give your lover a pseudonym in such poetry. Everyone knows that Catullus’s Lesbia was really Clodia.”

  “It was in the slave girls’ room,” I pointed out. “Do you suppose it might have been meant for one of them? They’re all attractive girls, and some local swain might be paying court to one of them.”

  “Don’t be dense, dear. Don’t you remember who Briseis was?”

  “Oh. Right.” In the Iliad, of course, Briseis was the captive girl seized from Achilles by Agamemnon, setting off the chain of events that ended with the funeral of Hector.

  Chryseis was the daughter of Apollo’s priest.

  5

  In the evening, with the cool offshore breeze making the flames of the new-lit torches flutter, we attended the funeral of Gorgo, daughter of Diocles. The family tomb was located beside the road to Baiae, about a mile from the temple. A large contingent of the local Greek community had turned out, along with all the usual notables.

  It is not Greek custom (or Roman, for that matter) to give women elaborate funerals, especially if they are not married and mothers. Still, it was a simple, dignified ceremony and I found it more congenial than the elaborate sort. The quietly sobbing slaves were infinitely preferable to the wailings of hired professional mourners. Their grief seemed to be genuine.

  Diocles gave the eulogy, speaking of Gorgo as a virtuous, blameless girl, one who had never caused gossip or given her father (the mother, apparently being long dead) any cause for displeasure, worthy to bear the name of the famous Spartan queen, and so on in this vein. It was a conventional oration, but most funeral eulogies are.

  When the final words were pronounced, Diocles took a torch from an attendant and touched it to the pyre. This, too, was modest, merely enough wood to cremate the body decently, not an ostentatious construction of logs stacked twenty feet high. But the wood had been soaked in cedar oil, and the slaves threw frankincense onto the flames by the double handful from bags donated, along with the soaked wood, by Manius Silva.

  When the ceremonies were over, I invited the attendees to partake of some refreshment. Earlier in the day I had had slaves from the villa set up tables near the tomb, beneath an awning in case of rain. There we served sweet cakes and honeyed wine, traditional Roman funeral fare at least since the obsequies of Scipio Africanus, more than 130 years before. (In Scipio’s day, these sweets were esteemed great luxuries.)

  “It’s good to have the facilities of the villa,” Julia said. “We’ve never before been able to afford this sort of liberality.” She wore a dark stola, with her palla covering her head. Most of the ladies present were thus attired. Even the usually flamboyant Quadrilla, Jocasta, and Rutilia dressed somberly.

  “I can’t argue with that,” I agreed. Being able to live and act like a grandee has its attractions, and I warned myself not to grow too fond of its seductions. Once accustomed to such a life, one begins to make excuses to prolong it. It becomes easy to overlook ethical lapses and to seek the favor of unworthy persons. It is, in short, deeply corrupting.

  Of course, some men were not at all disturbed by the allure of corruption, as witness my benefactor, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. He’d made a career of corruption and done very well out of it.

  Mopsus, the silk importer, came forward to thank us for our generosity. “Praetor, I know this raises your credit with the populace, and it was already high. Tell me, has the slaver’s son confessed yet?”

  “He maintains his innocence firmly,” I told him.

  “Well, I guess we could expect that. I suppose there must be a trial.”

  “All will be done according to law,” I assured him.

  “Naturally, naturally. Still, the sooner the wretch is condemned and executed, the sooner the place will return to normal.”

  He was the first. One notable after another came up, took me by the hand, and informed me that a trial was scarcely necessary, the boy was guilty, why waste everybody’s time?

  “There seems to be a strange unanimity of opinion,” I told Julia when the funeral guests were making their way back toward Baiae and the other towns.

  “The slaver is a despised figure,” she said. “It’s natural that people would suspect the worst of his son.”

  “Yet there seems to be little real malice. It’s as if—as if people just want it to be over.”

  “Why?” she asked. “It isn’t causing all that much unrest; the tenor of life here hasn’t altered a great deal.”

  “As you said earlier, most people are guilty of something; they all have something to hide. Maybe they are uneasy at the prospect of an investigation.”

  A shift in the wind brought us the smell of fragrant smoke, only faintly tinged with the smell of incinerating flesh. “I wonder why Silva donated all that expensive wood and incense. As far as I know, he’s not related to the priest and they don’t seem to be particularly close friends.”

  “Maybe for the same reason you laid on these funeral refreshments: It is traditional for office holders and those standing for high honors to give ostentatiously. He’s a duumvir of Baiae, he’s very rich, and he’s competing with the others for public esteem. He may have done it as a euergesia.”

  She used the Greek word for the obligation laid upon the wealthy to provide public works and entertainment for the people. It is the same custom that drives Roman candidates to bankrupt themselves building temples, bridges, basilicas, and porticoes, giving lavish entertainments and banquets and munera, all to win the favor of the populace and, more important, to outdo all the other great men in so providing. In Greek communities, there is no greater honor than to be known as a euergetes.

  “Maybe you are right,” I said to Julia, “but I am beginning to suspect everybody now.”

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “Isn’t that always the best policy?”

  That evening I visited Gelon in the villa’s palaestra. This gymnasium was as large as any such public facility in Rome, and a great deal more luxurious. The sand in the wrestling pit and on the running track had been imported from the Arabian desert, all the stonework was of the finest marble, the statuary were all portrait figures set up at Olympia to celebrate champion athletes of centuries past.

  Here my lictors and the young men of my party exercised and practiced when I had no need of them. I had enjoined my crew very strictly that all were to be fit and any who grew too slack would be sent home. As a holder of imperium, I could at any moment receive orders from Rome to take command of an army, and they would be obliged to follow me to war.

  When I arrived at the palaestra I found Gelon and his guards in a sand pit, under the watchful eyes of my lictors, engaged in spirited sparring with six-foot staffs, apparently a Numidian combat sport. Gauls and Spaniards and Judaeans are also fond of this weapon, but this Numidian play seemed more subtle than that practiced by the others. I enjoyed this exhibition for a few minutes, then beckoned my chief lictor.

  “Praetor?” he said, jogging up to me.

  “How has the prisoner comported himself?”

  “Quite well. He frets at confinement, but there’s plenty to amuse oneself with in this place. The stables are double guarded.”

  “Have you locked away all the practice swords and javelins? At this juncture I’m more concerned about suicide than escape.”

  “We have, but I think you needn’t worry. It did him a world of good when you assured him he didn’t face the cross or the beasts. No real man fears a quick beheading. He seems content to wait out events.”

  “Good, but keep a close watch on him anyway.” I dismissed the man and walked over to the sand pit. Gelon saw me and lowered his staff. “P
raetor. You’ve returned from the funeral?”

  “Yes. It was a good service and she’s on her way now with all the proper rites observed.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I am sorry that I could not attend. When I am out of this, I’ll sacrifice at her tomb.”

  “Commendable, but don’t buy any black ewes just yet. First, we have to get you acquitted and I’ve yet to see any way to do that. Have any significant facts occurred to you? A man in your situation usually receives a flood of exculpatory memories.”

  “Just that I did not kill Gorgo, that I was at home when it happened.”

  “I haven’t spoken with Jocasta yet. I will call on her tomorrow, after court. Are you sure there is no one else to vouch for your whereabouts?”

  He shrugged. “I am sorry. There is none.”

  I left him, feeling unsettled. For a man facing death, he was not terribly desperate to demonstrate his innocence. Perhaps, I thought, I was too hasty in ruling out crucifixion.

  I rejoined Julia in the triclinium where a late supper had been laid out, just our own party attending, no guests for once. I lay on the couch with a sigh of relief and picked up a hard-boiled egg. A slave filled my cup and I sampled the superb vintage. I was getting too used to this.

  “What a strange visit this has turned out to be,” Circe said. “Murder, erupting volcanoes—what next?”

  “It isn’t erupting,” said young Marcus. “I spoke with a local naturalist today. He calls this a ‘venting.’ He said every few years Vesuvius lets off a bit of smoke and ash, maybe emits a little lava, then it will go back to just smoking for several years.”

  “It makes me nervous,” Circe said.

  “Thank you, Decius Caecilius,” said Antonia.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For making Gelon our houseguest. Now that he is no longer connected with the priest’s daughter, I’ll have to work on him.”

  “I hear there are good armorers over in Pompeii,” said Marcus. “You might want to get yourself a throat protector.”

  “You will leave that young man strictly alone,” Julia ordered. “He is a suspect in a case the praetor is trying. He is a prisoner, not a guest.”