SPQR III: The Sacrilege

by John Maddox Roberts

  “Now,” Celer went on, “I think that Cicero is grooming your friend Titus Milo for the same role. I hate to think of a criminal gang leader like Milo as tribune, but I admit he’s a better man than Clodius.”

  “Milo is an excellent choice,” I said, “but I’ve never even considered the tribuneship. I am flattered that you think me worthy, of course.”

  “Don’t be too flattered,” he said. “The main reason we want you is because Clodius hates you so much. He’ll be so distracted by your rivalry that he may not do too much mischief.”

  “I see.” My mind was working like a fermenting wine vat. “If both Milo and I are tribunes the same year, we could combine forces to keep Clodius in line.”

  “You catch on quickly,” Celer said. “You may have a future in Roman politics. Well, all this may be years away, but I want you to think about it.”

  “Rest assured, I shall think of little else,” I said. Somehow, I had to get out of this. Clodius hated me enough as a mere enemy. If I were a political rival, his malignancy would know no bounds. In theory, the lives of tribunes were sacrosanct, and to murder one was an impious act. The trouble was, Clodius was a man who specialized in acts of impiety.

  “What are you two plotting?” The voice came from the colonnade and we turned to face its source. I knew it instantly, of course.

  Clodia was still one of Rome’s great beauties, and at this time one of the most notorious. She was also famed for her charm and wit, for her learning and patronage of artists and poets. Most of all, she was feared. She was suspected of complicity in a number of murders, and I happened to know that she was guilty of some of them. However, she was Celer’s wife, and certain basic courtesies were demanded.

  “You are more beautiful than ever, Clodia,” I told her, “and you know that your husband and I haven’t an ounce of conspiratorial talent between us.”

  “How disappointing,” she said, extending her hand. I took it and bowed over the cool, tapering fingers, artfully kissing my thumb instead of her hand. The caution might have been unwarranted, but she was rumored to keep poison under her gilded nails.

  “How long has it been, Decius? Not since dear Quintus took the field against Catilina? You left Rome then, did you not?” Needless to say, she had not accompanied her husband to Gaul, to my relief and no doubt to his as well. They were not a good match, but then, the great families always arranged marriages for reasons of policy. They had been betrothed when she was a mere girl and her brother, Clodius, no more that an obnoxious brat.

  “I’ve been away from Rome and you far too long, Clodia.” Well, the part about Rome was true. Clodia and I had a tangled and, for me, embarrassing past. Nothing embarrassed her.

  “Things have been terribly dull of late,” she said. “Now that you are back, perhaps matters will liven up.” That sounded ominous.

  “Young Decius will be working with me in my upcoming campaign for the Consulship, my dear,” Celer said, with the pained look shared by all men afflicted with such wives.

  “Oh, what a waste of talent. You couldn’t lose the Consulship if the other factions put up gods and heroes as competitors! Still, that means we’ll be seeing a lot of dear Decius, so it’s all for the good.” At that moment a slave came and announced a visitor, so Clodia took her leave and rushed off.

  “Well,” Celer grumbled, “it’s good you and Clodia get along, even if her brother wants to cut your throat.”

  “I have the highest esteem for Clodia,” I assured him.

  “Starting tomorrow, I want you to pay your morning call here instead of at your father’s house.” We began to walk toward the door.

  “Shall I bring my clients?” I asked.

  “Only if I’m to make an important speech. Otherwise, dismiss them when you leave your house.”

  “I shall be most happy to comply.” I never liked the custom of being followed around by a gang of clients. Even loyalty and devotion become annoying after a while.

  In the atrium we found Clodia and the new arrival, a kinswoman of mine, nicknamed Felicia. She was Caecilia Metella, wife of the younger Marcus Crassus, who was the son of the great Crassus. She made the usual cousinly sounds of greeting.

  “What are you and Clodia up to?” I said. I should have known better than to ask.

  “We’re going to do something scandalous and embarrass our husbands,” Felicia said.

  “Aren’t you a respectable matron now?” I asked. “Surely you’re raising a pack of little Crassi.”

  “Don’t be boring,” Felicia scolded. “Breeding is for slaves and livestock. Besides, you’ve reached an advanced age without marrying.”

  “No woman can pin Decius down that long,” said Clodia with a deft twirl of the thumb-screw. “He always makes trouble for someone powerful and has to leave Rome to save his skin.”

  “Ladies, if you will excuse us, I must see Decius out. He has pressing duties.” Celer guided me out the door. “No man should be called upon to deal with both of them,” he muttered.

  To my surprise I found Hermes waiting for me outside the gate, but in well-bred fashion I ignored his presence while I made my farewells to my eminent relative, promising to arrive early the next day.

  Hermes fell in behind me as I walked toward the Forum. “So that’s the great Metellus?” he said. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  “He is one of the greatest,” I told him. “I, on the other hand, am only a little Metellus. I am, however, far greater than you, which means that you are to curb your insolence.”

  “As you say, master.”

  It had been an eventful day, this homecoming of mine. It was to be among the more tranquil.

  2

  The next morning I rose far too early and greeted my clients. I still had only a small number of them, but they are a necessary adjunct of social and political life. I had about twelve at this time, mostly from families long associated with mine or else retired soldiers who had served with me at one time or other. They had little to do except cheer me in the courts or protect me in times of danger, and I was bound to help them legally and financially. They would be asking more favors now that I was a Senator.

  I dismissed them with thanks and gifts and then made my way to Celer’s house. I found a great mob in his atrium. His clientage in Rome alone numbered in the hundreds, with thousands more in Italy and the provinces. Naturally, even the Roman crowd could not all call on him at the same time. I think they had some sort of system of on and off days.

  I wandered among them, catching up with old friends and meeting a few new ones. People spoke mainly of Pompey’s upcoming triumph, and what a splendid spectacle it was sure to be. It seemed all but certain that the Senate’s muleheaded opposition could not last much longer. Among the crowd I found Caesar again.

  “Two days in a row, Caius Julius?” I said. “Surely no Julian has ever been a Metellan client.”

  Caesar smiled his dazzling smile. “No, I do not come as a client, but as a homeless suppliant. I’ve come to beg your kinsman for a roof to shelter my head tomorrow night.”

  “Didn’t they ever fix the tiles on the pontiff’s palace?” I asked. “They were working on that when I left Rome.”

  “No, the place is sound, but tomorrow night the rites of Bona Dea are to be held there, and I cannot be present.”

  “The date had escaped me,” I admitted. “But then, I’m not married.” This rite was performed in the house of the Pontifex Maximus under the supervision of his wife, and all the noblest ladies of Rome attended. It was absolutely forbidden to men, and women were forbidden to speak of it on pain of death.

  “You mean even the supreme pontiff can’t be there?” I said.

  “It is true. I have regulatory power over all aspects of our religious practice, but this one rite I cannot touch, and my wife may not speak to me of it.”

  “Well, that’s—” My words were cut off short when a man standing next to Caesar but with his back to me turned around. His face was malignant, dark
and flushing darker. I should have recognized that squat, neckless form even from behind. Somehow I managed to control my natural impulse to reach for a weapon. Just as well, since I was unarmed.

  “Why, Publius,” I said, “I rejoice to see your face again.” And indeed I did. It always did my heart good to look upon the scars I had put on that misshapen countenance.

  “My sister said you were back.” He almost strangled on the words, but perhaps he just suffered from croup. I swear I saw red veins shoot across his eyeballs like strokes of lightning. Then Caesar put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Now, let us have no unseemliness,” Caesar said, smiling. “This is the house of Metellus.” At his touch and his words and his smile, Clodius ceased to tremble and his color faded. Wordlessly, he nodded. It was the most extraordinary performance. Had the idea not been so absurd, I would have sworn that Clodius was afraid of Caesar! I could not guess what the little scene meant, but I learned something from it that was to haunt me for years to come. I wanted never to see Caius Julius smile at me like that.

  My kinsman Metellus Creticus was standing near and caught the unpleasant scene, and he moved in to provide a diversion.

  “It’s no wonder Decius is confused about the date,” he said. “Everybody else is, too. The calendar’s gotten all skewed again. That’s your job, Caius Julius. When are you going to correct it?” Our calendar was lunar, and because the diurnal year doesn’t quite come out even with the turnings of the moon, the calendar would get out of order and every few years the Pontifex Maximus would have to slip in an extra month to make it come out even. Caesar had ignored the problem since his election, probably because he was, basically, a lazy man.

  “This creaky old calendar of ours is beyond redemption,” Caesar said. “I propose to utterly reform the calendar so that it never needs adjusting again.”

  A good lazy man’s solution, I thought. “How will you do that?” I asked him.

  “I will assemble the best astronomers and mathematicians to be found and commission them to work out a sensible calendar in which the number of months always stays the same. I think it can be done if we accept the idea that not all the months will have the same number of days and they will have nothing to do with the phases of the moon.”

  “Sounds too radical to me,” Creticus said. At the time I took it merely for more of Caesar’s grandiose talk, but a few years later he actually did it, and we haven’t had to adjust the calendar since. Even a man like Caius Julius can do something right once in a while.

  By this time Clodius’s friends had led him away, and it occurred to me that somebody, perhaps Clodia, had passed the word that we were to be kept apart. That was a juxtaposition I could live with. As I waited for Celer to appear, I noticed something that I had begun to suspect the day before, in the Forum: I had become very popular with the publicani. Most of these were prosperous equities, men in the building or tax-farming trade. They all were eager to make my acquaintance and they all asked pointedly after my father’s health. As the Censors were in charge of letting the public contracts, I was clearly a man to cultivate. They hinted that, should I commend them to the old man, I could look forward to some generous gifts at Saturnalia. It looked as if I might finally escape my customary penury.

  Mind you, this was not considered a matter of corruption, although our First Citizen would have it so. He claims that we were utterly corrupt in those days and that his “reforms” have fixed everything and corruption is no more. As usual, he flatters himself. He has merely ensured that a fat chunk of every bribe that is passed comes to him.

  At one point, while having my ear abraded by a quarry owner, I found myself edging toward a little knot of men surrounding Clodius. I had keen ears, and I always loved to eavesdrop, especially upon conversations where my murder could be the main topic. They were not talking about me, though.

  “But just what is it the women do at that ceremony, eh?” The voice of Clodius dripped with prurient insinuation. I had to admit, guiltily, that I had wondered exactly that myself.

  “Every highborn husband in Rome wonders that,” said a man who was obviously uneasy about what his wife would be up to the next night.

  “But,” said a very young man I did not recognize, “it can’t be much, can it? I mean, they’re all women, after all.” The others drew back and made disdainful noises at such callowness.

  “I’ll wager it’s worth seeing, eh?” said Clodius. I thought of stepping over and hitting him on the head with a vase or something. I just could not abide that voice. It wasn’t just the subject. He could comment on the weather and it would come out sounding like that.

  “Worth a man’s life, you mean,” said an older and presumably wiser man. Then conversation ceased as Celer arrived and began greeting the callers. When he got to me he put a hand on my shoulder in that gesture that always says that this is a private conversation. The others turned discreetly away.

  “Decius, today I want you to call on Mamercus Capito and sound him out. Politically he’s a nobody, but nine in ten Consuls are. More to the point, he’s agreeable, which is to say he’s pliable, and as an Aemilian, he’s as noble as you can get in Rome without being enrolled among the gods. He’d be a suitable colleague for me and he’s talked about standing for the office. See if he’s amenable to a coitio, so long as he agrees that I’ll be the senior colleague.”

  “I’ll call on him at once.” This was the sort of politicking I liked. It was how a great deal of our public life was carried out. Personal relationships usually had as much to do with it as party affiliations. Debates in the Senate were often just so much noise and bluster, with the real decisions reached and agreed to at dinner parties, in the baths, even in the stands at the Circus.

  I hurried out, hoping to catch Capito at home. The Aemilii had been among our most illustrious families, but the line had dwindled and there were few of them left. Those of the present generation were undistinguished except for the name. Capito had plodded his way up the ladder of office, attaining seniority without military or political distinction. He was like two hundred or more of his fellow Senators: colorless functionaries who won office on the basis of family history, served as soon as age and seniority permitted, and lazed through their terms of authority with as little effort as possible, generally using position only as a way to get rich.

  In short, Capito was an ideal colleague for an energetic man like Celer, who wanted to pursue the activities of his office with minimal interference. And as senior colleague, he would get the better of the proconsular provinces when he stepped down from office. By that time, the main reason men wanted to be Consul was to get their hands on the rich proconsular provinces. These were supposedly chosen by lot, but everyone knew the choice was rigged. A man who gained sufficient senatorial support would get one of the plums, while one with many enemies in the Senate got a worthless place, rich in nothing but disagreeable natives.

  The Senate could come up with some real oddities for unusual Consuls. There had been the time when Pompey was given command over the entire Mediterranean and its littoral to rid us of the pirates, for instance. In later years, Caesar as Consul presided over a Senate that was not only hostile but possessed a sense of humor. Instead of a province, he was given the upkeep of Italy’s roads and cattle paths. He made them regret it later, of course.

  Yes, the Consulship was an office worth pursuing, although it was not without its hazards. I fully expected to be Consul someday, not because I was particularly ambitious, but because that was what you did when your name was Caecilius Metellus. Not that anyone ever accused me of being a man who lazed through office on his family name. No amiable political hack ever weathered as many murder attempts as I did. A man’s seriousness as a public official can usually be gauged by the number and homicidal habits of his enemies.

  I reached the house of Capito just as his morning callers were leaving and he himself was on his way to an annual sacrifice given by the Aemilii in memory of some victory or other. I k
new him only slightly, but he greeted me hospitably and professed himself glad to see me again. I hinted at political business and he invited me to dinner at his house that evening.

  Things were shaping up well, and now I had the rest of the day to myself. It was a short walk to the Forum, where I wandered about, soaking up sun and the attentions of a good number of publicani. Most of these were builders, but one intriguing fellow had a novel item to sell: a new design of shields for the legions.

  “It’s much better than the old scutum,” he explained earnestly. “Just as thick and protective, but cut off straight at the top and bottom.”

  “It’s hard to get soldiers to accept something new,” I said. “What’s the advantage?”

  “We’ve given quite a few to the ludi in Campania, and the gladiators there say it’s a much better fighting design than the old oval style. It’s lighter and gives better vision.”

  “Gladiators don’t worry much about arrows and javelins,” I said doubtfully. “There’s more to warfare than single combat, you know.”

  “Nonsense, sir,” he protested. “A man fighting will always hold his shield just below eye level. With the new design, even less of the soldier’s body is exposed.”

  “But if you give a shield a flat bottom,” I pointed out, “the soldiers on guard will rest them on the ground and lean on them and go to sleep. Every officer knows that.”

  He sighed with exasperation. “But that’s why centurions have vinestocks to beat their soldiers with. And what legion ever needs more than one exemplary beheading a year for sleeping when the enemy is near? That’s all it takes to keep the lads alert. Now, sir, if you’ll put in a good word with your father, the Censor, I am prepared to offer the state a very reasonable rate. My shops can outfit a full legion every year, complete with a cheaper version for the auxiliaries.”