SPQR III: The Sacrilege

by John Maddox Roberts

  My neighbor on the other side, at the foot of the couch, was the greatest surprise. It was young Appius Claudius Nero.

  “Twice in one day, young Nero,” I said. “If I believed that Oriental nonsense about astrology, I would believe that our stars are intertwined.”

  “The stars had nothing to do with it, Decius,” Capito said. “I invited Clodius, but when he learned you were to be here, he sent young Appius Claudius in his stead.” Everyone found this uproariously funny, and Nero’s face flushed as scarlet as Sulla’s. It was always considered witty to pick on the very young, half-witted or deformed, and I felt a bit sorry for him.

  “No offense, Nero,” I said. “I know you have no control over who your relatives are. I have a good many I’d just as soon not associate with.”

  “Nepos, for instance?” Afranius needled. My cousin Metellus Nepos was Pompey’s firm supporter, unlike most of our family. The year before, Nepos had served as tribune and had been a most inflammatory one. With Caesar’s backing, he had tried to have Pompey recalled from Asia to fight Catilina, had even demanded that Pompey be elected Consul in absentia. There had been some rioting and the Senate suspended both of them from office. Nepos fled to Pompey with an aristocratic mob at his heels, and Caesar, ever the adroit politician, patched up things with the Senate and continued his praetorship.

  Now that I thought of it, there were no friends of Caesar’s here, even though he sought friends everywhere. Catulus hated him because Caesar had tried to rob him of the credit for restoring the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and give it to Pompey. Catullus the poet suspected Caesar of having an affair with Clodia. Few prominent women escaped that particular honor. Afranius was of the aristocratic party and opposed Caesar as a matter of policy. The same was true of Piso. It was odd, but seemed no more than coincidence.

  As the first course arrived, the conversation turned to the main subject of the day: Pompey’s triumph. There was to be a meeting of the Senate the next day and the matter was once more to be discussed.

  “This will be your first meeting as Senator, will it not, Decius?” Capito asked.

  “It will,” I concurred.

  “And what will be the subject of your maiden speech?” the great Catulus asked. It was common for new-minted Senators to make a speech on first taking a seat in the Curia. Some made a great splash that way, but more earned ridicule.

  “I have been firmly instructed to say nothing until I’ve attained some sort of prestige in office, with the unspoken implication that several years might elapse before any such event.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Capito said. “I made my first speech back when Decula and Dollabella held the Consulship. I spoke in praise of Sulla’s reform of the courts, taking them from the equites and giving them back to the Senators. Seemed a safe enough speech at the time. Sulla was dictator, after all. When I left the Curia a mob of equites chased me through the streets until I got to my house and barred the gate; then they burned my house down. I escaped over the back wall and fled to Capua until things died down.” This, I thought, was before he had reached his present girth.

  “Those were exciting times,” said Catulus nostalgically. There followed some vintage gossip about the proscriptions and who had whom killed for what advantage. The wine flowed and tongues grew loose.

  “What’s to be done about Antonius Hibrida, Consul?” Afranius asked. Hibrida was Proconsul in Macedonia, where he had suffered some shattering defeats.

  “I intend to press for his prosecution upon his return to Rome,” Calpurnianus said.

  “Odd, Pompey doesn’t have his tame tribunes agitating for him to be given Hibrida’s command,” Catulus said.

  “That isn’t Pompey’s style,” I interjected. “Pompey waits until the war is almost over and then demands the command after someone else has done all the fighting. He did it in Spain, and in Asia and Africa. He’s not about to go salvage a situation where Romans have been repeatedly defeated.”

  “Well, I think that Pompey is a great man!” said Catullus the poet.

  “You poets are always enthralled by adventurers who pose as gods,” said Afranius. “They’re all just men, and Pompey’s not as much a man as some I know.”

  “Mucia didn’t think so, anyway,” said Capito. Now Catullus’s face grew as red as Nero’s had been. This was an indirect gibe at his infatuation with Clodia. It was widely known that Pompey had divorced Mucia because she had slept with Caesar. This did not prevent Pompey and Caesar from being allies. Politics is politics, and marriage, well, marriage is politics, too.

  “I think you are all jealous of his fame,” said the poet with some acuity.

  “Deserving or not,” said Calpurnianus, “it will be a show such as Rome has never seen before. I’ve been out to visit his camp and he’s got a hundred elephants out there, with mahouts drilling them to perform tricks throughout the procession. He has a legion fully armed just to guard his treasure.”

  This got my attention. “I thought he disbanded his troops when he reached Italy.”

  “He petitioned to keep this lot under arms until his triumph,” Calpurnianus said. “They’ve been out there practicing for so long that they’ll be ready to celebrate the triumph within a few days of the Senate’s granting permission.”

  “I hear that he’s celebrating three triumphs at once,” said young Nero. “The war with the pirates, the war in Africa and the one in Asia.”

  A slave came in and whispered something to Capito, and our host rose from the couch. “I must go and speak with someone in the atrium. Please continue to enjoy yourselves. I shall return within a few minutes.” He left as his slaves began to set plates of sweet pastries before us.

  “Pontifex,” said young Nero very respectfully, “everyone is talking about the rites of Bona Dea, to take place tomorrow night. I am a bit confused. Just who is Bona Dea?” By “everyone” I presumed he meant Clodius. We all turned to hear Catulus.

  “That is a touchy question,” Catulus admitted. “We pontifexes are supposed to know all about our native religious practice, but the Good Goddess is rather mysterious. Some identify her with our old Italian goddess Ceres, whom the Greeks call Demeter; others say she is of Asian origin.”

  “We’ve always expelled foreign mystery cults,” Afranius said.

  “That’s what makes it touchy,” said Catulus. “The college of pontifexes has always been hostile to such practice, but since men are forbidden to ask about this rite, and women are forbidden to speak of it, we don’t even know if it’s foreign or native.”

  In the midst of this learned discourse, Hermes leaned forward to fill my cup. As he did, he whispered in my ear: “Don’t eat the pastry.” I was long experienced at intrigue and conspiracy and gave no sign that I had received a warning.

  “Where are the rites being held this year?” asked one of the men at Afranius’s couch.

  “Caesar’s house,” I said. “He told me so himself this morning.” That caused something else to occur to me. “Isn’t it usually conducted by a Consul’s wife, or the wife of the senior praetor?”

  “It was all rather confused,” said Calpurnianus, “because I’m a widower and my colleague Messala Niger just divorced his wife. Caesar was praetor last year, and since he’s Pontifex Maximus, he said he’d volunteer his official residence. It’s a great bother because every male must be excluded from the premises, including slaves and animals.”

  “Even paintings, statues and mosaics of any male creature must be covered,” added Catulus the pontifex.

  “Who is Caesar married to these days?” I asked. “I remember Cornelia died a few years ago.”

  “Pompeia,” Afranius said, “and rumor has it he’s not happy with her.”

  “More likely the other way around,” said Catullus the poet.

  “Pompeia?” I said. “Is she Pompey’s daughter?” We began to hear voices raised in argument a few rooms away. Not an uncommon sound in a great house.

  Calpurnianus shook his head. “
No, she’s the daughter of Quintus Pompeius Rufus, whose father was Consul with Sulla the year he brought his army into Rome and exiled the Marians. Her mother—let me see—yes, her mother was another Cornelia, the daughter of Sulla.”

  Between our multiple, political marriages and divorces and the quaint naming practices we inherited from our simple, rustic ancestors, it is remarkable that we can keep track of our own families, much less somebody else’s. Pedantic old bores like Calpurnianus always took great pride in keeping these things straight. They were often wrong, but they always talked as if their genealogical memories were infallible.

  A loud shout from the front of the house jerked everybody’s attention in that direction. We scrambled from the couches and to our feet, aware that this was no domestic argument. As the others rushed out, I hung back and took Hermes by the shoulder.

  “Now what was all that about the pastries?” I said.

  “They were poisoned,” Hermes said.

  “Ridiculous. Mamercus Capito has no cause to murder me.”

  “Wasn’t him,” said Hermes. “It was that little patrician bugger next to you. He asked the old pontifex about that Bona Dea business, and when you looked that way he sprinkled something onto those pastries in front of you.” He leaned over and took one from Nero’s place and popped it into his mouth.

  “Hermes!”

  “Well, he didn’t poison his! I got hungry, standing there while you and your friends stuffed yourselves.”

  I took my napkin from within my tunic and carefully, without touching them, gathered up some of the pastries. These I wrapped and placed within my tunic.

  “Come,” I said, “let’s see what happened.”

  The others were gathered in the atrium along with some agitated slaves. On the tessellated floor lay a stout body. It was Mamercus Aemilius Capito, dead as Hector. Appius Claudius Nero stared at the corpse wide-eyed and pasty-faced. The rest, for whom the sight of a murdered nobleman was no novelty, were a good deal more composed. Considering that Nero had just tried to murder me, I found his distress commendable.

  “What happened?” I asked unnecessarily.

  “As you will discern,” Catulus said dryly, “our host will not be joining us for the after-dinner drinking bout. It seems that his caller did away with him.”

  “Did he have enemies?” asked one of the men from Afranius’s table.

  “He had at least one,” said Catulus. “Come now, man! What Roman of any importance lacks enemies?”

  “How boring,” said Catullus the poet. “In the epics and the dramas, murders are always exciting and terrible. This is rather tawdry.”

  Calpurnianus turned to Capito’s majordomo. “Summon my slaves.”

  “At once, Consul.” The man bustled off. I looked around for the slave who had summoned Capito from the table. It was a sizable atrium, but I spotted him and beckoned him to my side.

  “Who called upon your master this evening?” I asked him.

  “It was a man in a dark-colored cloak. He had a fold of the cloak drawn over his head, so I did not see his face. He spoke in a low voice.”

  “Didn’t that seem strange?”

  “It is not my place to screen my master’s visitors. He said that he was expected.”

  “Has you master received many such visitors lately?”

  “I do not know. I was just working in the atrium when he arrived. The gatekeeper would know.”

  The Consul’s slave retinue came in. Except for a personal valet, each of the greater guests had sent his attendants to the rear of the house. Calpurnianus had at least a dozen, who all tried to pretend that they hadn’t been drinking. He summoned a boy who wore the tunic, belt and hat of a messenger. The boy held out a tablet and stylus that were connected to his belt by thin chains. The Consul opened the wooden tablet and began to write on its wax surface.

  “Take this to the house of the Praetor Urbanus Voconius Naso. He is unlikely to be at home, but wait for him there and see that he gets this. No need to wait for his reply. I’ll speak to him tomorrow in the Curia.” The boy dashed off and the Consul addressed the rest of us. “I suppose he’ll want to appoint a iudex to investigate.”

  I spoke to the slave again. “Were you here during their talk, or was anyone else?”

  “My master dismissed me and instructed that he and his visitor were to be left alone.”

  At that moment, the messenger ran back in. “The gatekeeper’s dead,” he reported, then ran back out.

  “So much for other witnesses,” I said.

  “The mistress is at Picenum,” said the majordomo, “where they maintain a country house. I will see that she is notified and make arrangements for the funeral.” From elsewhere in the house began those extravagant mourning noises with which slaves bring a little drama into their lives.

  “Any sons?” asked Catulus.

  “No. Two daughters, both married. I will notify them as well.”

  “Nothing more to be done here,” said Calpurnianus. “Good evening to you all.”

  The others sent for their slaves. Our behavior might seem haphazard, but remember that in those days Rome had no police or regular investigative officers. A iudex might investigate, or an ambitious young politician might take it upon himself to look into the matter and bring charges against someone. But murderers were often of humble status, and therefore nobody’s reputation was to be made by prosecuting them.

  I saw Nero gather his slaves together. He had brought no fewer than four. The Claudians were a well-fixed family. I was greatly his senior in years, experience and reputation, and all I could afford was an amoral wretch like Hermes. I summoned that observant youth and whispered to him:

  “Follow that little bastard and see where he goes; then report to me tomorrow.”

  He looked indignant. “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean, is that all?” I demanded.

  “I just saved your life. That ought to be worth something.”

  “So you claim. For all I know, you’ve just accused a perfectly innocent young man. Just follow him. If it turns out you really did save me, I’ll be nice to you come Saturnalia.” He stalked off. Actually, I had no doubt he had told the truth. If Nero was associating with Clodius, then he had to be guilty. But I knew better than to flatter Hermes. Slaves like that will take advantage of you if you let them.

  The pool of blood around the body was growing rather large, but most of it was on one side. I stepped closer on the less bloody side and crouched for a better look. The murderer had cut Capito’s throat, but from what I could see of the wound, it was amazingly small, rather like a stab wound. Then I noticed a slightly depressed mark between the brows, as if he had been struck by some sort of cudgel. Most killers find one death-blow sufficient, but I supposed that a little insurance would not come amiss. I stood and backed away from the corpse, my sandals making slight, sticky sounds as I did. I had not been able to entirely avoid the blood.

  “Well,” I muttered, “that’s one who won’t be Celer’s colleague.”

  “What’s that you say?” Afranius said. The others had already left, but he had been busy berating his linkboy, who was too drunk to keep his torch alight.

  “Oh, a political matter. My kinsman Metellus Celer is standing for the Consulship, and I was to talk with Capito about a possible alliance.” It was not the sort of thing that had to be kept confidential.

  Afranius’s eyes lit up. “A coitio? Well, Capito is out of the picture. You know, I think the wine-bowl is still full in the triclinium. Why don’t we go back there and talk while my boy sobers up?” We ambled back into the dining room as all around us the house was filled with wails of mourning.

  4

  “Lucius Afranius, eh?” Celer said. We stood on the steps of the Curia in the dismal light of early dawn. “He wouldn’t be a bad choice. I could count on him not to give me any trouble or try to override my acts. In fact, he was one of the ones I planned to have you sound out, eventually. Good work, Decius.”
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  “Always happy to serve,” I assured him.

  “Pity about Capito, though. The janitor, too, you say?”

  “Killed with the same two blows, still chained to his gate.”

  “The killer was probably an ex-gladiator, then. The gangs are full of them, and the stab in the throat is the arena deathblow.”

  That had occurred to me as well. I had known many gladiators, and among that stalwart confraternity it is a matter of honor to kill the defeated with swiftness and dignity. With a sword, this is best accomplished with a quick jab to the jugular. It is believed to be nearly painless as well, but since none who receive the blow ever talk about it afterward, this is difficult to confirm. Also, there is lots of blood, and the crowds like that.

  “Probably a jealous husband and a hired killer,” Celer pronounced. “That’s what it usually is. Political matters haven’t reached the killing stage lately.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Business disagreements can get just as vicious.”

  “He was a patrician,” Celer said. “They’re not supposed to engage in business. Not that they don’t anyway.”

  While we spoke the Senate was assembling. The curule magistrates, accompanied by their lictors, climbed the steps, stifling yawns like everybody else. Cato was there, virtuously barefoot. The adherents of Pompey formed a grim, determined knot, ready once again to press their suit for his triumph. The usual gaggle of Metellans formed around us. Creticus was there, and Pius the pontifex, although he was an adopted Metellus, actually a Scipio. Of the prominent Metellans only Nepos was not with us. He was always to be found among Pompey’s faction. For a wonder, there was not a single prominent Metellan governing in the provinces that year.