SPQR III: The Sacrilege

by John Maddox Roberts

  “In that case,” I said, nodding to the lictors, “I wish to thank these fine citizens for preventing me from killing that loathsome and deranged reptile over there.”

  “It is lucky for you,” Octavius said, “that you intruded upon a court for extortion. Had this been the court for crimes of violence, I might have had you charged, tried and judged on the spot.” He exaggerated. Actually, there was a good deal of oath-taking and posting of sureties before a trial could begin. “This is not the first time the two of you have been charged with public riot. You are a menace to the safety of all citizens.”

  “I protest!” I cried. “I was just minding my own—”

  “Silence!” Octavius barked. He raised his eyes and gazed out over the Forum. “Where is the Censor Metellus?” He gestured to a lictor. “There he is, over by Sulla’s monument. Fetch him.” The man ran off and a few minutes later returned with my father. I could tell by the way he was glaring at me that the lictor had been giving him a colorful account of recent events.

  “Noble praetor, what is your wish?” Father said.

  “Cut-Nose, I am going to charge your son with public riot and bearing arms within the pomerium. I am also going to check the law books and see if a charge of crime against Maiestas is appropriate. I would like to do the same for Publius Clodius, but there is some question whether his quaestorship protects him. Will you stand surety for Decius the Younger if I release him to you?”

  “I will,” Father said.

  “Then take him away. I will send to Pompey’s camp for Clodius’s elder brother, Appius. Perhaps if we can keep these two separated, we need not fear for the destruction of Rome and the sanctity of her courts.” He truly had a gift for sarcasm.

  “I will see to it that my son arrives for trial on the appointed day. No Roman is above the law.”

  “These two least of all,” Octavius said wryly.

  The lictors released me and I stooped to pick up my weapons. The charge had been made, so it didn’t matter if I had them in my possession now. Clodius and I exchanged a final, mutual glare, and I turned to walk away with my father.

  “You have always been an idiot,” my father began as we walked across the Forum, “but this surpasses your previous enormities by a wide margin. Whatever possessed you to try to murder Clodius in a Roman court under the nose of the senior praetor?”

  “I thought I might never get another chance!” I said.

  “You were specifically instructed to keep away from him.”

  “I’ve done my best,” I protested. “He sought me out. He set a dozen men on me. I had to run and I had to fight.”

  “Am I to take it, then, that the blood on your dagger is neither yours nor Clodius’s? I thought it best not to ask in front of the praetor.”

  I shrugged, sending a dart of fire through my wounded shoulder. “Oh, there may be a body or two in the streets back there. Nobody who amounts to anything, just Clodius’s hired scum.”

  “Good. I would hate to think I had raised a coward as well as a fool. How bad is that shoulder?”

  “Kind of you to ask. It’s painful and bleeding freely. I think it will need stitching. I’ll go see Asklepiodes in the Trans-Tiber. He’s sewed me up before.”

  “The question is, can I trust you to go there without getting into more trouble?” Of course, it never occurred to him to accompany me there.

  “One fight a day is enough even for my glory-lusting spirit, Father.” We were out of the Forum by this time, and passersby ogled at my wild appearance.

  “I think you should leave the city for a while,” Father said.

  “But I just got back!”

  “Rome can take only so much of your presence. A stint managing the estate at Beneventum might settle you a bit. The realities of farm work could only improve you.”

  There is a belief among us that the only respectable life is agriculture. Probably because it is the dullest life imaginable. Of course, there is no virtue in working the land. The virtue lies in owning the land. How instructing an overseer to boss a gang of slaves returns a man to the realities of tilling the soil escapes me, but many swear by it.

  “I have an investigation to conduct, Father,” I said. “I can’t just break it off to go watch slaves spread manure under grape vines.”

  “Your wishes are of no importance,” he said.

  One of the most infuriating provisions of Roman law is the one conferring lifetime authority upon the paterfamilias. You can be the gray-haired commander of legions and conqueror of provinces, but if your father is still alive, you are still, legally, a child.

  “It’s a matter of state security,” I insisted.

  He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That business about the rites of that foreign goddess?”

  “There is far more to it that that,” I said with some urgency.

  “Go on,” he said, still walking from long habit at the standard legionary pace.

  I gave him a somewhat truncated account of my findings to date, along with some speculations as to their significance. I did not identify Julia. He would assume that any woman who shared my taste for snooping must be unworthy.

  “So you suspect Pompey is behind it, eh?” He said this grudgingly, but I could tell that his interest was piqued. Like the rest of the aristocratic party, he hated Pompey and feared that the man would crown himself king of Rome.

  “No one else is so bold. He is the one who has a pack of tame Etruscan priests.”

  “And,” Father mused, “he wants to settle his veterans on public lands in Tuscia.”

  “He does?” I said. This was news to me.

  “Yes, as you would know if you ever paid any attention to important public business instead of crawling through every sewer in the city.”

  “I’ve only been in the Senate for a few days,” I said.

  “That does not excuse you. And you realize that your vaporings are built upon the words of some of the most degenerate people in Rome?”

  “I always take that into account,” I said. A sudden inspiration struck me.

  “Tell me, how did Capito stand on the question of settling Pompey’s veterans?” At this question Father actually stopped in his tracks and stared at me as if at some wonderful apparition sent by the gods. I wiped blood from my upper lip with the back of my caestus. My nose was bleeding inside and out from Clodius’s bite.

  “There may be something in your mad sophistry after all. Capito opposed the settlements most violently.”

  “So does more than half the Senate. What was Capito’s particular objection?” We were nearing Father’s house by this time. We presented an odd spectacle, I must admit: the dignified Censor in his toga praetexta and I, who looked like the receiver of the second-place award in a munera. And the subject was politics, as always.

  “He claimed it would upset the public order and give Pompey a power base near Rome and so forth; everyone says that. But the real reason was that his family leases a huge tract of the ager publicus in Tuscia, an area that will be cut up into farm plots for Pompey’s veterans if the legislation goes through.”

  I grinned, but it made my mouth hurt. “So Capito’s family has been farming and grazing that land for several generations, paying the state at a nominal rate set a hundred or more years ago?”

  “Closer to two hundred.”

  “Oh, the elevated and patriotic motives of our Senators,” I said.

  “You’ll see worse than that in the Senate, if you live,” Father said. By this time we were at his gate.

  “Could you send a slave to my house?” I asked. “My boy, Hermes, should be there by now with my toga. Have him meet me at the surgery of Asklepiodes. He knows where it is and bring me a tunic.”

  Father popped his fingers and a slave came to take my instructions. The man ran off and we continued with every Roman’s favorite subject.

  “Where does Caesar stand on these questions?” I asked.

  “As a popular, he is for giving the land to the veterans,
but he favors the ager publicus in Campania. A bit farther from Rome, but the best farmland in Italy.”

  “They don’t seem connected, do they? What have those two concocted between them? I think it must be behind all this.”

  “They both argue that their settlements will strengthen the state,” Father said while I dripped on the tiles of his atrium. “Be a reservoir from which to draw soldiers for future generations. All that sort of talk.”

  In spite of everything, I managed a short laugh. “What pap! We all talk about the fine old times of the founding fathers and the virtues of the Italian peasant, backbone of the state. Does anyone really believe we can conjure those times back, like some necromancer raising the dead to prophesy? How long will those stalwart veterans last on their idyllic little farm plots, Father? How long before they sell up and leave the land to join the urban mob here in Rome? What peasant, however hard-working, can compete with latifundia the size of small countries and worked by thousands of slaves?”

  “They might last for Pompey’s lifetime,” Father said. “That’s long enough for his purposes.”

  “How very true.”

  “And what would you do?” he asked, his face getting red. “How would you change things?”

  “Break up the latifundia for a start,” I said. “Forbid the importation of new slaves and the selling of Italians into slavery. Tax those plantations until the owners have to sell off land.”

  “Tax Roman citizens?” Father bellowed. “You’re mad!”

  “We’re dying by inches as it is,” I insisted. I usually didn’t talk like this, but I was very tired and had lost a lot of blood. “I’d pay the owners a small, very small, indemnity and repatriate those slaves right out of Italy. They’re the root of most of our problems. The fact is, we Romans have grown too damned lazy to do our own work. All we do anymore is fight and steal. We have slaves to do all the rest.”

  “This is wild talk,” Father said. “You sound worse than Clodius and Caesar combined, far worse.”

  I laughed again, this time quietly and a little shakily. “I’m no radical, Father,” I said. “You know that. And I’m not going out into the streets to rabble-rouse, if only because I know how futile it would be. Reform or reaction, all they mean is Roman blood in Roman streets. We see enough of that as it is.”

  “See that you curb your tongue, then. Talk gets you killed as efficiently as action, these days.”

  “I don’t suppose,” I said, “that I could talk you out of a litter and some bearers to take me to my physician?”

  “All that bad, is it? Oh, very well.” He called to another slave and there was some scurrying about. The old man was mellowing with age. Time was when he would have lectured me half the day about how he had marched for fifty miles in full armor with wounds far worse. Maybe he had. I never claimed to be especially rugged.

  The ride to the Statilian ludus was a bit hazy. The sun kept getting brighter, then dimmer. I think only the fortification of that excellent Caecuban kept me from passing out. As it was, the gods sent me visions. I thought I saw the goddess Diana, in her brief hunting tunic, bow and quiver, but then she became Clodia, and she was laughing at me. Clodia had laughed at me before, with good reason. I was about to tell her what a scheming slut she was when I realized that it was not Clodia but Fausta. She said something that I could not understand, and I tried to ask her to repeat it, but then I saw that it was not Fausta but her brother, Faustus. The metamorphosis had been subtle because the twins were so alike. He was reaching something out to me in a beringed hand, but that did not seem right, because soldiers rarely wear a great many rings, especially large poison rings. Another transformation had occurred. Now it was Appius Claudius Nero, and he was holding something, something he urgently wanted me to take, trying to speak despite the puncture in his throat and the dent in his brow.

  Then a huge shadow reared up behind Nero. It was a four-footed beast towering over him, and its great paw descended, crushing him before he could give me whatever it was. I looked up and saw that the beast was Cerberus, the guard-dog of the underworld. I knew this because, unlike ordinary dogs, he was gigantic and had three heads. They were not dog heads, though, but human heads, like one of those hybrid Egyptian deities. The head on the right was that of Crassus, regarding me with those cold blue eyes. That on the left was the jovial head of Pompey. The one in the center was in shadow and I could not recognize it, but I knew that this one was the master of the other two, else why was he in the center? Then someone else was in front of Cerberus. This was Julia, and she, too, was reaching out for me. Her hand touched my shoulder.

  “Decius?” Asklepiodes gripped my unwounded shoulder lightly and shook me. His face wavered in my vision, then solidified.

  “I really would have preferred Julia,” I said.

  “What?” His elegantly bearded Greek face showed concern. “I was not expecting to see you again quite so soon, Decius.” He turned and shouted something over his shoulder. A pair of gladiators came and lifted me out of the litter as lightly as if I had been an infant and carried me to the physician’s quarters, where his servants efficiently stripped and washed me as he examined my wounds.

  “Up to your old activities again, eh? Are those human teeth marks I see on your face?”

  “Actually, they belong to a rodent, a species of weasel, or perhaps a stoat.” His poking and prodding elicited the usual flares of agony. This was the part he liked.

  “Well, I can stitch and patch you up enough to keep you alive and relatively mobile, but the ladies will shun your company for a few days. Speaking of ladies, who is Julia?”

  I averted my eyes as the silent slaves brought in horse-hair sutures, wickedly curved needles and ornate bronze pliers.

  “I was confused. I had a vision on the way here, and the last thing I saw was a lady of my acquaintance named Julia.”

  “She must be exceptional, since you seem to prefer her company to mine despite your manifest need for my attentions. What sort of vision? I am not especially skilled in the interpretation of dreams, but I know of some skilled practitioners not far from here.”

  “It wasn’t a real dream, but a sort of waking vision. I was aware of what was going on around me while it happened.” I spoke mainly to take my mind off his activities. I am not among those persons who believe that all their dreams are of great significance, and wish to tell you all about them, at great length. I rarely remember them, those I do remember are usually duller than my waking life, and such visions as the gods have given me have usually come to me under just such circumstances as these: wounds, blood loss or severe blows to the head.

  I related my vision to Asklepiodes, and he sat facing me with chin in hand, murmuring occasional wise noises. When I had finished, he resumed his horrid labors.

  “The appearance of persons with whom you have recently been involved is not at all unusual, even in the common or non-portentous dream,” he said. “But the appearance of a mythical beast is always of the highest significance. Does Cerberus have a significance among you that he does not have among Greeks?”

  “None that I know of,” I said. “He is the watchdog of Pluto, who keeps the dead from leaving the underworld or the living from entering.”

  “Pluto, then: How does he differ from Hades?”

  “Well, besides being lord of the dead, he is also the god of wealth.”

  “He is so among us, too, and by the same name, Pluto. That may be from confusion with Plutus, the son of Demeter, who is also a personification of wealth. But then, this may be because the name of both is derived from the very word for ‘wealth,’ which is—” He broke off when I squealed almost as Clodius had recently. In his pedantic reverie, he had dug a needle in too deep. “Oh, please forgive me.”

  “You’re enjoying this,” I said.

  “I always enjoy learned discourse,” he said, deliberately obtuse. “But it may be that wealth is behind all this.”

  “It usually is, when men plot villainy,” I sa
id. “But I think it may be more significant that Cerberus has three heads. One body, three heads; that is important.”

  “You saw the heads of Pompey and Crassus, enemies you have come up against in the past. But the third was unclear?”

  “Unclear, and the greatest of the three. How can that be? Who could be greater than Pompey and Crassus?” This, truly, seemed an impossibility.

  “I don’t suppose it could be Clodius? You are rather obsessive about him.”

  I almost laughed, but I knew how it would pull at the stitches. “No, not Clodius. He is a flunky and a criminal, nothing more.”

  “Then what of the boy Appius Claudius Nero? What was he trying to give to you, and why did the three-part beast crush him?”

  “That,” I said, “I would give a great deal to know.”

  11

  I woke up and immediately wished I hadn’t. Not only were my wounds screaming at me, but the night before, I had sought to promote sleep by draining a good-sized pitcher of cheap wine. I was now suffering the effects of both.

  “Serves you right,” Hermes said. “Leaving me there like that, holding your toga while you ran like a mountain goat up those stairs.”

  “You should have seen me on the flats,” I croaked. “Faster than a racehorse then. Silverwing on his best day couldn’t have touched me.”

  “Those men might have killed me!” he said indignantly. Slaves like Hermes take things so seriously.

  “Why would they have done that?” I said. “It was me they were after. I’m just glad that none of them thought to snatch my toga and you didn’t think to sell it.”

  “You certainly have a low opinion of me!” he huffed.

  “Yes, I know I’m probably wronging you, but just now I am not a friend to humanity. I feel like going out and upending a chamberpot all over a Vestal.” I got some breakfast in me and felt a tiny bit better. My morning calls went by in a fog, and I was about to leave for Celer’s when a new man arrived. It was the gap-toothed Gaul I had seen at the warehouse with Milo.

  “The chief wants to see you at the baths, Senator,” the man said without preamble.