ALL ROADS LEAD TO MURDER
A Case from the Notebooks of Pliny the Younger
A novel by
Albert A. Bell, Jr
I
I SAW THE SLAVE GIRL STUMBLE and knew the cup of wine she was carrying was going to land on her master.
We were eating a hurried lunch on the side of the road between Ephesus and Smyrna, finding what shade we could. This girl’s owner, Lucius Cornutus, more than anyone else in our traveling party, had been making demands on his slaves. He insisted they stand while he ate, except for the one female that he seemed to treat as a kind of concubine or mistress. She sat at his feet. Cornutus and another of our company, Tiberius Saturninus, had been throwing dice while they ate.
When the cup hit him, on the left side of his back, Cornutus leaped up from his camp stool, twisted around, and grabbed the girl. “You stupid cow!” He drew back his arm and the girl steeled herself for the blows to come. His concubine tugged at his arm, but he jerked away.
“Stop! Do not hit her!” The voice of a woman, one of those who had joined our caravan in Ephesus, rang out in Greek from off to my left, sending a chill up and down me, like the blare of a battle trumpet.
Her imperious tone and her arm outstretched as if to cast a spell, more than the words themselves, I think, brought Cornutus up short. Without letting go of the girl, he glared at the woman, then dropped his eyes. I had flinched the same way every time I spoke with this priestess or witch, or whatever she was. She stood tall, with a square face, long, wild black hair streaked with gray, and burning eyes that could buckle the sturdiest knees.
In the background I also noticed that the German merchant, a big strapping man who had been with us since we left Antioch, had his hand under his cloak. On a dagger, I suspected.
“There’s going to be bloodshed,” my traveling companion Cornelius Tacitus said under his breath. “The pot is just about to boil.”
I didn’t want anything to delay our return to Rome, so I decided to intervene. I stood and stepped between Cornutus and the witch, facing him, not her.
“Listen, Cornutus,” I said, “it was an accident. We’re all tired. Why don’t you show the girl some compassion?”
Cornutus let go of the girl, who slumped to the ground. The German withdrew his hand and the witch lowered her arm with a clanking of bracelets.
“Show compassion to a slave? Friend Pliny,” Cornutus said sarcastically, for I was by no means his friend, “this little cow just doused me.” He tugged at his wet tunic like an orator in court showing a bloodstain to a jury.
I glanced at the girl and wondered why he kept calling her a cow. She was actually quite lovely, a blonde with eyes as green as young acorns, a slender face and arms, skin as milky white as a statue of Galatea. About fifteen, I judged, six years or so younger than myself.
Cornutus took a step toward me, thrusting his broad face into mine. “If I don’t punish her, what will the others think?” He jerked his head toward the eight other slaves traveling with him. “Will they decide it’s all right to punch me, kick me, perhaps slip a knife between my ribs while I sleep?”
He was putting every Roman slave-owner’s nightmare into words. As the old proverb says: “You have as many enemies as you have slaves.” We can’t live without our slaves, and yet they heavily outnumber us. Fear of punishment is the only real control we have over them.
“Your own slaves might get ideas,” Cornutus said, raising a hand toward my four male slaves, who were sitting apprehensively in the shade of our wagons, alongside the three slaves belonging to Tacitus.
“The girl meant you no harm, Cornutus,” I said, determined to stand my ground against a man almost twice my age and infinitely more menacing. I felt like a hare, frozen in front of an angry dog. Any movement or sign of fear and he would pounce. “She was doing the task you assigned her. We all make mistakes. Things happen that we can’t control.” The fear constricting my throat made it difficult to form the eloquent, rhetorically balanced sentences in which I typically try to speak.
Cornutus put his big paw on my shoulder. His leathery face broke into a parody of a smile, like a wine-skin splitting open. “Friend Pliny, do you really consider a slave to be your fellow human being?” The sarcasm flowed over me like the heat gushing from the hot room of a bath house.
“No, I consider all human beings to be my fellow slaves,” I replied, relieved to be able to turn the argument so neatly to a philosophical point, with a nice chiasmus thrown in to boot. “Recall what Seneca said: ‘Fortune holds equal sway over us all.’ It is this girl’s bad fortune to be the slave, your good fortune to be the master. Things could as easily have been reversed.”
Another member of our traveling party stood and took a step forward out of the shade. An older man, Jewish I suspected. He and his companion had kept largely to themselves since joining us at Ephesus. At the moment I couldn’t recall his name. In a calm voice he said, “Young Pliny is right, Cornutus. In God’s sight there is no slave, no free.”
Cornutus laughed, a sharp snort. It was a chilling sound, even on a warm spring day. “So you worship a blind god, do you?” He swept his gaze over the entire group. “You’re a pack of fools, all of you.” To the girl he said, “I’ll deal with you tonight.” He shot a glance around the circle, daring anyone to contradict him again.
The girl’s face went pale and she looked at me as though pleading for help. How had I not noticed that face before today? There had been dozens of people, perhaps a hundred in all, in and out of our caravan since we left Antioch, but none of them could have compared to the face of this woman-child. She was at that exquisite age when most Roman girls are getting married and yet haven’t quite left behind their girlish innocence. She might hug her father or her husband with equal pleasure on her part, though their reactions would be quite different. And there was some quality lurking beneath the dirt on her face from where she had fallen. Just as you can go into a tavern and find a mural coated with soot, but you know that beneath the grime there is a masterpiece, even so I thought I perceived a special quality—a kind of hidden divinity—in her.
Cornutus jerked the girl to her feet and shoved her toward his wagon. His concubine put a protective arm around the girl’s shoulders. The rest of us loaded back into our wagons to resume the journey.
“Thank you for intervening,” a woman’s voice said behind me. I spun around to find myself facing the witch. Her voice may have softened slightly, but not her countenance. “That monster has no right to beat an innocent child.”
“She’s his slave,” I said. “He has the right to do whatever he pleases with her. I stepped in because I thought there was going to be a serious altercation, not to protect a slave girl.”
She sneered. “By the goddess, you Romans are all alike. You arrogant bastards think you can run roughshod over the rest of the world. There will be a day of reckoning, and it will come when you least expect it.” She stalked away to her wagon, bracelets and amulets jingling.
“Maybe you should have stayed out of it,” Tacitus said.
“I think you’re right. I’ve just made everybody a little bit angrier. And I don’t believe we helped the girl at all. If I had kept quiet, Cornutus would probably have slapped her a few times. Nothing she hasn’t endured before. Now, whatever punishment he inflicts on her tonight will be redoubled by his frustration at the delay and his resentment of our interference.”
As his slaves packed up, Cornutus bent over to pick up his winnings from the dice game. Saturninus had slunk back to his own wagon during the turmoil over the girl. Cornutus shook the coins in his hand and turned toward him. “Tiberius Saturninus, you thieving scoundrel! There was at least another twenty sesterces in thi
s pile. Cough it up.’
Saturninus skulked forward and flung the coins at him.
* * * *
“That’s the last milestone before Smyrna,” Tacitus said. “It was erected during the eleventh year of Claudius’ reign.” Since we set out from Antioch, twenty-three days earlier, he had read every inscription on every milestone we’d passed. At least twenty of the damn things every day. And he acted interested in what they said—who was consul and how many times the emperor had been granted tribunician power —and what they revealed about when a particular stretch of road was built or repaired. He sounded more like a historian than one of Rome’s brightest young orators.
“At least we’ll get to the city well before dark,” I said. “We’ll have a chance to find an inn while we can still see.”
“Are you sure you don’t know someone here that we could stay with?”
“Regrettably, no.” And I truly did regret it. I wanted to be nowhere in earshot when Cornutus unleashed his fury on that poor slave girl. “My uncle didn’t know anyone in Smyrna.”
“So this time he’s your uncle,” Tacitus said.
“I should make up my mind, shouldn’t I?” My uncle, Pliny, had adopted me in his will. When he died four years ago while trying to rescue people from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, I became his son and heir and took on his name in addition to my father’s family name, Caecilius. I am now Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, to give it in its ponderous fullness. Sometimes I wonder if I can stand up under the weight of it. My mother—Pliny’s sister—and I lived in Pliny’s home after my father died. Pliny had always carefully insisted that I call him ‘uncle’. He was very generous to me, a father in every way. That was how I thought of him, but a deeply ingrained habit was hard to break, so sometimes now I call him ‘uncle’ and occasionally ‘father’.
“I’m afraid my father had no connections here,” I corrected myself.
“That’s a shame,” Tacitus said. “His friends in Ephesus certainly treated us royally. Well, staying in an inn won’t be all bad. There’s always the possibility of an accommodating serving girl.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Or boy.”
I glanced at him disdainfully. His sexual versatility was the one thing about him that made me uncomfortable. We had met in Antioch as this caravan was forming for the journey to Rome. Pooling our resources, we bought some better wagons than either of us could afford by himself. I found myself enjoying his company before I became aware of his sexual predilections. There was nothing about his manners or his public life to suggest such inclinations. He had a wife, the daughter of the illustrious Julius Agricola, waiting for him at home. He was three years older than I and in the area of relations with sexual partners resented my attempts to stand on the higher moral ground.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with finding a bit of pleasure anywhere you can. Socrates and Plato and all those other Greeks you profess to admire did it all the time. Beauty is everywhere. Male, female—what’s the difference beyond an extra appendage or an extra orifice here and there?”
“But your wife . . .”
His waved his hand tiredly. “Aristocratic Roman women have had all the fun bred out of them, my wife being the perfect example. I appreciate the . . . earthiness of peasants and the servile class. They’ve watched animals couple. They’ve slept in the same room with their parents and siblings, so there’s no false modesty about them.”
On this point I suppose he’s incorrigible. I had made it clear that I didn’t share his inclination. We had enough other points of common interest that our friendship was blossoming rapidly. I decided to drop the issue and turned my attention to the scenery.
The highway which we were following, the Via Sebaste, runs almost due north from Ephesus until it veers northwest to skirt the range of hills at whose base Smyrna sits, at the head of a long, narrow bay. The land is fertile and, in early spring, the fields had been recently plowed and crops sown. With an early spate of warm weather a few of them were already covered by a green mist of tender shoots. As we neared the coast I smelled a hint of sea breeze, a bracing sensation when you’re safe on land. I enjoy watching the ocean. But, may it please the gods, I hope never to look on it from the vantage point of a ship again. I made the outbound trip to Syria by boat; with time I trust the nightmares will fade.
Tacitus and I were returning from Syria, where I served as a military tribune with the legions, and he had been on the governor’s staff. All Roman men hold such posts if they have any ambitions for a career in public service in the city. It had been a tense year. The dust from the Jewish revolt in the neighboring province of Judaea, which ended ten years ago, had not yet entirely settled. Many refugees from the destroyed city of Jerusalem had settled in Antioch and other cities of Syria. Those people cherish their grudges like a peasant guarding the last embers of his fire to fan them into flame another day. I wonder if there will ever be true peace in that part of the empire.
We were traveling in a caravan, of course. Tacitus and I had a wagon and driver for ourselves and another for our slaves and baggage. There were nine travelers, plus slaves, who had been together all the way from Antioch. Others had joined us for a time, then dropped out as they reached their destinations. Except for a few days of rain, it had been an uneventful journey. But, even under the best of conditions, travel is hard. Tempers can wear thin on these long journeys. Without the civilizing force of a city and magistrates, people sometimes resort to violence to settle disputes.
Most of our traveling companions were congenial enough, or at least not dangerous. Two others, like ourselves, had been on government service in Syria: Tiberius Saturninus and Gaius Sempronius, a couple of complete nonentities. The only thing that marked Saturninus in a crowd was that he wouldn’t admit he was bald and combed his hair up from the edges to cover his glistening pate. Whenever the wind blew he appeared to have a horse’s mane billowing from his head.
One fellow, Lysimachus, the most tiresome of the lot, was a philosopher/teacher of some sect, an offshoot of Platonism. He wore a long white beard and gloried in the sound of his own voice. I guess those are the two essential criteria for being a philosopher. He wasn’t an old man, just one whose hair turned white at an early age. He was on his way to Athens, to bask in the glow of walking where Plato had walked. I didn’t spoil his anticipation by telling him how much the city has declined since those halcyon days. It bears as much resemblance to Plato’s Athens as a grandmother does to the girl you were in love with all those years ago.
The merchant, a huge German who had mastered Latin and learned some Greek, was our biggest encumbrance, with several wagons laden with merchandise. He had shipped most of his goods by boat, but these items—silks and spices from India—he said he couldn’t trust to the whims of Neptune. I had to sympathize. This humorless fellow had Latinized his German name—which was Garl or Karl or some guttural growl impossible for a civilized tongue, and added a Roman praenomen, dubbing himself Marcus Carolus. To the Roman ear the effect was comic, but I doubt many people laughed about it to his face.
A pair of self-important toadies, named Rhascuporis and Orophernes, were representing their city, some backwater east of Antioch, on an embassy to Rome, to ask permission to build a temple to the emperor Domitian. They kept working on their speeches, practicing their delivery during our rest stops. Tacitus and I both have achieved some renown in Rome for our oratory, young as we are. It was all we could do not to laugh out loud as we listened to their rustic grandiloquence. They are sure to be mocked and parodied for days after their appearance before the senate.
Dominating the mood of our party was Lucius Cornutus, who had just finished a year on the staff of the governor of Syria. Tacitus had told me stories about the lavish dinners Cornutus was fond of hosting. When a man who handles the government’s money entertains on that scale, suspicions do circulate. Rumors followed Cornutus like a pack of hungry dogs trailing after a butcher’s
cart.
Several parties who had left Antioch with us concluded their journey in Ephesus. There we were joined by three other groups setting out from that city. All three of those parties aroused my suspicions, though for different reasons.
The first consisted of two men traveling without slaves and driving their own wagon. They kept themselves apart from the rest of us. One was tall, with dark hair, and appeared to be about forty. The other—the one who had spoken up to Cornutus at lunch—was shorter and older, about sixty I guessed. They took the last position in our train, frequently deep in whispered conversations. I caught occasional references to some kind of assembly, ekklesia in Greek. From their prayers at meals and what appeared to be secret signs they were using, I thought they might be Jews, or at least Greeks attracted to Judaism. There are a lot of such folks. They profess to admire Jewish ways, but not enough to undergo circumcision. I was quite surprised that the older of these men injected himself into my confrontation with Cornutus. Jews typically keep to themselves.
More unsettling was the appearance of another group, comprised of six women, with no male escorts and led by the one I thought of as the wild-haired witch. She wore an amazing number of bracelets, necklaces, and amulets. Their lead wagon was painted black and carried occult markings in bright colors on its sides. Ephesus is a center of magic and superstitious practices. ‘Ephesian books’ is used all over the empire to denote compilations of spells, even when they’re not from Ephesus. They conversed in passable Greek but among themselves resorted to some Eastern babble.
But the most troublesome party who joined us in Ephesus was one man, Quintus Marcellus Justus, whom I immediately recognized as a protégé of Marcus Aquilius Regulus. If protégé is the proper term for a scoundrel and rogue-in-training.
Marcellus’ presence troubled me because Regulus is one of the most notorious figures in Rome. Anyone who doesn’t know him knows of him. Everyone fears him; no one respects him. Regulus would describe himself as an advocate. Most of the aristocracy in Rome serve their friends and family dependents in that capacity. It’s one of the obligations that weigh against the privileges of wealth and class. So, admittedly, Regulus does nothing out of the ordinary by speaking for friends and clients. But he oversteps the bounds with his flamboyant —I might even say outrageous—manner in court and his insistence on handling the most sensational cases.
All Roads Lead to Murder Page 1
