Last Seen in Massilia: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Steven Saylor

  “Pistoria!” said Publicius, who intoned the name of the battleground as if it were a holy shrine. “You were actually there, beside the Deliverer himself! Did you hear his last words?”

  “I heard the speech he delivered to his troops.” Wry and ironical it had been, fearless and without illusion. Catilina had faced destruction with his eyes wide open, perversely defiant to the end.

  “And you saw his final moments?”

  I sighed. “Meto and I were near Catilina when the fighting began. He planted his eagle standard in the ground. That was the spot where he made his last stand. I saw the standard fall….”

  “The eagle standard!” gasped Publicius. “The eagle standard of Marius himself, which Catilina held in trust for the next deliverer to come.”

  Publicius and Minucius raised their hands and chanted together: “The eagle standard! The eagle standard!”

  “Yes, well….” I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of these two fawning acolytes of a dead deliverer. “If you were such staunch supporters of Catilina, why were you not there at Pistoria as well?”

  As they had chanted, so they blushed in unison. Publicius cleared his throat. “We and a few others came here to Massilia in advance of Catilina, to clear the way for his arrival. Up until very near the end, it was in his mind to escape to Massilia, here to plan his triumphant return to Rome. But in the end, alas, he could not abandon the country and the people he sought to deliver from the Senate’s tyranny. Catilina chose martyrdom over exile. He made his stand at Pistoria and fell there. It was left to us, the handful of his followers who had fled to Massilia, to keep his memory alive.”

  “To keep his dream alive!” added Minucius.

  “And now the gods have led you here, Gordianus the Finder. Have led both you and your son to Massilia! It can only be a sign that the faith we have kept alive all these years has been justified, that the gods have looked down upon us and given us their blessing.”

  “My son—how did you know he was here?”

  “Because he came to us, of course. He sought us out in secret. When he revealed to us who he was—”

  “No one less than Meto, who fought with Catilina at Pistoria, who crossed the Rubicon with Caesar—”

  “We could hardly believe it. It was a sign, of course. A sign of the gods’ favor—”

  “Favor?” I snapped. “You fools! My son is dead.”

  There was an awkward silence. My two visitors gazed sidelong at each other, keeping their mouths shut but working their eyebrows and lips, as if debating some point purely by an exchange of facial expressions. Finally Publicius stepped forward. He took my hand, which hung limply at my side.

  “Come with us, Gordianus. We have something to show you. And something to tell you.”

  “Tell me now, then.”

  He shook his head gravely. “No, not here.” He looked askance at Hieronymus and lowered his voice. “This place is…not suitable.” Impure, he meant. Unclean, on account of the scapegoat. “Come, Gordianus. You must see what we have to show you. You must hear what we have to say.”

  I swallowed hard. The visit from the Gaulish merchant had distracted me, had lured me with a puzzle to take me out of myself and away from my misery. The visit from these latter-day Catilinarians had plunged me back into an unhappy past and an even more miserable present. What of any consequence could they show me? What could they tell me that I didn’t already know? I looked to Davus, who saw my indecision and gave an eloquent shrug, as if to say, Why not? What have we to lose, fatherin-law, stuck here on the edge of nowhere?

  “Very well,” I said. “Davus and I will go with you.”

  “And where are you taking my guests?” inquired Hieronymus, who clearly thought as little of the two Romans as I did.

  “That, Scapegoat, must be a secret,” said Publicius, with his nose in the air.

  “But I’m this man’s host, and as such I’m obliged to look after his safety. Before he leaves my home, you’ll have to tell me where you’re taking him.”

  Publicius and Minucius conferred in whispers. At last Publicius looked up. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you,” he said, with the unsubtle implication that the scapegoat’s days were numbered. “We’re taking Gordianus to the house of Gaius Verres.”

  Verres! The name was synonymous with corruption, extortion, limitless greed, and the very worst sort of misgovernment. As my two visitors conducted Davus and me through the streets of Massilia, I wondered what possible link could connect these last pitiful sheep from Catilina’s flock to the most notorious of all Roman exiles.

  It was Cicero who had prosecuted Gaius Verres a little over twenty years ago. The case had been a major scandal and established Cicero as the preeminent advocate in Rome, even as it destroyed Verres, who fled for Massilia before the court could deliver its damning verdict. The charge against Verres was extortion and criminal oppression of the people of Sicily during his three years as provincial governor of the island. Roman governors have always been notorious for exploiting their provinces and lining their own purses at the expense of the governed, while the Senate, whose members all hope for the opportunity to do the same themselves someday, turns a blind eye. It was indicative of the egregiousness of Verres’s conduct that he was actually brought to trial for his offenses.

  According to Cicero, who had also served as an administrator in Sicily, Verres had not only extorted the populace and plundered their civic treasuries, but had virtually stripped the island bare of every beautiful man-made object. Verres’s appetite for fine works of art amounted to a mania. He especially loved paintings of the sort done in encaustic wax on wood, not least because they could easily be carried off, and he assiduously built himself a collection of the best pictures to be gleaned from every public space and private gallery in Sicily. But his greatest passion was for statues. Before Verres, every town square in Sicily, even the humblest, was decorated with the statue of a local hero or some particularly venerated deity; after Verres, the pedestals stood empty—except in those instances where the scoundrel, to squeeze even more money from the locals, had forced them to erect statues of himself, charging them outrageous sums for the privilege. Anyone who dared to oppose him, whether Sicilian or Roman, was ruthlessly disposed of. His behavior while he controlled the island was more that of a pirate than a provincial governor.

  As soon as Verres’s tenure was up and he returned to Rome, the Sicilians sought restitution from the Roman Senate and looked for a way to prosecute the man who had robbed them. Cicero took up their cause and, despite all Verres’s legal finagling and the Senate’s reluctance to prosecute one of its own, Cicero and the Sicilians eventually prevailed. The evidence assembled against Verres was so damning that even the Senate had to act; and as the trial progressed, Verres chose to flee Rome rather than face the verdict. The connoisseur of fine art set another fashion in his choice of destination; Verres fled to Massilia, and in the twenty years of political chaos that ensued, wave upon wave of Roman political exiles would follow him.

  I knew who Gaius Verres was, of course—what Roman didn’t?—but I had I never laid eyes on him. I knew that he was here in Massilia, but I had never expected our paths to cross. But then, nothing predictable or expected had occurred since the moment we emerged from the flooded tunnel into the city. More and more it seemed to me that Massilia was an unfamiliar world with its own peculiar rules of logic to which I must bend, willingly or not.

  Verres’s house was not far from the scapegoat’s, somewhere along the way to Milo’s house. Within her encircling walls, Massilia was a small city, and her fashionable district was very compact.

  The house itself surprised me by its opulence. One thinks of exiles living in ruin and misery, or at least in reduced circumstances. But the house of Verres was even more ostentatious than that of the scapegoat, with a brightly colored facade in shades of pink and yellow, and elaborate columns flanking the entrance. A slave admitted us at once; the Catilinarians
were obviously familiar visitors. The foyer was floored with yellow marble with swirling red veins, and, like a Roman house, had niches on either side housing the busts of Verres’s ancestors. Or so I thought upon first glance. When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the busts were not of ancestors after all, unless Verres claimed descent from the likes of Pericles, Aeschylus, and Homer. He had used the niches reserved for sacred display to show off specimens from his sculpture collection!

  A slave led us deeper into the house. Statues and paintings were everywhere. Many of the paintings were installed on the walls, jammed close together, but others were stacked in narrow spaces between pedestals and walls, and some were even piled atop each other in corners. But the paintings, as vivid as many of them were—portraits, pastoral scenes, episodes from The Iliad and The Odyssey, erotic tableaux—faded into the background. It was the statues that dominated the house, and not just in the niches and the usual spots in front of columns or under archways. There were scores of statues, perhaps hundreds, so crowded together in some rooms that only a narrow pathway had been left clear. Their arrangement made no sense; Diana with her bow and arrow thrust her elbow into the nose of some obscure Sicilian statesman and appeared to take aim directly at the head of a seated Jupiter only a few feet away, whose stern gaze was directed at a pair of rearing life-size stags done in marble and flawlessly painted, even to the white spots on their flanks. The house was large and the rooms spacious, but it was not a palace, and a palace would have been required to properly contain so much art. As it was, I had the peculiar feeling of having stumbled into a very crowded but ominously silent house party, where the guests were all made of bronze and marble—gods and animals, dying Gauls and cavorting satyrs, nude athletes and long-dead playwrights.

  It was a kind of blasphemy to treat works of art, especially images of the gods, in such a fashion, with no respect for their unique power and singularity. I shuddered.

  “Why in Hades have you brought me here?” I asked Publicius.

  “You’ll see,” he said in hushed voice. “You’ll see!”

  We were led at last to the garden at the house’s center, where an immensely fat man in a red tunic rose from a bench to greet us. A fringe of white hair circled his perfectly round head. A strand of tiny pearls and lapis beads peeked out from between the folds of fat that circled his neck. Rings of silver and gold glittered on his fingers. Among them I saw what looked like an iron citizen’s ring. Verres had no right to wear it. The court’s verdict had stripped him of his citizenship.

  “Publicius! Minucius! How good to see you again. Welcome to my house.”

  “I swear to Artemis, he gets bigger each time we see him,” said Publicius under his breath in a tone more full of wonder than disdain, and then, louder, “Gaius Verres! How kind of you to welcome us. We bring two guests, newly arrived from Rome.”

  “Ah! Rome….” Verres’s beady eyes glimmered. “So near, yet still so far away. Some day….”

  “Yes, some day,” Publicius agreed wistfully. “And perhaps not so long from now, from the look of things. The world has turned upside-down.”

  “And shaken out these two,” said Verres, regarding Davus and me.

  “Ah, yes, let me introduce you. Gaius Verres, this is Gordianus, called the Finder. The father of Meto,” he added in a hushed voice.

  If Publicius expected our host to be impressed, the fat man disappointed him. Verres looked me up and down as if appraising an object newly offered for acquisition. His rudeness was almost refreshing after the obsequious fawning of the Catilinarians. “When I was last in Rome, you were known as Cicero’s hunting dog,” he said gruffly. He spat the name Cicero as if it were an epithet.

  “Perhaps,” I said, staring at him coldly. “But you haven’t been in Rome for a very long time, Gaius Verres.” The Catilinarians winced. “At any rate, I had nothing to do with your trial.”

  Verres grunted. He turned his attention to Davus and raised an eyebrow. “And this big fellow?”

  “Davus is my son-in-law.”

  Verres crossed his arms and pulled at his several chins. “A model worthy of the great Myron himself. I should like to see him naked. But with what sort of props? He’s too grown-up for Mercury. His features are not intelligent enough to pass for Apollo. Not coarse enough for Vulcan, or old and worn enough to be Hercules, though perhaps some day…. No, I have it! Give him a helmet and a sword and he could be Mars. Yes, especially scowling like that….”

  Misreading Davus’s frown of consternation as anger, Publicius hurriedly spoke up. “Gordianus and Davus arrived in the city only a few days ago. It was the day of the battering-ram—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said Verres. “Everyone in Massilia has heard the story by now. Two Romans swam in through a flooded rat hole and were scooped up by the scapegoat, who’s now fattening them up—though why, no one can imagine, since it’s the scapegoat who’ll wind up as the main course one of these days.”

  This casual impiety induced an uncomfortable silence in the two Catilinarians. Publicius bit his lip. Minucius lowered his eyes. Clearly, of the three, Verres had by far the strongest personality. A tyrant he had been, and a tyrant he remained, even if his shrunken kingdom extended only as far as the walls of his own house.

  “Well, then,” Verres went on, “I suppose I can guess why you’ve come. Not to see my ivory Jupiter from Cyzicus, or the Apollo I brought back from Syracuse; nor to savor the beauty of my Ephesian Alexander, or experience the very rare sight of my miniature Medusa, which was executed by a student of Praxiteles. Did you know that the snakes on her head were carved from solid carnelian? Incredibly delicate! The largest is no thicker than my little finger. The Syracusans said the snakes were sure to break if I dared to move her, but not one of them suffered even a chip when I shipped her to Rome…and then here to Massilia.”

  “Fascinating, Gaius Verres,” said Publicius, in a tone that indicated he had heard the tale more than once. “But what we actually came to see—that is, what we came here to show Gordianus, so that he might behold it once again with his own eyes—”

  “Yes, yes, I know why you’ve come. It’s why you always come.”

  Verres called for a slave, spoke to him in a whisper, and sent him from the room. The slave returned with a bronze key, a big, bulky thing with numerous notches, and a flickering lamp. Why a lamp, when the sun was still up? Verres took the key and the lamp and dismissed the slave. “Follow me,” he said.

  We left the garden. A long hallway led to the back of the house, where a flight of stairs descended steeply to a subterranean level.

  The underground passage was so narrow that we had to proceed in single file. Verres and the Catilinarians went ahead of me, with Davus in the rear. The floor was treacherous and uneven. The wavering flame from Verres’s lamp was too weak to light our feet, but it did illuminate the masses of spiderwebs above our heads. In places the ceiling sagged; Publicius and Davus, the tallest among us, had to stoop.

  At last the winding subterranean passage terminated in a bronze door. There was a scraping noise as Verres pushed the key into a keyhole and worked it back and forth. The walk had required no special exertion, yet Publicius and Minucius both took labored breaths. By the flickering lamplight I saw that they trembled.

  Davus took my arm and whispered in my ear. “Fatherin-law, I don’t like this. Who knows what’s in that room? It might be a prison. Or a torture chamber. Or…”

  Or a hiding place, I thought. The Catilinarians had spoken of Meto. He had come to them, they said, sought them out. They told me they had something to show me, something I could see only at the house of Verres. I felt a sudden rush of irrational excitement and found myself breathing as heavily as the others.

  The door swung inward on creaking hinges. Verres stepped inside, leaving the rest of us in darkness. “Well, then, come on,” he said. Publicius and Minucius stepped forward, visibly shaking. Davus insisted on stepping in front of me so as to enter ahead of me. I was
the last to step inside the long, narrow room.

  XIII

  It was neither a prison nor a torture chamber, but the most obvious and logical thing to be found behind a bronze door beneath a rich man’s house: a treasure room. The chamber was crowded with ornately decorated jewelry boxes and urns heaped with coins, small silver statuettes and talismans carved from precious stones. On the walls were mounted antique weapons and military regalia of the sort collectors fancy. Amid this clutter, my eyes were drawn to something at the far end of the room. It stood apart, with space cleared around it so that it could be seen clearly.

  I recognized it at once and felt a sudden, painful stab of nostalgia. I had first seen it in a setting in some ways similar to this, illuminated by lamplight in a place of darkness. It had been in a mine north of Rome where Catilina and his inner circle were hiding. The thing was made of silver, perched atop a tall pole festooned with a red and gold pennant. Through the gloom, I peered up at the eagle with its beak held high and its wings spread. But for the glimmer of silver it might have been a real bird, frozen in glory.