A Murder on the Appian Way

by Steven Saylor

  I stared at Tiro, who still would not look me in the eye. “So you deceived Tiro as well. I can believe that. He’s not the actor you are, Cicero; his surprise and relief when we met on the Flaminian Way were too genuine to be a pretense. But Tiro—Tiro, look at me! You must have suspected something. Who else but Milo had a reason to kidnap us? How could Cicero not have known?”

  Tiro bit his lower lip. “The thought did occur to me. But I simply didn’t ask. I suppose I didn’t really want to know. There’s been a great deal else on my mind …”

  “Tell me just one thing, then, Tiro. Only one thing, and the absolute truth. Will you do that for me?”

  Tiro looked at me rather forlornly.

  “This speech for Milo—is it as good as Cicero claims it is? Or is that only his vanity speaking? Tell me what you really think.”

  “The truth, Gordianus?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Cicero’s speech for Milo is …” Tiro sighed. “Cicero has never written a better speech. No one has. That is my honest opinion. If anything can save Milo, this is the speech to do it. The jurors will weep. It will be Cicero’s finest hour.”

  This was not what I wanted to hear. May the gods help us all, I thought, as I hurried from the room and left them to go about their work.

  As I made my way home, some of Cicero’s phrases kept ringing in my head, try as I might to shut them out. All of it had been nonsense, of course, but some had been more nonsensical than the rest. “I might argue that neither Milo nor his men were ultimately responsible for Clodius’s death, at least not technically. That may well be the case, as I’m sure you discovered for yourself in your investigations … However, to argue for Milo’s outright innocence, I would have to introduce some rather arcane reasoning …”

  What in Hades could he have meant by that? I almost wished I had kept a cooler head and asked him; there was no turning back now. He had probably meant nothing at all, I told myself, but was simply spinning words, filling me with doubt, throwing dust in my eyes, just as he would try to do to the jurors in the morning.

  32

  On the fourth and final day of Milo’s trial I awoke to birdsong in the garden. New flowers had bloomed overnight. Bees and butterflies were already at work, doting on the blossoms. I was tempted to forget the trial and stay home. Why not spend the day enjoying the warm sunshine of Aprilis in my garden? But the plaintive eyes of the staring, broken Minerva would not let me forget what was about to transpire in the Forum.

  Davus and a fellow bodyguard had risen long before cockcrow to go down with folding chairs to save places for us. It was a good thing, for I had never seen the Forum so thronged with spectators. By order of Pompey, all taverns were closed for the day. Pompey no doubt intended to head off the threat of drunken rioters, but the radical tribunes must have been pleased for their own reasons; with the taverns closed, even their least civic-minded supporters had nowhere better to be than in the Forum attending the trial. Despite the crush, Davus had doggedly held on to our seats near the front of the crowd.

  Dominating everything were Pompey’s troops. Wherever there was an elevated place—temple steps or a bit of wall or ramp or pedestal—the soldiers had already occupied it the night before. A ring of troops completely encircled the Forum. At the various points of entry they pulled aside perfectly peaceable citizens to search for concealed weapons. Pompey himself was said to be in his stronghold in the treasury building, from which he would not stir until a verdict was announced. I felt as if I had awakened in some other city that morning, a place ruled by a military autocrat—except that autocrats do not allow public trials. There was a sense of confusion and uncertainty in the air, almost of unreality.

  And yet, everything proceeded smoothly. Milo and Cicero had shown up before most of the crowd, traveling in a plain, closed litter so that their arrival went unnoticed, which was no doubt as they wished it. They stayed out of sight in the litter, ringed by bodyguards, until it was almost time for the trial to begin. The three prosecutors arrived on foot to a great deal of cheering, surrounded by an entourage of secretaries and bodyguards. The officials of the court brought out three large urns; these contained the wooden balls on which each potential juror had written his name. Balls were chosen by lot until eighty-one jurors had been selected, among them Marcus Cato, I noticed. After the speeches by the prosecution and the defense, each side would be allowed to remove fifteen more jurors, leaving fifty-one men to decide the verdict.

  Domitius called the court to order. The prosecutors commenced with their arguments at once.

  As Cicero had predicted, their three orations seemed unduly short, more like synopses than full-blown speeches. They were potent, nonetheless. In typical fashion, the prosecutors divided various aspects of the case between them, according to their skills and dispositions.

  I knew little about Valerius Nepos, but I had heard that his forte was narrative, and so was not surprised that he gave the opening argument. He described the actual incident with dramatic flourish, using the full range of his ringing voice and dwelling on gruesome details to elicit groans and cries of outrage from the spectators. His final lament was so full of grief that it seemed all he could do to keep from tearing out his hair. Nepos would have made quite a performer on the stage, I thought, bringing blind Oedipus or the tormented Ajax to life.

  Marc Antony, the tactician, delivered the middle speech. He made the case that Milo had deliberately plotted to murder Clodius, citing evidence that Milo had spies among Clodius’s slaves and going over and over the complicated chronology of Milo’s and Clodius’s movements on the day of the murder. Antony was the right man for a speech that dwelled, by necessity, on such a concentration of details. A more emotional speaker like Nepos, wailing over timetables, would have risked looking absurd. A staid orator like Pompey would have put his listeners to sleep. Antony’s blend of soldierly gruffness with an innate sincerity of purpose kept the jurors’s full attention.

  Appius Claudius, the dead man’s nephew, delivered the emotional finale, a eulogy full of pathos. Seemingly overcome by grief, he was often choked with tears and had to struggle to regain his composure. In a ringing summation, he made proud references to the greatness of Clodius’s forebears and to the poignant irony that he should have met such a brutal death on the famous road which Appius Claudius Caecus had built and along which stood the tombs and shrines of so many members of his noble family.

  During these speeches, I looked to see the reactions of Milo and Cicero. Most defendants bring a horde of family members to cluster around them during the trial, but Milo sat alone, his arms tightly crossed. Granted, his parents were dead, but where was his wife? It would count against him that Fausta Cornelia was nowhere to be seen during her husband’s ordeal. Given her reputation, I could imagine the sort of jokes the Clodians would come up with to explain her absence.

  And what was Milo thinking, to show up at his own trial in a snow-white toga without even a loose stitch, much less a tear in it? His hair looked freshly clipped and combed, and his jaw was so clean-shaven that he must have seen his barber that very morning before he left his house. I had to shake my head at such audacity. Even the always sardonic Caelius, at his trial, had had the sense (drummed into him by Cicero) to wear an old, threadbare toga and to look at least a bit disheveled, and Caelius’s parents had shown up in torn clothes with their eyes red from crying and baggy from lack of sleep. A Roman defendant is expected to look as wretched as he possibly can, in order to play upon the sympathy of the jurors. This is often merely a formality, but everyone goes along with it out of respect for legal tradition. By showing up looking as if he were paying court to a widow or posing for his portrait, Milo was deliberately thumbing his nose not only at the jury but at the whole judicial process.

  Perhaps this was one of the things on his advocate’s mind that day. Cicero looked uncommonly distracted, and completely transformed from the previous night. Where was his excitement, his ebullience? His eyes were
shifty, his jaw tight, and he gave a start at every unexpected noise from the crowd. He fiddled with scraps of parchment, scribbled notes on a wax tablet, kept whispering to Tiro, and seemed hardly to listen to the prosecutors. Only once did he seem to come to life, during Antony’s speech. Antony was trying to imply that Milo paused to water his horses in Bovillae to kill time while he waited for a report that Clodius had left his villa and was on his way, so that Milo could be sure to pass Clodius on the road in order to stage a deliberate attack on him. To frame his accusation, Antony needed to establish the exact hour at which the incident took place, and stressed the point by repeatedly asking, “When was Clodius killed? When, I ask you—early or late? Early or late?”

  Cicero, in a loud voice, quipped, “Far too late!”

  In the immediate silence that followed there was some scattered laughter, but also expressions of shock among the jurors, and then a sudden welling of outrage among the spectators. Cicero’s icy grin vanished. Milo stiffened. Even Antony, who had faced barbarians in battle and had no cause to feel threatened by the crowd, backed away from the Rostra and turned pale. I looked behind me to see what they saw: a sea of upraised fists and angry, shouting faces. The fury on those faces was not of the opportunistic sort one sees on looters or soldiers; it had a kind of fiery purity, like the madness of religious ecstatics. It was a fearsome thing; even some of Pompey’s soldiers visibly flinched to see it. These were Clodius’s people, the angry and dispossessed, the degraded, the hopeless. They were a force to be reckoned with.

  I thought in that instant that the trial was about to come to an abrupt end. There would be a riot, murder, mayhem, massive bloodshed, no matter that Pompey’s troops were everywhere; the crowd would swallow up the soldiers along with everyone else. But even in the act of cursing and shaking their fists, the Clodians restrained their violence. The climax of the day promised them a deeper satisfaction: their dead leader’s vindication and the final destruction of Milo. The soldiers banged the butts of their spears against the paving stones and clanged their swords against their greaves until the crowd eventually quieted down.

  Antony managed a smile. “The time, in fact, Cicero, was the tenth hour of the day.” The crowd roared with laughter. Cicero’s face was like wax.

  Antony finished his speech. Appius Claudius delivered his encomium to his uncle, which drove much of the crowd, and even some of the jurors, to tears. Better that they should grieve than riot, I thought.

  And then it was time for Cicero to speak.

  Surely it must be some sort of ruse, I thought, as Cicero knocked his wax tablet to the ground and stumbled against his chair. Was he feigning clumsiness in a bid for sympathy from a hostile audience? The same people who had been weeping only moments before began to laugh and make catcalls. Milo scowled, crossed his arms tightly across his chest and rolled his eyes up to heaven. Tiro bit his lower lip and pressed his hands against the sides of his face, then seemed to realize what he was doing, drew back his hands and made his face like a statue’s.

  Cicero’s voice shook as he began his speech. It had quavered in just that way the first time I heard him speak in public, at the trial of Sextus Roscius; but that had been a lifetime ago, and since then Cicero had become the leading orator of his time, moving from triumph to triumph. Even in his darkest days, when Clodius was working to have him exiled, his defiance and sense of self-righteousness had always given him a steady voice, if not always steady friends.

  But now his voice shook. “Distinguished jurors! Distinguished … what an opportunity you have today! What a vital decision is yours to make … yours to make, and yours alone. Shall a good man, an upstanding citizen, an untiring servant of the state … should he be forced to pine away in miserable hardship … indeed, shall Rome herself be made to suffer endless, ongoing humiliations … or shall you put an end … that is, by your staunch, courageous, wise decision, shall you put an end to the long persecution of both the man and his city by lawless hooligans?”

  There was another outburst from the crowd. The noise was almost like a physical assault. Cicero appeared to quail before it, shrinking back on the Rostra. Where was the strutting cock who tended to swagger rather than fret before a hostile crowd? I was still inclined to think that his timidity was some sort of pose. What other possibility was there?

  The furor at last quieted enough for him to continue. “When my client … and myself … when we first took up politics …”

  “Yes, but when will you give it up?” shouted someone in the crowd.

  “Far too late!” answered a chorus of voices, to raucous laughter.

  “When we first took up politics,” Cicero went on at a higher pitch, “we held high hopes that honorable rewards for honorable service would come our way. Instead we suffer a constant burden of fear. Milo has always been especially vulnerable, for he has deliberately … deliberately and bravely … placed himself on the foremost … I mean to say, in the forefront … in the struggle of true patriots against enemies of the state—”

  There was another outburst, so loud it hurt my ears. Milo had sunk so low in his chair and hugged himself so tightly that he appeared to have melted. His expression was one of utter disgust. Tiro flinched every time Cicero stammered, and began to bite his nails.

  From that point on the roar of the crowd was almost constant. Whenever Cicero did manage to make himself heard, he seemed to be uttering confused fragments from more than one speech. On several occasions he clearly lost his place, muttered to himself, and started at some point he had already covered. His voice continually shook. Even knowing his general intention—to accuse Clodius of an ambush and to exonerate Milo completely—it was impossible for me to make any sense of his argument. From the looks on their faces, the jurors were equally confounded.

  Cicero’s orations had roused many reactions in me over the years—outrage at his willingness to twist the truth, admiration approaching awe at his ability to construct a logical argument, simple wonder at his prodigious ego, grudging respect for his loyalty to his friends, dismay at his shameless demagoguery, for Cicero was always ready to exploit his listeners’ religious sentiments and sexual prejudices to his own ends. Now I began to feel something I had never felt before, something I would have thought impossible: I began to feel embarrassed for Cicero.

  This should have been his finest hour. When he defended Sextus Roscius and risked offending the dictator Sulla, he had been too young to know better; inciting the people against Catilina had been almost too easy; destroying Clodia in his speech for Marcus Caelius had been an act of personal vengeance. This was a situation that required true bravery and heroic stamina. If he could have stood his ground against the angry mob, if he could have stared them down and by the sheer power of his oratory compelled them to listen, what a crowning accomplishment that would have been, whether he won the case or not. He could have attained a kind of glory even in failure.

  Instead, he was the very portrait of a man cowed by fear. He stuttered, averted his eyes, broke out in a sweat, stumbled over his lines. He was like an actor crippled by stage fright. No man could be blamed for being intimidated by that crowd, but from Cicero such a reaction was difficult to stomach. The wretchedness of his performance robbed his words of any weight they might have possessed. The few audible portions of his speech seemed disconnected, forced, artificial, insincere. I seemed to be watching a second-rate actor doing a poor parody of Cicero. More than feeling embarrassed, I almost felt pity for him.

  Milo became increasingly agitated until he seemed about to come out of his skin. He kept jumping toward Tiro, engaging him in whispered arguments. Milo, I suspected, wanted to call Cicero from the Rostra and speak extemporaneously in his own defense; Tiro managed to argue him out of it.

  The crowd soon learned to make a game of their outbursts. I have seldom seen a mass of people act with such seeming single-mindedness. They would grow just quiet enough to allow Cicero to be heard, then would laugh when he stuttered or misspoke, then wou
ld wait until the critical moment of the point he was making and let out a deafening roar. Their performance was uncanny, as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. The spirit of Clodius himself seemed to guide them that day.

  The debacle seemed to go on forever. In fact, it lasted for considerably less than the three hours allotted for the defense. Eventually Cicero neared the end of his speech. “Milo was born to serve his country. Surely it cannot be right that he should be forbidden to die within her boundaries—”

  “Then let him take his own life, right now!” someone shouted.

  “Distinguished jurors, can you possibly see fit to banish him from our soil? Send a man such as Milo into exile, and he would be eagerly welcomed by every other city in the world—”

  “Then send him! Send him! Exile! Exile!” The word became a chant that echoed all through the Forum.

  Cicero did not wait for the chant to die down in order to finish his speech. He continued in a hoarse voice amid the growing roar of the crowd. I strained to hear him. “Urgently I ask you, honorable jurors, when you cast your votes, be brave enough to act as you truly think is right. Do that, and believe me, your integrity … and courage … and sense of justice will surely please the one who chose this jury by fixing on the best and bravest and wisest men in Rome.”

  Was that, then, the ultimate appeal? That a vote to acquit Milo would be pleasing to the Great One, the sole consul and selector of judges and juries? If that was his final argument, it was just as well that Cicero’s voice was drowned out by the mob.

  Once the speeches were finished, each side was allowed to excuse fifteen of the jurors. This was done quickly, as both prosecution and defense had already drawn up their lists of those they considered undesirable.