A Murder on the Appian Way

by Steven Saylor

  All that remained was for the fifty-one remaining jurors to vote. Each was given a tablet with wax on each side, with the letter A (for absolve) stamped on one side and the letter C (for condemn) stamped on the other. The juror wiped out one of the letters, leaving the other to show his judgment. These were collected before they were counted, so that the vote of each juror was kept secret. Domitius presided over the counting of the tablets as they were separated into two groups. From where I sat, I could see that one group was about three times higher than the other.

  Domitius announced the results. The vote to condemn was thirty-eight. The vote to absolve was thirteen.

  The defeat was crushing. Even so, Milo had gathered more support from the jury than I expected. Strangely enough, I felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for him. He was responsible for some of the darkest days of my life; he had deliberately separated me from my family and treated me like an animal. Yet the time I had spent in captivity had also made me consider the harsh reality of the exile’s existence, cut off forever from his heartland, from the places of his childhood and the people he loves, from the only life he has known, forbidden ever to return, even in death. I had had a taste of that despondency, at Milo’s hand. Now Milo’s world was at an end. Just as I had almost felt pity for Cicero, I almost felt it for Milo.

  There was an outcry of triumph from the crowd. Expressionless, Milo rose stiffly from his chair and went directly to the closed litter in which he had arrived. Cicero, looking dazed, followed him. In addition to their own bodyguards, Pompey’s soldiers formed a cordon around the litter to insure its safe passage out of the Forum.

  Pompey must be pleased, I thought. After a shaky beginning on the first day of the trial, he had managed to establish order, and order, of a sort, had prevailed to the end. The question of Milo had been settled; Milo would trouble him no more, and neither would Cicero, at least for a while. Now the Great One could turn his attention to the Clodian radicals. What punishment would be appropriate for those who instigated the burning of the Senate House? Rome craved law and order, and Rome was about to get it—in the short term, at least.

  Taverns reopened as soon as the trial was over. The Clodians would drink to celebrate. Milo’s supporters would drink to drown their misery. I decided to stay behind locked doors.

  Over dinner, I revealed to the family what I had discovered the previous night regarding Milo’s responsibility for abducting Eco and me, and Cicero’s knowledge of it. Eco was not surprised. Bethesda and Menenia were outraged. Diana began to cry and left the room.

  We discussed the trial, which had done the job of punishing Milo for us; he was already being penalized to the full extent of the law, and there was nothing more that we could do to him. As for Cicero, Bethesda vowed to put an Egyptian curse on him. I myself was less certain about how to deal with him. Certainly, there could be no more friendly commerce of any kind between our houses ever again. I had come close to making a full break with Cicero in the past; now it was done. But beyond that, it was difficult to see what sort of satisfaction we might obtain against him, at least for the time being.

  We discussed and argued long into the night. The lamps grew dim and the slaves refilled them. We had eaten our fill, but gradually grew hungry again. Bethesda produced another course. We discussed and argued some more. At some point I realized how inexplicably happy I was. I was safe in my home, in the heart of the city, content with my family, finally out of harm’s way. Was everyone else in Rome like myself, heaving a great sigh of relief?

  The world had been turned upside down and given a great rattling shake. Soldiers had been given the run of a Roman court, a man who called himself sole consul was acting suspiciously like a dictator, and Cicero—Cicero!—had fallen apart during the most important speech of his life. These were grave omens, surely more meaningful and menacing than the usual run of omens, those dubious fires and strange cloud formations seen in the sky by professional mystics. But now I felt that the world was at last right side up again, and my feet were finally back on solid ground. The immediate, overwhelming problem of Milo had been taken care of, however messily. Things could only get better.

  Even Bethesda looked especially beautiful that night. Perhaps some of this was the glow of the wine, or even the glow of her warm cooking in my belly. Looking at her in the lamplight made me think of Diana. Where was Diana?

  I would send Davus to go and find her, I thought, but Davus wasn’t in the room either. I would go find her myself.

  I knocked on the wall outside her curtained door. There was no answer. I thought she must be asleep or not in the room at all, but as I pushed the curtain aside there was a shuffling noise. The room was dimly lit by a single lamp. Diana seemed to be in the act of throwing a coverlet off her bed. She slipped back onto the bed and sat against the wall. “Papa, what are you doing here?”

  “Daughter, only a few moments ago you were weeping for all that Eco and I suffered. Are you so unhappy to see me now?”

  “Oh, Papa, it’s not that.”

  “Then what is it, Diana? You’ve seemed so unhappy, ever since I came back. I might almost think you weren’t glad to see me at all.” I said it as a joke, but the look on her face gave me pause. “What’s the matter, Diana? Eco thinks it’s because you want to get married and leave home, or don’t want to get married and leave home …”

  “Oh, Papa!” She turned her face away.

  “Have you at least talked to your mother about it, whatever it is?”

  She shook her head.

  “Diana, I know I’ve been away, and since I came back I’ve been more preoccupied than I should be, but these are not normal times. I hope things will be better now. But your mother is always here, and I know she cares—”

  “Mother would kill me!” Diana whispered hoarsely. “Oh, she’s the last person I can tell!”

  This took me aback. Was the problem really as great as Diana imagined, or was it a trifle that a young girl had blown out of all proportion? As I wondered how to proceed, I walked around her bed and glimpsed the chamber pot. Though I looked away from it almost at once, the dim lamplight happened to fall on it in such a way that I saw its contents in an instant. “Diana! Are you sick? Have you been throwing up?”

  She realized what I had seen and tried, too late, to push the pot out of sight with her foot. At the same time I was startled by another sound behind me and turned to see Davus. How had he entered the room so quietly?

  “Davus, what are you doing here? No one called you. Go away. This doesn’t involve you.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Diana. “It does.”

  “No, Diana—”

  “But it does involve Davus, Papa. It does!”

  Then I realized the obvious. So did Bethesda, I imagine, who stood in the doorway wearing a look that could turn a man to stone.

  33

  I needed a drink.

  More than that, I needed to get away from my house. I could take only so much of Diana weeping, Bethesda stamping her feet, the broken Minerva staring at me. I did not want to overhear the whisper of my slaves saying, “What’s to be done with her?” or “What’s to be done with him?” or “I knew it all along!”

  Where can a man go to forget his cares in the middle of the night?

  I had not set foot in the place the poet Catullus called the Salacious Tavern in almost exactly four years, since the final day of another trial, that of Marcus Caelius. Eco and I found it easily enough, tramping through the warehouse district to the northwest of the Palatine Hill accompanied by his bodyguards (without Davus, of course) until we came to the upright pillar in the shape of a phallus, and the door lit up by a phallus-shaped lamp.

  The place had not changed a bit. It reeked of smoke from cheap lamp oil and the fumes of cheap wine. The general roar was punctuated every now and again by the rattle of dice and the cries of winners and losers. The few women in the place were clearly for sale. Most of the men appeared to be in a good mood. Insofar as the clientele of the Sal
acious Tavern had any interest in politics, they were likely to be Clodian sympathizers.

  While Eco and I looked for a bench to accommodate ourselves and our bodyguards, I overheard several snatches of conversation.

  “Cicero might as well have had his tongue cut out—maybe that’ll be next, if Pompey ever has the guts to make himself dictator and starts handing out some real justice!”

  “The idea of Milo heading off for Massilia, where he’ll stuff himself with mussels and wallow with Gaulish whores—what kind of punishment is that?”

  “Did Antony’s speech make any sense to you at all?”

  “Only a little more than Cicero’s!”

  “I wept, I tell you, wept when his nephew talked about him dying alone and bleeding on the Appian Way. He was a great man—”

  We finally found a place. A serving boy brought us wine at once. The vintage was as foul as the service was quick.

  “Eco, what am I going to do with them?”

  “A good question, Papa.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I think you know how it’s done, Papa.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “Is she absolutely certain about … her condition?”

  “She seems to be. So was Bethesda, after she questioned her.”

  “When did it happen, Papa? The first time, I mean … assuming there was more than one occasion …”

  “Do you remember the day the contio turned into a riot, and Belbo was killed, and the next day you and I decided to merge our households? You brought your bodyguards along with you, and gave me Davus to replace Belbo. Apparently, that very first night he was under my roof—”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Yes! What in Hades are you smiling at?”

  “Am I? Well, it’s just—at least, Davus wasn’t my slave any longer when it happened, technically. Thank the gods for that. I’d given him to you, to be your personal bodyguard.”

  “So you’re saying none of this is your concern?”

  “No, Papa, that’s not what I meant. I’m concerned, of course. But deciding what to do with Davus is entirely up to you.”

  “Thank you very much!”

  The serving boy made a fortuitous appearance to refill our cups.

  “He saved my life that day, you know,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The riot, the massacre in the Forum. When Milo and Caelius escaped dressed up like slaves. I came very close to being killed myself. It was Davus who plucked me out of the crowd. He’s no coward, that’s for sure.”

  “I’ll say. It takes a brave man to fiddle with his master’s daughter right under his roof, and on his first day in the house. What could he have been thinking?”

  “What was he thinking with, you mean. Not with his head! Diana claims it’s not his fault, of course.”

  “I think some of it must be his fault, Papa.”

  “I know what she means, and so do you. She says that she was the one who … initiated the matter.”

  “You make it sound like a legal contract! She may have ‘initiated’ it, but he was the one who should have refused. I told you Diana was starting to have an eye for young men. I told you it was time for her to marry.”

  “An eye for young men …” I nodded. “You’ll have to admit, Davus is just what they like. Big as Hercules. Handsome as Apollo.”

  “And as stupid as an ox. An ox in rut, at that! Where in Hades is that serving boy? Do you feel like doing some gambling, Papa?”

  I had to laugh out loud. “Eco, I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but gambling for months now. I think I’d like to stop gambling for a while!”

  “And just drink!”

  “Exactly! Just drink!”

  The serving boy arrived. We complained that the tavern’s cups were absurdly small. He made a face to show that he had heard this before.

  “So Diana is absolutely certain?” said Eco. His speech was beginning to slur.

  “Yes. I didn’t inquire for the precise details, Eco, but it’s been over three months since the two of them met, and Bethesda says that Diana’s schedule is considerably more reliable than the Roman calendar—”

  “No leap-months!” For some reason Eco found this hilarious. I waited for him to finish cackling.

  “Anyway, it’s all a great mess.”

  “So you mean, all the time Davus was with us on the Appian Way—”

  “He was thinking about Diana, no doubt! Just as you were missing Menenia, and I …”

  “And afterward, when we were abducted, and he was thrown from his horse and then came to his senses and went back to the house—”

  “Yes, Eco. The two of them were under the same roof every day, all day, and can you believe that Bethesda never noticed? Of course, Bethesda was distraught over the two of us, and busy managing Pompey’s guards and trying to keep the household running. Diana was probably her least worry.”

  “Still, how could Bethesda not have smelled something brewing? I think what this means, Papa, is that Diana has proved herself to be more clever and conniving than her mother!”

  “Actually, I think I knew that already. Yes, Diana outwitted Bethesda. She hid her trysts with Davus—”

  “All those days we were gone … and all the days we’ve been back!”

  “Please, Eco, I don’t want to think about it. And she also managed to hide her condition from Bethesda, which was quite a feat. Of course, that couldn’t go on forever. All this time, she’s been growing more and more miserable—”

  “And Davus has been acting like the treasury slave caught with his hand in the coffer … so to speak.”

  “Yes, I could tell he was guilty of something. It’s a terrible betrayal, isn’t it? He was supposed to be guarding me and my family, and instead …”

  “Papa, Davus is a man. And Diana, like it or not, is a woman.”

  “Davus is my slave, and Diana is my daughter!”

  “Meto was a slave, before you adopted him. And Bethesda was a slave, before you set her free and married her.”

  “But Meto was only a little boy, and Bethesda was carrying Diana. What was I to do, have my daughter born a slave?”

  “You could set Davus free. Make him a citizen. Then he could—”

  “Out of the question! Reward him for what he’s done?”

  “Then the only alternative, short of putting him to death, is to sell him, preferably to a new master somewhere far, far away. Or you could sell him to the galleys or mines if you really wanted to punish him; he’s young and strong enough that he’d probably survive a few years of that. Most men would have had him beaten senseless and put in chains the moment they found out, and done something almost as bad if not worse to the daughter involved. In the old days, a good father would have had both parties put to death on the spot and never have blinked an eye—”

  “Eco, stop! Oh, all this smoke is giving me a headache. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Look, isn’t that … ?” I peered through the orange reek of hazy lamplight. “Over there in the corner—it is! Who would have thought it?”

  I got up and walked, not entirely in a straight line, across the room. Sitting alone in the corner was Tiro.

  “Exercising your rights as a freedman to go out drinking and whoring in the middle of the night?” I said. “Surely Cicero wouldn’t approve.”

  Tiro looked up at me bleakly but didn’t speak.

  “The atmosphere in this place can hardly be good for your health,” I said. “And this wine would rot anybody’s stomach. Is there room on that bench for me?”

  “I can’t stop you from sitting wherever you want, citizen.”

  “Tiro, let’s have no hard feelings between you and me.” I put my arm around him.

  “Gordianus, you’re drunk.”

  “And you will be, too, soon enough. Do you come here often?”

  He finally smiled a bit. “Every now and then. Sometimes I just have to get away. And sometimes …” I saw that he was
looking at one of the women for sale.

  “Tiro, you dog. Are you telling me that you have a secret life that Cicero wouldn’t approve of?”

  “Why not? He’s done things behind my back that I don’t approve of, hasn’t he? Gordianus, if I had known at the time, if there had been any way for me to stop it—”

  “No, Tiro, not another word about that. Not tonight! I have too much else on my mind that I’m trying to forget.” I summoned the serving boy to refill Tiro’s cup. “I couldn’t believe your master’s performance today.”

  “He’s not my master any longer. You know that.”

  “Sorry; habit. What in Hades was wrong with him? He seemed so sure of himself last night, so confident. He was pure Cicero. I wanted to strangle him!”

  “When you saw him, yes. But he’s been up and down for days now. Giddy and sure of himself one moment, blind with despair the next. You have no idea how this crisis weighed on him. How many friends deserted him over Milo. How shabbily Pompey and Caesar have been treating him. You know his Achilles’ heel, his digestion; he’s hardly been able to eat a thing for days. He wakes up in the middle of the night with cramps. It’s been a terrible ordeal, a crushing burden. What he allowed Milo to do to you—I know you said not to speak of it, but I have to—that was out of character for him, and you know it. Just as out of character as what happened today. Thank the gods it’s over, at least!”

  “I’ve seen Cicero under pressure, but I’ve never seen any orator fall apart as he did today. What a spectacle.”

  “You sound as though you enjoyed it, Gordianus.”

  “Oddly enough, I actually felt a bit sorry for him. But a great many people appeared to relish it.”

  “That mob! Cicero was right to be afraid of them.”

  “Pompey’s troops were there to keep order.”

  “Oh, really? And would they have protected Cicero, if someone had started throwing stones at him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who knows what secret orders Pompey gave to his men?”

  “I can’t believe—”

  “Pompey was ready to be rid of Milo. He’d just as soon be rid of Cicero, too, if there was an easy way. Would his soldiers have defended Cicero, if it had come to that? Or would they have looked the other way, just for a few moments? Can you think of a more convenient way to get rid of Cicero for good, with no blame attached to the Great One himself? You shake your head, Gordianus, but believe me, Cicero had good reason to be frightened for his life today.”