by Mike Ashley
Quintilian suddenly raised both the sword above his head with both hands. “Close your eyes!” he commanded. “All of you, close your eyes. Now you are blind – only for the moment, fortunately. Now you must go to some place in your house, with family, servants and slaves all about, and hide a sword. Make sure no one sees you, even though you’re blind and cannot tell who might be watching. Where will you put it? Under your bed, as Blasus would have it? And will the slave who makes up your bed not see it? And remember, at some future time you’re going to have to come to this hiding place, wherever it is, and remove the weapon, in stealth and silence and unobserved. But are you unobserved? Can you be sure?”
Quintilian lowered the sword. I made a slight noise as I reached for a fresh tablet to continue taking down his words, and he looked crossly at me. Then he returned his gaze to the jurors. “Let us look at the story of this crime as presented by my good friend Blasus Parenas,” he told them. “He would have it that young Rufus rose from his bed in the middle of the night and retrieved the gladius from whatever secret location he had placed it, unobserved. Then he crept down the corridor and opened the door to his father’s room. Had his father been awake and cried, ‘Why Rufus, what are you doing with that sword?’ what would he have replied, do you suppose?
“And then perhaps the strangest act of all. Blind Rufus goes to his father’s side and, with one unerring thrust, drives the point of the sword cleanly between the second and third rib and into his father’s heart. There were no hesitation marks on the body, no secondary cuts, just the one clean thrust. How many among you, sighted men, trained soldiers many of you, could have done as well? Indeed this Rufus is a paragon.”
Quintilian lowered his voice dramatically and leaned forward. “No, I was mistaken, there was one thing stranger – so strange indeed as to have been impossible. The bloody hand prints – the hand prints that were meant to convince all of my clients guilt, to secure his conviction before this court – could not have been created as we are supposed to believe they were created.
“The noble Blasus has left a picture in our minds of Rufus, fresh from murdering his father, staggering back to his room and leaving a bloody hand print here, and a bloody hand print there, seven in all, as the unwitting signature of his guilt. But this was a corridor that Rufus was intimately familiar with; he walked it daily. He had no need to feel his way along.” Quintilian pointed a lecturing finger at the jurors. “Consider: would a man who, although blind, could thrust a sword cleanly between two ribs and into the heart have to feel his way along a familiar corridor?
“But, unlikely as it might be, I suppose it is possible. And I promised you a sight of the impossible. Well, you shall have it. Each of those prints on the corridor wall, as you have heard them described, as I myself have seen them, is from a hand freshly dipped in blood. It is a complete, whole, and damning print. But it does not damn Rufus Abracius. It is impossible for young Rufus to have made those prints. Blood does not behave that way.”
Quintilian paused and looked over his audience. “Many of you are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, with the behaviour of fresh blood. It would not stay on the hand to be impressed, time after time, to form a detailed image. The first one” – he pressed his hand against an imaginary wall – “would be clear. And perhaps the second. But by the third” – again his hand went up and pressed the air, and the jurors watched carefully – “there would be less blood, and the print would be less distinct. And by the fourth, and fifth, and sixth, the print would diminish and diminish and diminish, until by the seventh it would be scarcely visible at all.”
He lowered his hand. “No, my friends, those prints were made by someone who was unfamiliar with the action of blood. Someone who wanted Rufus to get the blame for her acts.” He turned to face the widow Lucilla. “Yes, madam, I speak of you. For you murdered your own husband, and contrived for his son – his poor blind son – to get the blame. No one else could have, and no one else had the motive. Who helped you? Who procured the sword? Was it that handsome centurion who sits by your side? Has he been your lover while you were married to Marcus Vexianus Abracius, a tiresome old man twenty years your senior?”
The centurion leaped to his feet, his face red, and clutched the hilt of his sword. Then he looked around and gulped and sat back down.
“Your motive, madam? Your stepson told me without knowing he did. When your husband dies you get only the widow’s portion, and Rufus gets the rest – unless Rufus is found guilty of his father’s murder and exiled or executed. Then he cannot inherit, and you get it all. So you had a double scheme all along: murder the father and blame the son.”
Lucilla stared stolidly at him across the rows of spectators and said nothing.
“And the sword, madam. Was he really killed with that sword? Or was it picked as a man’s weapon, one that would not cause anyone to think of you? Did you kill him with a knife first? I rather think you did: a long, slender knife. And then you thrust the sword in the gaping wound; enlarging it so you could get enough blood to make those damning hand prints. And they are damning, madam, they truly are. For they are the prints of a small hand – the hand of Rufus, or the hand of Lucilla. And, as they were made on purpose to point to Rufus, we must assume they were made by Lucilla. What do you say, madam?”
She said nothing.
Quintilian turned back to the jurors. “It is not my task here to prove this lady’s guilt, only to establish my client’s innocence. And I believe I have done that.”
And the voting bore him out. When the ballots were removed from the jar and counted, there were forty-six for innocent and only five for guilty.
The next day Titus came by to congratulate Quintilian and to see to his fee. “Rufus will pay you when the estate is settled,” he told him. “He has evicted that woman, but hasn’t decided whether to prosecute her or not. Apparently the centurion, a young man from the northern provinces, was indeed her lover, although he has admitted nothing.”
“I assumed as much,” Quintilian said.
“How did you figure it out?”
“Yes,” I added, “how?”
“Once I knew the lady was guilty, the pieces fell easily into place,” he told us.
“And how did you know that?” Titus asked.
“The hand prints were of her hand,” Quintilian said. “When I looked closely at them I saw a slight curve in the print of the thumb. The lady had a scar on her thumb that matched the curve.”
“You did not mention that at the trial.”
“Of course not. Jurors don’t like technical evidence, they will disagree with it as a matter of course. What they are swayed by is oratory: fine words strung together in telling sentences. That’s what I teach, not peering at walls!”
“Oh,” Titus said.
“You are the master,” I told him, “you really are.”
“You may write this case up,” Quintilian told me. “I can use it as an example in my text book.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“But remember to stress the importance of the rhetoric,” he said. “Not those little deductive details. They are not important.”
“Of course, sir,” I agreed.
A Payment to the Gods
Rosemary Rowe
In Classical Whodunnits, I was pleased to introduce the character of Libertus the Pavement-Maker in the story “Mosaic”. Since then Rosemary Rowe has developed the character in a series of novels – The Germanicus Mosaic (1999), A Pattern of Blood (2000) and Murder in the Forum (2001). So I’m even more pleased to introduce a new Libertus short story set in Glevum (Gloucester) at the end of the second century AD.
Rosemary Rowe is the maiden name of the author Rosemary Aitken, a highly qualified academic who has written over a dozen bestselling textbooks on English language and communication. There’s some rather subtle communication that takes place in the following story.
“Why! Libertus the pavement-maker! Come in! Come in!” My patron, Marcus Aurelius Septim
us greeted me with much assumed surprise – as if I had not in fact dropped what I was doing in my mosaic workshop and scuttled half-way across Glevum to be here at his express command. He turned to the oiled and well fed citizen reclining on the couch beside him. “Why, this is the very fellow I was telling you about. Get up, Libertus . . .” this because I had dropped to one knee before him, as custom demanded . . . “You know Graupius Lividius, perhaps?”
I did not know Lividius, though I had heard of him. Rich, much travelled and famously superstitious, he was said to be a generous patron of the temple (indeed, all his daughters had been dedicated to temple service from birth) and was reputed to offer a personal sacrifice in every town he entered. Men joked that he was afraid of offending the gods, for fear of losing the considerable fortune he had amassed exporting his fine fleeces all over the Empire. Perhaps he did owe his success to divine intervention. Certainly, “the luck of Lividius” had become a local byword, and one look at his stolid, well fed face was enough to suggest that – though he might possess a certain market cunning – he had not become wealthy through the power of his intellect.
“I have not had that honour,” I muttered, preparing to drop to the tiled pavement again. I am no longer a young man, and all this formal courtesy is hard on aging knees, but I was grateful to Marcus all the same. It was clear now why he had summoned me. If he had been speaking of me to Lividius, it could only be to recommend my services, and for the sake of gaining a rich commission I would have done more than bob up and down a few times on a hard surface.
But I was spared even that necessity. Graupus Lividius stretched out a restraining hand. “No, no, citizen, do not kneel to me, I was warned by a rune-reader once that undeserved flattery from a stranger would augur ill-luck.”
Marcus met my eyes across the table. That rune-reader knew his business, the look said. One day or another his prediction would assuredly come true – and even if it did not, Lividius would attribute this to his own vigilance. I wondered how many sesterces that little piece of advice had cost him.
“Graupius Lividius wishes to commission a pavement,” Marcus told me. “He has received good news, and this will fulfil a promise to the gods.”
“Good news indeed,” Lividius said, eagerly. “The answer to years of prayers, petitions and sacrifices. Monnia, my wife, has given me a son. After two marriages, five daughters – at last a son.”
I nodded. “Good news indeed.”
It was. Every citizen hoped for a son to carry on the family name, and inherit his father’s wealth. A daughter (if she had not been first given as a temple slave!) of course might have inherited, but a woman will always be the legal ward of her husband or of someone in authority, and where great estates were concerned that is always a liability: it inevitably occasions disputes – in which case there is a lawsuit and half the fortune ends up in the official coffers. Many son-less citizens legally adopt a male heir, specifically to avoid such difficulties. My pavement at least would be in honour of a genuine blessing. “When did this auspicious event take place?”
Lividius put down the wine goblet he had been cradling, and beamed, proudly. “I received word of it three days ago. I was returning from Rome, and messengers were sent to greet me. I have ridden on ahead of the party, and shall arrive home at my country house tonight.”
Again I glanced at Marcus. A man journeying to Rome might be away for months. I wondered whether the gods (and Monnia) had after all been jesting with Lividius. Marcus, though, was shaking his head discreetly, and Lividius’s next words disabused me.
“I have been away more than three moons already. I was sorry to leave my wife at such a time, but the Emperor wanted fleeces, and of course I could not deny him. I thought to be back before the birth took place, but it was not to be. Perhaps her calculations were astray.”
I must have a suspicious mind. I was beginning to wonder how long Lividius and his wife had been married, and if – after all – it might turn out to be some other man’s child he was fostering, but again his words surprised me. “We had hoped, you know, before this – last year, when we were first married. But she fell and lost the child. She was very ill herself. This time, I was determined to take good care of her. I have lost two wives in childbirth before. So she had her own cousin to attend her – more than a midwife, a sort of female medica – right from the start, as soon as ever we knew she was with child again. And I had the city wise-women bathe her stomach in a decoction of sacred herbs every night, right until the birth, to ensure the desired outcome.”
He stopped, as though his very words might bring ill-luck, and emptied the few drops in his goblet into the Vestal fire, as if to propitiate the fates. “And, the gods be praised, it all worked splendidly. She was brought to bed perhaps five days ago. My brother sent a letter to inform me of the event – since, of course, Monnia has never learned to write. A lusty child he said – active in spite of all the swaddling – and bawling its lungs out when he saw it. Of course the omens were always good.” He leaned forward conspiratorially, “I had augurers attend us every night, before we attempted to achieve conception, to decide which was the most auspicious moment.”
This unexpected picture of Lividius’s married life brought a smile to Marcus’s lips, but I had spent ten years in servitude, and I knew how to disguise unseemly amusement. However, the recital had put to rest any doubts I might have had. I sent up a mental apology to the unknown Monnia. “You must be anxious to see your son,” I said.
He smiled again, but this time there was anxiety in the darting eyes. “It was important that I should arrange this pavement first. I vowed it to the temple. The priest himself suggested it. He was reading the entrails of a sacrifice I made – before I went to Rome – and he told me then that, if it was a boy, I must make a due and ample sacrifice, before I ever took the child up. Otherwise there would be much unhappiness, he said. He suggested 1,000 sesterces, a sacrificial lamb and a small decorative pavement for the temple. About so big . . .” he gestured with his hands.
I nodded. Before he “took up the child” literally, Lividius meant: the simple civic ceremony where a father seeing his child for the first time, “took it up” from the floor in front of witnesses – usually a priest – and by so doing acknowledged it as his. This priest, obviously, had seen an opportunity to gain something for his deity in the process. And, of course, rather a pleasant roast dinner into the bargain. The meat from sacrifical animals is often distributed to the poor on public occasions, but at more private ceremonies it is the sacerdotus who usually consumes it – on behalf of the god, naturally. “I should be honoured to accept the commission,” I said, as gravely as I could.
A price must be agreed (of course) under Roman law, to make the contract binding, and Lividius’s offer almost made me whistle. I accepted it with unseemly haste, and the bargain was formally concluded. It seemed to lift a load from Lividius’s mind – and (I don’t mind admitting) from mine also. The sum involved would keep me in candles and oil for many moons to come.
“Do you have a motif in mind? For the mosaic?” I asked.
Lividius looked at me blankly. “Motif? I . . . I don’t know, citizen. Whatever you think appropriate.”
Arranging for the pavement had been a priority, clearly, and once he had done that the details of the design were unimportant to him. On the other hand, they were of the utmost moment to me. If my choice displeased him, he might disown the whole contract.
“Some symbol of your household,” I pleaded, “Personal to yourself? Or to your wife?”
It was Marcus who came unexpectedly to my aid. “Lividius has asked me to escort him home, to act as witness to the ‘taking up’.” So that was why Lividius had called on him! It made sense. As the Provincial Governor’s personal representative, my patron was one of the most senior magistrates in the country, and in that capacity often acted as celebrant for the imperial religion in civic matters. For a small fee of course. And Marcus had taken the opportunity to put in
a word on my behalf.
He did it again. “We shall be travelling in my official carriage,” Marcus went on. “If you wished to accompany us, you could act as witness to the ceremony – and at the same time look for inspiration. Something in the villa, I am sure, will strike your artist’s eye.”
Rather to my surprise, Lividius accepted the idea – almost with relief. “It would seem a most suitable arrangement. If you have nothing more pressing to do this afternoon, citizen?”
I forbore to mention that any plans that I might have had for the afternoon – such as literally minding my own business – had already been superseded when Marcus sent for me. But this was a very lucrative commission. I murmured my agreement, and in a very short space of time found myself sitting between them in a cramped official carriage, trotting southwards from the city, with a pair of slaves in a cart behind, and a couple of Marcus’s guard as outriders. Lividius’s own servant had been sent on ahead to warn the household of their master’s approach.
They were waiting to greet him as we arrived – the whole household of slaves lined up in the entrance as we turned off from the lane. The gatekeeper half-prostrated himself as he opened the gate, and a pair of page-boys ran before us strewing rose petals in our path, while the waiting servants set up a chorus of “Welcome, welcome, the genus paterfamilias.”
This was, of course, no more than a simple statement of Roman religious “truth”. The master of the household was the “genus” of his own hearth, and a statue of him was always included among the household gods. Yet the slaves knew their man. The new father’s face flushed with pleasure and he began to look more and more like a paterfamilias as we neared the front door. One could almost see the man expanding with self-importance. That would be worth a few quadrans in gifts to the servants later.
