The Corpus Conundrum

by Albert A. Bell

  “There you are, Gaius.” She sounded as light-hearted as I had ever heard her this close to the anniversary of the loss of her daughter, almost giddy. “I thought you and Tacitus were going to take a bath.”

  “We wanted to check something in the library first. We’ll bathe in a moment.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’ll want to use the bath right now, dear.”

  “Why not?”

  “Apollodoros is bathing, and some of our girls are in there with him.”

  “You know how I feel about that.”

  She patted my arm. “Oh, I think it’s all right in this case, dear. The girls insisted on it. If I were younger, I might be in there with them.”

  “Mother! Why are you women acting like this over him?”

  “Acting like what, my lord?” Naomi asked.

  “Like ... like ...”

  “Like mares in heat around a stallion,” Tacitus put in.

  Mother’s laugh rang around the atrium, something I hadn’t heard since Vesuvius erupted, and she didn’t even blush. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But he’s quite charming. One might even say alluring.”

  “I’m afraid his charm—or his allure—is lost on me.” But not on Tacitus, I wanted to add, and in a way that would shock you.

  My mother didn’t even seem to hear me. “And when he sings—oh, when he sings!” Her face seemed to glow.

  “Sings?”

  “Yes, songs his mother taught him, from India. They have the most amazing effect on you. You’re drawn to them—and to him—almost in spite of yourself.”

  “He sounds like one of the Sirens in the Odyssey,” Tacitus said.

  “Very much like that.” Mother sighed deeply. The faint sound of singing—a man’s voice with women accompanying him—floated toward us. Mother glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the bath, a longing, far-away gaze in her eyes.

  I took her by the shoulders and turned her to face me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, dear. Never better.” She took my cheeks in her hands. “Now, why don’t you and Tacitus ride into the village and use the public bath? I think ours is going to be occupied for a while. By the time you get back, dinner will be ready. That is, if I can coax a few of the girls out of there.”

  Wonderful! I thought. I have to ride two miles round trip to bathe while my own bath is turned into a ... a brothel for some stranger. And my mother approves! Naomi, her servant, seemed to have better sense at this point.

  While Tacitus and two of our servants prepared for the ride I showed Hylas the passage about Aristeas in Herodotus and told him to look in the Natural History for any mention of the man, and of Apollodoros while he was at it.

  “And Tacitus wants to purchase that copy of Catullus you’re making. Whatever price you settle on, the money will be yours.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” He barely suppressed his delight.

  “Tacitus will give you instructions about additional drawings.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Then make a copy for me,” I concluded, “but without pictures.”

  While the servants were preparing horses for our ride to Laurentum I asked Tacitus to accompany me down to the beach. “As long as we’re considering things out of the ordinary,” I said, “I want to see what you think of this.”

  The rock was still where I had put it to mark the end of the footprints. I explained to Tacitus how I had followed a man up to that point. “He must have jumped from here.”

  Tacitus stood by the rock and gauged the distance to the edge of the woods. “That would be a long jump indeed. You say you saw the fellow until he went behind that outcropping of rock?”

  “Yes. I lost sight of him for a moment or two. By the time I got around the rock, he was gone, and the footprints ended just where I put that stone.”

  “Well, let’s give it a try. The fellow was running? How fast?”

  “It was dark. I just know he was running.”

  Tacitus backed up, got a running start, and leaped when he got to the stone marker. He landed at least a full pace short of the grass at the edge of the woods. “Why don’t you try it?”

  I started farther back than Tacitus had but my jump still left me well short.

  Tacitus paced a long stride, beyond where I landed, to the grass, “Either one of us would have left footprints. But I don’t claim to be the most athletic sort. A man in better condition than me might have made it to the grass. You came closer.”

  “But it took all the effort I could muster.” I looked at the trees hanging over the sand. “Could he have jumped up and grabbed a branch?”

  Tacitus, the taller of us, reached up and shook his head. “He’d have to grow wings.”

  When we got back to the terrace Tranio was waiting for us. “My lord, the duovirs are here.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They won’t say, my lord. Just that they want to talk to you. They’re in the atrium.”

  “I hope this doesn’t take long,” Tacitus said. “I’d really like to get to that bath.”

  “The ride doesn’t take very long.” But I had a bad feeling about why the duovirs were making this call.

  The older of the two men was examining the frescos in the atrium when we entered. He was a sturdy man, handsome except for the pock-marks from some childhood disease on his complexion. He wore his authority as unobtrusively as he wore his toga. I estimated him to be in his late fifties, with a full head of dark hair that did not show much gray yet. His son, a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties, stood by the door, with his hands behind his back, like a servant awaiting his master’s order. His thick hair was light brown. Even as he looked at me, his right eye seemed to be looking at something to one side of me. The strongest hint of a familial resemblance between them was that they both looked singularly unhappy.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” I said. “What brings you to my door?”

  “Good day to you, Gaius Pliny,” the older man replied. “We’ve not met formally. I am Publius Licinius Scaevola, duovir of Laurentum. This is my son and fellow duovir, Lucius Licinius Strabo.”

  So the son’s cognomen was not randomly chosen. Many cognomina, whatever their original meaning, have come to be traditional in some families. Scaevola might not be left-handed, as his name implied, but his son definitely was cross-eyed.

  “Good morning, duovir. I am Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus.” I didn’t have any legal authority, but at least I could outnumber him with my names.

  Scaevola nodded, but only barely. “I know your uncle never liked to waste time, so I’ll come right to the point. We have heard that you found a dead man on your estate yesterday.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “The source of our information doesn’t matter. As magistrates it is our duty to know what’s happening around here.”

  “This isn’t Laurentum, Publius Scaevola. I’m not even sure my estate falls within your jurisdiction. And, in any case, you’re mistaken. There’s nobody dead on my property.”

  Scaevola motioned for his son to step forward. As he did so, Strabo brought his hands from behind his back and held up a rolled-up piece of papyrus. Scaevola took it and unrolled it so I could see it. It was one of the posters I had had Hylas make and put up in Laurentum.

  “Who is this man?” Scaevola asked. “And why are you offering a reward for him? You put this up in my town. That is what makes this my business.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know that either. He was trespassing on my land yesterday, but now he’s gone.”

  “That’s not what we heard,” Strabo said. “We were told he was lying dead in your stable.”

  “Who told you that?” I am very nervous about spies in my household, apparently with good reason.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Scaevola said. “If there is a dead man on your property, we need to make an investigation.”

  “As I tol
d you, nobody is dead here. If he was dead, I would know, wouldn’t I? I found him trespassing yesterday, but now he’s gone. You may search the place, if you like.”

  “Did he steal anything? Is that why you’re offering this reward?”

  “No, I just wanted to know who he was and what he was doing on my land.” And now I wanted to know why the duovirs were so interested in Nobody.

  V

  Laurentum is an easy ride from my house. The road isn’t paved, but it is hard-packed and drains well. On any other day this pleasant little jaunt would have dispelled my anxiety about anything that might be worrying me.

  Not today, however. Since we found Aristeas in the woods yesterday, nothing that had happened made any sense. I needed to puzzle things out in my head, and I often do that while I’m riding. Tacitus kept up a stream of light conversation. I let him chatter without really listening to him, any more than I would listen to a brook babbling over the rocks on its way.

  Even if we had arrived at the right conclusion about Apollodoros’ lack of understanding of time, we hadn’t explained Aristeas’ disappearance. Tacitus had shown me how a man could have gotten out of the stable, but it depended on so many factors converging at just the right moment, like intersecting roads. Aristeas had to awaken from whatever lifeless-but-not-dead state he was in as the guard left his post for even the briefest time. He had to be aware of the rope hanging outside the door of the stall. Could he have seen it when he was being carried in? The guard had to look in the door when he returned, just long enough for Aristeas to sneak out of the paddock from his hiding place behind the cart. Just because Tacitus had done it that way, I couldn’t be sure he had duplicated Aristeas’ method of escape.

  Even if he had, that didn’t explain how the blanket Aristeas had been wrapped in was left lying undisturbed.

  Or how the man’s image had gotten onto the blanket.

  Or that damn raven on the roof.

  Now the passage in Herodotus made all of this even more difficult to understand. Seven hundred years ago a man named Aristeas appeared to be dead, yet vanished from a locked room. Then he disappeared and reappeared, seemingly at will, at different times and places. Above all, the reference to a raven unnerved me. They’re common enough birds, but the one on the roof of my stable this morning, and the timing of its departure, was uncanny.

  For once I wished I could believe in coincidence. Then I could dismiss the raven, even if I couldn’t explain much of the rest of this puzzle. Not yet, anyway.

  We emerged from the woods just before reaching the town of Laurentum, if ‘town’ isn’t too grandiose a word for the place. It’s really just a market village for the surrounding farms and estates, not a port town like Ostia. According to some of our historians, it was once a grand enough place to be called the capital of Latium. Today it’s a run-down village, with remains of old buildings on its edges covered by shrubbery and trees. Even the aqueduct that runs down here from Ostia is so decrepit that it leaks like a woman crying over a lost love.

  The village’s primary amenities are the bakery, the three baths and the three taverns surrounding the baths. It boasts three baths because a number of the neighboring villas do not have a steady enough water supply to maintain their own baths. In the early afternoon the village is a busy place as people come in to bathe. To save on wood, my own household members use these public baths when I’m not at the villa.

  One bath and two of the taverns are owned by the Licinius clan. The crown of the village is its cheese shop, one of the best in all of Italy. As a child, it was always a consolation to me, when we left the villa to return to Rome, that we would stop there and stock up on cheese. The shopkeeper was generous to me with small bits of his wares. Mother still makes sure we take a supply back to Rome with us.

  Like a bath in any small town, this one was reserved for the women in the morning. The men took it over shortly after midday. The dressing room was combined with the frigidarium, and there were no separate warm and hot rooms, but the place was bright and well-maintained and the crowd small. When I come down here for just a day or two, I often bathe in the village to save firing up my furnace for that short time. But then it is my choice. Today bathing in Laurentum was not my choice, and I resented that. At least most of the crowd was gone.

  “There’s your notice,” Tacitus said as we walked up to the building. The papyrus with Aristeas’ picture was nailed up just outside the door.

  “I told Hylas to have it put up in a place where everyone was sure to see it.”

  “And the duovirs did.” Tacitus stood before the notice, studying it from several angles. “Your scribe is quite the artist, whether he’s using his imagination or drawing a real face.”

  “I know. I’m going to have him do a fresco on one of the walls when I redecorate the triclinium this summer.”

  “He’ll do an excellent job, I suspect. And you won’t have to hire someone from outside your household. That will save you some money.”

  “Oh, I’ll pay him. Not as much as if were hiring someone else, but I’ll pay him. It’s only fair.”

  “What does fairness have to do with slaves?” Tacitus asked.

  I couldn’t answer that question without starting a symposium on the subject. If life were fair, would there be any slaves? Pour the wine and let the conversation begin.

  We paid our fee and went into the combined dressing room and cold room, which was decorated with blue tile on the floor and frescoes of sea creatures that made me feel like I was already in the water. There were only a few sets of clothes in the row of niches around the wall.

  “Hardly any more company than if we were bathing at your house,” Tacitus said as we undressed and handed our tunics to our servants.

  “Good. I’m in no mood to dally.” I washed off at the large bowl of water on its pedestal in the center of the room. “I want to get back before Apollodoros casts his spell over every woman in my household.”

  “He’s off to a good start, to judge from your mother’s reaction. She had a look in her eyes that I’ve seen on Julia’s face after she watches one of her favorite actors—as though she’s waking from a dream.”

  Tacitus has told me many times how much he admires my mother’s solid, old-fashioned character. To him, she embodies the virtues of a matron of the old Republic, and she deserves that sort of praise. I suppose someday I’ll have to put on her tombstone the time-worn phrase, “She worked wool.” In her case it will be true. She does domestic work right along with the servant women.

  “Since my uncle’s death,”I said, lowering my voice, “I’ve grown concerned about how her moods change. She’s usually melancholy, but now and then she becomes euphoric. I’m afraid she’s susceptible to unwholesome influences.”

  “Unwholesome? How so?”

  “Bizarre religious cults that prey on the emotions of women and slaves. She seems to think they can give her some purpose in life again. The death of my uncle made her mood even darker, but I realize now that she has never recovered from the loss of her daughter all those years ago.”

  Tacitus arched his eyebrows. “That’s a long time to grieve and brood. Do you think Julia will be affected that way?”

  “For women some wounds never heal.”

  “And on top of that they bleed every month.”

  “Just another reminder of the weakness of the sex. I think my mother might have let herself die years ago, if she had not had me to raise. Have I ever told you that, when we were fleeing from Vesuvius, she told me to leave her and save myself?”

  “You’ve never told me much about those days.”

  “I’m only now getting to the point that I can bear to think about it.”

  We got our vials of perfumed olive oil and strigls from our servants and went into the room that combined the tepidarium and caldarium. Since the furnace had been heating the place all day, it was as warm as one could wish. We had the place to ourselves, except for one man in the pool and one being massaged by a slave in
the far corner.

  Tacitus lowered himself into the pool and sat on the underwater bench running around the edge so that the water, which was unusually deep, came up to his chin. Considering how badly the aqueduct leaked, I was surprised the bath had this much water in it. He cupped his hands and scooped up water to throw over his head.

  Leaning back, he said, “Do you think Julia will spend the rest of her life brooding about the child she lost? You didn’t really answer my question, and I am greatly concerned about her.”

  Since I’m shorter than Tacitus I would have drowned if I had sat on the bench with the water this deep, so I stood near him and slowly bobbed up and down, luxuriating in the warmth of the water. “It seems to make a difference if a woman has someone she can talk to about her sadness, especially if the other woman has had the same experience. Did Julia’s mother ever lose a child?”

  “No one has mentioned it.”

  “Naomi has been a great comfort to my mother. She’s been the friend I cannot be to her, and they share that tragedy of losing a child.”

  Tacitus took a deep breath, stuck his head under the water, and came up shaking himself like a dog. “When did they learn this about one another?”

  “Only recently, I gather. Naomi and her son have been in our household since they were taken captive at the end of the Jewish rebellion, but Naomi did laundry and other tasks in our house in Rome that didn’t bring her into much contact with my mother. She didn’t travel with us when we went to any of our other houses, and Mother has always preferred to spend as much time here in Laurentum as possible. Then, about two years ago, Mother says, she found Naomi sitting in the garden one night, crying. It was the anniversary of the loss of her daughter at birth some years earlier. Mother sat and held her and cried with her. They’ve been inseparable since.”

  “Well, it’s good that they can console one another.”

  “I guess so. It worries me, though, that Naomi has imparted some of her Jewish superstitions to Mother. During the last Saturnalia Mother gave Naomi a nine-branched candlestick and allowed her to celebrate some barbaric festival associated with the thing. I do worry about the woman’s increasing sway over Mother.”