A Point of Law (19 page)

We found places at a table crowded by neighbors and were greeted noisily. Strabo and Lucia bustled over personally to fill our cups.

“Welcome, Senator, my lady!” Strabo cried. “This is even better than the usual election season, isn’t it?”

“For us, anyway,” Lucia chimed in. “Too bad about this Fulvius
business.” She didn’t seem greatly saddened by my predicament. Not with the business her inn was doing that night.

“Pay it no heed,” Strabo advised me. “It will all blow over in a few days.”

“In a few days the elections will be over, and I can’t get elected with this hanging over me.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

“It’s all the Via Sacrans’s doing,” Lucia asserted. “Ever since they lost Clodius, they’ve been looking to do us a bad turn. They know you’re our favorite senator.”

The Via Sacrans and the Suburans, though fellow Romans, regard each other the way the Spartans and Athenians used to. The rivalry was usually good-natured: shouting at each other in the Circus, where the Suburans supported the Greens and the Via Sacrans the Blues, and the annual fight over the head of the October Horse. But sometimes it erupted into a minor civil war, with scores killed in days of running street fights.

“Does anyone know anything about this man Fulvius?” Julia asked the table at large. It was a long table, and it held a fairly representative sampling of the neighborhood: shopkeepers, idlers, a thief, a Jewish marble merchant, a craftsman or two, even another senator.

This last was a man named Spurius Gavius Albinus, a man of a totally undistinguished Suburan family. Each generation they managed to get one son elected to a quaestorship and thence to a seat in the Senate. He then never held higher office, but membership in the Senate was for life, barring expulsion by the censors. Thus these Gavii retained their status as a senatorial family. The great majority of senators at the time were such men. Only a small group of senatorial families ever held the praetorship, and a smaller group yet, my own included, were consuls.

“Word has it,” a shopkeeper said, “that he was being lined up for next year’s tribuneship elections.”

“Where does this word originate?” Julia asked.

The man looked puzzled. “I don’t know. It’s just around. Fulvius was going to make a big name for himself by taking on the Metelli.”

“I heard,” said the thief, “that he had plans to make Pompey’s life miserable.”

“Pompey?” I said. “The wretch didn’t lack ambition.”

“Way I heard it,” the thief went on, “he figured he had better blood in him than Pompey.”

“I knew his father slightly,” said the marble merchant. “I travel to Baiae two or three times a year on business.” He was a fully Hellenized Jew, meaning that his dress, hair, beard, and adornments were all Greek, and he spoke that language with cultured fluency. He went by the name Philippus. I presume he chose the nane himself, and it was a clever one, being one of the few Roman names of Greek origin.

“He was Fulvius Flaccus, wasn’t he?” I inquired.

“Publius Fulvius Flaccus Bambalio,” Philippus said, giving it the full treatment. “He and his partner donated a fine Temple of Neptune to the city of Baiae. I furnished it inside and out with beautiful, sea green marble.”

“His partner being Sextus Manilius?” I asked.

“No. It was Caius Octavius, the one who was praetor some years ago.”

I almost knocked over my cup, but rescued it in time. “Octavius? I’d no idea the man had holdings in Baiae!”

“Oh, yes!” said Senator Gavius. “Octavius served as duumvir one year out of every three. He was one of the town’s main benefactors.” He added, with a smile of satisfaction, “I go to Baiae often.”

Probably because you never do anything for the state, I thought. I might have said something indiscreet, but Julia jumped in at that moment.

“We had heard that Fulvius Flaccus and Sextus Manilius are close friends.”

“They are,” Gavius said. “Manilius is another of the regular
duumviri
of Baiae. There’s a little group of families down there who take
the highest offices in turn.” He refilled his cup and grinned at me. “Just like here.”

“Manilius?” said a copper founder named Glabrio. “Is he any relation to the young tribune?”

“Look!” Julia cried happily, stomping on my foot. “Here’s a hero we know back from the war!” It was fortuitous timing. Even without having my foot stomped on, I knew we didn’t want to expose this Gordian knot of intrigue before our neighbors.

Entering the courtyard was a family of my clients. In their lead was old Burrus, a veteran of my legion in Spain. Crowned with laurel, in military tunic and belt, was his son Lucius, whom I had last seen in Gaul a couple of years earlier. He had a hand on the shoulder of a nephew who wore one of the Gallic torques that were showing up everywhere. His mother was swathed in what appeared to be about ten yards of vividly checked and striped cloth.

“Patron! Domina!” Lucius said, catching sight of us. I took his hands and saw that he wore silver bracelets on both wrists. Among Roman men, only soldiers wear bracelets, and these are decorations for valor. It was rare for a man so young to wear two of them.

“I see you’ve been busy.” I poured a cup and handed it to him. “Still in the first cohort?”

“I’m an
optio
now, in the
antesignani
of the first cohort.”

Old Burrus beamed with pride, and he had reason to. The term is obsolete now, but in those days the
antesignani
, “those who fight before the standards,” were the cream of the legions, the bravest of the brave. To be an
optio
over such men was a great honor.

“Amazing! You’ll be a centurion in no time!”

“Next year,” he said confidently, “when the
primus pilus
retires, then my centurion becomes First Spear, and I step into his place.”

This popped my eyes. “That means you’ll be a senior centurion without ever having served in the junior centurionate!”

“Caesar knows how to reward the best men,” his father said, holding up one of the braceleted wrists for general admiration. “He’d
be wearing the
phalerae
if he’d had the rank when he earned these.” These formidable decorations, nine massive silver disks worn on a harness, were awarded only to centurions. “As it is, he’ll be the youngest man ever to be senior centurion in the Tenth.”

“This we must hear about,” I said. We made room for them all at the table and spent the next hour or so hearing Lucius Burrus’s war stories. And to think that, just a few years before, I had saved this young hero from being executed for murdering his own centurion! It just goes to show that good deeds really are rewarded. Sometimes, anyway.

When the questioning eased up, Lucius turned to me and said, “Father tells me that you and your whole family are under attack.”

I gave him a brief rendition of events, the parts that had become public knowledge.

“Pompey’s probably behind it,” he stated flatly.

“Why do you say that?”

“He isn’t supporting us the way he was when the war started. He’s jealous of Caesar’s success and glory.”

“I don’t doubt that at all, but I don’t see him taking part in something like this. It’s too subtle. Pompey’s a man of direct action. Besides, how is this supposed to push us into Pompey’s camp?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but it’s him. You’ll find out.” There was no shaking his assurance.

He was getting to be like Julia: Caesar could do no wrong, and Caesar’s rivals and enemies were not to be trusted. All of Caesar’s soldiers thought and spoke this way. I have never understood why men are so loyal to a man who is getting them killed for his own profit and glory, but they do. To be truthful, there is a great deal about human behavior that I fail to understand. Maybe philosophers know, but I am too old to take up philosophy now. Besides, I suspect that most philosophers are frauds and fools.

Later, Julia and I wandered over to the little Temple of Mercury that stood just behind our house.

“There’s another name that’s turned up too many times,” I said to her as we walked, “Octavius.”

“He was just a common political nonentity,” she said. “He made it as high as praetor, but he never achieved any real distinction. I think he died last year or the year before. But you’re right. A name that comes up twice when you are investigating a conspiracy has to be suspicious. Just this morning we were talking with Callista about his daughter and her marriage to Caius Marcellus—”

“That’s it!” I exclaimed, just as we turned the corner next to the little temple. Its altar fire still burned high, attended by a couple of sleepy-looking priests. They glanced our way at the sound of my cry.

“Keep your voice down. That’s what?”

“What Octavia said that was important and I couldn’t remember. She said she hadn’t seen her brother since he was an infant.”

“Yes, so?”

“Earlier this morning I talked with Cato. He says that, a few months ago, the younger Caius Octavius gave the funeral eulogy for his grandmother, Julia, the sister of Caesar. Is Octavia saying that she didn’t attend
her own grandmother’s
funeral?”

“Decius! Sometimes you really are inspired! I attended that funeral. She was my aunt, after all, and I was there with all the Julia Caesares. I heard the boy speak, and it was excellently done for one so young. It was while you were still on Cyprus.”

“And was Octavia there?”

“She was. So why is she lying about it now? Why does she want to pretend she has nothing to do with her brother?”

“I intend to find out.”

T
HE NIGHT HAD BEEN A LONG ONE
, but I woke early and fully alert for a change. Time was getting short, and I had none of it to waste. I rousted Hermes, and Julia and the slaves got me presentable and out the door before full daylight broke over the City.

“To the Archive again, Hermes,” I said.

“Again?”

“Yes. Today, it’s the Land Registry.”

This was located on the ground floor with several of its rooms dug back into the side of the Capitoline Hill. Since nothing was more important than ownership of landed property, these documents got the most stringent protection from fire.

In charge of this department was an old freedman from Athens named Polyneices. We found him at his desk in the gloomy interior of the huge building. He was white as a grub from spending his days entombed
within the sacred soil beneath the Capitol. The only illumination came from oil lamps that burned in locked lanterns with lenses of inch-thick glass. The lamps had to be lighted outside, then locked before being carried within. To kindle a light within these rooms meant crucifixion for a slave, beheading for a free man.

“This is most irregular,” Polyneices said, not quite as peevishly as Androcles, whose offices were two floors above.

“What constitutes regularity in this place?” I asked him. “I just need to find the title history of a piece of City real estate. It’s a tedious job, I’ll grant you that, but I’ll make it worth your while. Don’t bother trying to tell me you’re unbribable. You are a Greek, after all.”

“Do I look like I need money?” he asked. “I’ve already paid for my funeral, and I’ve bought a very decent tomb for my family out on the Via Tiburtina.”

“Everybody needs money!” Hermes protested.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “However, I shall be praetor next year, and very few men never need a favor, if not for themselves, then for some family member. How about it, Polyneices? I am sure you are all very respectable people, but surely you have the odd scapegrace, the inevitable ne’er-do-well, among your kin? My own father has bailed me out of the lockup more than once in my young and foolish days.”

He thought, stroking his jaw in that odd Greek fashion. “Well, I do have a grandson who causes me to lose sleep. He’s caused his mother endless worry, and he’s getting old enough to get into serious trouble.”

“If he’s arrested in the coming year, have his mother call on me and remind me that he’s your grandson. I’ll let him off for a first offense, as long as it doesn’t involve bloodshed or robbing a temple.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t do anything that serious, Senator. Just youthful foolishness. Let me see what I can do for you.” He disappeared into the gloom of the underground chambers like one of Pluto’s minions.

“Will you really let him off?” Hermes wanted to know.

“Surely. If it
is
just youthful foolishness, the scare will do him a
great deal of good. If he’s a born offender, he’ll be back and I won’t spare him a second time.”

A short while later, Polyneices emerged with a deed engraved on plates of copper. Some old Roman families used these copper plates as further insurance against fire, water, hungry insects, and simple age. Lead plates were sometimes used for this purpose, but lead melts at a low temperature, making it a false economy. Copper is more expensive, but it lasts forever. I carried the plates to the doorway, where enough light made its way in for me to read them.

The deeds were for the house lived in by the late Fulvius and owned by Caius Claudius Marcellus. But Marcellus had owned it only for the last four years. Before that, the owner was Caius Octavius.

“How was this property transferred from Octavius to Marcellus?” I asked Polyneices. “Was it purchased? A gift?”

“I have no idea, Senator. The law requires a record of transfer of ownership, but it does not require disclosure of the manner of transfer. Caius Octavius states that this property now belongs to Marcellus and he appends his seal. That is it. I would not want to be the one to ask such a man to furnish particulars.”

“True,” I said. “Aristocrats are touchy when vulgar subjects like money are brought up. They love to acquire it, but they hate to talk about it. I don’t suppose you might have records of holdings in Baiae here?”

“Are you joking, Senator? Deeds pertaining to the City and surrounding countryside give us enough trouble. We need a new
tabularium
as it is. No, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Baiae if you want to see those deeds.” A malicious gleam came into his eye. “You plan to be consul in a few years don’t you, Senator? You could make your name immortal by giving us a new archive. You could call it the
Tabularia Caecilia Metella
. The land just above this building is wide open. Caesar is going to give us a huge new basilica, you know. It will be called the Basilica Julia, and it will be the largest building in Rome. But your
tabularium
will be on higher ground and will look more impressive.”