SPQR III: the sacrilege (2 page)

"I'll go home and change, and then I'll call on Celer. With your permission, I shall take my leave."

"Just a minute," Father said. "There was something I was going to give you. What was it? Oh, yes." He signaled and a slave presented himself. "In the cabinet in the atrium," Father said, "in the drawer below the death masks, you will find a package. Fetch it." The slave ran off and was back within seconds. "Take it," Father told me.

Mystified, I took the parcel, wrapped in the finest paper. I stripped off the wrapping and found a rolled-up garment. I shook it out and found that it was a white tunic, severely plain except for the broad purple stripe running from neck to hem. The tunic was the sort worn by every Roman male, but the purple stripe could be worn only by a Senator.

"I gave you your first sword, so I thought I might as well give you this," Father said. "Hortalus and I could think of no pressing reason to keep you out, so we enrolled you among the Senators last month."

To my mortification, my eyes began to film with tears. Father rescued me from disgrace in his usual fashion.

"Don't let it go to your head. Any fool can be a Senator. You'll find that most of your fellow Senators are fools or villains, or both. Now attend me well." He held up an admonitory finger. "You are to sit well to the back of the Senate chamber. You are not to make speeches until you have achieved some distinction. You are always to vote with the family, and you are to raise your voice only to cheer for a point made by our family or one of our adherents. Above all, you are to stay out of trouble, Clodius or no Clodius. Now, you have my leave to go." He returned his attention to his scrolls.

I left. Father could steal the sunlight from a summer day, but that was just his manner. I was happy with my new tunic. I had already ordered several made in anticipation of admission to the Senate, but it meant something to receive this one from my father. His stern instructions were no more that I had expected. Barbarians think that every Roman Senator is a veritable god, but we know better. With or without a purple stripe, I was still a mere son. I made my way through the noontime bustle of the city and soon stood before the familiar street door of my house. Before I could even rap on its surface, the door flew open and there stood my elderly manservant, Cato, and his equally aged wife, Cassandra.

"Welcome home, Senator!" he cried, causing every head in the street to rotate. Cassandra blubbered as if she'd just received news of my death. Nobody can beat a house slave for sentimentality. It struck me that this was the first time I had been addressed with my new title, and I decided that I liked the sound of it.

I embraced Cassandra and she wept with redoubled fury. "I am so ashamed, master! That boy came by with your horse and belongings less than an hour ago, and I haven't had time to set the house to rights. It's disgraceful."

"I'm sure it is immaculate," I said, knowing they always kept my house so. They were too old to do anything else. "The horse isn't mine. Where is it?"

"I told the boy to leave it at the freedman's stable down the street."

"Good," I said. The stable hired out litters and slaves to carry them, but there were stalls for a few horses and mules. I would go there later and arrange for a rider to take the beast back to Ostia. "The rest of my belongings should arrive sometime soon. I left them with a freighter." I caught sight of someone hanging back in the shadows to the rear of the atrium, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. "Who is this?" I asked.

"Your father sent him a few days ago," Cato answered. "He thought you'd be needing a body servant to dog your heels, now you're a Senator. He's from the house of your uncle Lucius."

I sighed. In my family, we did not just go out and buy slaves in the market. That would have been unthinkably vulgar. We only employed slaves born within the family. This sounds terribly well-bred, but it meant severe disadvantages. Instead of going out and choosing a slave who had just the combination of skills and qualities you wanted, you got whatever some relative wanted to fob off on you. I knew that before long I would discover why Uncle Lucius wanted to be rid of this one.

"Come here, boy, let's have a look at you." The lad complied. He appeared to be about sixteen, of moderate growth and wiry. His face was narrow and foxy, with a long, thin nose that provided far too little distance between his eyes, which were an alarming shade of green. His dense, curly hair grew to a sharp peak over his brow. His whole look was shifty and villainous, with a touch of surly arrogance. I liked him instantly. "Name?"

"Hermes, master."

I do not know why we name our slaves for the gods, kings and heroes. It must be odd to achieve true greatness and know that someday your name will be borne by thousands of slaves.

"Well, Hermes, I am your new owner, and you'll find that I am a good one, within reason. I never use the whip without reason. On the other hand, when there is reason I wield it very well indeed. Does that sound reasonable?"

"Very reasonable, sir," he assured me with utmost sincerity.

"Good. As your first duty in my service, you may attend me at the baths. Fetch my bath articles, a pair of sandals and one of my better togas. I call on a very distinguished man this afternoon." The boy was about to rush off, but I stopped him. "Stay. Better let me pick out my toga."

With my clucking slaves dogging my steps, I went to my bedchamber to scan my wardrobe. Cassandra had aired the room and placed fresh flowers in the vases. I was touched by this. At this time of year, to get fresh flowers on such short notice they must have bribed the slaves of my next-door neighbor, who had a greenhouse.

I picked out my second-best toga and a pair of sandals. It was a mild winter, so I did not bother with foot wrappings. They always look undignified, and after the chilly climate of Gaul, I felt no need of them.

"I may return late," I told my slaves. "If anyone calls, I shall be at the baths, the Forum, and then the house of Metellus Celer. But nobody knows I am in town yet, so there should be no visitors." I walked as I spoke, and as I walked my aged slaves patted me, dusted me off and all but swept the ground before my feet.

"All will be ready for your return, master," Cato assured me.

"I'll have dinner ready, should none of your friends invite you home," Cassandra said. I knew this would not last. After a few days they would revert to their usual scolding, complaining selves.

I went out into the street with Hermes behind me, carrying the toga, towels, vials of oil and a
strigil
of fine Campanian bronze work, the gift of a friend in younger, more carefree days. Its handle was decorated with lewd images which the imp admired as we walked.

"Are you familiar with the city?" I asked him.

"I've never lived anywhere else," Hermes said.

"Good. I shall probably have more use for you as a messenger than as a body servant." Rome is a chaotic city, and it is difficult to find anything except the Capitol, the Forums and the major temples and Circuses unless you have had long experience of the city.

"Did my uncle Lucius employ you thus?" I asked.

"No, but I ran away a lot and I learned all about the city that way."

I stopped and looked at his forehead. It was free even of pimples, no F branded there.

"Why were you not marked as
fugitivus
?" I demanded.

He had the hypocritical grace to look abashed. "Well, I was very young, and I always came back on my own."

"Turn around," I ordered him. I tugged the neck opening of his tunic wider and looked down his back. Not a mark. I released him and continued walking. "Uncle Lucius is a lenient man. Run away from me once, and your back will have more stripes than an augur's robe. Twice, and I'll collar you. Three times, and you'll have a great big F burned right between your squinty little eyes. Is that understood?"

"Oh, yes, master. But from what I hear, you are a gentleman who likes to get out a lot. If I attend you, I'll be all over town and there'll be no need to run away, will there?"

"I never thought of that," I admitted.

We went to the old bathhouse near the Temple of Saturn, just off the Forum. At a stall on the street I had myself barbered and tonsored, then went inside. The baths of those days were far more modest than those you see now, but this was one of the largest such establishments in Rome, and its interior was cavernous.

I stripped and left Hermes to guard my clothes in the anteroom while I went within. I braced myself, gritted my teeth and plunged into the cold pool. There are many theories about the health-giving properties of cold water, and many Stoic types use only the cold pool, but these theories are nonsense. The reason that we always start with the cold plunge is that Romans distrust anything that affords pleasure, which we think is decadent and weakening. So we suffer first in the cold bath so we can feel all right about luxuriating in hot water afterward.

After my brief gesture to virtue, I hastened, shivering, to the
caldarium
and wallowed in the warmth. I saw a good many old acquaintances and had to make up many lies about my dangerous, savage adventures in Gaul. After I had bored them sufficiently, I summoned Hermes and he rubbed me with scented oil; then I went to the exercise yard, where I rolled around in the wrestlers' pit until I was coated with sand. Then Hermes wielded the
strigil
to scrape off sand, oil and a good deal of skin. This tedious but necessary step is another of the sufferings that make us feel better about bathing.

That done, I went down to the steam rooms. I saw a pack of bearded Stoics in the cold pool trying to converse normally as if their teeth weren't chattering. They weren't the worst, though. Marcus Procius Cato, in his unending quest to become the most virtuous man in Rome, bathed all year round in the Tiber, because that is what he fancied our ancestors did. I don't think it ever occurred to him that the river didn't carry nearly as much sewage in the days of the founding fathers.

When I walked from the bath, I felt quite literally a new man. For the tunic of a soldier I had exchanged the toga of the citizen and the tunic of the Senator. After the heavy
caligae
, wearing street sandals felt like being barefoot. I sent Hermes home with my military tunic and boots and made my way into the Forum. Rome has many Forums, but this was
the
Forum, the Forum Romanum, which always had been, was then, is now and forever shall be the center of Roman life. So much a part of our existence is it that we never bother with the Romanum part of the title unless it becomes necessary to distinguish it from the Forum Boarium or one of the others. It is just the Forum, which is to say, it is the center of the world.

So true is this that, to prove it, we have the Golden Milestone smack in the center (all right, a little off-center, but not by much), from which all distances in the world are measured. You won't find anything like that in some barbarian potentate's main civic center, where they dispense justice, execute felons and sell slaves right alongside the vegetables. It felt good to be at the center of the world again.

I strode across the uneven pavement into the marvelous jumble of monuments, many of them erected to men and events long forgotten. Among the stalls around the periphery I noted with distaste many fortune-tellers. These witches were periodically expelled from the city by aediles and Censors, but they always trickled back. It was bad enough that they influenced political matters with their predictions, but they also ran profitable sidelines in poisons and abortions. Doubtless my father was too busy purging the Senate of his favorite enemies, but he would get to these soon.

The Forum was thronged with citizens, and foreigners gaped at the splendid temples and public buildings to be seen in every direction. The weather was fine, so courts were being held outdoors. Trials are a favorite spectator sport for Romans, and every last street-sweeper fancies himself a connoisseur of the finer points of law. They cheer a clever defense and hurl decaying vegetables at a clumsy one.

As at the bath, I saw many people I knew and smugly accepted their congratulations on my new, exalted status. I received numerous dinner invitations, some of which I accepted, consoled a young kinsman who had been elected quaestor only to be assigned to the treasury, and generally comported myself as if I had achieved some importance. My only sorrow was that no meeting of the Senate had been called for that day, so I could not attend my first session as a full member and strut among my new peers.

When even this new amusement palled, I betook myself to the house of Metellus Celer. He was one of the most distinguished men of the day, and I was unsure what duties he could require of me in his pursuit of the Consulship, which the senior members of my family regarded as all but their birthright. The province he had just governed was one ordinarily assigned to ex-Consuls, but so prestigious was Metellus Celer that it had been assigned to him upon his leaving the office of praetor, at which time he had taken me along to get out of Rome, where I was, as usual, in trouble.

I presented myself at the gate of his town house and was shown to the atrium, where a good many callers idled about, some of them Senators of great seniority. Among them was the last man I expected to see: Caius Julius Caesar. He had held a praetorship the previous year and had been assigned the province of Further Spain to govern. So why was he still in Rome? The extravagance of Caesar's debts was the wonder of the Roman world, and the only hope he had of extricating himself from them was to get to Spain and start looting. He caught my eye and came toward me with hand outstretched, just as if he were standing for office.

"Decius Caecilius, how good to see you back in Rome! And please accept my congratulations for your enrollment among the Senators." He was followed by a band of his toadies, who smiled at me as if my elevation were their own.

"I thank you, Caius Julius," I said. "But I am surprised to see you here. I thought surely you would be in Spain by now."