SPQR III: the sacrilege (9 page)

Since he is now a god, people think that Caius Julius must have been held in reverent awe since earliest youth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At this time he was forty years old, completely undistinguished politically and militarily, and highly regarded only in the popular assemblies, where he was good at currying favor with the mob. In the Senate he was a nobody. He had bribed his way to the supreme pontiff's position and he was renowned only for his extravagance and his questionable morals. Of Caius Julius Caesar two things were generally agreed: He had the biggest debts in history and he had almost certainly been buggered by King Nicomedes of Bithynia.

It was hearing that unbelievably sanctimonious pronouncement from such a source that convulsed the Senate. During all this hilarity Caesar stood like a statue of himself, his face devoid of expression. In later years, I lost a great deal of sleep wondering if he remembered that I was the first who laughed that day.

The meeting broke up with nothing decided. In no time at all, the story was all over the city. For months afterward stage comedies and wall scrawlings referred to Caesar's famous dictum. Anytime conversation flagged or a party seemed to be growing dejected, somebody would draw himself up and intone: "But Caesar's wife must be above suspicion," and everybody would laugh like rabid hyenas.

I walked down the steps of the Curia, mopping the tears from my face with a corner of my toga. No one could ask for better entertainment than this. Hermes came running up to me, and of course I had to explain everything to him. The jabber of the multitude in the Forum grew deafening. Between them, Clodius and Caesar had concocted the most memorable event of the year.

I went to the baths and was swamped by men who had not been there, demanding to know what was going on. I held forth for some time, not neglecting to call for the immediate arrest and trial of Publius Clodius. It was all so congenial that I had to remind myself that I was involved in deadly matters as well.

"I hope there's a trial," said a fellow Senator. "I've wondered for years what it is my wife does at that rite." It turned out that he spoke for a great many highly placed husbands. Others were more fearful of divine wrath.

"That woman Clodia must be involved," said a prominent banker. "She's his sister, and everyone knows that woman will do anything." This had occurred to me as well.

From the baths I went to the Statilian
ludus
, where I had to explain everything all over again to Asklepiodes. He knew little of Caesar and therefore missed the humor of the situation. And he had a Greek's love of mystery cults, so he was mildly scandalized by Clodius's sacrilege.

"Your Italian gods seem to lack the proper subordinates for punishing such transgressors," he said in his superior fashion. "Greek deities would have set the Friendly Ones after him."

I thought of those winged, serpent-haired creatures pursuing Clodius through the alleys of Rome, blood dripping from their eyes and their claws extended to rip flesh.

"It's a great pity," I admitted. "We don't personalize our gods in quite the way you Greeks do, and give them minions and servants. Some of our gods don't even have images."

"That is a very poor sort of religious practice, if you ask me," Asklepiodes maintained. "And the way you elect and appoint your priests, as if they were just ordinary officials. And most disgraceful is the way you appoint your augurs and give them a rule book for taking omens. Where is the art of divination without the divine afflatus?"

"That is because we are a rational and dignified people, and we are not about to conduct public affairs according to the ravings of a demented ecstatic. In times of crisis, I admit, we consult a sibyl, but I never heard that it did any real good."

"Because you Romans lack a true understanding of divine nature," he said stoutly.

"Nor have I ever heard of it doing Greeks any good. Even when their prophesies proved to be correct, the supplicant usually misinterprets it and comes to disaster."

Asklepiodes looked down his nose at me, a considerable feat since he was shorter. "It is always the occasional tale of irony that makes its way into legend. When approached in the proper spirit, sibylline oracles are usually quite reliable."

"I'll take your word for it," I told him.

"Now, on to less exalted matters. I fear I must bill you for one pig. A small one, originally intended for the gladiators' dinner."

My heart sank. "Then it was truly poison?"

"Healthy pigs are seldom struck dead by natural causes or the wrath of the gods. I fed it the pastries you gave me, and it was dead within an hour."

"An hour? That long? It must have been a weak poison."

"Not necessarily. Those instantaneous poisons one always hears about are fictitious. I have never encountered one that took less than an hour to kill a grown man, and most of them take much longer, accompanied by agonizing pains and convulsions. Somebody wanted you dead, my friend."

"Any idea what sort of poison?" I asked.

"I spoke before of the difficulty of this. I dissected the animal afterward and found no signs of hemorrhage. It did not go into violent convulsions. The poison might have been an extract of certain mushrooms, but it might as easily have been a decoction of Egyptian cobra venom which had been reduced and concentrated, then mixed with a stabilizing agent to form a powder."

"Cobra venom? That's a bit exotic. The boy had just visited a peasant herb-woman in the Forum. Do they traffic in such things?"

"They most certainly know mushrooms. Do not be fooled by appearances, Decius. She may never have attended lectures by learned physicians, but a peasant herbalist will have an intimate knowledge of the local plants and their properties. For all I know, there may be an herb or a root native to some local valley that produces a poison deadlier than any known to the school of Hippocrates."

"Or he might have obtained it elsewhere," I said.

"I marvel as always at your discernment in these matters. Most men are inclined to accept the quickest or most convenient answer to everything."

"It's what makes me so good at my work," I admitted. "There is a faculty in me that refuses to accept face value. If an explanation is easy or obvious, I get suspicious. If someone wants me to believe something, I suspect an ulterior motive."

"It must be a useful faculty indeed. In kings it becomes overdeveloped and they see assassins everywhere and overindulge themselves in executions."

"It's a good one for a man on the service of the Senate and People of Rome," I maintained. "And sometimes the lethal designs of enemies are real, as witness the unfortunate pig. How much for the animal, by the way?"

"Twelve sesterces."

"Twelve? That seems a bit steep for a small pig. Couldn't you have gone ahead and fed it to the gladiators? Surely the poison affected only the vital organs and could not have permeated the flesh."

"It is always inadvisable to take liberties with the diet of professional killers. Twelve sesterces, Decius."

I took out my purse and counted out the coins. "Now,as I see it, the boy may have been consulting the woman in her fortune-telling capacity, as she claimed. When I took his hand, I noticed that he was wearing a suicide ring. My slave Hermes followed him home and he vomited twice on the way. These seem to me to be signs of a very young and inexperienced conspirator, unused to murder. Well, he will be sorry he picked me for his maiden effort."

"And the fortune-teller?" Asklepiodes inquired.

"He probably wanted to confer about favorable signs or some such. I rather doubt he confided to her the nature of his mission, but a boy nervous enough to wear a poison ring would want to be sure that the gods favored that day for a momentous enterprise, or perhaps he wanted confirmation that he has a long life ahead of him."

"Yet he was a stranger to you. Who do you suspect set him upon you?"

"I have a short list this time, but more names may be added as I investigate further. Clodius, of course, but I think he would rather do me in with his own hand."

"Even Publius Clodius may have attained a certain discretion and maturity with the advance of years," Asklepiodes said. "I hear him spoken of as a promising figure in city politics."

"Oh, that. It just means he's the most successful criminal now operating."

"I also hear your good friend Titus Milo spoken of in the same fashion," he added.

"That's just because they're rivals. But Milo is my friend!" Sometimes I just could not understand Greeks.

"Now, you asked me to view the corpse of Aemilius Capito," the physician reminded me.

"Oh, right. I almost forgot. Being the would-be victim of a murderer makes you forget other people's problems in that area. What did you make of it?"

"Most odd," Asklepiodes said.

"How so?" My attention sharpened. "I thought it seemed rather ordinary, apart from the two-blow style of dispatching."

"That was the oddity. I persuaded the undertaker's men to allow me to examine the wounds closely. The persuasion will cost you another ten sesterces, by the way."

"Ten sesterces just to handle a corpse?" I said. "The necrophiles who lurk around the amphitheaters only pay five."

"Please!" he said, offended. "I did not 'handle' the corpse. That would be unclean. I examined closely. And one would expect the price to be higher for a Senator than for some poor, condemned wretch."

"It had better be worth it," I said, counting out yet more coins.

"It was most intriguing. The cut, or rather,
stab
in the throat was delivered with the most precise expertise. The blade was double-edged, no more than an inch wide, not a
sica
or a
pugio
, but rather an extremely sharp, flat-ground blade with a short point section." He gestured at the armory hanging on his walls. "I have nothing quite like it among my collection, but I think it must be rather like the sticking knife used to slaughter animals."

"That is odd," I admitted. "I know of nobody in Rome who kills like that. Perhaps that's why he knocked poor old Mamercus on the head first--to set him up for the artistic death-blow."

"Now I come to the oddest part," Asklepiodes said, relishing this slow process of revelation. "Come to it quickly," I said.

"When I examined the depression on the brow, I had no difficulty in identifying the weapon. It was a hammer, one with a round, flat face approximately one and one-half inches in diameter. The circular depression lay just above the nose, and it was twice as deep on the lower or nose side as on the upper side, toward the hairline."

"You speak as if this unevenness of depth were fraught with significance," I commented.

"And so it is. It means that the hammer blow was not delivered first, to stun the victim. Had that been the case, the depression would have been deeper toward the hairline. No, the murderer struck Capito with the hammer after he lay on the floor. He stood behind the body, about a foot from the top of the head, and struck downward at a rather sharp angle."

"
After
he was already down!" I said. "Whatever could have been his purpose? Capito was as good as dead when the knife blow was struck."

"Decidedly. A severed left carotid brings unconsciousness within a very few seconds, and death only a few seconds after that. There is no saving the victim. The hammer blow must have been for another purpose." He wandered over to his window and gazed down at the men practicing in the yard below. "It reminded me of something, and I think it was a thing I saw many years ago, but I cannot call it to mind. I do not have your facility for summoning up odd facts and putting them together."

I might have known. He probably knew something vital, but he couldn't remember what it was. I decided to be patient. My near-poisoning concerned me far more than the unfortunate Capito.

"Well, should you remember, please send for me."

"I shall. And should there be more of these murders, please feel free to consult me." He patted my shoulder as I left his quarters. "If I know you, there well be more of them."

Chapter VI

The next morning, at the house of Celer, I eyed the callers most closely. Clodius was not there, nor was Nero. Neither was Caesar, but he might have been busy divorcing his wife. I saw my kinsman Creticus and went to pay my respects. He wasn't much of a figure as the senior members of my family went, but he had once stood up to Pompey and came out on his feet, for which I respected him greatly.

"Decius, good to see you," he said. "Odd business the other night, wasn't it?" Nobody in Rome was talking about anything else.

"What does Felicia tell you?" I asked. Felicia was the daughter of Creticus.

"She just takes a smug attitude and claims she can say nothing while hinting she knows things we men can only dream about. What's your wife say?"

"I'm not married, Uncle," I said. He wasn't Father's brother, but I had always called him that. He was actually a second cousin, or perhaps it was a third.

"Lucky you. Well, my money is on Clodia as the instigator, and Felicia and Clodia are as close as two women can be, but I can't get a thing out of the girl. I've told her husband to put a stop to it, but the boy dotes on her and won't say a word to offend her."

The boy was the younger Crassus, and it was true. His love for Felicia was the talk of Rome. They had been united in a typical political marriage, but some people are just meant for each other. When she died he built her the most splendid tomb ever seen in Rome.

"When it comes to Clodia," I said, "it is often best not to inquire too closely."

"Jove has spoken," he vowed. Our conversation was interrupted when Celer beckoned for me to join him. I went over, and he excused the two of us from a knot of magistrates and foreign ambassadors. We walked not merely to a private corner of the atrium but all the way out into the peristylium, where we could be sure even the slaves wouldn't overhear.

"Decius," he said, "I'm taking you off all political duties. I have a job of investigation to be done, and I know you're the best for that. Your father acts like it's unworthy, but he takes a real pride in your accomplishments. When I broached my problem at the family council last night, he recommended you as the one to appoint."

"I am flattered," I said. I had not been informed that a family council had been called, but I didn't amount too much in those days.

"Here is the task: You know what everybody knows about the profanation of the rites of the Good Goddess by my odious little brother-in-law. Today the college of the pontifexes meets to officially declare the charge of sacrilege. That means nothing. All they can do is turn it over to the courts. A trial will be--messy. I would rather not see it happen. As for Clodius, it would not bother me greatly if the little swine were to die on the cross. But I don't want my wife involved. Do you understand?"

This was discomforting. "I understand, sir. But I cannot guarantee that I will be able to--"

He grabbed me by the upper arm, painfully. "Decius, find out what happened. Find out who was responsible, compile evidence, but
keep Clodia out of it
! Do you understand?"

"Perfectly, sir," I said. It was not the first time I had been told to suppress evidence. It was the first time the demand had come from my family, though. It seemed odd, since they should have known better than anybody else that I couldn't do it. It was not that I was especially honest, or that I did not want to act as demanded. It was just that some mischievous
genius
in me made me ferret out the truth and make it public. It was another part of that faculty Asklepiodes and I had discussed. One thing I could be sure of. My father had no illusions about me. If he had recommended me for the job, he understood what might come of it.

The truth of the matter was that this caused me no great crisis of conscience. The profanation of the Bona Dea ceremonies seemed ludicrous rather than shocking. I did not classify mere scandal as crime, whatever the pontifexes might think. Besides, she was not really one of the official state deities. When someone was trying to poison me, the indignation of some highborn Roman ladies seemed a small matter, indeed.

"What is to be my official capacity in all this?" I asked him.

"Oh, say that you're acting on my behalf as Consul-elect."

"I can't do that! Granted you'll win the election, but if you assume the authority so far ahead of time, people will regard it as high-handed. They'll vote against you out of spite."

"You're not going to be making speeches to the Centuriate Assembly," he said testily. "You're going to be questioning in the houses of Senators, discreetly and in privacy. They know how these things work."

"Where should I start?"

"You're the investigator. I leave it up to you."

I took a deep breath. "I will have to question Clodia."

He glared from beneath his bristly eyebrows. "If you must," he all but muttered. "Just keep my admonitions in mind."

"Well," I said, "I'll be about it." I dreaded confronting Clodia, but the chance of doing Clodius a bad turn was too good to miss.

I didn't question Clodia first, though. I left Celer's house and made for the Forum, with Hermes dogging my steps. The day was blustery and the law courts had moved indoors. I found Cicero in the Basilica Porcia, the oldest of our permanent law courts. He had been listening to a defense conducted by one of his students and readily stepped aside with me into one of the aisles. I briefly sketched my commission from Celer and asked Cicero's opinion, wanting to be sure of my legal ground.

"Since no official investigator has been named, you may do what you like as an interested citizen. Celer, of course, has no authority, and I suspect that he is motivated primarily by personal interests."

"Keeping Clodia out of it, you mean?"

"Not that any involvement of hers matters greatly," he added rather hastily. "If she had anything to do with it, the pontifexes may reprimand her, but no more.The sacrilege was committed by Clodius, who as a man was forbidden to look upon the rites. If formal charges are brought, they will be against him alone."

"That sets my mind at ease, a little," I said.

"Has Celer indicated his preference for a colleague?" Cicero asked, changing the subject rather abruptly. He was a politician, and power interested him far more than ritual matters.

"He asked me to broach the matter to Mamercus Capito," I told him.

"Now disqualified."

"Decidedly. The main contender now seems to be Lucius Afranius," I said. "Did I just hear you groan, sir?"

"I groan because I am not a philosopher," Cicero said, "and only a philosopher could look upon Lucius Afranius without groaning. The man is a nonentity."

"I think that's what Celer likes about him," I admitted.

"These times call for firm direction from our Consuls. I shudder to think of Afranius in such a position."

"It will essentially be a one-man administration, and Celer will be the man," I said. "You must admit that his withdrawal of opposition to the Pompeian demands was a wise political move, however much he may have disliked it."

Cicero shook his head. "No, no, I mean no disrespect to your kinsman, but he is too firm an adherent of the aristocratic party. It was foolish to oppose the triumph, that is obvious. But the settlements for the demobilized veterans are another matter entirely. This involves land, and lowborn men getting control of it, a thing that horrifies the extreme aristocrats. And it means a landed power base for Pompey, whom the aristocrats hate. Believe me, Decius, by this time next year Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer will be firmly aligned with the extreme end of the aristocratic party."

It did not escape me that Cicero spoke of the "extreme" aristocrats. He was an adherent of that party himself, despite the fact that many of its leaders openly snubbed him. Cicero had an ideal of a Republic led by the "best" men, who would be drawn from the prosperous and propertied classes of free citizens, who would educated, patriotic and concerned with the welfare of the state. It was a fine ideal, but Plato had had such a concept and had not had conspicuous success in convincing his fellow Greeks to adopt it as a governing principle.

I would never claim that I had more than a fraction of Cicero's intellectual capacity, for he had the finest mind I have encountered in my long lifetime. But he had a certain blindness, an almost naive belief in the inherent capacity of aristocrats to govern.

I was born an aristocrat, and I had no illusions about my class. Aristocrats are persons who possess privilege by virtue of having inherited land. They prefer rule by the very worst of aristocrats to that by the most virtuous of commoners. They detested Pompey, not because he was a conqueror of the Alexandrine mold who might overthrow the Republic, but because he was not an aristocrat, and he led an army of the Marian type that was not composed of men of property.

At the time of which I write, my whole class was engaged in a form of mass suicide by means of political stupidity. Some rejected our best men for reasons of birth, while others, like Caesar and Clodius, curried favor with the worst elements of Roman society. Most wanted a return to their nostalgic image of what they thought the ancient Republic to have been: a place of unbelievable virtue where an aristocratic rural gentry lorded it over the peasants. What they got was our present system: a monarchy masquerading as a "purified" Republic.

Cicero was right about Celer, though. Within a year he was back among the most extreme aristocrats, opposing the land settlements for Pompey's veterans.

"It is not surprising that they dislike the idea of Pompey having a powerful private army settled near Rome," I said. "I find the idea rather upsetting myself."

"I am not so easily terrified," Cicero said. "With the Asian menace settled, there are no glorious campaigns in the offing. He will have no interest in the sort of desultory combat that Hibrida is bungling so terribly in Macedonia."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that, for now, Pompey must stay home and devote himself to politics. The very concept is ludicrous, Pompey is a political dunce. He held most of his military commands without holding any of the offices required by the constitution. He was made Consul by force alone. He has no experience of civil administration or the real politics of the Senate. The man's never even served as quaestor! You'll be a more effective Senator than Pompey, and you've had less than a week's experience as Senator."

It was an odd sort of compliment, if compliment it was. At least I was now fairly certain that I would not be hauled into court for snooping.

I now had some people to call upon. I decided to begin at the very site of the enormity. I went to the house of Caius Julius Caesar, whose wife, we were given to believe, must be above suspicion. The house of the
Pontifex Maximus
was a sizable mansion, one of the few residences in the Forum, adjacent to the palace of the Vestals.

The gatekeeper let me in and conducted me through the atrium, where the household slaves went about in the gingerly fashion that bespoke uncertainty in their lives. Doubtless they were wondering which of them would stay with the master and which would accompany the divorced mistress. I noticed that the male statues still wore palls. The sun had broken through the clouds and I was conducted to the enclosed garden, where the roof-tiles still dripped musically. In a corner stood a small statue of Priapus, covered by a scarlet cloth. In front, the cloth hung from the god's outsized phallus like a ludicrous flag.