The Venus Throw (36 page)

“If ever there was a case which proved the sad necessity for courts such as this one, this is that case. If ever there was a man who fully deserved the condemnation of this court, Marcus Caelius is that man.” So Atratinus concluded.

I turned to Bethesda and asked what she thought. “Rather too young for my taste,” she said. “But a pleasant voice.”

The freedman Publius Clodius spoke next. His speech dealt with the first three charges against Caelius. Where Atratinus had shown a kind of prim distaste at having to pollute himself with cataloguing Caelius’s crimes, Clodius attacked with the relish of a man wielding a red-hot poker. He did not hesitate to make crude jabs and thrusts, but he also pulled back from time to time, confident in his weapon’s power to inflict damage even from a distance. Paroxysms of disgust were punctuated with abrupt full stops, during which, standing stock-still and emotionless, Clodius would deliver some of his most acid comments, eliciting gasps and laughter from the crowd. It was a technically dazzling speech.

The virtues or vices of Caelius’s character might ultimately be matters of opinion, he conceded, especially in a time when so many Romans had become sadly confused about such things, but the outrages committed against the Alexandrian envoys were simple matters of fact. A hundred of the most respected men in Egypt had come to Rome to petition the Senate. As ambassadors, they carried the protection of the gods and the state. Yet they had been met with unremitting violence, intimidation, fire and ultimately murder. Word of this scandal had spread from the Pillars of Hercules to the borders of Parthia, undermining Rome’s prestige with her subjects and allies and inflaming her already precarious relations with the volatile kingdom of Egypt.

The places and dates of these attacks were well documented. The prosecution would produce witnesses who would swear that in each instance—at Neapolis, at Puteoli, and at Palla’s estate—Marcus Caelius had been seen in the vicinity shortly before the attack, in the company of known assassins. Further, as other witnesses would attest, Caelius had been heard shamelessly bragging in public about his
part in the massacres. What sort of man was so imprudent as to boast of engineering such atrocities? Clearly, a man with the depraved character of Marcus Caelius.

Clodius proceeded to give a vivid account of each attack, piling on gory details, painting tableaus of pity and terror, invoking the shades of the unavenged dead.

Why, he asked, had Marcus Caelius perpetrated such violence? The reason was obvious: for financial gain. A man like Marcus Caelius, from a humble but respectable family, could hardly engage in the high living he was famous for without incurring massive debts. Witnesses would be called to document his reckless spending habits. If Caelius wished to dispute these witnesses, and if he had nothing to hide, let him open his private account books for the court. Was he willing to do that? If not, why not? Because, Clodius alleged, those account books would reveal the payments Caelius had received to mount his campaign of terror against the Alexandrian envoys. To finance his own disgusting pleasures, Caelius had sold out the good name of the whole Roman people. Clodius’s indignation came to an appropriately thunderous climax that had the crowd stamping their feet with appreciation. He returned to the bench mopping sweat from his forehead like a boxer.

I turned to Bethesda and raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

“Everybody blows that freedmen try harder,” she said. “But all that blustering and waving of arms only makes me nervous.”

“I noticed you fidgeting. Afraid for your precious Marcus Caelius?”

“ ‘Oratory is all very well when there are no facts to go on,’ ” she said. I looked at her amazed, as I always am when she unexpectedly quotes some old Roman proverb. It’s natural of course that she should pick up such things from me and from going to trials, but there’s something jarring about hearing them repeated with an Egyptian accent.
“And so far,” she said, “they’ve said nothing about the death of Dio, nor about any attempt to poison Clodia.”

“I suspect that will come next.”

Lucius Herennius Balbus mounted the Rostra to conclude for the prosecution. If Atratinus had played outraged youth, Herennius was the stem, admonishing uncle, castigating Caelius’s character from an older, wiser, but no less scandalized perspective. He began and ended his speech by reciting the litany of Caelius’s vices. In between, he dealt with the death of Dio and the “bare escape” of a certain Roman lady who had the misfortune to know more about Caelius’s crimes than was healthy for her.

That lady, he said, would testify about a Joan which she had made to Caelius, ostensibly to put on games in his hometown for the sake of his political career—when in fact no such games had taken place. The money she lent him had been used to bribe slaves in the house of Lucius Lucceius, in an attempt to murder Dio by poison, and thus put an end once and for all to the decimated Alexandrian delegation by destroying its leader. That particular plot had failed, but Dio, alerted to the danger, had fled to another house, and it was there that he eventually met his end. By whose hand, everyone in the court must know: the assassin Publius Asicius. Never mind that Asicius had been acquitted at his own trial; it was common knowledge that the prosecution and defense had conspired together to throw the case in Asicius’s favor. Caelius and Asicius, partners in so many other vices, had been partners in this outrage as welt—witnesses would be called who would place the two very close to the house where Dio was staying on the night of his murder. Like a tree with many branches, the Alexandrian delegation had been ruthlessly hacked away, limb by limb, until only the trunk remained. Caelius had not been satisfied until that, too, was destroyed.

Here Herennius delivered an encomium to Dio, reciting his many honors and achievements, naming the men who
had bravely given him shelter in his days of despair, mourning the loss of so brilliant a philosopher, lamenting the shame that had been visited upon Rome by his murder.

What of the final charge against Caelius, that of ruthlessly seeking the death by poison of a great Roman lady, the descendant of one of the city’s oldest and proudest families, the widow of one of her most distinguished citizens? The lady was present and would, strength permitting, testify herself to the outrage plotted against her.

At one point, Caelius had aligned himself with the lady’s brother—just one more of his fickle, never-to-be-trusted alliances—and this brought him into the lady’s acquaintance. Sad day for her! Young and good-looking, Caelius was quite a charmer, to be sure—proof of that was the fact that he’d talked two men he’d stabbed in the back into representing him today! Using all his skills he had charmed the lady out of a rather large loan. Later, she had cause to regret her trust in the scoundrel, not only because the loan was never repaid—typical, predictable!—but because with mounting horror she realized the use to which Caelius had put the money. His Egyptian coffers had run dry, but his mission was not yet finished, so he used her gold to bribe another man’s slaves to poison Dio. The realization shocked the lady to her senses. Disgusted with Caelius’s indecency and his murderous bent, outraged that she had been duped into financing his crimes, she decided to do something about it; she agreed to appear as a witness at this trial. A brave act, to make herself the enemy of a murderer—and almost fatal, as it turned out. To silence her, Caelius decided to poison her.

“Those of us who have attended all too many trials for murder know the sad pattern,” said Herennius, lowering his voice to a confidential tone. “Let a man once descend to using poison on another human being and, sooner or later, he will try the same thing again. Poisoning becomes a habit, a secret vice, like certain other things men do in the dark.
Until he is stopped, by the law or by the gods, a poisoner will repeat his vile crime over and over again.”

Thus, having fallen into this vice with his attempt on Dio—if indeed it was his first poisoning!—Caelius not surprisingly resorted to poison to rid himself of the troublesome lady. He tested the stuff first on one of his own slaves. (Not on one of his old, trusted slaves, to be sure; Caelius had purchased a slave specifically to test his poison, as one might buy a cheap garment intending to use it as a rag and then throw it away. If he cared to deny the fact, let Caelius produce that slave in court alive and well.) Then Caelius approached some of the lady’s slaves (like a typical poisoner, repeating the same mode of operation) and tried to bribe them to administer the poison. But the loyal slaves betrayed the plot to their mistress, and she cleverly sought to trap Caelius’s agent in the act of handing over the deadly stuff.

Herennius proceeded to give a completely straight-faced account of the disaster at the Senian baths, which provoked some snickering among the spectators; the story had made the rounds. To verify the incident, he said, the slaves whom Caelius had thought to suborn would testify. So that they would not have to suffer the indignities of torture, and to reward them for their loyalty, these slaves had been manumitted and would testify as freedmen.

Herennius sighed with exasperation. “Caelius’s attempt to poison Dio failed. So did his first attempt on the lady. But still Caelius did not give up! Only hours ago, the lady came very close to death, thanks to Caelius’s relentless, insidious efforts to do her in. Look at her now, at her pale face and languid eyes, at her helpless trembling! One need only see her to know that something truly terrible has transpired. ‘What awful thing was done to her?’ you ask. But no, I shall refrain from relating the sordid details of this latest, almost successful attempt to murder her. Since the gods have seen fit to spare her from Caelius’s murderous plots, let her tell the story. Let the tale of her hairbreadth
escape emerge from her own shocking testimony. I only pray to the gods that she will continue to recover and be strong enough to testify!”

Regarding this latest outrage, the judges would also hear the written confession of the wretched slave girl Caelius had seduced into betraying her mistress. Her testimony was even now being extracted under torture, as the law required.

There would also be a third, surprise witness to corroborate. Herennius cast a chilly smile at the bench opposite. “That man’s testimony should be of special interest to the defense, I imagine. The esteemed Marcus Cicero himself has declared this witness to be ‘the most honest man in Rome.’ Wait until you hear what that fellow has to tell us about the attempts to poison this lady, Cicero! I wonder what you’ll have to say then about the depraved murderer sitting beside you!”

This struck me as a clever but dangerous ploy on the part of Herennius, to leave a damaging revelation to his witnesses so that it could emerge as a surprise at the very end of the trial; rather than to include it in his oration, where he could shape and deliver the accusation himself. The advantage was the sympathy to be stirred by a poison survivor telling her own story; the defense would be hard-pressed to anticipate and neutralize ahead of time any surprises that might emerge from such testimony. Who, I wondered, was this alleged “most honest man in Rome”? I looked at Cicero to catch his reaction and found him, oddly enough, staring straight at me.

I
don’t believe for a moment that he poisoned her,” said Bethesda, “any more than I believe that he killed the Egyptian.”

After three long orations, the court had adjourned early so that the defense advocates could present their responses in succession on the following day. Bethesda and I immediately headed home, where she proceeded to get ready for Clodia’s party, even though nightfall was still hours away.

“But Clodia insists that he did.”

“She’s mistaken,” Bethesda frowned at the burnished mirror she held in her hand. “This necklace will never do. Hand me the silver one.”

“It can’t be both ways,” I said. “One of them is lying. What a pity that you have to choose between Clodia and Caelius. What a choice for anyone to have to make!”

“Right now, I am trying to choose a necklace,” she said. “The silver one, please.”

I searched her dresser for a silver necklace and found myself lost amid the day jars of unguents and little glass vials of perfume. My eye caught a flash of bright red. “What’s this?”

“What?”

I picked up the little day figure of Attis, identical to the
ones I had seen in the room of Lucceius’s wife and on Clodia’s dresser. The smiling eunuch stood with his hands on his fat belly, with a bright red Phrygian cap on his head. Bethesda glimpsed its reflection and put down her mirror “You shouldn’t touch that.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It came while we were at the trial today.”

“I asked
where
it came from, not when.”

“It’s a gift.”

“Who sent it?”

“Who do you think?” Bethesda took the statue from me. She put it back on the dresser, then scooped up a long silver necklace and reached for her mirror. “You’re hopeless. Go away and tell Diana to come help me dress.”