SPQR VIII: The River God's Vengeance Read online

  “Then it’s true?” she said. “Your family is going over to Pompey?”

  “They’ve struck a reasonable compromise,” I said. “No reason to put too extreme an interpretation on it.”

  “That isn’t how it sounds to me. It sounds to me as if there has been a decisive and irreversible shift in policy.”

  “There is no such thing as an irreversible policy,” I insisted. “Not in Roman politics, anyway. And they are right. We need a period of powerful central authority to straighten out the City, and there is no man for the job except Pompey. Even I can see that, and you know better than anyone how much I loathe the man.”

  “Yes, this is something of a change for you,” she said suspiciously. “Why this sudden cessation of hostility toward Pompey?”

  I laced my fingers behind my head and marshaled my thoughts. This was something that had been stewing in my mind since Gaul. The faint flicker from the tiny night lamp danced over the new frescoes Julia had commissioned for the walls—the fanciful, elongated architectural and vegetation designs that had lately come into fashion.

  “Pompey is through,” I said. “I can see that now. For years I worried about him and Crassus. I thought someday it would come to civil war between the two of them. Now Crassus is a senile old fool, headed for his death in Parthia, if he even gets that far. Pompey is getting no younger and neither are his soldiers. They haven’t fought a decent war in years. If he calls, they’ll rally to him; but they’ve grown fat and idle on the farms he wrangled for them in Campania and Tuscia. He’s no longer the threat I once thought him to be. Since his last consulship, he’s overseen the grain supply and accomplished what everyone thought was impossible: rooted out corruption and put the whole business on an efficient basis. He has the right combination of ability, prestige, and popularity to restore order in the City.”

  “Somehow,” she said, “I don’t feel that you look forward to a rosy future for Rome and the Empire, with or without Pompey.”

  “Caesar is now in command of the largest Roman army since Marius and Sulla fought it out more than thirty years ago. If things go well for him in Gaul, he’ll come back rich, prestigious, and backed by an experienced army fresh from victory. It is a dangerous combination. The people love Caesar, but the Senate is growing alarmed. If they get frightened enough, they’ll back Pompey against Caesar, and they’ll be backing a loser, as they’ve done so often in the past.”

  “Caesar will never take up arms against Rome!” she said indignantly.

  “Nobody ever takes up arms against Rome,” I pointed out. “Every would-be Alexander claims to be the savior of the Republic. The other man is the one with ambitions to be tyrant; you know that as well as I. Well, we’ll know soon enough.”

  “If Pompey takes a firm hand,” she said, “it could be the end for your friend Milo.”

  I had thought of that. “Yes, but he’ll have to squash Clodius and the others, too. Milo is my friend, but this gang warfare is tearing Rome to pieces, and it must end. I hope Milo will accept honorable exile and not fight it out to the finish.”

  Her voice softened. “You have been undergoing a change of heart, haven’t you? Which way will you go when the time comes?”

  “That will depend upon the times,” I told her, “and the times are changing rapidly. There is no way to make a decision just yet, but I won’t let my family determine it. Nepos has gone his own way and done well enough out of it.”

  “Right. And just how did Valerius Messala come to be steering the family policy of the Metelli?”

  “That has my head spinning just now,” I said. “The Valerians are a great and ancient family, patricians as noble as any Cornelian or Julian, but the man’s a schemer. I think he senses a weakness in my family, and he is moving in.”

  “Weakness?” she asked, astonished. “Yours is the most powerful plebeian family in the history of Rome!”

  “In sheer numbers, yes. In the Senate and the Assemblies, in officeholders and in clientele, we are powerful. But the leadership is weakening. Celer and Pius are dead, Nepos is Pompey’s man, and Scipio is adopted and seems to prefer his old name to the one Pius gave him. And I’m afraid Father is failing.”

  “How is that?”

  “Tonight he wasn’t acting like himself. He allowed intrafamily squabbling in there tonight, and we’ve always maintained unity in front of strangers. I think old age has finally caught up with him.”

  “It happens to everyone if they live long enough. It’s time for you to take your place in the family councils. Make that the price of accepting a second aedileship.” Julia was nothing if not practical.

  “I’ll consider it. Now, what were you talking about with Asklepiodes?”

  Caught unawares, she stammered, “I—I—” then, calming, “I asked him about a certain treatment my great-aunt Aurelia recommended: fresh honey and fennel seed mixed with powdered shell of owl’s egg.”

  So that was it. I might have known. We had been married less than two years, but Julia was already tormented by an old family fear. It was the famous infertility of the Caesars. Men and women, they had few children; and of these, perhaps one in three lived to see their fifth year. Julia had already miscarried once and was certain that she shared the family curse. She was her father’s only living child. Julius Caesar at that time had only a single daughter from his multiple marriages.

  “Julia, Asklepiodes specializes in wounds suffered by men whose profession it is to infiict such wounds. The special conditions of a woman’s fertility are the domain of witches and midwives, not physicians and surgeons.”

  “I know that,” she said. “It should tell you how desperate I am. I spoke with him mainly because he is such a sweet and reassuring man, and it is not his profession to be so, as you point out. He told me that time was the best remedy, but he did recommend an Alexandrian woman named Demetria”—I was about to object, but she silenced me—”and no, she is not some country wise woman. He assures me that she is a highly educated physician and philosopher who has studied at the Museum. Alexandrians are much more liberal in these matters than we are. I intend to seek her out tomorrow.”

  “Well,” I said reluctantly, “if Asklepiodes recommends her, she must be acceptable. See her if you will, but I think he was right the first time. You just need to give it some time; you’ll see. Remember the family you’ve married into. We Caecilians became so powerful by outnumbering everybody else.”

  She turned over and placed her head on my chest. “All right,” she said sleepily. “I promise not to worry for a while. But I’m still going to see Demetria tomorrow.”

  If she said anything more, I do not remember it because I was sound asleep in another instant.

  7

  I DIDN’T EVEN GET AS FAR AS the Temple of Ceres the next morning.

  “Aedile!” The shouter was a man I recognized, a freedman from the staff of Publius Syrus, the famous actor and playwright. “Please come to the theater! My patron says that it is an emergency!” The man was quite excited, but then he was a Greek, and his master was a Greek-Syrian, and all Greeks are excitable people. They invented philosophy just to get themselves under control.

  The previous year I had contracted with Syrus to provide the theatricals for my upcoming Games. The first Games of the calendar year were to be the Megalensian Games, celebrated the next month. These were not nearly as lavish as the really big celebrations of the fall, the Roman Games and the Plebeian Games. But I was determined to make the first spectacles as splendid as possible to set the tone for my aedileship.

  “What is the problem?” I asked. “I have a great many duties to—”

  “It can’t wait!” he yelled, cutting me off. “You have to come at once!”

  “Don’t talk to the Aedile like that, you jumped-up foreign catamite!” Hermes shouted at him.

  “No, Hermes, we’d better go,” I said. “I can’t risk anything spoiling my show.”

  So we followed the man down toward the Sublician Bridge.
Near the bridge towered the giant theater erected a few years before by Aemilius Scaurus during his aedileship. At this time there were two theaters in Rome worth the name: the Aemilian and the Theater of Pompey. Pompey’s was built on the Campus Martius and was made of stone. The Aemilian was made of wood.

  I had chosen the Aemilian for a number of reasons. Pompey’s theater had been damaged during his triumphal games when his elephants stampeded; then he burned a town onstage, and the proscenium caught fire and the damage was not yet repaired. Also, it was far from the City center and seated perhaps forty thousand spectators. The Aemilian was a far shorter walk for most citizens, it held eighty thousand people, and, best of all, it wasn’t built by Pompey. I didn’t want people watching my games and thinking about Pompey.

  And just because it was built of wood instead of marble doesn’t mean it was not splendid. The vast, semicircular structure shone all over with paint and gilding, which I had had renewed. It was decorated with mosaics in semiprecious stones, amber, and tortoise shell, each arch of its upper galleries displaying a fine statue. It was equipped with huge awnings against the sun and a system of fountains that would spray a fine, perfumed mist over the audience in hot weather. These latter features would not be required for the Megalensian Games, but I would definitely need them for the Apollinarian Games, which were celebrated in the hottest days of summer.

  As we entered the cavernous building, we were struck by the powerful smells of fresh paint, turpentine, pitch, and fresh-cut wood. Like all large, wooden structures that are open to the sky, the theater required constant maintenance. And, like all others of its sort, it made constant noise, an almost musical chorus of groans, creaks, and squeaks as changing temperature and every buffet of wind made the whole structure move, timber fiexing against timber, boards stretching and pulling against nails, the huge masts that would support the awning whipping back and forth as if they wanted to go to sea like all the other masts.

  Publius Syrus was on the stage, rehearsing his cast and chorus, his support crew, and all the rest of the multitude he needed to get a whole set of theatricals presented. Most of us, seeing only the performance, which involves a mere handful of people, are never aware of what a mob is required to present a single play.

  “Ah, Aedile,” Syrus cried, catching sight of me, “you have come!” As if I needed to be told this. But artists like Syrus had to be handled delicately.

  “As always, I am prepared to drop everything to consult with my Master of Theatricals,” I said heartily. “Is anything wrong with the plays?”

  “The plays? Of course not! They shall be superb!” All this declaimed with many broad gestures. Then, more calmly, “If, that is, there is a theater to celebrate them in.”

  “Eh? What are you talking about?”

  “Come with me, Aedile.” He looked up at the stage. “The rest of you, continue practicing! You have only days to master your roles and your duties!”

  “Have the seat cushions arrived yet?” I asked, scanning the nearby seats. “I ordered seat cushions, good ones made of Egyptian linen, stuffed with raw wool. No grass or hay, mind you. Newly sheared raw wool.”

  “It’s far too early for that, Aedile,” Syrus insisted. “They’ll just get wet. You don’t want cushions delivered until a day or two before the festival.”

  “Well, they’d better be in place by the first performance or heads will fall.” I was especially determined to have these cushions because everyone would think I was being terribly extravagant. Actually, one of my clients dealt in wool and cloth, and when the performances were done he would dismantle the cushions and get me back at least three-quarters of my outlay. Best of all, the cushions would outrage Cato. He always went into frothing frenzies anytime an innovation appeared that made people more comfortable.

  We walked into a passage beneath the stage, and Syrus praised himself and his work. “Aedile, I have rewritten the scene where King Ptolemy tries to burgle the house of Crassus. Instead of finding Crassus in bed with Caesar’s wife, he discovers General Gabinius in bed with the wife of Crassus!”

  I nodded. “The news from Egypt has it that Gabinius has been very successful. He really needs to be smeared and lampooned and slandered.”

  Syrus smiled happily. “My very thought. Too much praise attracts the jealousy of the gods, so we will be doing him a favor.” Syrus was the foremost practitioner of this sort of political satire. It was considered scandalous, and various senators had tried having it declared criminal; but it was wildly popular with the plebs, so the tribunes saw to it that no such legislation was passed. Everyone who could hired Syrus to libel and belittle their political rivals and enemies. Sooner or later, someone was going to hire him to give me this treatment, and I was not looking forward to it.

  “How are the rehearsals for Agamemnon coming along?” I asked him.

  Syrus looked as if he had bitten into something sour. “It is not the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Aedile. It is Antigone, which is by Sophocles, you will recall.”

  “Ah, yes, I always confuse those old buggers. They all sound alike to me, but my wife is very fond of them. Rehearsals going well, are they?”

  He closed his eyes. “Beautifully, Aedile. Tears and pity and terror shall be the order of the day.”

  I didn’t see that it mattered very much, but I was trying to be polite. Nobody would want to attend the tragedy anyway, except for scholars like Cicero and high-born ladies and whatever protesting husbands they could drag along. What the plebs loved were the comedies and satyr plays, the mimes, and the Atellan farces; and I planned to deliver these in good measure. I wasn’t going to be as radical as Pompey, though, and provide large animals and armies clashing in mock battle on stage. It was dangerous, and his innovation had been a failure anyway, spreading panic and dismay. Such activities properly belonged in the arena, not the theater. The Roman public was extremely conservative about this sort of thing.

  We came out onto an outside gallery used by the scene shifters and other workmen of the theater. The gallery ran along the straight side of the semicircle, and it was cluttered with heaps of rope, buckets of paint, parts of the crane used for lowering gods into the action, and so forth. It all looked like total chaos to me; but to those whose business it was, it was as orderly as the arrangement of a seagoing vessel.

  “Look down there, Aedile,” Syrus said, leaning over a railing and pointing downward.

  I did likewise, and so did Hermes. The theater backed almost against the riverbank, and the gallery upon which we stood projected out over the mud fiat like a balcony. Below us, a crew of workmen were shoring up the building with heavy wooden beams. The muddy, turbid water of the Tiber was already within a few yards of their feet.

  “They arrived at first light this morning, sent by the agent of Aemilius Scaurus. It seems we are to be fiooded. What am I to do?”

  “Why, carry on, of course! This building has survived the high water of the last few years. Maybe it will survive this as well.”

  “But suppose it doesn’t!” he cried excitedly. “All will be ruined! What shall we do then?”

  I took him by the arm. “Now, Publius Syrus, you just leave all the petty details to me. If this theater is destroyed, we can always move operations to Pompey’s, much as it would pain me to do so.” I steered him toward the tunnel that led back to the stage. “Just go back and drill your troops. Whatever happens in the next few days, the water will have subsided by the Megalensian Games. I will see to everything.”

  Muttering to himself, shaking his head, wringing his hands, he retreated into the interior. As if I didn’t have enough on my hands already, I had to deal with temperamental artists, too.

  “Let’s go talk to these men,” I told Hermes. There was a rickety stairway leading from the gallery to the mud fiat. Downriver to our left was the Sublician Bridge. Before us the river itself had achieved alarming breadth and swiftness of current. The bridge, like the upriver Aemilian (built by an ancestor of the Aemilius who built th
e theater), was lined with gawkers, pointing at the water, gesturing, and doubtless all exclaiming how they, personally, had predicted this very thing. People always do that.

  Most of the workmen appeared to be slaves, but these were not unskilled foreigners like the gang we had seen demolishing the wreckage of the insula. These men knew their business, and they were constructing a stout brace beneath the overhang of the huge theater, with heavy timbers set horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, resting atop blocks of cut stone. To my unpracticed eye, it all looked very secure. What made me uneasy was that my eye was, indeed, unpracticed.

  Bossing the crew was a man whose clothes were of better material than those of the workmen. His hair and complexion were a bit darker than those of a typical Roman, though he wore a citizen’s ring.

  “I’m the plebeian aedile Metellus,” I told him. “What is the likelihood that your work here will save this building in a severe fiood?”

  He bowed slightly. “I am Manius Florus, freedman of Manius Florus. My patron’s firm has been retained by the steward of the proconsul Aemilius Scaurus to try to preserve his theater from the coming high water. To answer your question, Aedile, all will depend upon the fiood itself. If the current is terribly swift, the bank here could be eaten away so severely as to drop the whole structure into the river.

  “However,”—he swept an arm wide, taking in both bridges—”situated as it is, here between these two fine, strong bridges, I have hopes that it will be spared that. It has been my experience of such fioods that the upstream bridge,” he pointed toward the Aemilian, “will break much of the force of the current here in the bend and redirect it toward the center of the stream, where it can do little harm. That bridge has survived many, many fioods over the centuries.”

  “I truly hope you are right,” I said.

  Hermes came up to me. “I think you had better look at this,” he murmured. It was unlike Hermes to murmur. I followed him to the heavy framework. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. Into the surface of the timber was scratched, in large, crude letters, HERMES.