SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead Page 21

  I sighed. “Yes, much that appears terribly ancient here is of comparatively recent origin. Only the tunnel to the underground river itself, and the recently uncovered ventilation tunnel, are of great antiquity.” This was the first Cordus and Pedarius had heard of the ventilation tunnel, but I was not yet ready to make that common knowledge. “I am convinced that this whole business has been about money.”

  Julia looked uncomfortable. She was ready enough to discuss these sordid matters in private, but she felt it improper to speak of matters as base as money in front of a fellow patrician.

  “Now, my friend Cordus,” I said. “About that slave sale.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said the historian. “There was nothing at all difficult about its location. The town praetor’s office keeps records of all such transactions. But there was one thing that threw me off the scent, so to speak, and caused quite a bit of searching. You said that the seller was one Aulus Plantius, an itinerant slave dealer . . .”

  “That was the name given me by the girl herself,” I told him. “It comes as no surprise that she lied, but she had been coached. My friend Duronius, who was my host that evening, confirmed that there was a slave dealer of that name, who sold him a cook.”

  “Yes, I ran across a record of that very transaction, which took place several days before the sale of the girl.” He passed me his copy of the record of sale. I read the name of the seller and smiled. I passed it to Julia and her eyebrows went up. Then she looked at me.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “I thank you. I will study the records Lucius Pedarius has brought later. I think I have everything I need now. I do hope you will accept my hospitality and stay for the—well, I won’t call it a trial, but it will be a most damning presentation before the public.”

  “I would not miss it for anything,” Cordus said.

  12

  THE DAY DAWNED SPLENDIDLY. IT HAD the sort of clear light spilling over the unspoiled countryside that the pastoral poets love to sing about. I detest pastoral poetry. To me the day was splendid because it put me one day closer to Sicily. As much as I loved southern Campania, I was anxious to be away.

  At midmorning, Cato and his little band came clumping down the road, Cato giving the impression of wearing army boots despite his bare feet. He wore an expression of grim determination. Now that I think of it, that was the only expression he ever wore, with variations that included scorn, anger, and contempt.

  “Hail, Praetor!” he shouted, saluting with upraised arm. “I take it you have things wrapped up here?”

  “Just about,” I said. I’d already sent a servant for copious wine and now we sat and she poured drinks all around.

  “What do you want me to do?” Cato said, after he’d drained his cup and held it out for a refill.

  “I want you here as a witness. I am about to do some things of questionable legality and I know that you will report to the Senate exactly what you have seen. There are few senators I can trust to do that.”

  He nodded. “Yes, there are no other senators who have my integrity.” He said this with absolute sincerity and not a trace of humor. He was absolutely sincere about everything—and absolutely humorless. “How do you intend to proceed?”

  I gave him a brief rundown of my plans. He nodded. “You will be exceeding your authority, all right, but I agree that the circumstances of this case are unique. Unique cases call for unique action. When Cicero condemned the Catilinarian conspirators to death without trial, he exceeded his powers as consul by a great margin, but I supported him because there was no other way he could have proceeded with sanity. When traitors are about to overthrow the constitution with violence, it is pure foolishness to give them the benefit of the constitution.”

  “Despite your support, which was admirable, Cicero ended up in exile,” I noted.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes a man must pay a price for his patriotic actions. At least he escaped death, which a good many senators wanted to inflict upon him.”

  “Things may get rough. I don’t know for sure how many are involved in this and some may not come along quietly.”

  Cato gestured toward the men who followed him. They all looked supremely tough. So did Cato. “We don’t object to a little bloodshed. Speaking of which, I heard you got shot with an arrow.”

  So I entertained him with the tale of my close brush with death. He and his men thought the whole affair was funny. I have said that Cato was humorless, but he did find amusement in things like pain and suffering. At the end he nodded with approval.

  “That’s the way to handle wounds: get back to the gymnasium as soon as you’re back on your feet. A Roman on public service can’t let something as trivial as being skewered by an arrow slow him down. You’re just lucky that arrow wasn’t poisoned.”

  I shuddered to think of it. “Apparently it didn’t occur to my enemy to poison the arrows. About the only serious lapse in an otherwise excellent plan of mass homicide.”

  I sent for Hermes and he appeared within moments. “Hermes, take some men and go arrest the woman Porcia. Search her house thoroughly and bring back anything you find interesting. Put her under close guard in one of the rooms here. That means a permanent suicide watch.”

  He grinned. “So she’s one of them after all, eh? I’m off!” He ran down the steps, calling out names, calling for horses. In moments he and a dozen other armed men were mounted and pelting down the road toward the villa. Then Cato surprised me.

  “You’ve raised that one well. He’d make fine material for the army and even the Senate. It’s too bad he’s a freedman and barred from office. He’s better quality than half the men in the Senate.”

  I was dumbfounded. For once, Marcus Porcius Cato had said something absolutely correct and sensible. “I’ll tell him you said so. Coming from you, it will mean a lot to him.”

  “War is coming. When it comes, if you don’t have a position for him, send him to me. I’ll have command of at least one legion. I’ll give him a centurionate.” In those days it was still possible for an exceptional man to be appointed centurion without spending years in the ranks first.

  “I will keep that offer in mind,” I said, “but I expect that I’ll have plenty of use for him.”

  Cato favored me with one of his rare smiles. “Of course, you’ll be taking the field yourself.” Cato always assumed that I was as military-minded as he was, and that I would look forward to wielding command. I had won a certain military distinction, but it was almost all against my own inclinations. He could never understand that. I certainly was not about to send Hermes to serve with Cato, no matter in what capacity. Not that Cato wasn’t a good commander, but I knew he would sacrifice his army and himself over some point of principle that meant nothing to anyone else.

  “All right,” Cato said, “you’ve just taken your first extralegal step. I take it we are to expect more?”

  “Far more,” I assured him. He meant that I had no power of arrest here and the arrestee was not a foreigner.

  “Good,” Cato said.

  Early in the afternoon, Pompey arrived. He was in full military fig and accompanied by a rather large bodyguard, around fifty mounted men. This was because of what I had written to him:

  If you would like to see the end of this, come to my court as soon as you can. Bring some of your men. There may be trouble.

  He heaved himself from his saddle a little more adroitly this time, but he was still struggling with his weight. There was a two-inch gap between the front and back plates of his bronze cuirass. I took him to the terrace where our strategy session was still in progress. By this time I’d had a larger table brought out to accommodate our expanded numbers. He exchanged greetings with Julia, Cato, and some others. I gave him an abbreviated briefing on my findings and plan.

  “I always thought it was unreasonable of Pedarius not to let me just go ahead and pay for the restoration of the temple,” Pompey said. “I wouldn’t have insisted on putting my name on the pediment.”


  “Poor men can be prouder than rich ones,” I told him. “This one was so intent on preserving the dignity of his patrician name that it led him into some foolish choices.”

  “I hope he hasn’t made me look foolish along with him,” Pompey said ominously.

  “You wanted this district to be quiet. When this is over it should be and you can concentrate on your recruiting.”

  “When do things start?” he wanted to know. “My time is limited.”

  “Almost everyone has arrived at my summons,” I said. “We should be able to begin tomorrow. If all goes well, it should be over tomorrow, too.”

  A prodigious crowd had gathered for the opening of my court the next morning. Actually, I use the word “court” advisedly. I was going to do something quite contrary to long-established Roman court practice. Perhaps if I had had more time and manpower, I might have called down some jurists from Rome to put it on a more conventional footing and make sure that the precedents were followed, but I had neither the time nor the resources.

  A Roman praetor is not supposed to bring charges himself. He does not prosecute or defend. He presides in majesty over the arguments of lawyers and the deliberations of juries. He takes no part himself except to see to it that the proper forms are followed, that the jury’s decisions are correctly arrived at, and at the conclusion he delivers his judgment in accordance with the findings of the jury. This was going to be very different.

  My dais had been arranged so that Pompey and Cato sat beside me, my curule chair slightly elevated above theirs. Pompey had his own curule chair, spectacularly draped with tiger skins. Cato did not hold an imperium office and his chair was an ordinary one, slightly lower than Pompey’s. My six lictors and Pompey’s twelve made an impressive sight ranged before the dais, the polished wood and steel of their fasces shining in the morning sunlight. Just to add to the drama, Pompey had provided a pair of trumpeters with their great cornus curling over their shoulders.

  I had Hermes make sure that everyone was present. It is always embarrassing to call a witness only to find that he is absent. It breaks the rhythm of the proceedings and makes the caller look foolish. He returned a while later to report that everyone was present. Just in front of my chair was a table, and it bore the documents I would need for my case.

  In the forefront of the crowd were many of the most prominent persons of the district, and in the forefront of these were the various praetors, duumviri, dictators (yes, some towns called their elected headman dictator), and so forth of all the nearby towns. Ranged behind them were priests, guild chiefs, and other persons of consequence, many of them just plain rich. Those local lawyers looked at me with curiosity mixed with fear and anger. They knew that something here didn’t smell right.

  When I judged that the level of tension had reached the right pitch, I signaled the trumpeters and they blew a long, ringing blast. Instantly, the crowd fell silent. I stood and gathered my purple-bordered toga about me in the manner approved by all the best rhetoric instructors.

  “Citizens!” I said, pitching my voice in outdoor-oratory mode, and flattering them somewhat since by no means all of them were citizens. “For some time now, this district has been afflicted by a most distressing series of murders. All the priests of the Temple of Apollo,” here I gestured grandly toward that building, “a slave of that temple named Hypatia, a Syrian merchant of Pompeii named Elagabal, the wealthy widow Sabinilla, and now, I have learned, the patrician patron of the temple, Manius Pedarius, have been murdered!”

  A murmur went through the crowd. Most of them had never heard of Elagabal, and this was the first proclamation that the death of the elder Pedarius had been a murder. They had a lot to murmur about.

  “Not only that,” I continued, “but I myself was nearly murdered, an arrow shot from ambush missing my heart by the breadth of a finger.” This was something of an exaggeration for dramatic effect, but it had been close enough.

  “These murders,” I cried, “are only the latest and most public of a long line of homicides, going back many years, of which the people of this district were entirely oblivious. Consider this, citizens. Visitors have come to this area to consult with your oracles from all over Italy, from Greece and even from Ionia and beyond. They have come here, never to return to their homes. Murdered and robbed in your midst, their bodies disposed of, and you have known nothing of it. You have not even suspected that any of this was happening.”

  Those important dignitaries in the front row didn’t like the sound of this. They depended on the transient trade. If people should get to thinking that this place was a death trap, those dignitaries stood to lose a good deal of money.

  “Praetor!” one of them shouted. “These are outrageous accusations!”

  “You will be silent while I speak,” I proclaimed grandly. “As it happens, I have indeed marshaled a most incriminating host of documents and witnesses, sufficient to prove my charges accurate in the last detail.” Then I gestured toward the two who flanked my chair. “Here to act as witnesses on behalf of the Senate of Rome are two of the most distinguished senators of our day: General Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, most famous soldier in the world, propraetor of Spain and minister extraordinary of the grain supply, and the distinguished Marcus Porcius Cato, former praetor and the most incorruptible governor and minister Rome has ever produced.” People cheered for Pompey and Cato. I hoped Pompey wasn’t interpreting this as support for his military plans. Cheers cost nothing. “They will render to the Senate a full account of all that transpires here today.”

  I drew myself up. “Citizens, what has happened here was never the doing of a single murderer. It was the result of a conspiracy involving many persons, some of them active agents in robbery and murder, others passive accessories, who profited from their passivity and their silence.”

  They were quiet, half-stunned. “First of all, I charge Iola and the entire staff of the Oracle of Hecate!”

  A local lawyer could stand no more. “It is no part of a praetor’s duties to bring charges. This is an outrage and an example of Roman highhandedness and, dare I say it? Roman tyranny!” There were growls of agreement from the crowd.

  “Don’t arrest him or kill him,” Pompey muttered in a low voice. “I need these people.”

  “Don’t worry,” I muttered back. I had expected exactly this accusation and had prepared for it.

  “Citizens,” I said with utmost scorn, “I would have been most happy to see some public-spirited local citizen come forward to indict these miscreants, but nobody has seen fit to do so. Nobody has raised a voice in the ten years that this outrageous conspiracy has existed! And it may go farther back than that. I felt it incumbent upon me to take up the task at which you have failed so miserably.”

  I switched to sarcastic, Ciceronian mode. “Of course, should one of you already have a case prepared and be ready now to come forth, I will be most happy to let you come forward, and I will resume my chair and preside.” In a grand rhetorical gesture I cupped a hand to my ear and pretended to be listening. “What’s this? Not a single voice to be heard?” I lowered my hand. “Then, if you will allow me to proceed.” I turned to my lictors. “Bring forth the accused.” The lictors marched off and returned with Iola and her crew, looking a bit the worse for a few nights in custody. At least they didn’t have their dogs with them.

  “Iola, I charge you and all your associates gathered here with the most heinous crime of murder, and not merely of murder but a whole series of murders. I charge you with sacrilege for falsifying oracles to lure your victims to their death, and with committing murder, and disposing of the bodies of the slain without the proper rites, in a place deemed holy for many centuries. How do you plead?”

  She seemed to speak past some obstruction in her throat. “Not guilty, Praetor.”

  “I scarcely expected you to plead otherwise. Iola, stand with your other women over there, aside from the men.” Mystified, she complied.

  “Citizens,” I went on, “I will no
w present you with the account of a crime typical of those perpetrated here. Ten years ago, there was an oil importer of Stabiae named Lucius Terentius. It was his custom to make voyages to consult with his suppliers overseas. Before undertaking a voyage, like many another traveler he would consult an oracle. On that occasion, he made the mistake of consulting the Oracle of the Dead, here at Hecate’s sanctuary. I call the woman Floria, freedwoman of Terentius.”

  The woman was brought out and administered the terrible oath that calls down the vengeance of the gods on perjurers. Personally, I have never noticed anyone to suffer for committing perjury unless they were caught and couldn’t bribe their way out of it. Still, I suppose the oath does no harm and scares some people into telling the truth.

  “Floria,” I said, “tell this court exactly what happened when your former master came to this place, and of what transpired afterward.”

  So she recited her story, much as I had heard it earlier. At first, her voice was weak, and I told her to speak up. When she finally understood that she would truly not be tortured or abused, she gained confidence and her voice steadied. It was actually far more effective than a rehearsed speech, and I could see that many of the onlookers were beginning to believe there was something to all this.

  “Well done, Floria,” I commended, when she was done. “Now, I want you to go over there”—I pointed to the knot of black-robed women—“and tell this court if you recognize the slave girl who so treacherously extracted crucial information about your master from you.”

  She walked over to them slowly. “I am not sure, Praetor. It was ten years ago.”

  “Just examine them carefully and see if you can recognize her.”

  The woman looked closely at them, one by one. Then she stopped and gasped. She pointed at Iola. “This is she, Praetor!”

  “Are you certain, Floria? Be sure you are not mistaken.”

  “There is no mistake, Praetor! Now that I see her, I know her as if it was yesterday I saw her.”