SPQR III: The Sacrilege Page 7

  “I will try an animal. It is difficult to induce a dog to eat sweet pastries, but perhaps a pig will oblige. These tests are not infallible, I must warn you. There are substances deadly to humans but harmless to animals.”

  “If it is a poison,” I asked, “is there any way to determine what sort?”

  “That is extremely difficult unless you use a human subject, who can describe his symptoms. I am, of course, forbidden to do any such thing.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said. “Do you think you could get a look at Capito’s body? Unfortunately, I have no official position just now.”

  “I am acquainted with the most prominent undertakers. There should be no difficulty. From your description, no detailed examination should be necessary. A quick look should suffice. I shall attend to it this evening.”

  “I shall be grateful,” I told him.

  “My friend Decius, life is always so much more interesting when you are in Rome. Please feel free to call upon my services.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him.

  “Try to live that long,” he urged. Asklepiodes had a strange sense of humor, but one must make allowances for Greeks.

  As I walked back across the river toward my home in the Subura, I began to regret that I had not thought to arm myself before going out that day. I had been so elated at the prospect of attending my first Senate meeting that it had caused me to be less than cautious. It is forbidden to bear arms within the pomerium and doubly forbidden to carry them into the Curia, but I was prepared to risk censure. A recent attempt on my life always lowered my respect for custom.

  Now here I was wandering alone through streets that might harbor Clodius’s minions. Even as I thought this, I was struck by something else: Poison was not his style. Whatever else you could say about Clodius, he was always perfectly willing to kill his enemies with his own hand, right out in public.

  But who else was my mortal enemy? I hadn’t offended anyone lately. Only madmen like Clodius nurse grudges year after year, awaiting a chance to strike. I had made my peace with most of my enemies, and the rest of them seemed to have forgotten me. It was all a great puzzle.

  I managed to reach my house without homicide and sent for Hermes. My aged slave Cato clucked dolefully.

  “Nothing good will come of having that young lout in the house, master. He’s destined for the cross.”

  “Most likely. But until that sad day, let’s see what use we can get out of him. Send him in.”

  Hermes came in, smirking and swaggering as if he had done something heroic, something praiseworthy. I would have been astounded to learn he had done something moderately honest, but slaves perceive things differently from the freeborn. Sometimes one must humor them.

  “What have you to report?” I asked him.

  “I followed your friend from the dinner party just like you told me to. He stopped twice on the way to vomit.”

  “That’s odd,” I said. “Dinner wasn’t all that rich, and the drinking had hardly started when Capito’s murder broke things up. It must have been the first time he had tried to murder somebody. It may have made him nervous.”

  “Ha! So you admit I saved your life!” Hermes crowed.

  “Not yet. I’m having the pastries tested. Go on with your report.”

  “I followed him over past the Circus and up onto the Palatine to a big town house—”

  “I knew it!” I said. “He went to Clodius’s house to report that he’d failed to kill me. I wish I could have seen Clodius’s ugly face when he heard the news!” Then I noticed that Hermes had that smug expression slaves get when they know something you don’t.

  “He didn’t go to the house of Clodius, master.”

  “Whose, then?” I demanded.

  “He went to the house of your kinsman Metellus Celer.”

  5

  I did not really believe that Celer would try to kill me. We were on good terms, and he and my father were close. I had not forgotten who his wife was, though. But it had been years since Clodia had last tried to have me killed, and I could not think why she would try to do away with me now. Her only possible reason would be that she thought I threatened her brother, for whom she had a more than sisterly fondness.

  These things were much on my mind as I prepared for the day. This time, I did not neglect to tuck my dagger and my caestus into my tunic. Best to be safe. Accompanied by Hermes, I set out for Celer’s house. I had no intention of confronting him with Nero’s doings. In the first place, I did not yet have confirmation that any murder attempt had taken place. I would wait and watch.

  I stopped at a corner barber’s stall for a shave, then proceeded on toward the Palatine. I was at the base of the hill when I met a well-dressed procession headed toward the Forum, a grim-faced Celer at its head. He did not spare me a glance, and I was not about to attract his attention. I had seen that look before, in Gaul, and it usually meant that traitors were about to be executed. I fell in with the crowd of clients. I noticed that Caesar was there as well, equally grim-faced. I spotted my cousin-by-adoption Scipio Nasica the pontifex and stepped to his side.

  “What’s happened?” I asked him in a low voice.

  “We don’t know,” he said, equally quiet about it. Everyone looked as if something terrible had happened. “A messenger came during the morning call. He took Celer and Caesar aside and spoke to them in private. Then they came out looking like they do now. Celer announced that an extraordinary meeting of the Senate has been called and has said nothing more.”

  My spine tingled. Ordinarily, this meant a major military disaster. I wondered where it had happened. Antonius Hibrida had turned in a string of defeats in Macedonia, so that should not come as a surprise. Perhaps the Germans were on the march again. I shuddered at the thought. The last time they had terrorized all Italy, and it had taken Gaius Marius to defeat them. Despite all his posturing, Pompey was no Gaius Marius.

  The Forum had that look it always gets when everyone knows there is bad news in the air. Instead of the usual drifting, shifting mass, people gathered in tight little knots, each one feeding the other’s ignorance with rumors and omens. I overheard talk of military disaster, civil war, invasion by foreign enemies, plague, famine, earthquake and wondrous visitations by the Olympian deities, all before we reached the steps of the Curia.

  Senators were bustling up the steps, eager to find out what had transpired. The lictors of the magistrates stood leaning on their fasces, trading omens like everybody else. As we reached the steps, Caius Julius left our little procession to speak with a matron so hatchet-faced she made him and Celer look cheerful by comparison. I asked my companions who this might be, and someone identified her as Caesar’s mother. This was strange indeed. Roman women, however prestigious, were not supposed to take part in political matters.

  Inside, the Curia vibrated with a low buzz, everyone apprehensive but also eagerly curious to know what had happened. Down in front, where all the greatest men were, stood the Consuls and the senior magistrates, the pontifexes and the Princeps. Something seemed decidedly odd about this group. Some of them, the Consuls in particular, looked amused. There was an aura of barely suppressed hilarity among them, until Caesar joined them and they resumed their stony faces. The Consuls took their curule chairs and the rest of us sat on our benches. When all was properly ordered, Hortalus stood to address the Senate.

  “Conscript fathers,” he intoned, “I must address you on a grave matter.” His voice to the ear was like honey to the tongue. “Last night, here in this sacred city of Quirinus, a most heinous act of sacrilege was perpetrated!” He paused for effect, and he got it. This was the last news anyone was expecting to hear. Serious offenses against the gods were rare, and usually involved unchastity in a Vestal Virgin. I noticed, however, that Hortalus had used the rare word sacrilegium. Sexual relations with a Vestal was always referred to as incestum.

  “Last night,” Hortalus went on, “during the ancient, holy and most solemn ri
tes of Bona Dea, an impostor was discovered spying upon this ritual, which is forbidden to all men! It was the quaestor Publius Clodius Pulcher, who entered the house of the Pontifex Maximus by stealth, dressed as a woman!”

  The Curia erupted into total uproar. There were calls for trial, calls for death. Mostly, there was just jabbering and whooping, and I did my share of it. I jumped around like a boy, clapping my hands with sheer joy.

  “Now we’ll be rid of him!” I said to someone near me. “Now he’ll be condemned and given some awful ritual punishment, buried alive or pulled apart with red-hot pincers or something.” It was a cheering thought, but my neighbor dampened it.

  “He’ll have to be tried first. Sit down and let’s see what the pontiffs and lawyers say.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Cicero had gotten himself in plenty of trouble by urging the Senate to condemn the Catilinarians without jury trial, and no one had forgotten that. I sat. The Senators would be cautious about prosecuting him, worse luck.

  The Consul Calpurnianus stood and held up a hand for silence, which he finally accomplished.

  “Conscript fathers, before we can even discuss action, we must have some definitions so that we know what we are talking about. The distinguished Princeps Quintus Hortensius Hortalus has used the word ‘sacrilege.’ I will ask another distinguished jurist, Marcus Tullius Cicero, to explain this term for us.”

  Cicero stood. “In earlier times, ‘sacrilege’ was defined as the stealing of objects consecrated to a god, or deposited in a consecrated place. In more recent times, this word has been extended to cover all damage or insults done to the gods and to sacred places. If the conscript fathers so direct, I shall be most pleased to prepare a brief listing the sources and precedents for the legal charge of sacrilege.”

  “Caius Julius Caesar,” said Calpurnianus, “as Pontifex Maximus, is it your judgment that this offense merits the name of sacrilege?”

  Caesar stood and walked before the Senate as if he were officiating at his father’s funeral. He pulled a fold of his toga over his head, solemn as a tragic actor.

  “I do so judge it,” Caesar intoned, “and it is to my unutterable shame that this unspeakable act should happen within the house of Caesar.” This was the first time I heard him refer to himself in the third person, an annoying habit with which we were to become all too familiar.

  “Then,” said Calpurnianus, “with the concurrence of the Senate, I shall direct the praetor Aulus Gabinius to go with his lictors to the house of Clodius and place him under arrest.”

  “Just a minute, now!” shouted a Senator named Fufius, a notorious lackey of Clodius. “Publius Clodius is a serving Roman official and cannot be arrested or impeached while he is in office!”

  “Oh, sit down and stop talking like an idiot!” barked Cicero. “Clodius is a mere quaestor, with no more imperium than brains. What’s more, he has not yet gone to his place of duty to take up his office, and this offense has nothing to do with the discharge of official business.”

  “And let us not forget,” said Metellus Nepos, all bland malice, “that during the Catilinarian emergency, serving Roman officials, including a praetor, were arrested. Might not a charge of sacrilege be as serious as one of treason?” This, of course, had nothing to do with Clodius but was aimed directly at Cicero, who had ordered those arrests.

  I must say that, in the midst of all this legal and ritual dispute, the mood of most of the Senate was one of merriment. The whole affair was so absurd that it was like something happening in a play by Aristophanes. We would not have been surprised to see the principals don comic masks with wide-stretched mouths.

  “Gentlemen,” said Hortalus, “before we speak seriously of arrests and trials, I must remind you all of something. If we bring Publius Clodius into court, there will be testimony. In the course of that testimony, somebody, sooner or later, must speak of the rites of the Good Goddess.” That gave us all pause.

  Cato stood up. “Unthinkable! These sacred matters must not be made the subject of vulgar gossip in the Forum!”

  “Step outside, Cato,” shouted someone. “I’ll wager a hundred sesterces nobody’s babbling about anything else right now!”

  “How can we have a trial,” said the praetor Naso, “when the women who were present at the offense can’t speak of what they were doing and no man can hear about it?” That set off another round of calls for action and protests against any such thing. I began to despair of anything constructive being decided. By now, I thought, Clodius must be on a fast horse headed for Messina, there to take ship for Sicily, where he could hide under the cover of his office until the furor died down in Rome.

  Toward noon, there occurred a remarkable exchange. Everyone has heard some version of it, usually distorted beyond recognition by those who were not there or those who were but in later years grew too fearful to tell the truth. I am the only man now alive who was there that day, and this is how it truly happened, not how it ended up in Roman legend.

  “Caius Julius,” said the Consul Messala Niger, “without your speaking of forbidden things, do you know if any of the ladies who were present last night have any idea of what Clodius was up to when he entered your house dressed as a woman?” Everybody wanted to hear about this.

  “My mother, the lady Aurelia, has told me there was talk that Clodius thus gained stealthy entrance to carry on a liaison with Pompeia.” He drew himself up so straight and tall that I suspected him of wearing actors’ buskins on his feet. “I have therefore resolved to divorce Pompeia forthwith!”

  Celer stood. “Don’t be hasty, Caius Julius. There is nothing going on between your wife and Clodius. He just wanted to spy on the rites. The fool has talked about nothing else for days.”

  Then Caesar made history, of a sort. Gazing around him like an eagle, he said, “She may well be innocent, but that is immaterial. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” You could have heard a pin drop in the Curia. The appearance of a god among us could not have been so stunning.

  One of the many banes of my existence has been my laugh, which is high-pitched and raucous, and has on more than one occasion been likened to the braying of a wild ass. I could not help myself. I held it in as long as possible, then let it loose when the pain of suppression grew insupportable. It started as a snorting wheeze high up in my aristocratic Metellan nose and, an instant later, emerged like the sound of a legion’s pack-train demanding their ration of oats.

  In an instant, the Senate was convulsed. Vinegary old politicians who didn’t laugh from one year to the next doubled over, laughing until their guts cramped. Solemn pontifexes had tears rolling down their wrinkled cheeks. Just outside the chamber, a whole bench of tribunes rolled about so helpless with laughter that they could not have interposed a veto if we had called for the beheading of every plebeian in Rome. I am sure that I saw even Cato smiling.

  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.”