Under Vesuvius Page 8

  Antonia shrugged. “Prisoners, hostages—what’s the difference? Two years ago my brother had that Gallic prince Vercingetorix in the house. He was a prisoner, but do you think I let that stop me?”

  “A barbarian prince, even an enemy prince,” Circe said, “is a far cry from the son of a Numidian slaver.”

  “I’m always amazed at the ability you ladies have to draw distinctions,” I said.

  “This is your fault,” said Julia. “You never should have brought him into this house. The local lockup would have been quite good enough for him, even if he is innocent. It might have taught him a little humility.”

  “Lectures on humility from a Caesar!” Antonia cried, laughing. “I like them arrogant, even the wicked ones.”

  Julia gave up and applied herself to dinner. It seemed that patrician propriety was not to be a feature of our household for the duration.

  When dinner was done, Julia and I stayed behind in the triclinium, and I called for Hermes to report. He seemed uncommonly somber when he came in, not at all his usual mischievous self.

  “The altar was clean swept,” he reported, “and I couldn’t find where they dumped the ashes, so I went straight to the house.”

  “You got in and out undetected, I trust?” I asked.

  “Naturally.”

  “Pride in burglar skills is not becoming in a free man, Hermes,” Julia chided him.

  “Says the poem thief,” I commented. “What have you found?”

  “First, this.” He tossed me a little bundle of something hard that gave beneath my fingers when I caught it. It was a small bag of purple silk. Whatever was inside, the bag itself was a minor extravagance. I released the drawstrings and withdrew the contents. Julia gasped and snatched it from my fingers.

  It was a necklace formed of some twenty lozenges of gold, each the size of Julia’s thumb, each set with an emerald as big as the nail of that digit and carved with the image of a deity.

  “This is fabulous!” Julia exclaimed. “You’ve never given me anything this fine.”

  “I’ve never been that rich,” I reminded her. “Still, we’ve seen ladies around here wearing jewelry as expensive. But if Gelon gave her that, Papa must be giving him a more generous allowance than my father gave me.”

  “There was more going on in that girl’s life than keeping the temple tidy,” Julia commented, unable to stop fondling the necklace. Just what I needed. Now she would want one like it.

  “All right,” I said to Hermes. “This bauble didn’t put that wan look on your face. What else did you find?”

  “As I was leaving I thought I was alone in the place. But I heard someone crying. It didn’t sound like grief for the dead woman. I traced the sound and found a lockup next to the pen for sacrificial animals.”

  “I suppose you just had to look,” Julia said.

  “There’s a little window in the door. It was dim inside, so it took a while for me to make anything out, but I saw that it was the slave girl Charmian. She had good reason to cry. She’d been severely beaten. From her neck to her heels she’s striped like a zebra. And it wasn’t done with rods or a flagellum either, it was laid on with a flagrum.” He referred to the fearsome whip with multiple thongs studded with bone or bronze.

  “Well,” Julia said, “from your description she’s rather a bold creature, and such women easily fall afoul of their masters. Besides, the priest had good reason to be displeased with her. He may hold her responsible for letting Gorgo stray out that night.”

  “But why just Charmian?” I asked. “Why not the other two, Leto and Gaia? Go on, Hermes.”

  “I called her name. After a while she looked up. Her face was so swollen and bruised she was barely recognizable. I asked her why she’d been punished so, but for a long time she couldn’t talk at all. Finally she said, ‘I’ll talk to the praetor, no one else.’ Then she lowered her head and I think she passed out. I couldn’t linger.”

  This was the reason for his grimness. Hermes had been a slave and could sympathize with the unfortunate girl, even though he had given his own masters far more grief than they ever gave him.

  “I have to do something about this,” I said.

  “What?” Julia demanded. “You have no right to interfere with a citizen disciplining his own slave. He can kill her if he likes and you have no say in the matter. That’s the law.”

  “I know it is, but I don’t like it.”

  “Anyway, he may have good reason to beat her.” But she said it without conviction, for the sake of form. She knew perfectly well that the girl could hardly have earned so savage a beating.

  But I had to wonder. Just what did that girl know that she would tell only me? Somehow, I had to find out.

  * * *

  The next day I held court in Baiae. The cases were all the same: some disgruntled businessman of the city bringing suit against a foreign competitor. The boredom induced by such cases is difficult to describe, but it works like the face of Medusa in turning a man to stone. I am afraid that I rendered judgments based on whether I found one plaintiff or defendant more congenial. Anyway, it served them right for wasting my time so.

  About midday a slave came to my curule chair and handed me a message. Eager for anything to break the monotony of my day I unrolled it and read: Please come to my house as soon as you dismiss the court. It was signed Jocasta. I tucked it away with some satisfaction. I had intended to seek her out and she was relieving me of the trouble.

  I rushed the court through the final cases and pronounced adjournment. There was some muttering at my haste, but I’ve had worse than mutters thrown at me in my day. Hermes came up to me. He had been away all day investigating.

  “No luck finding the merchant who sold it,” he said, referring to the fabulous necklace. “But it’s Phrygian in origin.”

  “That’s not much help,” I said. “Keep looking. And don’t assume that any merchant is telling the truth.”

  “Do you think I’m a beginner at this?”

  “Go. I’m headed for the house of Gaeto to talk with his wife Jocasta. She may be the boy’s only alibi.”

  “Don’t assume she’ll tell you the truth,” he said, grinning.

  “Get out of here.”

  I saw the messenger slave and beckoned him to me. “Take me to your mistress,” I told him. Silently he turned and I followed him from the forum, bidding my entourage to meet me in the evening at the villa. They were mystified. Ordinarily, one as august as a praetor goes nowhere alone, without even his lictors. But I wanted to question the woman by myself, and witnesses are the same thing as spies.

  The boy led me to a house of modest size, by the standards of Baiae. It lay on one of the broader streets, near the edge of town by the city wall. I placed a hand on my guide’s shoulder. “Is this the house of Gaeto?” It seemed entirely too small and was nowhere near the slave market.

  “This is my mistress’s town house,” he explained. “My master’s house is on the bay, outside the city wall.”

  “I see.” He would not be the first husband to indulge his wife in this lavish fashion. Nor the first to regret it, either. Wives with their own houses have been the subject of scabrous comedies since the days of Aristophanes.

  We entered the courtyard, and moments later the woman appeared, this time wearing a dress no more extravagant than was common for the wealthy women of Baiae. Apparently, she reserved silk for special occasions.

  “You honor my house, Praetor,” she said. “And you must have hurried right over from court. You must be hungry.”

  “Famished,” I agreed.

  She led me to a table in the impluvium next to the pool with its fountain playing around a figure of a dancing faun. There a table had been laid out lavishly.

  “This,” I said, eyeing the superb viands, “could be construed by some to be a bribe.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” she said. “Besides, it rates far below the standards of Baiae bribery.”

  “Senators and magi
strates come cheaper in Rome,” I told her, reclining on the couch. Instantly, a slave removed my sandals and another pair commenced washing my feet. Others filled my cup, arranged my cushions, and fanned me, all unnecessarily, but then that is what luxury is all about.

  Jocasta took a couch opposite me, artfully allowing her peplos to gape slightly. Well, more than slightly. Clearly, the garment had been designed to gape and she had a good deal to display thus. Women have frequently practiced these wiles upon me, almost always with success.

  “Try some of the honeyed pheasant breast,” she suggested, serving me a plate of it with her own hands. I took it and tried a slice. It was superb, but I had by this time come to expect no less. I took a good swallow of the wine, which I recognized to my surprise as Gaulish. I had always thought that benighted province would never produce drinkable wine, but a few years before some vineyards there had begun producing a rather decent vintage, and this was far more than decent. I refer of course to our old, southern province of Gaul, where the people were respectably clad in togas, not to the trousers-wearing part.

  “Gelon tells me,” I began, “that he spent the night of the murder at his father’s house and that you were there.”

  “Yes, I was there.” She popped a ripe strawberry into her mouth.

  “Why weren’t you at the dinner given by Norbanus? Your husband was there.”

  “I don’t like being snubbed by all those grand ladies. My husband enjoys flaunting his wealth and influence at such events, but I can do without them. The civic banquet where you were honored was quite another sort of thing.”

  “I see. Will you be able to testify that Gelon was in that house for the entire night?”

  “Yes—that is, I believe he was.”

  “Your memory seems to be less than certain on this point,” I noted.

  “Gelon was in the house in the early evening, after his father had departed for the house of Norbanus. We had dinner together. Afterward, I retired to my bedroom. I never heard anyone leave during the night, and he was there the next morning, when your men came to arrest him.”

  I washed down a fig with the excellent wine. “Forgive me, Jocasta, but that is thin.”

  “Does it matter? I am just the slaver’s wife and everyone will think I am covering up for the slaver’s son.”

  “You would have to come up with a much better lie than that to rouse such suspicion.”

  “I fear it is the best I can do. My husband may forbid me to testify, anyway.”

  “I will speak to him on the matter. You requested my presence here,” I reminded her. “Surely it wasn’t just to tell me that you have no compelling reason to believe that Gelon killed the girl.”

  “No, I had a different but connected reason to ask you here.”

  “This sounds devious. Please continue.”

  “I believe you should be looking into the activities of the priest Diocles.”

  My cup hand paused halfway between table and mouth. “Why?” The cup resumed its progress.

  She grew oblique. “Tell me, have Norbanus and Silva approached you, urging you to execute Gelon and be done with it?”

  I was no slouch at obliquity myself. “And if they have?”

  “Ask yourself why.”

  I had been asking myself exactly that, but I would have been foolish to reveal this to her. “Come to the point, Jocasta. What are the priest and the duumviri up to?”

  “By now you’ve seen that Baiae and much of southern Campania are fat on the luxury trade. Landowners control things up in Rome, but down here the likes of Silva and Norbanus and all the rest are cocks of the dunghill. Silk, perfume, incense, dyestuffs, gems, gold, extraordinary slaves—if it is precious, expensive, rare, those men control it and they make millions from it. Where there is so much wealth, there is corruption. I doubt I am telling you anything terribly surprising.”

  “I am aware of the connection between money and political influence. I fail to see what this has to do with the case at hand.”

  “Where there are luxuries, there are sumptuary laws, import duties, trade restrictions, and many other inconveniences to the pursuit of further wealth. Even in a common year there is a great deal of bribery, coercion, and influence buying to be done. In a censorship year like this one, the problem increases tenfold.”

  “I can see that this might be of concern to men like the duumviri and their colleagues including, I am sorry to say, your husband. How might the priest be involved? He seems an austere man. His house is modest, as are his clothes, his household, and his late daughter.”

  “That girl was not the modest, blameless idol the old man described in her eulogy.” What she felt delivering these words was difficult to read, but I sensed deep emotion there.

  “What mortal has ever matched up to his or her eulogy? The form is stylized and consists almost entirely of conventional phrases. I myself have delivered eulogies for utterly wretched human beings and made them sound like fit companions for the gods.”

  She laughed, and she had a good laugh, one that made all the flesh she was displaying jiggle. “Well, be that as it may, the girl was—I don’t want to speak ill of the dead and attract her vengeful spirit—” she spilled a few drops of wine onto the pavement in propitiation “—but that young woman was spreading herself pretty thin.”

  “And if she was promiscuous, what of it? That’s the stuff of family scandal, not the concern of a senior magistrate.”

  “It is if her activities involve treason.”

  “Treason?” I said, intrigued. In those days treason was an exceedingly slippery concept. With so many men and factions vying for supreme power, each tended to define the concept his own way. These days, it just means anything the First Citizen doesn’t like.

  “Treason,” she reaffirmed. “We don’t engage in Roman-style power politics down here, but we aren’t entirely unaware of how it’s played. Campania and points south are old Pompeian territory, full of his clientela.”

  “I can hardly be unaware of that.”

  “Before much longer, it’s going to come to a showdown between Caesar and Pompey.”

  I closed my eyes. Finally, those two names. I had thought I was away from it all, but no chance of that. “The names are not unfamiliar to me. But activity on behalf of one or the other scarcely merits the onus of treason.”

  “It does when dealings with foreign powers are involved.”

  Perhaps I should clarify something here. Clientage—that interlocking series of relationships that so closely binds men not necessarily of the same family—has always been a bedrock of Roman society and remains so even now. But in my younger days it carried even greater import. Citizen clients were obliged to vote for you, and noncitizen clients owed you all the accustomed duties. Hence, politically ambitious men took every pain to expand their clientela. Great men had millions of clients, encompassing whole districts. In Italy, this meant a great well of loyal manpower when raising legions. The greatest men, like Caesar and Pompey, had foreign kings and by extension their kingdoms, among their clientela. Needless to say, the First Citizen put an end to that upon assuming dictatorial power.

  Once again, my cup paused in its ascent.

  “Before we proceed further,” I said, “I should very much like to know how it happens that you know what these men have been up to.” Men in my experience generally did not make their women a part of their political lives. There were exceptions, of course. Clodia, for instance. Or, for that matter, my wife, Julia.

  “My husband’s business subjects him to long absences from Italy. During those times, I conduct his affairs here. Whether they like it or not, those men have to deal with me frequently.”

  This did not satisfy me, but I let her go on.

  “I am quite aware when one or more of those men are in financial difficulties, and when one is, they all are. They try to conceal this from me and everybody else. The pattern of their dealings changes and they begin to meet in secret. Their meeting place is always the
same: the Temple of Apollo.”

  “Mere changes in commercial habits should not reveal such a thing to you. How did you come by this knowledge?”

  “The usual way. I employ spies in their households.”

  Immediately, I thought of the unfortunate Charmian, now languishing in the ergastulum with her back cut to pieces. I would have liked to surprise Jocasta with this knowledge, but it’s always good to keep something in reserve.

  “What did your spies report?”

  “That the duumviri and certain others met with the priest and discussed the secession of the former Greek colonies of southern Italy, Baiae, Cumae, Stabiae, Tarentum, and Messana, and several others. Soon after these meetings their pecuniary problems cleared up as if by magic.”

  “Whose money?” I demanded.

  “Who wants to see Rome brought low? There is no shortage of candidates, but the remaining free Greek states seem the likeliest, don’t you think? Macedonia is always fretful and in a state of rebellion.”

  “Macedonia is poor.”

  “Rhodes is not. Rhodes is rich and powerful and still, just barely, independent. Ptolemy chafes under the Roman heel and might like to be truly independent instead of a Roman puppet. And Alexandria is a Greek city. They might all see a coming civil war as their last chance. If all of them subscribed to a bribe fund, it would scarcely dent their resources to buy powerful sympathizers in all the humiliated towns.”

  “With the priest as go-between?”

  She said nothing, merely selected an especially fat cherry and dipped it in honey. There was a great fad for cherries back then. A few years previously Lucullus had brought the first cherry trees to Italy as part of the loot from his eastern campaign. He had planted a vast orchard and made seedlings and cuttings available to Italian farmers at only a nominal cost—one of those acts of euergesia Julia had spoken of. The new trees were just beginning to bear and everyone was eating cherries.

  “What is the girl’s part in all this?”

  “As I said, she was spreading herself thin among the local male population, and it seems she had a habit of babbling in the throes of passion. I don’t think the priest would have killed his own daughter for it, but any of the others would have.”