The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "No, Papa. I thought of it myself. I knew where the poison was—" "Of course you did, because I made such a point of warning you about it when I got it from Eco. So dangerous, I thought, to have poison in a house with a child. Dangerous in a way I never considered! But your mother must have known when you mixed it into Dio's portion?"

  "No. I did it while her back was turned, then made sure that I did the serving."

  "You did it all on your own! In the blink of an eye you made up your mind to kill a man, then fetched the poison, slipped it into his food, and ... "

  Diana lowered her eyes.

  "All on your own!"

  She nodded. I shook my head. "When did Bethesda give you those old green-glass earrings of hers?"

  Diana sighed. "Ages ago, Papa. She tired of them, and there were scratches in the glass, so she let me have them. I wore them from time to time."

  "And I never noticed. Of course, Bethesda wears her hair up, showing her ears. You still wear your hair down, like a girl ... "

  "It's funny. I can't remember wearing them that day. I can't even remember using one of them to pry open the lock on the strongbox to get at the poison, but I suppose I must have. It's like it all happened underwater. I didn't realize until days later that I'd lost the earring. I looked everywhere for it. Everywhere but inside your strongbox. Finally I gave up on finding it. I gave the widowed earring to Titania."

  "Yes, Titania told me." I shook my head. "You left the lock just as it was, broken. You never even tried to replace the poison you'd taken, if only with something that looked similar." I winced. "That fact alone should have told me that Bethesda wasn't responsible. She would have covered her tracks! You behaved like a child, Diana, thinking you could leave such clues and not be found out. When did you tell your mother?"

  "Not until just the other day, after Clodia's visit."

  "Why did you wait so long? I'm not surprised that you didn't tell me, but I thought you had no secrets from your mother?"

  "I meant to tell her right after Dio left the house. I wanted to. But

  I was suddenly afraid. Then I was confused. The next day, after you were gone, we heard that Dio had died. I could see that Mother was pleased, though she never spoke a word. But everyone said that Dio had been stabbed to death, and if that was so, how could I have poisoned him? Maybe the stuff was harmless, I thought, not poison at all, just a yellow spice. Maybe I had only imagined doing it. It all seemed so strange. I didn't know what to do. I just wanted to forget and be done with it."

  I nodded. "So Bethesda didn't know the truth until after Clodia's visit. All her protests that Caelius was innocent were only statements of opinion! She was also sure that Caelius could never have poisoned Clodia. Well, she was wrong on both counts—Caelius tried his best to kill Dio and Clodia both. So much for Bethesda as a judge of character. So much for me, admiring Dio! What prompted you to finally tell her?"

  "It was hearing her tell Clodia what happened to her and her mother when she was a girl. I was amazed to hear her talk about it to anyone but me. It made me cry. That was when I finally made up my mind to tell her I poisoned Dio, not because I was proud of what I did, but because I didn't want to have any secrets from her. So that night, after Clodia left, I told her. She said that we mustn't tell anyone. 'Not even Papa?' I said. 'Especially not him!'

  "But a couple of days later, after the two of you came back from Clodia's house, Mother came into my room to tell me about the party, and then you burst in, shouting at her. You'd gone looking for the poison and found the broken lock and the empty pyxis. You threw the earring on the floor—and suddenly I realized where I had lost it. But what you said made no sense. You seemed to think that for some reason Mother had stolen the poison for Clodia ... "

  I groaned and shook my head. "I accused her of deceiving me, and she admitted it—but we were talking about different things! I thought she had given the poison to Clodia behind my back, but the deception was something else—she knew you had poisoned Dio and kept it from me."

  Diana nodded. "After you went storming out of the house, Mother told me, 'If he does figure out the truth, keep your mouth shut. Let me take the blame.' But you found me out, didn't you, Papa?" She spoke without recrimination, but rather with a hint of pride — of Bethesda for shielding her, of me for finding her out.

  I looked at her face in the soft light from the garden and saw a girl-child with lustrous black hair and the beginnings of a woman's beauty. "I don't know what to make of you, Diana. You're a mystery, like your mother. Why did you do it? What gave you the strength to go through with it?"

  "How can you not understand, Papa? Do you remember when we were in this room the other day and I wanted to see the letter you were writing to Meto? It was a letter about the work you were doing, looking into Dio's death. I asked you why it was so important for you to know who killed Dio. You talked about peace of mind. You said to me, 'If someone who was close to you had been hurt, wouldn't you want to avenge that person, to redress the wrong that was done to them, if you could?' Of course, Papa! That's exactly what I did. I did it for Mother. I did it for the grandmother I'll never know. Would you have me undo it, if I could? If you could turn back time, would you have me do nothing, instead?"

  I studied her face, confused, and tried to remember what I believed about murder and justice, right and wrong.

  "Wouldn't you have done the same thing yourself, Papa?"

  For an instant the veil of mystery dissolved. The eyes that looked back at me were as familiar and empty of secrets as my own eyes in a mirror. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her brow. From the garden came the noise of the family arriving for dinner—Eco, Menenia, Meto, the all-conquering twins. I drew back and looked into Diana's eyes again, and saw with a shiver of regret that the veil had returned. She was a mystery again, distinct and wholly of herself, another mortal adrift in the cosmos: out of my control, beyond my comprehension. The moment of recognition was fleeting, as such moments always are, like music which fills the void to overflowing and then vanishes in the twinkling of an eye.

  AUTHOR'S

  NOTE

  Within thirteen years, many of the players in the trial of Marcus Caelius would be, in the historian T. P. Wiseman's phrase, "spectacularly dead" — Clodius murdered during a skirmish with Milo's gang (an angry mob burned the Senate House the next day); Crassus massacred along with twenty-thousand troops in his ill-fated campaign for military glory against the Parthians; Pompey a casualty of the tumultuous Civil War; Cicero a casualty of the peace. Republican judicial restraints on "political violence" clearly failed, as did the second attempt by Crassus, Caesar and Pompey to form a stabilizing triumvirate; at the end of the road stood Augustus.

  King Ptolemy would also be dead, leaving his children (including the famous Cleopatra) to fight over Egypt and to fend off Roman domination for a little while longer.

  As for Marcus Caelius, he shifted allegiance once too often, and against the wrong man. Unable to convince a garrison of soldiers to revolt against Caesar in the middle of the Civil War, his ambitions ended in a violent death. His colorful correspondence with Cicero survived to make him the darling of historians like Gaston Boissier ("In the history we are studying, there is perhaps no more curious figure than Caelius") and W. Warde Fowler (who called Caelius "the most interesting figure in the life of his age"). Early on, the first-century commentator Quintilian delivered the judgment of posterity: Marcus Caelius "deserved a cooler head and a longer life."

  Catullus died the soonest of any, in 54 B.C. , of unknown causes. He was probably about thirty years old.

  What of Clodia? After the trial, she vanishes from the scene (though I suspect that Gordianus may not have seen quite the last of her). We get a glimpse of her again nine years later in some of Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus, who appears to have been on good terms with Clodia. Looking to buy property where he can enjoy his retirement ("A place to grow old in," Atticus assumes,
to which Cicero bluntly replies, "A place where I can be buried"), Cicero asks his friend to check out various horti that might be for sale around Rome.

  This is Cicero, in Shackleton Bailey's translation: "Clodia's gardens I like, but I don't think they are for sale." And a few days later: "But you say something or other about Clodia. Where is she then or when is she coming? I prefer her grounds to anyone's except Otho's. But I don't think she will sell: she likes the place and has plenty of money: and how difficult the other thing is, you are well aware. But pray let us make an effort to think out some way of getting what I want."

  So far as I can tell, the very last we hear of her is in a letter of April 15,44 B.C., in which Cicero writes to Atticus: Clodia quid egerit, scribas ad me velim ("I should like you to tell me what Clodia has done"). Was Cicero seeking clarification of a bit of gossip he had heard? Was he inquiring about Clodia out of the blue? We do not know.

  I should like to acknowledge some of the books I encountered in my research. Foremost among them is T. P. Wiseman's superbly annotated Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge University Press, 1985), which ranges far and wide to render a vivid picture of Catullus and his circle of history, fiction, and academic myth.

  Studies of Catullus abound, from Tenney Frank's venerable Catullus and Horace (Henry Holt and Company, 1928) to Charles Martin's insightful and thoroughly modern Catullus (Yale University Press, 1992). There are numerous translations of his poems. The Penguin edition by Peter Whigham is accessible (in every sense); Horace Gregory's 1956 translation may be harder to find, but rewards the search. Readers with some Latin will find The Poems of Catullus: A Teaching Text by Phyllis Young Forsyth (University Press of America, 1986) frank and useful.

  The famous oration in defense of Marcus Caelius can be found in Michael Grant's translation of Selected Political Speeches by Cicero (Pen-guin, 1969). R. G. Austin's commentary on the Latin text (Oxford, 1933; third edition 1960) is delightfully sharp.

  Some odds and ends: Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult by Maarten J. Vermaseren (Thames and Hudson, London, 1977) is a treasure trove of information about the Great Mother and her eunuch priests. Back From Exile: Six Speeches Upon His Return, translated with notes by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (American Philological Association, 1991), gives a lucid picture of Cicero's ongoing feud with Clodius. The melodramatic tale of Appius Claudius the decemvir and the hapless Verginia is found in Book Three of Livy's History of Rome. An explication of the Nola pun in Caelius's speech (of which we have only a few secondhand quotations) can be found in T. W. Hillard's ' 'In triclinio Coam, in cubiculo Nolam: Lesbia and the Other Clodia" (Liverpool Classical Monthly, June 1981).

  Much of my research was conducted at Doe Library at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Perry-Casteneda Library at the Uni-versity of Texas at Austin.

  Special thanks to Brad Craft, who helped get me in the mood to take on Clodia and company with a copy of Forberg's 1844 Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris); to Penni Kimmel, for her comments on the manuscript; to Terri Odom, for reading the galleys; to Barbara Saylor Rogers, who showed me that the world is full of the most unex-pected interconnections; and to my Austin friends, Gary Coody and Anne and Deborah Odom, who gave the author places to retreat from his labors.