Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery)

by Lindsey Davis

  Flora’s is a watering hole for Falco’s brother Festus, for Petronius Longus on his way home from a shift, sometimes for Falco himself. We first encounter it in Poseidon’s Gold, where Falco indignantly learns the owner is his father’s girlfriend. After Epimandos dies, the thankless task of waiter passes to Falco’s run-down ex-teacher, Apollonius. After Flora’s death, Falco’s unsuitable sister Junia runs the place. We can assume it will stay in the family.

  The Valerian

  Opposite Flora’s is a much better run, well-scrubbed but much less popular caupona. The Valerian had a quiet atmosphere and quite good wine … [PG] But Nobody went there.* People were afraid the cleanliness would give them hives. Besides, when nobody goes to a place there is no atmosphere. [OB]

  * Author’s note: wrong, Apollonius wisely eats there!

  The River Embankment

  Below the Aventine, the south bank of the Tiber was reinforced with an embankment, much as today, though without thundering motor traffic. You can still see the outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Drain built in Etruscan times to carry away water from the marsh area of the Forum. This features in The Silver Pigs and again in Three Hands in the Fountain. Once he lives in Pa’s old house, Falco often walks along the Marble Embankment. On unavoidable occasions, he meets his brother-in-law Lollius, the water-boatman, there.

  Rome had been founded upstream on high ground at the earliest bridgeable point on the Tiber – but that presupposed ours was a useful river. Romulus was a shepherd. How would he know? Compared with the grandiose waterways in most major provincial capitals, old Father Tiber was a widdle of rat’s piss. [STH]

  The Cloaca Maxima and its brother under the Circus kept the centre of Rome habitable and its institutions working. The Great Drain sucked down standing and surface water, the overflow from fountains and aqueducts, sewage and rainwater. [THF]

  Pa’s house, which eventually becomes Falco and Helena’s settled home, is a narrow town house, prone to flooding. I have imagined layout and decor – for instance the salon with battered antique furniture where Falco and Helena impress the travel agent in See Delphi and Die. Its roof terrace is a favourite hideaway, also useful for observing Anacrites’ men’s antics. Then as now, Romans decorated their houses with plants. It had troughs filled with plants, bulbs, even small trees. Shaped trellises were curtained with roses and ivy. At the parapet more roses were trained along chains like garlands. There between tubs of box trees, stood two lion-ended seats, providing a vista across the water to Caesar’s Gardens, the Transtiberina, the whale-backed ridge of the Janiculan … [PG]

  Falco, who once used to brood on the Embankment, takes a particularly lonely decision here on his own rooftop, at the start of Nemesis.

  The Emporium

  The Emporium, which incorporated an earlier store called the Aemilian Portico, was a long, secure building on the Embankment. Here barges from Ostia brought every kind of import. Scenes from several novels in the series take place at the Emporium, which lies close to Pa’s house. You can smell it from the water. A blind man would know he had arrived. Here anything buildable, wearable or edible that is produced in any province of the Empire comes to be unloaded at the teeming wharves. The slick stevedores, who are renowned for their filthy tempers and flash off-duty clothing, then crash the goods onto handcarts, dump them in baskets, or wheel about with great sacks on their shoulders, ferrying them inside the greatest indoor market in the world. Cynical sales are conducted, and before the importer has realised he has been rooked by the most devious middlemen in Europe, everything whirls out again to destinations in workshops, warehouses, country estates or private homes. The moneychangers wear happy smiles all day … [TTD].

  Into her three ports of Ostia, Portus, and the emporium beneath the Aventine poured the tiles and bricks, the wines and fruits of Italy; the corn of Egypt and Africa; the oil of Spain; the venison, the timbers and the wool of Gaul; the cured meats of Baetica; the dates of the oases; the marbles of Tuscany, of Greece and of Numidia; the porphyries of the Arabian desert; the lead, silver and copper of the Iberian peninsula; the ivory of the Syrtes and the Mauretanias, the gold of Dalmatia and of Dacia; the tin of the Cassiterides, now the Scilly Isles, and the amber of the Baltic; the papyri of the valley of the Nile; the glass of Phoenicia and of Syria; the stuffs of the Orient; the incense of Arabia; the spices, the corals and the gems of India; the silks of the Far East.

  CARCOPINC

  Balbinus Pius organises a raid, after which Petronius gets into trouble for closing the place. Falco makes enquiries in the German trading community in Saturnalia.

  The Forum Boarium

  The meat market, close to the river and near the starting gate end of the Circus Maximus, with its rough traders and smell of dried animal blood, makes a frequently apt scene. Ideas for the smell and atmosphere come from a street of butchers’ stalls near the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, where at one time Richard and I used to stay. There must have been a landing place and a market here since long before Romulus grew up and identified the Seven Hills as an ideal development site. [TTD] The corpse in a gangster killing is found there in Time to Depart; another scene occurs in Saturnalia, where the Praetorian Guards get short shrift from the butchers’ wives.

  Two exquisite Roman temples have survived nearby, their dedications uncertain but now identified as most likely a Temple of harbour god Portunus (the rectangular one) and the round Temple of Hercules Victor.

  The Circus Maximus

  The four-horse chariot of the Blues,

  When Catianus plies the whip,

  Drops back – to win the bribe and lose

  The race. Consummate jockeyship!

  MARTIAL

  Today, as in Roman times, the huge long hollow of the Circus lies between the Aventine and Palatine Hills, an inescapable barrier to walkers.

  View from Lower Aventine, across the Circus Maximus, with Capitol and Palatine behind. [Rome Reborn]

  Prostitutes haunted the colonnades; they were called ‘night moths’. Filling the outer vaults was the usual scene of deplorable commerce, a strange contrast to the delicacy of the paintings and gilt decoration which adorned the stucco and the stonework under the arcades. In the cookshops and liquor stalls the hot pies were lukewarm and greasy, and the cool drinks came in very small containers at twice the price you would pay outside. The loose women were plying for hire noisily, vying with the bookies’ touts for spectators who were still trickling out … I entered by one of the gates on the Aventine side. I had the president’s box to my far left above the starting gates, the glittering imperial balcony immediately opposite me against the Palatine Hill, then the apsidal end with the triumphal exit away to my right. The dazzle off the first two tiers of marble seats was sizzling hot by then, and even in the lull at lunchtime I was met by a wall of sound … [SB]

  The Capena Gate

  One of the oldest gates, inside the city by Falco’s time, where two aqueducts, the Appian and Marcian (which were notoriously leaky), crossed. This is where the senator lives, Helena’s family home. The Camilli owned a pair of houses near the Capena Gate. They had all the amenities of the nearby busy area around the Via Appia, but were ensconced in a private insula off a back street where only the upper classes were welcome. I could never have lived there. The neighbours were all too nosy about everyone else’s business. And someone was always having an aedile or a praetor to dinner, so people had to keep the pavements clean lest their highly superior enclave be officially criticised. [THF]

  This was close to the sacred spring where the Vestals filled their water jugs; so in One Virgin Too Many it is where Constantia slips on the moss and says a rude word.

  The Forum Romanum

  It was the usual scene in the Forum. We had the Record Office and Capitol Hill hard above us on the left; to the right the Courts, and the Temple of Castor further down the Sacred Way. Opposite, beyond the white marble rostrum, stood the Senate House. All the porticos were crammed with butchers and bankers,
all the open spaces filled with sweaty crowds, mainly men. The piazza rang with the curses of strings of slaves crisscrossing like a badly organised military display. The air simmered with the reek of garlic and hair pomade. [SP]

  View of the northern end of the Forum [Rome Reborn]

  The main Forum was absolutely crowded with temples and other buildings, so that many emperors built new fora alongside to act as overflows. At the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar, Falco has a bad experience being picked up, then later dumped semi-conscious, by the crook Priscillus in Venus in Copper.

  Almost every book set in Rome has scenes in the Forum Romanum.

  The Tabularium

  This partly survives below the Campidoglio; we think it was the record office. On its wall, in The Iron Hand of Mars, Falco chalks up his advertisement, after washing off a candidate’s election puffs from the Manicure Girls at the Agrippan Baths.

  The Temple of Saturn

  The series begins with Falco on the steps of this important temple, where the Treasury was housed in the basement. As he and Sosia rush inside to escape her pursuers, he mentions the dignified beauty of the Ionic portico; eight columns and part of the portico remain. The cult statue is supposed to have been wooden, and filled with oil, a fact I had fun with … This is the scene of the lectisternium, or outdoor public banquet for the god, in Saturnalia.

  Forum; the remains of the Temples of Saturn and of Castor and Pollux

  The Temple of Castor and Pollux

  Often shortened to omit Pollux; three columns still stand in lonely grandeur. Falco’s favourite bath house and Glaucus’ Gym are around the back of this very old temple, which commemorated a myth that after assisting the Romans at a battle, the Dioscuri had watered their horses in the Forum. The Basin of Juturna was the sacred spring where this happened; it is glimpsed briefly in Three Hands in the Fountain, as is the Arch of Augustus, one of the sites where speeches could be made, a kind of Hyde Park Corner. Falco seems unimpressed by the principle of free rhetoric: there various hotheads waved their arms as if they were trying to lose a few pounds while they declaimed against the government in a manner that could land them in jail being beaten up by unwashed guards – another offence against their liberty to roar about. Some of them wanted to be philosophers – all long hair, bare feet and hairy blankets – which in Rome was a sure way to be regarded as dangerous. But I also noticed cautious souls who had taken care to come out girded with water gourds and satchels of lunch. [THF] In the same passage he also mentions the ancient Shrine of Venus Cloacina.You can spend a lot of time wandering around the Forum today, trying to pinpoint these features. Sometimes they are labelled (often the labelling is disputed by scholars …)

  Glaucus’ Gym

  Establishments like this were meant to be sociable, like sports clubs today; Falco’s choice has a strict entrance policy, and sounds like an enlightened gentleman’s club. The one I used was run by an intelligent Cilician called Glaucus. It had the unusual distinction of being respectable. Glaucus kept a casual exercise ground where likeable citizens brought their bodies up to scratch with their minds (which were on the whole quite good), then enjoyed pleasant conversation in his bath house afterwards. There were clean towels, a small library in the colonnade, and an excellent pastry shop beside the portico steps. [SP]

  A sleek fellow who took off two days’ growth with an expression as if he were cleaning a drain. [TFL]

  It has the usual manicure girls, a sneery barber, and a huge, pain-inducing masseur from Tarsus. We learn more: the gym usually stayed open until after dinner time. It was well lit, with pottery lamps lining all the corridors, yet at this time of night the place assumed a certain eeriness. There were attendants lurking somewhere who would scrape you with a strigil if you wanted to shout out to them, yet most people who came at dusk managed alone. Many clients were middle-aged grafters with proper jobs of work. Designers of aqueduct systems and harbour engineers who sometimes worked late at emergencies on site. An academic type who had lost all sense of time in the library at the Portico of Octavia and then came here stiff and bleary-eyed. Men in trade, arriving from Ostia after an afternoon tide. And one or two offbeat, freelance freaks like me, whose weapons training Glaucus personally supervised and who worked at odd hours for reasons which his other customers never asked about … [SB]

  Glaucus allows Falco to introduce Camillus Verus, so in The Accusers they are able to meet there to plot. In Three Hands in the Fountain, the crook Florius discovers enough about Falco’s haunts to send thugs after him; Glaucus and his clientele set to eagerly with flying fists, to save him.

  The Rostra

  Between the Basilica Aemilia and the Basilica Julia stood the raised platform from which public orations were made. It was adorned with the prows of ships captured in battle, from which it took its name (rostrum means beak or prow).

  The Basilica Julia

  One of the finest buildings in the Forum, it had been rebuilt by Julius Caesar. The steps remain, complete with scratched gaming boards, though last time I went, access was disallowed. The long rectangular hall, roofed in wood over a fifty foot span, has a double row of colonnades on each long side, paved with more glittering slabs, so a ponderous chill strikes the bones in winter and an important hush lies everywhere, except when barristers are arguing among themselves in the side aisles. The colonnades have upper galleries, where people can observe proceedings, eat nuts, then throw down pistachio shells into the toga folds of the legal teams. [AC] Home to the Centumviral Court, it was closed from September to mid-October for summer recess.

  The Golden Milestone, Milliaria Aurea

  … the Golden Milestone, from which all the roads in the Empire take their distance. [SP]

  Sosia asks Falco to meet her there in The Silver Pigs; when he fails to turn up, she goes to her death alone. Ironically, the Golden Milestone stood close to the Temple of Saturn, where Falco rescued Sosia in the first scene of the book. In The Iron Hand of Mars, Falco tells Xanthus to meet him there before they set out for Germany: on a journey this long, I always start from Zero …

  Built by Augustus around 20BC, the Golden Milestone may have inspired the phrase All roads lead to Rome. Of unknown form and decoration, it was either the same as, or adjacent to, the Umbelicus Urbis Romae (the Navel of the City). A stone in the Forum today claims to be the base of the Golden Milestone but is probably nothing to do with it; the Umbelicus, once clad in marble, exists only as a pile of bricks.

  The Basilica Aemilius (Basilica Paulli)

  A long, very narrow building with a wooden roof, which was fronted by a two-storey colonnade called the Porticus of Gaius and Lucius. Dating from the age of Augustus, it was beautifully decorated in many-coloured marbles and had the frieze showing scenes from Roman history and the larger-than-life statue of a barbarian that Falco describes when he visits his banker in Ode to a Banker. It was a retail outlet and haunt of bankers; lawyers too: Here we sat, among the fine Doric columns of black and red marble in the Porticus of Gaius and Lucius, named for the grandsons of Augustus, lost golden boys whose early deaths symbolised dashed hopes. We occupied a peaceful corner outside the shops, close to one of the staircases that took people up from this gracious porch-like frontage to the richly ornate upper gallery of the Basilica Paulli. This was sophisticated living … [AC]

  Only the floor, still beautiful, survives.

  Behind the Porticus was the Janus Medius, a meeting point to discuss financial business.

  All could have found a more congenial place to discuss the news … By gathering in this dead-end passage they were consciously setting themselves aside in a private clique. [OB]

  The Temple of Vesta and House of the Vestals

  In One Virgin Too Many we glimpse an elderly Vestal going in procession: She glanced about with the truculence of a loopy old lady who has men who should know better being respectful to her all day. Is she the friend of Helena’s mother and grandmother? Don’t ask me; I only write this stuff.<
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  View past the Temple of Vesta towards the Capitol [Rome Reborn]

  Praetors, consuls and dictators would sacrifice before this flame upon taking up office, but a mere Procurator of the Sacred Poultry would have to find a damned good reason before approaching the sanctum. [OVTM]

  It used to be possible to walk around the Vestals’ House and its garden, though more recently it has been cordoned off. The first time we really see the temple, Marina’s friend is being sick on the Corinthian columns and Marina herself shouts ‘Bitches!’ Rebuilt after Nero’s Great Fire, the temple has been partially reconstructed in modern times too so you can appreciate what its delicate columns and famous latticework were like. Standing on a high podium, it was supposed to resemble an ancient hut built of wood and straw though the mock-antique construction appeared pretty crisp. [THF] Mopped out in a daily ritual, this was a place of extreme sanctity, housing a perpetual fire and the mysterious Palladium.

  The Temple of Venus and Rome

  Mentioned by mistake. (Don’t write in!) All right, all right; Hadrian built it.

  The Temple of the Divine Julius

  Also called the Temple of the Comet, because a comet was supposed to represent Caesar’s soul among the gods.

  The Regia

  The ancient palace of King Numa Pompilius was taken over by the College of Pontiffs, then reconstructed in majestic style by a wealthy consul. It contained the Temple of Mars where military dedications were made. Rutilius Gallicus gives Falco a commission in the oddly shaped triangular courtyard that you can still make out today; its purpose is that old archaeological standby ‘not fully understood’. Coolly paved in white and grey marble slabs. Around it were various old rooms used for meetings, and scribes’ nooks occupied by guardians of the archives and annals which were stored here … In the centre of the courtyard was a large underground cistern, possibly an old grain silo from centuries ago when people actually lived in Numa’s Palace. [OVTM]