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

by Lindsey Davis

  Often in the evenings, I stroll around the Circus and Forum

  Those haunts of trickery; I loiter beside the fortune tellers; then

  I make my way home to a plate of minestrone with leeks and peas.

  Then I go off to bed with no worries about having to be up early in the morning …

  I stay in bed till ten, then walk; or else after reading

  Or writing something for my private pleasure I have a massage …

  HORACE

  (Falco reads Horace too, being a similar laid-back entity.)

  Compare the poem with: I stayed in bed long enough to prove that I wasn’t a client who needed to leap out and grovel for favours at some rich patron’s house. Then I showed myself to the eager populace in the Forum, though most were looking the other way. I dodged my banker, a girl I preferred not to recognise, and several of my brothers-in-law. Then I sauntered into the men’s baths at the back of the Temple of Castor for a complete physical overhaul … [PG]

  This is Mediterranean life, where things that would be only incidental in other societies are the driving force. This life has its casual side; people are passionate about that.

  The Hours of the Day

  Strangely to us, the Romans divided days and nights into twelve hours each, according to light and dark; so in winter an ‘hour’ might be as little as forty-five minutes and in summer seventy-five. People rose at dawn, or earlier (ugh!), and even for labourers the working day ended around the sixth hour, when most bath houses opened. Dinner would be around the eighth or ninth hour, perhaps carrying on into the night. Brothels were supposed to remain closed until the ninth hour – though did they? Some trades, as always, had to take advantage of any chance to make money, so barbers were famous for staying open until late and the Saepta Julia might have shops open until the eleventh hour, when it must have been growing too dark to see much.

  The system bears some relation to modern life around the Mediterranean, where many businesses close at midday, allowing a period of rest or mischief in the afternoons.

  The first two hours of the morning tax

  Poor clients, during the third advocates wax

  Eloquent and hoarse; until the fifth hour ends

  The city to her various trades attends;

  At six o’clock the weary workers stop

  For the siesta; all Rome shuts up shop

  At seven; the hour from eight to nine supplies

  The oiled wrestlers with their exercise;

  The ninth invites us to recline full length

  Denting the cushions.At last comes the tenth …

  Then my jest books can appear …

  MARTIAL

  Status, Family and Empire

  Social Status

  On his first visit to Camillus Verus, perhaps his first ever close encounter with a senator, Falco assesses himself: A free citizen, his importance signalled by the length of his train of slaves – in my case, none. [SP] This introduces the financial qualifications for rank, the custom of paying morning visits to patrons (Falco isn’t a client, but he will be), the acceptance of slavery and the importance of show. All will colour the series. Falco does not take kindly to the superior ranks: how clannish these people can be: little pockets of reliable friends sewn into every province from Palestine to the Pillars of Hercules … [SP]

  Besides physical reconstruction of the city, Vespasian set out to purge corruption and scandal from Roman life. This tends to make Vespasian touchy about Helena Justina allying herself with a plebeian. However, it offers Falco the lure of promotion;Titus suggests he might aim for the middle class. But in Poseidon’s Gold, even though Falco has borrowed enough cash, Domitian refuses to promote him; his status as an informer damns him.

  He reformed the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders, weakened by frequent murders and longstanding neglect; replacing undesirable members with the most eligible Italian and provincial candidates available.

  SUETONIUS

  Rome was an unforgiving society. An illustrious pedigree was vital and a family could be permanently damaged by a wrong move. It happens to the Camilli, as Falco foresees: In a Roman scandal none of the family escapes. Unborn generations, judged by the honour of their ancestors, were already condemned by this act against the state … [SP]

  The Emperor

  Augustus devised the famous phrase primus inter pares, first among equals, to excuse his position as emperor, or permanent dictator. He pretended he still lived as a private citizen, ostentatiously keeping an ordinary house – though rather specially located on the Palatine. Falco, an unrepentant republican, rejects the principle: Every free man should have a voice in the government of the city where he has to live. The senate should not hand control of the empire for life to one mortal, who may turn out insane or corrupt or immoral – and probably will. [SP]

  Augustus and subsequent emperors were declared ‘divine’ after they died. This was what caused difficulties for Christians. It was also the source of Vespasian’s wry joke when dying, Dear me, I think I must be turning into a god!

  Senators

  There was a financial qualification for the Senate: at least one million sesterces invested in Italian land. Most senators in fact owned much more than that. However, the Emperor had a right of veto. Strictly, ‘patricians’ were members of only a handful of ancient, snobbish families. The Camilli belong to one such, but I suspect mine are from an inferior branch.

  There were responsibilities, sometimes expensive. Falco tells King Togidubnus: Lavish spending is the duty of a wealthy Roman. It demonstrates status, which glorifies the Empire, and it cheers up the plebs to think they belong to a civilised society. [BBH]

  There were rules. Senators could not marry slaves or freedwomen; this prevented Vespasian marrying Caenis. Senators could not leave Italy without permission. It was forbidden either to be or to marry an actor, gladiator or prostitute – though it happened. I’m a senator’s offspring, Helena scoffs. Disgracing myself is my heritage. Every family my mother gossips with has a disgruntled son no-one talks about who has run off to scandalise his grandfather by acting in public. [LAP]

  Falco is contemptuous: nobody needs exorbitant talents like judgement, or even a sense of honour, to vote in an assembly three times every month … [TTD] He reserves particular satire for senators’ wives and daughters (except the one he wants). Senators’ wives, in my scheme, fall into three types: the ones who sleep with senators, but not the senators who married them; the ones who sleep with gladiators; and a few who stay at home. [SP] Then, Mothers regarded it as a duty to educate their daughters to be rebellious. Daughters revelled in it, throwing themselves at gladiators, joining queer sects, or becoming notorious intellectuals. By comparison, the vices open to boys seemed tame … [LAP]

  Falco loathes people in authority who are not up to it. He is haunted by my prejudices: fast-track admin trainees: PhDs who lack intellectual rigour; modern politicians, who go from university to being a ‘political researcher’ then jump into a Parliamentary seat without ever having held down a job or even run a household.

  So farewell Rome. I leave you

  To sanitary engineers and municipal architects, men

  Who by swearing black is white land all the juicy contracts

  Just like that – a new temple, swamp drainage, harbour-works,

  River-clearance, undertaking, the lot – then pocket the cash

  And fraudulently file their petition for bankruptcy.

  JUVENAL

  Equestrians

  The middle-rank qualification was 400,000 sesterces – less than for the Senate, but still a lot of cash. It is the rank from which Vespasian rose, and many others.

  This was where opportunists could make their mark, and perhaps make money. Procurators, in executive positions, ran branches of government. Camillus Meto, himself equestrian, sums it up derisively: Life with a high moral tone, and so little else!Trapped among third-grade tax collectors, freed imperial secretaries, the Admiral of the British C
hannel Fleet! Hard work on a mean salary or struggling in trade. No ceremony abroad, no style or power at home. [SP] Falco, ironically, takes a different view: I thought of what it meant – not simply the land and the rank, but the kind of life they enabled me to lead. Like Flavius Hilaris, ploughing a useful furrow in his own way – so passionately – and enjoying quiet, comfortable houses with a wife he dearly loved, the life of my choice among people I liked, where I knew I could do well. [SP]

  Falco’s first (so far his only) government position is as Procurator of the Sacred Geese of Juno. ‘You deserve it,’ grinned the Emperor. The job was rubbish; we both knew that. For me the future looked dreary. I had risen above generations of rascally Didii – to what? To being a rascal who had lost his place in life. [OVTM] It has dangers too; being accused of neglecting his duties in The Accusers nearly wipes him out financially and socially.

  Falco is hard on himself when he reaches his equestrian rank: a sinecure, a placeman, a careerist, and a half-hearted one at that. [OB] However, I feel he deserves it – and the rank certainly deserves him.

  It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure and the poor wot gets the blame!

  MUSIC HALL SONG

  Plebeians

  These are the poor. Their privileges are few, but they can vote and appear in court; they have tribunes to speak for them. In theory a plebeian with funds and influence can enter the Senate at the age of forty and even become consul at forty-two (Falco could do this – only he will reach forty just as Domitian’s reign begins …) Most work too hard and die too young.

  It was worse than slavery to be free but very poor: Being a menial among people who have no regular income is worse than captivity on a rich landowner’s farm. No-one here cared whether Congrio ate or starved. He was nobody’s asset, so nobody’s loss if he suffered. [LAP]

  Freedmen

  A freed slave who had been set up with a little money, and who had initiative, could be extremely successful. Placidus, the procurator for port taxes, says, I bought my freedom, worked in commerce, earned enough to be granted equestrian rank, and offered myself for useful posts … Some of us really try to do a decent job, but we’re thwarted at every turn. [DLC] The aristocracy, who could not engage in trade legally, were allowed to use their slaves as commercial intermediaries, so many freed slaves understood business and gained useful contacts. There was a tendency for everyone else to look down on them as uncultured and showy, but like yuppies today, why should they care? The Hortensii in Venus in Copper are a picaresque example: people even Falco views with a Roman shudder.

  Imperial freedmen were powerful in government. In the Julio-Claudian period, the most famous – and richest – was Narcissus. The strong Flavian emperors will have had their mandarins, but they worked in the background.

  Any slur about having been a slave seems only to have lasted one generation. One of Trimalchio’s cronies in the Satyricon says: I’m a man among men, and I walk with my head up. I don’t owe anybody a penny – there’s never been a court order out for me. No one’s said ‘Pay up!’ to me in the street. I’ve bought a bit of land, and some tiny pieces of plate. I’ve twenty bellies to feed, as well as a dog. I bought my old woman’s freedom so nobody could wipe his dirty hands on her hair. Four thousand I paid for myself. I was elected to the Augustan college and it cost me nothing. I hope when I die I won’t have to blush in my coffin [PETRONIUS].

  These coarse, clever, thrusting ex-slaves, most often of foreign extraction, suffered from none of the crippling conventions and moral beliefs that every upper-class Roman inherited as part of his emotional baggage. What enabled them to amass gigantic fortunes, and to force their way into positions of political power, was by no means only their native ability. They were cashing in on their masters’ ignorance of, and contempt for, a world ruled by commerce and industry.

  PETER GREEN

  Slaves

  Slaves had no legal identity. They were property. Causing harm to someone else’s slave was actionable as an injury to their owner. Slaves could possess money only in limited circumstances, and could not marry. They were never to be armed. They could be sold, whatever heartache was caused, with no redress. In good homes they were treated as one of the family, though in bad they were violently abused. Satirists frequently show women screaming at their maids, pulling their hair and beating them, for imagined slights. A slave, male or female, could be used sexually by their own master or others on the master’s say-so; it was common and expected. Pertinax is half-brother to Barnabas, fathered on a slave. When sleeping with a slave, why should he care? A birth only meant one more entry in the plus column of his accounts. [SB] The two men remain close; Barnabas is one person for whom Pertinax shows genuine affection.

  No matter how brazenly he was defying me, I knew better than to beat up another citizen’s slave [TFL]

  The position of rural slave labour was often grim; for farm work, olive oil production and so forth, large numbers were barracked in poor accommodation, badly fed, forced to work long hours. Worst of all was the lot of slaves in metal mines. It was expected that they would die; being sent to the mines was a criminal punishment – usually intended as a death sentence. Falco may sometimes seem a clown, but subjecting himself to this voluntarily in The Silver Pigs is an act of extreme courage.

  I’m glad to hear that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. It is just what one expects of an enlightened, cultivated person like yourself. ‘They’re slaves,’ people say. No. They’re human beings. ‘They’re slaves.’ But they share the same roof as ourselves. ‘They’re slaves.’ No, they’re friends, humble friends. ‘They’re slaves.’ Strictly speaking they’re our fellow slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them. SENECA

  The liberal Falco is close enough to poverty to feel awkward. He and Helena need domestic help, but his first visit to a slave market is unproductive.

  ‘I want a clean woman with experience of headstrong children who would fit in with a young, upwardly moving family.’

  ‘You’ve got expensive taste! We do a basic model with no trimmings. Lots of potential but you have to train the bint yourself. You can win them over with kind treatment, you know. Ends up they would die for you.’

  ‘What – and land me with the funeral costs?’ [BBH]

  Slavery exists in the modern world, particularly in the sex ‘industry’. In opulent countries people work illegally in sweatshops or labour gangs, below the authorities’ sightlines. We can share Falco’s uneasiness about live-in domestic workers: Some ill-trained, immature, uninterested foreigner for whom our baby represented a spoiled, rude Roman brat with spoiled, rude Roman parents, all of whom Fortune had spared from slavery and suffering for no obvious reason – unlike the conjectural nurse who would think herself, but for Fortune, as good as us. As, but for Fortune, she might well have been. [OVTM] Any modern yuppie would recognise this.

  Runaways

  To run away, to lure away a slave, or to harbour a runaway was theft, depriving the owner of his property. The vigiles would apprehend suspicious characters and start a search for their owners. Petronius jokes, not to fear: all anyone had to do to be in the clear was to produce his valid certificate of Roman citizenship. [STH] Where masters were not found, runaways became public slaves, working in latrines, hypocausts or even the mines.

  Women

  It is commonplace to say that a Roman woman had no legal identity. A man had to speak for her, and in the absence of a father and husband, like a juvenile she had an appointed ‘guardian’; I feel giving Roman women guardians may just have given them more wimps to push around. At least, unlike Greek women, Roman women went out to dinner with their husbands or were joint hosts at home. However, the man was the head of the household, received the corn dole, answered the Census call, registered the children, appeared in court, served on juries, and according to Carcopino even did all the shopping … Let me point out, gently, that a tradition of Roman marriage was that a new wife was formall
y handed the keys to her husband’s store-cupboards.

  Rights given to a mother of three children (four in Italy, five elsewhere) did allow her to manage without a guardian and to make her own will.

  In practice, it is clear that among the lower orders, women were their husbands’ life and business partners. On tombstones or in paintings they sit side by side, equal in size, which is indicative in ancient pictorial art. Any society where women are visible, which respects mothers and daughters, or where marriage – hence divorce and dowry management – is by mutual consent, will have loud, self-confident women who bully husbands and sons, spend at will, and do not suffer fools gladly. Roman women were the ancestors of modern Italian women. They, too, could be said to live in a paternalist society, but from an old village granny to a celluloid celebrity, you don’t cross them.

  ‘Our history is written by men and perhaps they underestimate the part played by women in real life. The Empress Livia, it is well known, was a rock to Augustus throughout the decades of his reign; he even allowed her to use his seal on state papers. And in most family businesses the husband and wife play an equal part. Even ours, Falco!’ [OB]

  Where there was a shop, Roman women minded it. If it is true the husband spent a lot of time out shopping, then for the wife to take charge of the business in his absence would be a necessity!

  Girls who worked, as many must have done at the poor end of society, would have had their own style – for instance, women like the pistachio-chewing, mulsum-swigging, parasol-wielding, late-staying, man-baiting members of the Braidmakers’ Old Girls. [THF]

  I was Maia’s older brother and Helena’s chosen partner. According to the ancient laws of Rome, my word should be law: fat chance. These were women of character and I was just the poor duffer who had to do his best for them. [THF]