SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead

by John Maddox Roberts

  More substantial courses followed, each accompanied by the appropriate wines, all of which were uniformly excellent. Between courses we had entertainment, their order directed by Pedianus. There were reciters of poems and dancers, jugglers and tightrope walkers, even an astonishing woman who balanced on her hands while using her feet to shoot a bow and arrow with great accuracy.

  In past generations, it had been a custom in Campania to have gladiators fight at banquets. In some houses, this was still done. But I have never felt that blood goes well with food. The munera form the proper venue for such carnage. Thankfully, our host seemed to agree.

  For a while we spoke of this and that, the upcoming races, events overseas, the latest omens, and so forth. Julia got the fashionably ragged local philosopher Gitiadas to expound upon a theory that the world is round like a ball, which would have been rather interesting had it not been so absurd. He said something about the circular shadow cast upon the moon during a lunar eclipse, which made no sense whatever.

  “Praetor,” said the abundantly endowed Porcia, “are you making any progress on the murder of the priest?” She popped a honeyed fig into her mouth, making her multiple chins jiggle.

  “I confess it is perplexing,” I told her. “The priest is dead, the other priests have disappeared, and the devotees of Hecate either cannot or will not help. My biggest headache is figuring out how he got into the river in the first place.”

  “Praetor,” said our host Duronius, “the neighborhood is full of the wildest rumors. Of those here, only you and your wife were actually there when the body appeared. Perhaps you could tell us exactly what happened.”

  “Of course, but I cannot tell you exactly what happened, only what I observed.” At this I saw the philosopher Gitiadas nod approvingly. So I gave them a perhaps overly lurid recitation of my experience, trying to make it as entertaining as possible. Julia then told the tale as she and the other women experienced it. Her account was much more respectful of the holiness of the site and stressed their awe at the surroundings and the uncanniness of the Oracle. Some of the company had visited the Oracle personally, and agreed that their experiences had been much the same, minus the corpse.

  “You had an uncommonly straightforward answer from the Oracle, contradictory though it seemed,” said the beautiful Sabinilla. She wore a white-blond wig that could only have been made from German hair. Her gown was of transparent Coan cloth and she had a cat’s appearance of bonelessness as she lounged on the couch. “I asked her if my husband would recover from his illness and she said, ‘Follow the sun to Vulcan’s pool.’ Later, a physician told me that if we had gone west to Sicily, there is a healing hot spring at the base of Aetna where my husband might have been cured, but by that time he was dead so it wasn’t much help.” Others agreed that they had been given similarly confusing answers that sometimes proved to make sense in retrospect.

  “My men have not yet found an access to the river where the priest’s body might have been thrown in. It is most vexing.”

  “Praetor,” said Gitiadas, “I confess I have never visited this Oracle and her mysterious tunnel, so much of this is new to me. You say that the water bubbled violently as if boiling, but it felt no more than warm?”

  “Yes, that is how it was.”

  “Bubbles are merely air moving through liquid. When water boils, air forms somehow and moves upward to the surface, by a process much debated among scholars. Other than by the boiling process, in order to make bubbles, air must somehow mix with the water from this layer of air in which we breathe, which exists above the level of the sea. If the water of the subterranean river has no access save the cave of the Oracle, where are all those bubbles coming from to make it froth so violently? The river must touch the air somewhere very near the spot where it enters the cave.”

  This was amazingly good sense, and I couldn’t imagine why I had not thought of it before. I suppose one must be a philosopher to deduce things so logically. It gave me much to think about, and I fear I was rather withdrawn company for a while. Eventually the best wine came out—a Cretan vintage I had never heard of—and I got back to my duties as a guest.

  “Does anyone know,” I asked, “why the cult of Hecate has lasted so long in these parts while it has died out almost everywhere else in Italy?”

  “Hecate has the Oracle,” Porcia said, “but the Oracle was there before Hecate.”

  “That’s just an old tale,” Sabinilla protested.

  “Oh, tell us about it,” Julia urged.

  “Well,” Porcia began, “we Campanians hold ourselves to be the original people of these parts, and we regard the Greeks and Romans as newcomers, but truth is there were people here even before we came here from somewhere else. I’ve heard them called Aborigines, but that’s just a name the Greeks gave them. They called themselves something else. It’s said they were great magicians, and they used to have all of Italy and the islands to themselves. They built their temples of huge stones and you can still see some of those here and there. It’s said they carved that tunnel down to the river, and they had the Oracle, or some sort of god, in that place. The temple above was built by their descendants on top of an even older one, before the Greeks changed it to their liking.”

  I remembered the sense I’d had that the decorations of the temple covered older, cruder figures, and the carvings around the tunnel entrance had struck me the same way. About the Aborigines I was more Skeptical. Certainly, some sort of people inhabited Italy before the first Latins arrived, and I had seen some of those temples and monuments of ponderous stones as large as any the Egyptians had utilized that Porcia spoke of. But it seems to me that all the defeated and subjugated people in history somehow acquire the reputation of having been great sorcerers. I find myself wondering how, if they had such potent magic at their command, they always got themselves conquered by unmagical but soldierly people. To carve and move big stones all you need is a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and an odd idea of what it is the gods want.

  “Personally, I don’t believe any of that,” Stabinilla said.

  “Oh,” I asked. “Why is that?” I wondered if she shared my own doubts.

  “The Aborigines were nothing but savages, like Gauls or Germans. There are none of those giant stone monuments here in Campania, or anywhere else in Italy that I ever heard. Whoever cut that tunnel had skill and good tools. I don’t think it could be older than the earliest Greek settlers. They had the skills and tools necessary. They knew how to survey and how to mine. No pack of primitives drove that tunnel straight down to an underground river.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Porcia put in. “Even a mathematician from Alexandria couldn’t find that river so far down. It was sorcery.” Then she went on in a lower voice, “But there’s some even stranger tales about that place.”

  “Such as?” Julia asked.

  “Well, there are some old tales that say the tunnel wasn’t driven down from the surface. Some think it was carved upward, from below.” There were gasps and mutters from around the table. People made gestures to avert evil. Talk of the underworld always makes people uneasy.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose it is relatively easy to find the surface from the river, compared to going the other way.”

  “And the precise alignment on the solstice?” Julia asked.

  “Well, underworld demons would know how to do something like that, wouldn’t they?” Porcia said. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “What do you think, Gitiadas?” Julia asked.

  “Here we only speculate,” the philosopher said. “We are presented with certain remarkable facts: a tunnel carved with great precision in alignment with a celestial event, an underground river with no known source or effluent, and the appearance of a corpse therein. From these things we can spin theories both natural and supernatural, but our speculations have little value, because we are not in possession of enough facts from which to draw informed conclusions.”

  “You make uncommonl
y good sense, for a philosopher,” I commended, while Julia rolled her eyes, as she often did when I spoke with learned persons. “What we need is more basic facts. We need to know where that river comes from. We need to know who had it in for the priest and perhaps all the priests.”

  “We also must dismiss those things that are facts but are nonetheless irrelevant to the case at hand. Too many facts can be as inimical to clear thought as too few.”

  “Exactly!” I said. “Personally, I don’t care if that tunnel lines up with moonrise on the anniversary of Cannae. Nor does it matter if it was carved out by the Aborigines, the Greeks, or our host’s grandfather. The circumstances of this murder are both immediate and local, and we need to concentrate on these matters, not upon ancient tales.”

  “Most astute,” Gitiadas commended. “And, one must ponder certain other matters concerning this killing.”

  “Such as?” I queried.

  “Well, there must be a motive for the slaying.”

  “Mmmm. Here we are confronted with an embarrassment of riches. People are killed for a great many reasons. Speeding up an inheritance is a classic motive. Revenge is another and forms a whole subcategory in itself. An insult may be a call for vengeance, or a tit-for-tat killing as is common in blood feuds. I’ve known many killings to result from jealousy and more from political rivalry. Killing during a robbery is common, and manslaughter can be the result of an accident, as when a blow meant merely to chastise results in a broken neck or crushed skull. I could go on all evening on the subject of motive alone.”

  “Then,” said Gitiadas, “you must eliminate all save those that may apply in this case. Another factor must be the means of murder, be it a weapon or an opportune circumstance.”

  “People are killed with everything from swords to chamberpots,” I observed. “Daggers, garottes, spears, bricks, clubs—I even knew a woman who strangled her victims with her own hair. This is, I believe, the only case where the weapon was a sacred river.”

  “If he was drowned,” Julia said. “That hasn’t been proven yet, nor whether it was murder at all, rather than an accident.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I would be inclined to believe the death the result of an accident, if a rather bizarre one, save for one fact: the disappearance of the other priests. That makes it smell of foul play.”

  “Has it occurred to anyone,” said the playwright, “to wonder why, of all times to carry out a murder, the perpetrator or perpetrators chose a day upon which the shrine was visited by a Roman praetor?”

  “And one famed for his successful criminal investigations,” Duronius put in.

  “Ah! Most excellent points,” said Gitiadas. “What says the praetor to this?”

  “Socratic method, eh?” I said, letting him know that I was not entirely ignorant of philosophical matters. I pondered the question, which was indeed a good one. “First off, they did not know we were coming. The visit was suggested in idle conversation and we set off forthwith. The killing must have been plotted well in advance and had to be carried out at a specified moment. It seems that they could not alter their plan.”

  “Quite logical. And the sudden appearance of the body in the river—do you think that it was intended or an accident?”

  “I can hardly think that someone who wished to carry out what must have been a rather difficult murder should have intended that the victim appear before our very noses,” I said.

  “The goddess took a hand in it,” Porcia said with great conviction. “She was offended that someone would pollute her sacred river with a dead body, so she threw it up before the praetor’s party. She wishes justice from you, sir.”

  I was about to rebuke her for dragging the gods back into the matter, but I saw Julia nodding agreement and held my tongue.

  “Oh, rubbish,” said Stabinilla, coming to my rescue. “The gods don’t interfere in human affairs as petty as a mere murder, unless it’s patricide, and even then I rather doubt it. I have half a dozen neighbors I’m pretty sure helped their fathers along into the afterworld, and they are doing just fine. As the praetor said, people get tired of waiting to inherit.” For the first time I noted the understated elegance of her jewelry. Unlike most Campanian women, she did not favor ostentatious amounts of gold and precious stones and pearls. Instead, her bracelets, earrings, and necklace were of bronze—but it was not plain metal. It was the old Etruscan work, in which the surface was covered with minute beads of bronze so close set that they give the piece an exquisite texture. It is said that only children had a touch delicate enough to set the bronze beads in place for soldering, and that it could not be done past the age of twelve. The art of making this jewelry has been lost; it was only in recent years that Romans had begun to appreciate it, and the old pieces were eagerly sought after.

  “You’re one of those Skeptics, I take it,” said Porcia.

  “Are you a follower of Aenesidemus?” Gitiadas asked, apparently referring to some philosopher of that school.

  “Never heard of him,” Sabinilla said. “But I believe in good sense. I like to see evidence. If you buy a horse, do you just listen to the seller blather on about the perfection of this beast he wants you to buy? No. You go look at the horse. You check its teeth and punch it for wind. You examine its legs and hoofs for evidence of illness or injury or poor breeding.”

  “You can’t know everything by empirical observation,” Julia said.

  “Who wants to know everything?” Stabinilla countered. “I just want to be clear about the things that affect me personally.”

  “I merely meant,” Julia said, “that there are such things as instinct, and inspiration, and divine revelation.”

  “Difficult concepts to use in court,” I said. “Evidence works better there, although imaginative vituperation and character assassination can be more persuasive.”

  “Not to mention showing off your scars,” Julia commented drily. In those days any man in public life was expected to be a soldier and it never hurt to remind a jury of one’s honorable service. In these recent, decadent times many men practice law who never lifted a sword.

  “Also excellent legal technique. Look at this,” I said, hiking up my tunic to show the huge furrow that slanted from my left hip diagonally down almost to the knee. “Got that when I was run over by a British chariot. That one’s won me many a favorable verdict. Not a lawyer in Rome can match it, not even Marcus Antonius, and he’s been cut and stabbed and speared more times than all the heroes in the Iliad combined.” The other guests murmured admiration at the spectacular scar, but Julia just rolled her eyes again and turned away. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen it before.

  This little entertaining moment was interrupted when Hermes appeared at the entrance to the triclinium. He made his way around the couches and stood by my side. As highest-ranking guest and a serving magistrate, I was of course given the “consul’s place,” the right end of the center couch, where it was convenient for a man on public service to receive and dispatch messengers, for a Roman official was never off duty.

  “Praetor,” Hermes said in a low voice, “we’ve found the other priests.”

  3

  OF COURSE THE WHOLE BUGGERING lot of party guests, including half of the slaves, had to come along. You don’t get to see a spectacle like this every day, and all my protests and fulminations did no good. So much for the dignity and majesty of Roman office. Like some great traveling festival, we all descended upon the precincts of the Temple of Apollo and the Oracle of the Dead.

  The evening was well advanced, and thus the uncanniness of the venue all the more pronounced. A mild wind blew, causing a sinister rustling among the funereal trees and shrubs, like small deities of the underworld conversing just below the level of human hearing. I was just as happy to bypass the gloomy grove and go to the temple instead.

  “So close,” Julia said, stepping down from her litter. “Just a few steps from where it all started.”

  “I felt it must be so,” I t
old her. “There was just no time for them to have gotten far, or that no one would have seen them.”

  My lictors arrived from our quarters and I directed them to stand guard on the steps of the temple and let no one enter save myself and the members of my party.

  Hermes came to join us, accompanied by a few of my other young men. They had that smug look of men who know something important that nobody else knows yet. I suppose I’ve worn that expression myself from time to time.

  “It was easy to miss,” Hermes said. “The Oracle isn’t the only place around here with odd passageways.”

  We followed him into the temple. The lamps glowed warmly and the god smiled down upon us benignly, above all human foolishness.

  “Well, let’s get to it before the word spreads and the sightseers start to gather,” I said.

  Hermes nodded to young Sextus Vespillo, and the boy, trying not to swell with importance, went to a decorated paving stone just before the plinth supporting the statue of Apollo. He bent and fiddled a moment with a bit of carved ornamentation. Then he worked free what looked like a loop of stone vinework. He twisted the loop and tugged and up came the stone, and not just that one but about eight adjacent blocks. The whole must have weighed the better part of a ton, but the boy raised it as easily as a wooden trapdoor in a house. Another piece of that mysterious engineering we had come to so admire.

  Julia and the other women gasped. The men muttered. I merely asked, “It’s well hidden. How did you discover it?”

  “I am a brilliant investigator like you and—” he caught my look. “Actually, Sextus Lucretius here got on rather well with one of the temple slave girls. She told him she’d spied on the priests opening this trap one night.”

  “If only all my assistants exercised their gifts to such beneficial effect,” I said. The boy blushed furiously. “Where is the girl?”

  Hermes signaled and the girl stepped from the shadow of a column. “Her name is Hypatia.”