SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead

by John Maddox Roberts

  So at last Julia was getting her wish. I was getting back in shape for the wars. She and the physician had conspired to curb my wine intake as well and she had threatened Hermes into going along with it.

  In the exercise yard of the palaestra building we rubbed down with oil, then rolled in the sand and scraped it off with strigils, then went into the bath to soak. The bath needed no fire, as the water was piped in from a nearby hot spring. The sulfur-smelling water soothed away the soreness of my muscles and the lingering pain of my wound. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  While we lazed in the water, an unexpected visitor arrived: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus came in and lowered himself into the water. Apparently he had put himself on a regimen like mine. He wasn’t quite as corpulent as when he arrived in Campania, though he still had a long way to go before he would achieve soldierly fitness. He had almost as many scars as I had, too, but his were mostly on his arms and legs since he got them on the battlefield, wearing armor. I had won many of mine in the streets and alleyways of Rome.

  “Well, you seem to be coming along nicely, Praetor,” he said, as he settled in. “You’ll be ready to serve with the eagles in no time.”

  “Whatever the noble Senate decides,” I said evasively. “How goes recruiting?”

  He made a sour face. “Oh, my veterans have flocked to the standards handsomely, but the youth of Italy are not what they were in my younger days. I’ve gone through all the cities and the country markets calling for volunteers, and I get a handful at a time, a dozen here, a dozen there. There was a time when I could raise ten legions from this area alone, stout young farm lads eager for a good war. I’d have to turn most of them away, there was never enough equipment to arm all the volunteers.”

  “Perhaps they don’t smell much loot to be had in a civil war,” I told him, “and there aren’t that many farm lads left these days. The latifundia are worked by slaves, not peasants, and southern Italy is covered with latifundia these days.”

  “All the same, I should have more volunteers than I’ve been getting.” He shook his head in disgust. “Have you managed to find out who put an arrow through you?”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “If anybody knows, nobody is saying.”

  “It might have just been some local hothead, a Samnite out hunting who saw a chance to kill a Roman praetor and get away with it. There’s still a lot of bitterness left over from the Social War in these parts.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so. I’ve made myself very unpopular with some people in this district. They want to put an end to my investigation and the easiest way to do that is to put an end to me.”

  “Maybe you had better give it up, just pack up and move your court to Liguria or somewhere.”

  Instantly, I was suspicious. “Just a few days ago you wanted me to find the murderers, and quickly.”

  “A few days ago nobody was trying to murder you. Whatever this business is about, it’s not worth the life of an important Roman, especially one I may need soon.”

  So he assumed that, because my family now supported him, I would as well. I thought it best not to disabuse him of the notion just yet.

  “Actually, I’d been thinking of Sicily.”

  “Fine place,” he commended. “Good climate, quiet natives. It’s already been thoroughly looted, of course, but you could do far worse. I recommend it.”

  We talked of inconsequentialities for a while, then I dried off and returned to the villa. The next day I awoke stiff and sore, but I made myself take the same long trek back to the palaestra, and did the same on the days following. In an amazingly short time, I was running without breathing hard, hurling the javelin right on target, and even striking Hermes almost as many times as he struck me when we sparred with wooden swords. Before I knew it, I was very nearly in top shape and my wound scarcely pained me any more. Julia seemed pleased.

  “I haven’t seen you this tan and fit in years,” she said. “Cutting back the wine has cleared up your eyes marvelously.”

  “I hadn’t realized how sloppy I was getting,” I admitted. Sometimes it was a good idea to admit that Julia had been right about something. “Almost being killed is a literally sobering experience.”

  Being wounded had one benefit: It gave me an excuse to stay in Campania longer than I should have. There came a day when Baiae celebrated an annual festival dedicated to one of the local gods, an equivalent of Bacchus whose celebrations were even wilder than those of the Roman god. This being shared some of the characteristics of Dionysus and I was eager to see what his adherents got up to. So I gave my lictors the day off, and Julia and I, along with numerous members of our entourage, set off for the city.

  The road was crowded, with everyone from the countryside and nearby towns making for Baiae. Many of them were already decked out in wreaths of grape leaves and some carried thyrsi: wands tipped with pinecones. It was late morning when we got to Baiae, and the town was already rollicking. All its statues were draped with huge flower wreaths and more such wreaths hung from all the temples and public buildings. There were places where we walked through flower petals ankle-deep. Children ran about smashing eggs on people’s heads. The eggshells were filled with perfume and the air smelled sweetly, not just from the perfume but from the incense that burned on all the city’s altars. Sounds of pipe and tambourine and sistrum came from every part of town, and everywhere we heard the voices of people singing.

  It was one of those days when almost all of the rules were suspended. Slave and free mingled on terms of equality, as at Saturnalia. Men and women partnered promiscuously, without regard to who was married to whom. There were women with their hair let down wearing only wreaths and loosely draped leopard pelts, waving their thyrsi or playing double flutes and dancing to their own wild music. Many people wore masks, and mask vendors were everywhere, doing a brisk business.

  “No masks,” Julia warned me sternly. “No fooling around with women, and no wine.”

  “Then what am I here for?”

  “To show that the Roman praetor honors the local gods and customs. You can do that without acting like a purple-rumped baboon.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  So we made our way through the throng, leisurely and with impressive gravitas. There were tumblers and mountebanks of all sorts, fire-eaters I had last seen at Sabinilla’s party, dancers, and musicians. There were many stages set up, where actors performed absurd and often obscene farces.

  Of course I was quite aware that if someone wanted to kill me, this was the perfect place for it. Some masked assassin could easily step up to me, slip a dagger between my ribs, and be off into the crowd safely. However, I was wearing my armor and Hermes stayed close behind me, his hand always on his sword hilt, his eyes constantly scanning the multitude.

  “Way for the praetor!” someone shouted. I thought they meant me, but then there came a roar of laughter from the crowd. Julia and I made our way toward the noise and we saw the crowd part and a procession of dwarfs approached, marching with exaggerated self-importance. First came six “lictors” who, instead of fasces, carried sponge-tipped sticks, of the sort used in public latrines. Behind them strutted the “praetor,” a potbellied dwarf swathed in a purple-bordered toga and wearing a mask that was an unmistakable caricature of my own face, my long, Metellan nose drawn out to an absurd length. Just in case anyone was unsure who was being mocked, he had an oversized arrow protruding from his chest.

  “Now, dear,” Julia said, “hold your temper. It’s all in fun.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Have you noticed who’s behind him?” The praetor was followed by a dwarf woman dressed in patrician white, her hair almost obscured by a huge, gilt laurel wreath, her mask bearing Julia’s features, twisted into an expression of utter shrewishness.

  “This is intolerable!” Julia hissed.

  “Way for the proconsul!” shouted the same voice. Now the crowd parted and another procession came through. This time there were twelve dwarfish,
obscenely equipped “lictors,” preceding yet another dwarf, this one wearing a helmet and armor that almost reached his ankles. At his side hung a sword at least five feet long, its scabbard dragging along the ground behind him.

  As the two processions met, the praetor’s lictors lowered their latrine wipes, just as real lictors lower their fasces when they meet those of a superior magistrate.

  “Hail all-powerful, wonderful, godlike General Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!” shouted the “praetor.”

  “Greetings, Praetor Peregrinus Metellus, pursuer of evildoers, smiter of the wicked, target practice for archers, friend of the winesellers, and enemy of sobriety.”

  “And to you, glorious Pompey,” cried the “praetor,” “before whom recruits now flee as once your enemies did.”

  They went on in this vein for some time, bestowing fulsome compliments that were actually insults. At times it was hard to hear their act, so loud was the crowd’s laughter. Seeing Pompey thus mocked took a bit of the sting out of being on the receiving end of the ridicule. Obviously, on this day, the people had license to lampoon anyone.

  Throughout the day we saw more such ridiculous acts, featuring prominent locals, Caesar himself, and even a whole “Senate” made up of dwarfs, albinos, giants, and malformed persons of all sorts, debating all kinds of absurd issues such as war with India, economizing on the navy by building ships without nails, flying to the moon, and so forth. Every debate ended with the “Senate” awarding itself more lands, more money, or more power. This last was probably closer to the truth than most people there imagined.

  We watched a troupe of Spanish dancers perform the famously salacious dances of that land, and attended a comedy by Aristophanes that was positively decorous compared with everything else that was going on. As evening drew on, the revelry only increased in its frantic pace, and Julia decreed that we must leave before the temptation to join in got the better of me. Reluctantly I agreed, and we made our way to the city gate, often having to step over unconscious and even unclothed bodies. Someday, I vowed, I’d contrive a way to come down to this festival without Julia.

  “You’ve skipped a day at the gymnasium,” Hermes reminded me cheerfully as we began our journey homeward. “Tomorrow you’ll have to work twice as hard.”

  “Thank you for reminding me,” I told him.

  Back at the villa, Julia said: “We have to make some decisions. As much as I love this place, we can’t stay here much longer. You’ve recovered from your wound and soon you’ll have to take your court somewhere, whether Sicily or somewhere else.”

  “I know I can’t dawdle much longer,” I said, “but I hate to leave without catching whoever killed the priests and the girl at the temple, and, incidentally, the one who shot me with an arrow.”

  “It’s awful to contemplate, but people get away with terrible crimes all the time. You may just have to admit that you’ve lost this one, swallow your pride, and go.”

  “If I do that, you know what my political enemies back in Rome will say. They’ll say Metellus ran because he was frightened. That sort of thing can damage a political career.”

  “They’ll lie about you anyway, you know that. Let them say what they want.”

  “Still,” I groused, “they’re going to make the most of it. Shot from ambush by an archer! It’s disgraceful. Even Achilles suffered loss of honor when he was killed by an arrow shot by a coward.”

  “Are you serious? Does that actually bother you? It’s too juvenile even for you!”

  “I know. I just said it to annoy you. I’ll give it a few more days. If I haven’t found them in another four or five days, we’re off to Sicily. I’ll go ahead and send letters to the major towns and tell them I’ll be holding court in Sicily soon.”

  This seemed to mollify Julia. Truthfully, I was not so certain. To me it seemed that the contending factions of the day were closing in on me like a great pair of blacksmith’s tongs. I had not the luxury of remaining neutral. They would force me to choose sides in spite of myself. It was my great misfortune that the Republic came to such a pass just in the year when I was a praetor, wielding imperium and therefore a man to court, or to kill, as the case might be. Before, I had not been sufficiently important to merit the attention of the great men of the day. Should I survive my year, I might be inconsequential again. It would be some time before I should be given my propraetorian province to govern.

  Perhaps I was deceiving myself. My family was one of the great ones, and I had at last achieved a standing and dignity that made me a power in that family. That made it difficult to maintain a pose of neutrality.

  Still, one thing kept me focused on this corner of Campania, shutting out the distractions of a world about to plunge into war and chaos. I had to find out who had committed all these seemingly meaningless murders. It was just my nature.

  At the end of the evening I went to bed, exhausted. When I woke in the morning, I thought I had the key to solving the riddle.

  10

  I AWOKE KNOWING THAT SOMETHING HAD come to me in the night. I know that I dream almost every night, but I rarely remember the dreams. They seem clear when I wake, but if I try to remember them in detail, they fade before me like a ground mist clearing in the morning sun. A few especially vivid ones stay in my mind, particularly those that seem to be sent by the gods. This one was not like that, but it was nonetheless compelling. Something, some voice or some sort of silent compulsion, was telling me that I had missed something, that there was a glaring factor that I had ignored or had not followed up on.

  There is a certain dream that I have repeatedly, and sometimes remember. It has a number of variations. It always involves my trying to get somewhere, or trying to find someone, and always being frustrated. I recall one dream in which I wanted to go to the second floor of the Tabularium in Rome to look up something. I would climb the usual outside stair, but in some fashion it would not take me to the second floor, but instead I found myself on the third. I then took the internal stairway, but it bypassed the second floor and deposited me on the ground floor again. I stepped outside the building and I could see the second floor, but somehow I just could not get there.

  Likewise, in another variation of the same dream, I sometimes found myself in the Forum, seeking some person I knew to be there, but always being frustrated in my goal. Some petitioner would always demand my attention just as I was about to find the person I sought. Or a procession of Vestals would come between me and my goal.

  These are commonplace dreams, like the one in which you are a schoolboy again and the master has scheduled an examination in Greek, or Homer’s poetry or the like, and you have not studied or prepared in any way and are in a panic. Everyone has these dreams, and they have nothing to do with the gods but are only a reflection of your own inner concerns. Such was my dream that night.

  It had no coherent narrative or progression. It was just a repeated series of scenes in which I was in the tunnel of the Oracle, walking about tapping on the walls, trying to find hinges or hidden trapdoors or anything else that would help me solve the murder of Eugaeon and the others. In this dream, Hermes and the other men were not with me. I wandered alone in my bafflement.

  In the dream, from time to time I would look up and see those vent slots. They loomed much larger that they had in real life. Somehow, they were trying to tell me something. In some fashion, they seemed to be important, even crucial. I heard sounds coming from them, not words but vague, inchoate sounds, like those I had heard on my first venture down the tunnel, when certain sounds had seemed to form words, if I could only hear them clearly enough.

  In time I awoke and I knew where I should be looking. Julia noted my altered expression as we sat on a terrace outside our bedroom for a breakfast of the inevitable cherries, sliced fruit, bread, and honey.

  “You look transformed,” she said. “Did a god visit you in the night?”

  “I don’t believe so. I’ve had that sort of night vision, and in those cases it was pretty clear
which god appeared to me, and what he or she wanted me to do. This was different. It told me something I had been overlooking, but there was no divine person communicating with me. It may merely have been that my own mind, unable to make sense of things in the waking state, sorted them out somehow in the dreamworld.”

  “What an interesting concept,” she said. “And what did this vision tell you?”

  “That the vent slots in the ceiling of the tunnel and the shrine are the key to what has been happening here.”

  “In what fashion?” she asked.

  “That I don’t know, but I intend to look into it.” I sent for Hermes. He appeared within moments.

  “Hermes, go fetch that master stonemason—what’s his name?”

  “Ansidius Perna.”

  “That’s the one. Go find him and bring him to me at once.”

  “What is this about?” he asked.

  “Why should I explain myself to you?” I demanded. “Go do as I bid you.”

  “Well,” Julia said, “aren’t we grand this morning. Why don’t you tell him why you want to question the man?”

  “Are you now taking sides against me with my freedman?” I demanded.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Julia said. “Hermes, he’s had some sort of insight concerning the ventilation holes in the tunnel of the Oracle. You know what he’s like in times like this, he’s not entirely sane or responsible.”

  This was the sort of respect I got in my own home. In any case, Hermes left to find the master mason. I chewed on my breakfast and mused. “That air is coming in from somewhere,” I said. “But where?” Julia looked at me as if I were insane. Then I compounded her doubts. “So if air is coming in, what else might be?”

  “What else could come through tiny little slits in the rock?” she demanded.

  “Sounds,” I told her. “Voices.”

  “But,” she pounced, triumphantly, “you said that you found none of those vent slits in the chamber of the Oracle.”

  “They weren’t needed there, if my thoughts are on track,” I said. “I’m pretty sure now what they were used for, I just need to know where they came from.”