SPQR V: Saturnalia

by John Maddox Roberts

  His smile dropped away and the real Clodius flashed through. “Some things are beyond even the demands of political expediency. I’m going to drive him into exile and I’ve made no secret of the fact.”

  “You realize that you’ll be robbing Rome of one of her best political and legal minds, don’t you? Cicero is one of the most capable men of our age.”

  Clodius snorted. Maybe he had water up his nose. “Decius, like most of the aristocrats, you’re living in the past. Between the dictatorship of Sulla and the present we’ve had this little revival of the old Republic, but it won’t last. The important figures of our age are the men of action, men like Caesar and Pompey, not lawyers like Cicero.”

  “Let’s not forget Crassus,” I said, annoyed at his all-too-accurate assessment of the times. “Men of wealth are of paramount importance, too.”

  Clodius shrugged. “When has that not been the case? Even kings are primarily rich men, forget about the blood lineage. But wealthy men who are not also powerful soon lose their wealth to men with many followers and sharp swords. During Sulla’s proscriptions, wealthy men were routinely condemned so their property could be seized.”

  “You seem to have all the answers,” I said.

  He nodded. “I have.” He stood and his flunkies rushed to bring him towels. “I really must be going, Decius. I have a great deal to accomplish. The transition to the new government is already in process. I will see you this evening at Clodia’s.”

  “Is she still living in Celer’s house?” I asked.

  “Yes, for the moment. She will be moving back into the Claudian mansion after Saturnalia. It’s more secure.”

  I interpreted this to mean that Celer’s will had been read and he had left nothing to Clodia. This meant that the house would probably go to Nepos, who was half-brother to Celer. He was Pompey’s man, and Clodia was aligned with her brother, who was Caesar’s. This was a not particularly complicated matter of property, family, marriage, and politics, and typical of the times.

  When Clodius and his men were gone, Hermes came tiptoeing in.

  “Master, I never saw them coming. I’d have warned you, but I looked up and there were those gladiators and Publius Clodius and I …”

  “Quite all right, Hermes,” I said, studying the ceiling, rejoicing in the fact that I was breathing. “I rather expected that they had killed you. Clodius does so love his little surprises.”

  “I thought I’d find you floating facedown,” he admitted. “I’m glad to see he let you live.”

  “Then let us rejoice in our mutual survival.” I almost felt that I could get out of the bath without my knees wobbling too disgracefully. I had never been reluctant to fight Clodius one-to-one, or each of us with his own followers behind him, armed or unarmed. We’d had it out in the streets more than once, and I did not fear him on anything like an even footing. But there is something unmanning about being caught by your deadliest enemy when you are alone, hugely outnumbered, cornered without means of escape, and stark naked to boot. From a proud and pugnacious Roman, I had become something resembling a jellyfish.

  “What’s happened?” Hermes asked.

  “Well, how shall I explain?” I studied the ceiling some more. “The good part is, we are safe in the streets for a while. Clodius has called off his dogs. The bad part is, he, too, wants me to investigate Celer’s death, but only because he wants me to clear Clodia of guilt. I fear a certain conflict here.”

  Hermes didn’t take long to figure out the problem. A slave always knows exactly where the danger is coming from.

  “Prove her innocent and you alienate your family,” he said. “Prove her guilty and Clodius will kill you.”

  “That is how I read it,” I affirmed. “Of course, Clodius plans to kill me anyway, no matter what I do. It’s not as if a threat from him was anything new. And my family at least won’t have me killed. I can, however, look forward to spending the rest of my life draining the swamps on the worst of the family estates.”

  “You could throw your support to Pompey,” said Hermes. He was learning fast.

  “No, I can’t. I won’t back Pompey or Caesar or Crassus. I am a Republican.”

  “Don’t they all claim that?” His grasp of reality was improving.

  “Of course they do. But they are lying and I am not. Sulla claimed that he was restoring the Republic, and he proved it by murdering half the Senate and then making his supporters senators whether they’d served in office or not. Pompey was made consul without having ever served in elective office, against all constitutional law and precedent! And Caesar is the worst of the lot because nobody knows what he is up to, except that he intends to be dictator!”

  “You know,” Hermes said, “your voice sounds really good in here, the way it echoes off the walls, I mean.”

  “Bring my towel,” I told him. Wearily, I climbed from the hot bath and made my way to the massage tables.

  An hour later, dressed, massaged, rubbed down with fresh oil, and over my second fright of the day, I felt ready to resume my activities. Life in Rome was nothing if not stimulating. I was already wondering what Clodia would have for dinner.

  I STILL HAD A FEW HOURS BEfore going to Celer’s house. Clodia, I recalled, liked to start dinner late. This was regarded as scandalous, which was probably why she did it. That gave me time to make another essential call.

  Milo’s house, or rather fort, was located in a tenement warren that made it difficult to attack directly. He had planned it that way. He had once told me that a house fronting on a public square is imposing, but it gives your enemies plenty of space to run and build up momentum with a battering ram. It was because of such foresight that Milo had risen to the prestige and dignity of Rome’s most prominent gangster. Always with the possible exception of Clodius.

  At that time Milo was allied with Cicero. As Cicero’s star was descending, Milo’s preeminence was likewise fading. It was one of the many ironies of the political and social scene that the aristocrats were championed by Cicero, a novus homo from Arpinum, whose favored gang leader was Milo, a nobody from nowhere, while the representatives of the common people were Caesar and Clodius, both of them patricians from incredibly ancient and prestigious families.

  The guard at the gate was, as usual, Berbix. He was an ex-gladiator of Gallic origin, who was well known in Roman courts. He had uncommonly good eyesight, making him especially apt for spotting Clodius supporters at a distance and concealed weapons closer up.

  “Welcome back, Senator,” he said, favoring me with a gap-toothed grin. I was beginning to wish people could find something more original to say.

  “Is Milo in?” I asked.

  “He always is, except when he’s in the Forum,” Berbix answered. “His door’s always open to any who want to see him. Go on in.” He ignored the dagger beneath my tunic. I was one of the few men who were allowed into Milo’s presence armed. Not that anyone, with or without weapons, presented much threat to Titus Annius Milo Papianus.

  This accessibility of his was part calculated political wisdom and partly the fact that he wanted people to think of him as a tribune. By ancient custom, the doors of the Tribunes of the People were to be open at all times. Milo felt that political power grew from close contact with the citizens, not hobnobbing with senators. He was always ready to do people favors. Then, of course, they were expected to do favors for him.

  I found him sitting at a small table with another man, a hard-faced character in a senator’s tunic who looked somewhat familiar. The two of them were going over scrolls that seemed to contain lists of names. Milo looked up at my approach and a huge grin spread over his face.

  “Decius!” He sprang to his feet and enveloped my comparatively diminutive hand in his huge paw, the palm of which felt as if it were covered with articulated metal plates. He had been a galley rower in his youth, and he had never lost the horny hands of that profession.

  “I hear you’re prospering, Titus,” I said.

  “So I am,�
�� he said, self-satisfaction enveloping him like a toga. In another man it might have been a repellant attitude, but Milo accepted the largesse of Fortuna the way a god accepts worship. He looked like a god, too, which never hurt him with the voters. He turned and gestured toward his companion. “I believe you know Publius Sestius?”

  Now I remembered. “Of course. We were both quaestors when Cicero and Antonius Hibrida were consuls.” It was coming back to me and I held out my hand, which Sestius took. “We never saw much of each other. I remember that you were returned first at the polls and got attached to the consuls’ personal staff. I was in the treasury.”

  “It was a memorable year,” Sestius said, which was a diplomatic way to put it. He had the look of an aristocrat who was also a street brawler. The same, I suppose, might have been said of me.

  Milo clapped his hands and a thug brought in a tray with a pitcher of wine and cups, along with the usual nuts, dried figs, dates, parched peas, and so forth. Despite his wealth, Milo had no comely serving girls, cultured valets, or entertainers among his staff. Every member of the household was eminently capable of defending the house and their master.

  “Publius and I are working out our strategy for next year’s tribunician elections,” Milo said. “We’ll probably spend most of our time in office undoing all the harm Clodius will do next year. Clodius will get Cicero exiled, so we’ll get him recalled. That’s going to take some hard work.”

  “I’ve just had an odd encounter with Clodius,” I said, glancing significantly at Sestius.

  “And you’re still alive? Speak freely, Publius is no friend of Clodius.”

  Briefly, I sketched out my odd interview with Clodius. Milo listened with his customary intense attention. No nuance of anything he heard ever escaped Milo. At the end of it, he tossed a handful of salted peas into his mouth.

  “I fear you are not going to make Clodius a happy man. That harpy poisoned Celer as sure as the sun comes up every morning.”

  “Why?” I asked. “She’s malevolent and she despised her husband; but she had to be married to somebody, and Celer wasn’t as objectionable as most she would have been attached to. He had a fine house, and he left her free to do pretty much as she pleased.” This constituted a happy marriage, among my class.

  “Celer got a bit too hostile toward her little brother toward the end,” Milo said.

  “That’s right,” Sestius concurred. “Decius, you’ve been away from Rome too much of late. Last year Metellus Celer, as consul, opposed Clodius’s bid to transfer to the plebs. He was certainly not alone in that, but he got downright violent about it. He was losing his sense of moderation in his last months in office.”

  “It was a busy year,” I observed. “I heard that Caesar and Pompey and Crassus made up their political differences.”

  “Temporarily,” Milo said. “It won’t last. But for now the usual feuds are dormant. Caesar got Clodius transferred to the plebs to clear his path to the tribuneship, got him adopted by a man named Fonteius to do it, and guess who presided as augur at the adoption?”

  I ran the list of augurs through my memory, trying to recall which of them were still alive and in Italy. “Not Pompey!”

  “Pompeius Magnus himself,” Milo confirmed.

  “The world is getting to be a very odd place,” Sestius said. “If you can’t count on people like that to slit one another’s throats, what can you count on?”

  “Things will be back to normal soon,” Milo said. “Clodius is going to make such a mess of things next year that people will demand a return of order.”

  I had my doubts. “Clodius is ridiculously popular,” I said. “Is it true that he plans to make the free distribution of grain a guaranteed right of the citizens?”

  “A radical concept, isn’t it?” Sestius said.

  “It won him his tribuneship as nothing else could,” Milo commented, picking up a few nuts. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”

  “You’re joking!” Sestius said. “If the grain dole becomes institutionalized; instead of an emergency measure, not only will we lose one of our most powerful political tools, but every freed slave, ruined peasant, and footloose barbarian in Italy will head straight for Rome to sign up!”

  “They already do that anyway,” I pointed out.

  “It’s no cause for rejoicing,” Sestius grumbled.

  “We’ll sort things out,” Milo said confidently.

  It may seem odd that men like Clodius and Milo and Sestius could speak with such sanguine assurance, as if they were about to reign as kings rather than serve as elected officials, but the tribuneship had made a great comeback in the last few years. Sulla had all but stripped the Tribunes of the People of all their powers, but one after the other, each year’s tribunes had passed laws in the Popular Assemblies restoring them. Now they were more important than ever, and they had the immeasurable power to introduce new legislation and carry it through the assemblies. This was the power that gave or withheld proconsular appointments, apportioned the state’s treasure, and got people exiled. The consuls themselves were relatively powerless by comparison, and the Senate had become a debating club. Real power lay with the commons and their elected representatives, the tribunes.

  I promised to keep Milo apprised of the situation and left his house, wondering whether I should go to Clodia’s house armed. I also regretted that I had not thought to ask Asklepiodes whether there existed a reliable means to avoid being poisoned.

  6

  THE HOUSE OF THE LATE METELLUS Celer was located low on the slope of the Esquiline, in a district that had somehow escaped the worst of the fires that periodically swept the city. It was a relatively modest structure. It had been in the family for several generations and so was on the scale common to the days before the Punic Wars, when even the greatest families were little more than wealthy farmers.

  Hermes accompanied me in a mixed state of alarm and anticipation. Clodia frightened him as she frightened everybody. But she also belonged to that new generation of Romans who affected to love things of beauty for their own sake, rather than for their value as loot. To this end she surrounded herself with beautiful things, including slaves. Clodia was a familiar sight in the slave markets, always shopping for new beauties as she discarded those past their peak of comeliness.

  This was another of her many scandalous traits. Most well-bred people, including my own family, pretended that they never bought slaves but used only those born within the household. When they wanted slaves from the market, they discreetly sent stewards to do the buying. Not Clodia. She liked to look over the livestock herself, examining teeth with her own eyes, punching for wind and squeezing for muscle tone with her own hands.

  “Try not to get caught doing anything improper with the girls,” I cautioned Hermes.

  “Of course not, Master,” he said with patent insincerity. “But you do want me to pump them for information, don’t you?”

  “Quit drooling. Yes, I want to know if they have any knowledge of Celer’s death or if Clodia had any strange visitors. Well, I know she has all sorts of strange visitors, but what we’re looking for are witch women, mountebanks, the sort of people who are likely to be peddling poisons.”

  This was a pretty far-fetched hope. Clodia had traveled widely for a woman, and she might have picked up exotic poisons almost anywhere. It was the sort of thing she would shop for. But there was a chance that she had acquired her poison openly, right here in Rome. Aristocratic felons like Clodia often took few precautions to conceal evidence of their crimes. They considered themselves above suspicion, or at least above prosecution.

  I knew I was in for an interesting evening the moment the door opened. In the past, Clodia had been allowed to exercise her taste only within her own quarters. The rest of the house was a typically drab, stuffy Metellan establishment. That rule had gone up with the smoke of Celer’s funeral pyre.

  The janitor who opened the door to us looked like one of those Greek statues of ephebic athletes,
all flowing muscles and perfect skin, and dense, curly locks. Except for his scalp he had been fully depilated, a common affectation of highborn women but rarely encountered in men except for Egyptian slaves, and this boy was clearly not Egyptian. The only concession to modesty Clodia had allowed him was a gauzy pouch that bagged his genitals, supported by a thin string about his hips. His only other covering was a gilded and jeweled neck ring by which he was chained to the doorpost.

  “Welcome, Senator,” the boy said, smiling to show perfect, white teeth. “My Lady and her guests are in the triclinium.”

  We passed through the atrium with its flanking rooms and its niche for ancestral death masks and on into the peristyle. It was usually open to the sky, but an elaborate awning, decorated with golden stars, had been drawn across it to keep out the cold breeze. Beneath the awning the pool now featured a graceful sculpture of a dancing faun, and fat, ornamental carp disported themselves in the water below. Between the pillars bronze chains supported beautifully wrought Campanian lamps.

  Everywhere I looked I saw splendid works of art and craftsmanship. I also noticed that Clodia hadn’t bothered to inlay the floors with mosaic in the new fashion. Not much point in it, since she wouldn’t be staying. All of her treasures were portable and would go with her.

  “Decius!” Clodia came for me, her gown floating around her body like colored air. She was still one of the most beautiful women in Rome and about thirty-three years old that year, her body unmarked by childbearing, hence the near-transparent Coan gowns she favored. The sheer stuff was woven on the island of Cos and the censors always tried to ban it from the City, or at least keep respectable women from wearing it. Clodia’s respect for public morals laws was minimal. Her face was youthful, marred only by a certain hardness about the mouth and eyes. She used cosmetics sparingly, unlike so many women.

  “How good to see you,” she cried, taking my hands in both of hers. “It’s been far too long since I’ve seen you. Fausta told me all about that exciting business in Alexandria. The court there sounds wonderful.” Clodia and Fausta were best friends, even though Fausta was soon to marry Milo, the deadliest enemy of Clodius. Politics.