Roma

by Steven Saylor

  Quintus shook his head. “You walk a dangerous path, Kaeso. To learn a bit about building and engineering is not a bad thing. But Claudius is a devious man, and charming. He may yet seduce you to his way of thinking.”

  “I assure you, cousin, he will not. Would it set your mind at rest if I were to promise you that I will not learn a word of Greek? It would be an easy promise, as I seem incapable of doing so, anyway.”

  Quintus begrudged him a faint smile. “Kaeso, Kaeso! Very well. Since you’ve convinced your father to acquiesce to this arrangement, then I shall not object, at least not publicly. I’ll keep my mouth shut, and hope that you know what you’re doing.” He glanced at the rows of wax effigies in their niches. “Always remember your ancestry, Kaeso, and preserve the dignity of your name!” Did he once again hesitate and blink, as he looked from the faces of the deceased Fabii to the face of Kaeso, which bore no family resemblance?

  “But I asked you here for another reason,” said Quintus. “I have something for you—that is, if you’re still interested. Come with me.”

  Kaeso followed him to a room where the walls were lined with pigeonhole bookcases stuffed with scrolls. On tables here and there, unfurled documents were laid flat for perusal with paperweights to hold down the corners. The library of Quintus Fabius was smaller than that of Appius Claudius, and its contents were quite different. Here there was not a Greek text to be found or any volumes pertaining to the history of foreign peoples. All the documents in the library of Quintus Fabius had to do with legal matters, property claims, monetary transactions, family history, or genealogy.

  “You expressed an interest in seeing the various documents regarding the investigation I conducted many years ago, as curule aedile, into the mass poisonings in the city. They were a bit scattered, but I believe I’ve managed to gather them in one place.” Quintus indicated a tube made of leather, into which a great many scrolls, rolled together, had been inserted. “This is the dossier pertaining to the case. Of course, I realize that your studies under Appius Claudius may be claiming all of your time and attention—”

  “Not at all, cousin Quintus! I’m very grateful that you remembered my interest in the matter, and that you went to so much trouble to make these available to me.” In fact, in the excitement of his work for Claudius, Kaeso had completely forgotten the discussion about the poisonings, but it would hardly do for him to say so. Did his cousin intend for him to sit here in the library, examining the documents? Kaeso did not have time; he was eager to get home so that he could perform a task which Claudius had assigned to him, recalculating the measurements for a section of the aqueduct. “Would it be possible for me to take this with me, so that I can peruse the contents at my leisure?”

  Quintus frowned. “Usually, I would never allow any of these documents to leave my possession. Some contain sensitive information. Many are irreplaceable. But…why not? I ask only that you be very careful with them, and return them in due course. Hopefully, they’ll give you some insight into the challenges and responsibilities of holding a magistracy. A life of public service can be very demanding, but also very rewarding. You must think of your future, Kaeso, beyond this work you’re doing for the censor.”

  “This is very kind of you, cousin. I shall look at them tonight.”

  As it turned out, laboring under the flickering light of a hydra-headed lamp that hung from the ceiling of his room, Kaeso worked much too late that night to bother looking at the documents from Quintus. He finally fell into bed, exhausted.

  But he did not sleep well. Perhaps his head was too full of numbers. Perhaps the disapproval of his cousin weighed on him more heavily than he realized.

  In his dream, Kaeso was back in the vestibule of his cousin’s house, alone except for the wax busts of the ancestors in the niches. Suddenly, each of the effigies blinked at once. The disembodied heads turned to stare a him, scowling, then began to speak. Their voices were sarcastic and hateful.

  “He’s not one of us.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “Who knows what sort of blood flows in his veins?”

  “He might be the offspring of a Gaul!”

  “The foul product of a rape!”

  “Pollution!”

  “Corruption!”

  “Filth!”

  “The blood of the noble Fabii can be traced back for centuries, but this creature comes from nothing!”

  “He’s like a fly that rises from a dung heap!”

  In his dream, Kaeso ran from the room. He found himself in the Forum. His father was leading him onto the Rostra. A great multitude had gathered before the platform to hear him speak, but when he opened his mouth, only nonsense came out. The crowd began to laugh and jeer at him. Their heads were made of wax, like the effigies of the Fabii.

  He ran from the Rostra, to the house of Appius Claudius. The censor greeted him warmly, oblivious to Kaeso’s distress. He unrolled a map which showed the course of the aqueduct. The line to Gabii ran off the map, into a gray nothingness.

  “But where are the springs?” said Kaeso.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Claudius. “I know where the water will come from. What I don’t know, young man, is where you come from!” Suddenly the censor was glowering at Kaeso, looking as stern and disapproving as the effigies in Quintus’s vestibule.

  Kaeso woke. His body was covered with cold sweat.

  His reading lamp was still lit. In his exhaustion, he had forgotten to extinguish the tiny flames that danced upon the projecting tongues of each of the hydra’s heads. Desperate for any distraction, he reached for the dossier his cousin Quintus had given him. He pulled out the documents, rubbed his eyes, and began to read.

  The tale of the poisonings and the ensuing investigation was told in bits and pieces. The fragmentary nature of the material only made it more fascinating, like a puzzle with many pieces. Grateful for anything to make him forget his nightmare, Kaeso perused the documents far into the night.

  In the months that followed, Kaeso’s life settled into a comfortable pattern. He worked very hard under the tutelage of Appius Claudius, learning everything he could about every aspect of the great road, which men were calling the Appian Way, and about the water channel, which men had dubbed the Appian Aqueduct. There was no task, high or low, in which he did not take part, from digging trenches to calculating the volume of water that could pass through a given section of the aqueduct in a given amount of time.

  He even managed to learn the Greek alphabet and a few rudiments of the language, but whenever Claudius set him the task of translating a passage in Greek about hydraulics or engineering, the complexity of the language continued to stymie him. “One thing is clear,” said Claudius in exasperation one day, “there cannot be a drop of Greek blood in you!” The comment was entirely innocent, but set off a fresh cycle of nightmares that haunted Kaeso’s sleep.

  At night, after a long day of working hard with his body and his mind, Kaeso looked forward to eating a hearty dinner with his parents, relaxing for a while in the garden, and then spending an hour or so reading the documents that Quintus had loaned to him. He found it strangely relaxing to sift through the confessions of the poisoners, the lists and memoranda scribbled in Quintus’s hand, the official decrees of the Senate and the consuls, and the various other pieces of evidence. An obscure reference in one document would lead him to search out another, and then another which he might already have read, but had not fully understood without the later knowledge that came from further research. The puzzle-like nature of the material amused and engaged him. From seemingly unrelated bits and pieces, an increasingly coherent picture of events began to emerge, like the creation of a mosaic from odd bits of stone.

  Over and over, and utterly fascinated, he read the statements given by the women.

  “I did it because my husband slept with another woman,” said one.

  “I did it because the shopkeeper looked at me the wro
ng way,” said another.

  “My brother and I had always quarreled,” said one. “I was tired of quarreling.”

  And another: “I did it because my two sisters had done it to their husbands, and I did not want to feel left out.”

  The notorious Sergia had performed a great deal of experimentation with various plants and other substances, making notes on how the poisons could be extracted, which of them were more or less reliable, the symptoms they caused, the time they required to take effect, and how they worked in combination. Sergia had also made detailed sketches of numerous plants, to serve as guides for her servants when she dispatched them to find specimens growing in the wild.

  Typical of Sergia’s notes was her entry about aconitum, illustrated by a drawing of the flowering plant:

  Aconitum. A white powder derived from the plant called Pluto’s helmet, because the purple flower, which grows in upright clusters, is shaped like a warrior’s helmet with a high crest and cheek plates. The plant is knee-high to hip-high and grows in the shade of trees, in moist soil. A Greek merchant tells me that his people call it the Queen of Poisons. Legend says the plant first sprang from the saliva of the three-headed dog Cerberus, guardian of the underworld. All parts of the plant appear to be toxic, but most especially the roots, from which the white powder is derived. Ingestion causes death. The powder may also kill a woman if it comes into contact with her genitals. Very quick to act—death may occur within ten minutes, and almost certainly within four hours. The victim quickly experiences numbness and tingling in the mouth and throat, both of which feel parched; also there is a severe burning sensation from throat to abdomen. Tingling spreads to the hands and feet and then the whole body. The skin and extremities feel cold and clammy to the touch, yet at the same time the victim may feel as though his limbs are being flayed. Legs become weak. Sight and hearing grow dull, but the victim will be clearheaded until the moment of death. Muscles twitch and convulse. Pulse weakens. Pupils dilate. The slightest exertion results in a fatal swoon.

  And so it went, with Kaeso falling asleep with details of long-ago murders in his head. Such reading matter provided an escape from the pressing problems of the day. His last conscious thought was less likely to be about some vexing technical puzzle posed by the aqueduct than about the patrician matron Cornelia, who killed her husband while they were copulating by inserting her middle finger, covered with the white powder aconitum, into his fundament—a method of stimulation he demanded of her and which she found distasteful. The poison killed the victim within minutes, but not, according to Cornelia, before he had attained a peculiarly violent orgasm. The dossier was full of such extraordinary details.

  No amount of reading would banish the dreams that arose from Kaeso’s anxieties regarding his origins. These nightmares recurred from time to time, usually set off by some chance remark made to him during the day that had nothing to do with his ancestry but that nonetheless made him feel exposed and vulnerable—an outsider, an interloper, an imposter within one of Roma’s most ancient and distinguished families.

  Thus, for a while, Kaeso’s life settled into a comfortable pattern. Then there came a day that he knew was to change his life forever, but not for the reason he thought.

  The obvious event of the day was his betrothal to a girl named Galeria. The betrothal was the culmination of intense negotiations between the two patrician families involved. On the Fabius side, it was Quintus who pushed for Kaeso to marry. The young man had shown himself to be bright and ambitious, but also stubborn and contrary; the responsibilities of marriage might be just the thing to tame his reckless energy.

  Kaeso had mixed feelings about the prospect of marriage, but Galeria was a pretty girl with the figure of a Venus, and in his chaperoned conversations with her, she was charmingly shy and sweet.

  The betrothal was finalized one afternoon at the house of Quintus Fabius. Kaeso, his father, and Galeria’s father drank several toasts with Quintus’s best wine. As soon as he could, Kaeso, feeling a bit tipsy, stole away and headed for the house of Appius Claudius, eager to share the news with his mentor.

  The door slave, explaining that the censor was meeting with a visitor on official state business, asked him to wait in the antechamber next to Claudius’s library. It was a warm day and the doors were open. Kaeso could hear quite clearly the conversation that was taking place in the adjoining room.

  “Admittedly,” Claudius was saying, “there is some precedent for what you’re asking to do. The state religion has grown so large and complex, with so many rituals that must be performed every day, all over the city, that in recent years more and more duties have been delegated to temple slaves, who are owned by the state and receive special training from the priesthoods. Nonetheless, Titus Potitius, what you propose is a bit different, and sure to be controversial.”

  The name Potitius meant little to Kaeso. He knew the Potitii to be a patrician family—one of the oldest—but they figured little in the politics of the day and were seldom seen in the exalted social circles of the Fabii. If pressed, he might have recalled that they had something to do with the Ara Maxima, and in fact, it was that ancient hereditary duty that Titus Potitius had come to discuss with Claudius.

  “Please understand, Censor.” The man sounded old, and his voice was weary and downtrodden. “If I saw any other solution to the family’s ills, I would never have come to you with this request. The sad fact is, the Potitii can no longer afford to maintain the altar, or to put on the annual feast in Hercules’s honor. The altar itself is woefully in need of restoration. Have you looked at the site lately? It’s an embarrassment to us all! The feast has become a pauper’s banquet; it causes me great embarrassment to admit this, but it’s the simple truth. Our inability to properly fulfill these duties does not reflect in an honorable way upon Roma, or upon the god, or upon the Potitii. Our continuing attempts to do so are only driving the family into greater poverty. Alas, in the days of our ancestors, an altar could be nothing more than a flat stone, and a feast could be a handful of beans! But Roma is no longer like that. As the city’s power and wealth have grown, so have the standards of religious observance. The state can afford to restore and maintain the Ara Maxima and to honor Hercules with a feast that will make all Roma proud. The Potitii cannot.”

  “Your point is well taken, Titus Potitius. In return for ceding this privilege to the state, I presume you will expect a substantial payment.”

  “It would be proper.”

  “A payment large enough to get you and your kin out of the financial hole you find yourselves in.”

  “The state’s generous recompense will be put to good use, Censor.”

  “So, an exclusive, hereditary religious duty, jealously guarded for centuries, is merely a commodity to be bought and sold? You realize that this is what some people will say.”

  “As censor, I believe you have the authority to approve this transaction.”

  “And if I do, what will people say of me? ‘There goes Appius Claudius, abusing his office again! It’s not enough that he packs the Senate with his low-born friends and fixes the elections; now he’s tinkering with the most ancient religious rites in the city!’”

  Potitius sighed. “I realize that the decision would be a difficult one for you—”

  “On the contrary! I wholeheartedly approve of your idea.”

  “You do?”

  “Absolutely. The old-fashioned notion that certain priesthoods and religious rites should remain under the exclusive control of a particular family is obnoxious to me. Any religious function that affects the entire state should be in the hands of the state. The people’s religion should be controlled by the people. For that reason, which has nothing to do with your family’s financial woes, I entirely approve of your offer to cede authority over the Ara Maxima and the Feast of Hercules to the state. Toward that end, I’m sure I can arrange for just compensation to be paid to your family.”

  “Censor, I can hardly express my gratitude—”


  “Then don’t, at least not yet. As I warned you, there will be some who rabidly oppose this change. They’ll accuse me of impiety and abuse of my authority. They’ll defame you and your kin. You must be prepared for their aspersions.”

  “I understand, Censor.”

  “Very well. Before we can proceed, I must ask if you truly represent the will of the entire family. From the census rolls…” Kaeso heard a rustling of scrolls. Claudius grunted. “I see that your numbers are smaller than I supposed. Can this be right? There are only twelve separate households of Potitii remaining in Roma, comprising some thirty males who carry the name?”

  “That is correct. Our numbers have dwindled along with our fortunes.”

  “And you have authority to speak for them all?”

  “I am the paterfamilias senior to all others. The matter has been thoroughly discussed within the family and decided.”

  “Very well.”

  Claudius called for a secretary, to whom he issued some instructions. He exchanged some parting pleasantries with Titus Potitius and escorted him from the room. As the two of them stepped into the antechamber, Claudius saw Kaeso and smiled broadly. Kaeso saw that Potitius had gray hair and a gray beard to match his elderly voice, and was wearing a toga that had seen better days. The old man gave Kaeso a passing glance, then stopped short and stared at him.