He handed Pilate a sealed papyrus scroll, with a bit of crimson stain on one corner. Pilate took it from him with a wry look. “Cut-purses indeed!” he snorted. “You are a talented man, Quintus Sullemius. You waste your abilities as captain of a small ship like this.”
“Perhaps you could find other employment for me in the future?” the captain asked with a grin.
“I can probably find a use for a sharp blade and a quick mind,” said Pilate. “Provided they are not accompanied by a wagging tongue!”
The seagoing scoundrel looked at Pilate askance. “By the gods, sir, you wound my feelings!” he said. “I am merely a humble sea captain, transporting a roving scholar to Cyprus to consult the histories of the House of Ptolemy that are stored there.”
Pilate tossed him a small purse of gold coins. “Then come to me in Rome, and I will find work for you that you will enjoy—and profit from. Now, begone with you, rascal, and get this ship underway for Paphos immediately!”
As soon as he had the tiny cabin to himself, Pilate opened the scroll and quickly perused its contents. Piso was in trouble and he knew it, apparently. He wrote:
To His Excellency Tiberius Caesar,
I am mortified to find that I have offended in my actions. By all the gods, I thought that an order from Sejanus was as good as an order from you! The poison should have acted much more swiftly—I had no idea that the arrogant whelp Germanicus would live long enough to name me a suspect in his demise! But does his death still not serve your purpose? Your rival and would-be successor is gone, and you may now rule Rome uncontested for years to come! I recognize that the Senate and People are unhappy and may require that someone pay the price for this crime, but I warn you—if I stand trial before the Senate, I WILL let them know who gave me the order to dispatch Germanicus. If you do not want the odious task of explaining to the Conscript Fathers how your offhand remark somehow got translated into a death warrant for a member of the Imperial family, you had best find a way for me to avoid public trial. I am a talented and wealthy man. I do not mind in the least disappearing into the east, or the south—wherever Caesar tells me to go. I am still loyal to you, Emperor Tiberius—but not so loyal as to die a traitor’s death to atone for your actions and words!
Rome’s humble servant,
Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso
Pilate shook his head. He knew Piso only by reputation, but that reputation was confirmed by the contents of the letter. Related by blood to the last wife of the Divus Julius, the Calpurni all had a reputation as rather stupid, venal social climbers determined to cash in on their family connection to the Julio-Claudians. But the breathtaking arrogance of Piso’s letter was truly shocking. Did he really think that the Emperor of Rome would let himself be blackmailed by a jumped-up mushroom from a minor noble family? As the ship’s crew made preparation to set sail for Paphos, Pilate decided that performing this particular task for the Emperor might be somewhat enjoyable.
The northwest wind continued to push the ship swiftly through the waters of the Mediterranean, and they covered the 300 miles from Rhodes to Paphos in just over two days. Pilate sent Sullemius to find out where Piso was staying. The Governor, it turned out, had hired out a small vacant villa just outside of town while he waited for the winds to change—and, probably, to hear a reply from his frantic missive to Rome. Fortunately for Pilate, Piso had only his wife and one loyal slave with him, so confronting him would be relatively easy. There were also four Roman legionaries outside the estate, making sure that Piso did not make a run for it, but Pilate knew the habits of legionaries well enough to avoid them. After all, they were there to keep someone from getting out, not from getting in.
After dark, Pilate pulled on his hooded mantle, strapped on his gladius and a dagger, and hired a mount from a local stable. He rode quickly to the remote villa and tied his horse up at an inn a mile down the road, booking a room for the night. He had to spend an extra denarius to get the chamber to himself, but it had a window that faced away from the road, so it was money well spent. He ate a quick bite and pretended to go to bed, then slipped out the window just before midnight. The four legionaries were living in a large tent pitched in front of the villa. Two of them were sleeping, while the other two slowly patrolled the grounds. Pilate waited for them to both pass out of his field of vision, and stealthily ran toward the building, ducking behind a column just as one of the sentries rounded the corner coming toward him. Swathed in his dark mantle, he carefully spied out the rooms of the villa. Fortuna was smiling on him—Piso’s wife, Munatia Plancina, was gone from the villa for the evening. The servant, an elderly butler, was snoring in a deep sleep in the servants’ quarters, with a jug of wine at his elbow. Pilate smiled. It was time for some fun!
He slid into Calpurnius Piso’s bedroom, silent as a shadow, and drew the dagger from his belt. Then, in one smooth motion, he clapped his hand across the portly governor’s mouth and put the blade against his throat. The eyes started awake and stared about the room in terror. Piso tried to scream, but Pilate’s hand reduced his cries to a muffled squeal.
“SILENCE, fool!” he hissed in Piso’s ear. “Listen to me very closely. You are a dead man. The only thing remaining to be seen is whether you die like a Roman, quickly and cleanly, or squealing like a wench being raped by a legionary! Do you understand me?”
Slowly, Piso nodded his head, and Pilate released him.
“I am the governor of Syria, little man!” snapped Piso. “How dare you lay a hand on me!”
Pilate laughed softly. “Really?” he said. “It is a bit late in the game for false bravado. I come to you directly from Tiberius. You have made things very uncomfortable in Rome for our Emperor. The people blame him for the death of their beloved Germanicus.”
“As they should!” snapped Piso. “Sejanus wrote me that Tiberius wanted his adoptive son gone, and I made it happen!”
“In a way that was so obvious a child could see who was responsible!” snapped Pilate. “Not to mention the fact that Sejanus foolishly interpreted a drunken rant for a direct order. Be that as it may, there is only one way for the Emperor to salvage his reputation now. You must die, cleanly and by your own hand, leaving behind a letter acknowledging your guilt and exonerating Tiberius completely. You killed Germanicus in anger because of your dispute with him, not because you thought the Emperor would reward you!”
Piso’s eyes shifted rapidly. “If I give the alarm, the sentries will come running!” he said.
“And find you a gutted corpse!” said Pilate. “Not to mention that I would then have to kill all four of them and set fire to the villa. Trust me, in this matter, you need to remember your honor as a Roman and act for the good of Rome. An uprising against Tiberius would be brutally crushed, and hundreds if not thousands killed. Your wife and children would be stripped of their citizenship and crucified, or sold into slavery to the Parthians. Do you relish the thought of your son being turned into a toy for some perverse Parthian nobleman?”
Piso gritted his teeth. “Who are you to speak to me so?” he snapped.
“I am the Emperor’s man,” said Pilate. “That is all you need to know. Now, I believe you have a letter to write.”
The Governor of Syria gave a sigh of resignation. “May the guilt of your deeds hang over your head like a cloud of doom all your days, stranger!” he snapped. Then he withdrew a piece of papyrus from his wardrobe and dipped a pen into the inkwell and began writing. When he was done, he handed the finished note to Pilate.
“Excellent!” said Pilate. “Now lie down on your bed while I read it!”
He placed the point of his dagger against the man’s throat and held it there while he quickly read the suicide note. It was short and quite effectively phrased.
To His Excellency Tiberius Caesar,
I regret deeply that I have wounded you and your family by ending the life of Gaius Caesar Germanicus. His acts against me as governor of Syria wounded my pride and inflamed my temper, and in a fit of anger I had
him poisoned without thinking of the cost to Rome. I am deeply grieved that any would dare to think I did such a thing under your orders. Murdering your son was a selfish act, and I apologize for the grief I have inflicted on you, and on the children of Germanicus. May the ending of my life be a satisfactory atonement for my misdeeds.
Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso
Pilate removed his dagger from the man’s throat. “Now all that is left is to do the deed,” he told Piso.
The governor gave him a look of pure hatred, and drew his gladius from its scabbard. “I should charge you here and now!” he snapped. “I’ll wager I could hold you off until the guards came!”
Pilate laughed, a long, low, mocking laugh. “Look at yourself!” he hissed. “Life in the debaucheries of Syria has made you soft and fat! I won the Civic Crown for killing five Germans in as many minutes, every one of them ten times the man you are. Do you think I cannot cut you down in a matter of seconds, no matter how loud you yell? Then your wife goes to the cross and your children to the slave markets. Is that what you want?”
The resistance in Piso’s eyes slowly drained away. “In the name of all the gods, I curse you—Pontius Pilate! When you mentioned the Civic Crown I knew immediately who you were. Tiberius’ bloody-handed message boy! See how long you last once you have fallen from the tyrant’s favor!”
Pilate yawned. “Oh, do get on with it!” he snapped, showing more sangfroid than he felt—the curse of a dying man was not something to be taken lightly. But he refused to give the man the satisfaction of knowing that his words had carried any weight whatsoever.
Piso went to his knees, placed the point of the gladius against his chest, and fell forward. The razor-sharp blade slipped between his ribs and drove clean through his chest. His eyes widened and his body spasmed. He opened his mouth to cry out, but Pilate’s hand was there again, blocking the sound. The anguished eyes writhed in Piso’s face as he twisted in Pilate’s grasp.
“Missed the heart, apparently,” said Pilate. “Fear not. You have skewered your lung, and you will expire in a matter of moments. They will find your letter; your wife will be treated as the tragic widow of a man whose ambitions got the better of him. Your children will grow to adulthood with a chance to redeem your family name, all because you did the honorable thing.”
Piso nodded weakly, and his eyes ceased rolling so wildly. As Pilate watched, he saw consciousness begin to fade. Unable to resist the temptation, he whispered in the dying man’s ear: “That is, unless I choose to slaughter them myself!”
Piso’s eyes widened in alarm, and he twisted in Pilate’s grasp one more time. Then, with a final gasp of bloody froth from his lips, he died.
Pilate stood and surveyed the chamber. The spreading pool of blood covered the marks his feet had made near Piso’s body, and the suicide note was neatly placed on the small writing desk. There was nothing there to indicate that the Governor of Syria had not written the note of his own free will, and then fallen on his sword in fine Roman fashion. He yawned and stretched, then silently slipped from the room. He hid behind a colonnade until the sentry passed by, and darted into the woods. Just over an hour after he had left it, he returned to his chambers in the tiny inn through the window he had left by, and slept soundly all night long.
The next day the winds changed abruptly, blowing stout and strong from the southeast. The small bireme got underway, its scholarly passenger having copied the passages he needed from the chronicles of House Ptolemy. They enjoyed a swift and uneventful voyage back to Rome, and a month after he had been summoned by the Emperor, Pilate rode to his father-in-law’s country villa in Samnia. Proculus Porcius was gone way on business, but his daughter was there, sitting down to breakfast as Pilate arrived.
She greeted him with an affectionate but proper Roman kiss. “Greetings, husband,” she said. “It pleases me to see you well again.”
“I am feeling much better,” Pilate said. He returned her kiss with enthusiasm and walked her outside, away from the ears of her father’s servants. “Does anyone suspect that I have been away?”
Porcia smiled. “No!” she said. “I had your young slave Democles take your place, and brought him soup twice a day. His groans from the sickroom were very convincing! I told everyone you had the spotted pox.”
Pilate beamed at her. “Very clever,” he said. “That would definitely keep visitors away! But how shall we explain the absence of sores?”
She looked at him shrewdly. “Sometimes the malady only afflicts certain parts of the body,” she said. “I told them that you were mainly broken out on your lower torso, with just a few small spots on your face. We may have to—well, do something to create those spots, though.”
Pilate winced. “I suppose you are right. Two or three pokes with a burning taper should generate pretty convincing blisters on my face, and perhaps one or two on my shoulder, where my toga leaves it bare. I shall ask double reward of Tiberius for this!”
She kissed him again. “Fear not, my dear,” she said. “I will not mar your manly beauty!” With that, they retired to their bedchamber, and did not emerge until the next day.
CHAPTER SIX
“By the gods, man, what happened to your face?” Tiberius asked in horror.
Pilate smiled instinctively, and then winced. His face was marked with a half dozen or so angry red blisters, with several more on his shoulder, where his toga left it bare. “We needed a convenient reason why I have not been seen in public for the last month,” he said. “A case of the spotted pox seemed as likely an excuse as any.”
The Emperor looked at him and shuddered. “How on earth did you . . .” he began.
“A lit taper, and the steady hand of my wife,” said Pilate. “She assures me they will heal with minimal scarring.”
The Emperor looked at Pilate again, and slowly broke into a rare smile. “I shudder to think what my accursed wife would do if I let her get a lit taper anywhere near my face! Now, tell me—what of your errand?”
“Piso is dead,” Pilate said. “By his own hand, leaving a note full of remorse for the death of Germanicus and the grief he caused the Imperial family.”
“Well done, sir!” Tiberius said. “I shall see you elected Consul for this!”
Pilate bowed. “It is my pleasure to serve Rome,” he said.
The Emperor nodded. “And serve you have,” he said. “Tomorrow I shall greet Germanicus’ wife and children and conduct them to the funeral games that are being held in his honor. I should ask you and your wife to be part of the official entourage for the day. I shall remain in the city for at least another month or so, until I am sure that the public unrest is quieted. Then I shall return to Capri. The consular elections are a ways off, but I shall have Sejanus begin quietly lobbying my clients in your favor—the fool needs to be put to work, to atone for his dreadful error in judgment!”
Pilate’s mind was racing. Consul of Rome! In the days of the Republic, the consuls had been chief executives, leading the Senate, conducting foreign policy, and commanding the armies in time of war. Since Augustus had ended the Republic, all the old offices were still in place, but much reduced in power and authority. But still, being consul ennobled his family for life, and guaranteed him the governance of a nice, profitable province when his yearlong tenure was up. His years of diligent service to Tiberius had finally paid off—Pilate would no longer be a minor noble from an honorable but obscure plebeian family. Instead, he would be a respected statesman and leader of the greatest nation on earth. Piso’s blood was well spilled, he thought. He would have willingly bathed in the blood of a dozen such idiots in order to climb this high!
Even as he thought that, Pilate paused a moment, listening to this violent inner voice. Where had it come from? He was a cultured Roman, a sophisticated man who read Greek philosophers and spoke three languages. Like all Romans, he understood and appreciated the need for violence and armed might to sustain the power and authority of the Empire. But where had his own savage love of cr
uelty come from? He recalled the vile words he had whispered in the ear of the dying governor, and was repulsed—not only by the sheer vindictiveness of what he had said, but by the savage glee that had filled his heart as he said them. Yet now that part of him slept, satisfied and content. He could not find the least desire within himself to do violence to anyone at the moment—but he also knew that, at some point, that hungry beast within him would awaken again, and when it did, another person would pay with blood and ruin for this part of his nature he did not understand.
“Praetor Pilate!” The Emperor’s voice snapped him back to the present. “My word, man, did you doze off with your eyes wide open? I was speaking to you!”
Pilate bowed once more. “I beg your pardon, Sire, but my face was throbbing and my mind wandered for a moment. May I trouble you to repeat yourself?”
The Emperor looked at him, gruff but sympathetic. “You have paid a high price for obeying my orders,” he said. “Sejanus will want to speak with you for a moment, and then by all means go home and rest. Put ointment on your burns—I mean, on your blisters. Make your wife tend you well! And then join us tomorrow in the Amphitheater of Taurus.”
The Prefect of the Praetorian Guard looked at Pilate’s ravaged face and nodded thoughtfully. “Nice bit of work, that!” he said. “I keep my ears to the ground throughout the city, and there has not been so much as a hint that you were anywhere other than at home, in your villa, deathly ill. With Piso gone and the Emperor cleared of suspicion, the crowd will weep for Germanicus and move on. You have helped Tiberius, Lucius Pontius, but you have also helped me. I must learn to be more cautious and thoughtful in carrying out our master’s wishes from now on, and I might not have gotten the opportunity for this lesson had you not taken care of the situation so well. I know what the Emperor has promised you, but I want you to accept this gift from me alone.” He handed Pilate a very heavy purse, and when he arrived home, Pilate discovered therein a talent of gold, a beautiful and ornately inscribed man’s sapphire ring, and a lovely ruby and emerald necklace for Procula Porcia.
The Redemption of Pontius Pilate Page 8