by Talbot Mundy
— from The Log of Tros of Samothrace
NOWHERE on earth was it easier to make mistakes than in Rome, nor more difficult to recover from them. It was a city where a man might do almost anything, including murder, with impunity, provided he went about it according to precedent and did lip-service to institutions and conventions. Above all, a foreigner needed discretion. Too often foreigners had trailed behind the chariots of Roman generals, in the celebration of those triumphs over foreigners that made Rome affluent; too many thousands of alien slaves were doing the work of animals and pandering to Rome’s depravity; it was too usual to attribute treachery to foreigners in order to provide excuse for new campaigns, and it behooved the alien to study his deportment shrewdly, with an eye not only to the mob’s continuously cultivated craving for excitement, but also to the prejudices of the privileged. Privilege was of the essence of Rome’s government.
Aware of all that, nevertheless, Tros fell immediately foul of custom. Wishing to avoid curiosity that Orwic, with his fair moustache and unusual manners, almost certainly would have aroused, he accepted the use of Helene’s litters and her personal attendants to convey him to the Forum, where Zeuxis assured him he would almost certainly find Cato. He was conscious of having offended Zeuxis by not permitting him to overhear the conversation with Helene. He knew the Greek’s mercurial temperament, as capable of malice as of generosity and of leaping in a moment from one extreme to its opposite. But he did not expect Zeuxis’ resentment to be quite so swift. The malicious smile with which Zeuxis watched him get into the extravagantly decorated litter made no impression on him at the time.
“You will cause quite a flutter in Cato’s bosom. There is nothing like a favorable introduction!” said the Greek.
And for a while it looked as if Zeuxis had meant exactly what he said. As the litters approached the city they became the objects of such attention that the liveried slaves had hard work to make progress through the crowd. Helene’s notoriety had not been lessened, nor her popularity diminished by the recent brawling in the Forum for the right to walk beside her litter through the streets. Her recent offer to fight with net and trident in the Circus Maximus had become common gossip; it had been nobody’s affair to circulate the news that the authorities had instantly forbidden such a scandalous proceeding. The crowd wanted to be scandalized and gloated at the prospect of Helene’s doing it.
It was known too, that she had a four-horse team to enter in the races that would precede the three days’ butchery of men and beasts in the arena; the possibility that she might drive the team herself had raised her popularity to fever-heat. The mere sight of her well-known litter forcing its way toward the Capitol was enough to block the narrow streets and draw attention even from the orators who were trying to work the crowd into electioneering frenzy wherever there was room for fifty men to stand and listen.
It was easy to see out through the litter-curtains, although next thing to impossible to recognize the litter’s occupant, so all the way to the Forum Tros received the adulation that would have amused and thrilled Helene to the marrow of her being. It disgusted Tros. He loathed it. It revolted him to have to use a woman’s notoriety to further his own plans. But it seemed safer to trust to Helene’s influence than to make experiments with Rome’s senators, or senators’ wives, who might be less notorious but not less treacherous. No one — probably not even Caesar — knew the long reach of Caesar’s spies and Caesar’s money.
But he hated the scent of the goose-breast-feather cushions. The stifling city smells annoyed him and the din of city traffic — street-vendors’ cries, the tumult of electioneering factions skillfully incited to frenzy by men whose only claim to public office was cupidity and the ability to pay the necessary bribes, yells of the charioteers who found the street blocked, clangor of the armorers in dim basement workshops, hoarse pleadings of the auctioneers disposing of the loot from far-off provinces, shouts of the public announcers, the yelping of dogs and the overtone, blended of all of it:
“Buy! Buy! Buy!”
Rome was for sale to the craftiest bidder. That was the key to the din. The offspring of seventy races were hawking their hearts in the market, to the buyer with the keenest brain and longest pocketbook.
Midsummer heat had driven all who could afford it to the seaside or to mountain villas — that, and bedbugs incubated in the crowded, dark slave-quarters and the rack-rent tenements. The orators were well dressed. There were equites in dusty chariots arriving post-haste from the country to investigate alarming rumors, but the crowd had the shabby, ill-tempered appearance it assumes so swiftly when the fashionable element withdraws. Hot nights and too much politics — slaves overworked and free men unemployed — enormous and increasing wealth of one class, poverty and irresponsibility increasing for the other — corn-doles, open bribery, free entertainment at the expense of demagogues — postponement of the elections because the senate was afraid of mob-rule — Caesar’s agrarian laws designed to curry favor with the populace, and the impossibility of enforcing them in the face of the landowners’ opposition, or of earning a living on the land in competition with the cheap slave-labor of the large estates, had all combined to arouse irritation, uncertainty and the expectation of a riot such as even Rome had never seen. Almost the air itself seemed ready to take fire. Men’s faces wore the ugly look that precedes violence.
And Rome herself was ugly-drab with the color of smoky bricks and vegetable refuse — ugliness enhanced by the beginnings of adornment. There was marble here and there; and there were statues, some decapitated, some half hidden under crudely smeared electioneering posters, that suggested dignity forgotten. From between its ugly wooden scaffolding the marble of Pompey’s enormous new theater shone in the baking sunlight, hinting at the only method by which Rome was likely to emerge out of her filth. It was against the law to build a theater of anything but wood; so, as all men knew, including they who should enforce the law, Pompey was building behind screens of wood that should be torn down in a night at last and lay bare a magnificent defiance of the law. And all men knew that none, unless possibly Cato, would dare to call Pompey in question. Men laughed at the senate’s helplessness, while they reviled the senate for not fostering tradition.
As the litters neared the Forum, where the shop-fronts and the open wine- shops looked drab in the dust from buildings being torn down by Caesar’s agents and the thud of falling masonry resounded like the tumult of a siege, the crowd grew denser. Roofs, temple steps, the shop-fronts, upper windows, all were thronged with agitated sightseers, some crying out the names of candidates for public office, some reviling Cato, others — evidently led by unseen agents — shouting for Pompeius Magnus and dictatorship.
The crowd was so dense that even two lictors preceding a praetor’s deputy were brought to a halt. Rather than challenge the crowd in that temper they preferred to follow the two litters, for which the crowd made way. They recognized Helene’s livery and there began to be an ovation. One of those strange moods that capture crises spread like a contagion; there was humor in the thought of humoring Helene, who had to stay at home three days because of gross infractions of the public peace of which she was the cause, and of dishonoring the praetor’s representative.
The crowd, it seemed, was there to vilify the praetor — to inspire him with such dread as should prevent him from interfering with electioneering bribery. They began yelping at the lictors and at the sacred official who strode behind them with his toga concealing the lower half of his face. Then suddenly some genius conceived the thought that Helene had been arrested and was being brought before the praetor for examination. Mockery turned to anger. That was interference with the citizens’ amusement and intolerable.
“Rescue her!”
The shout came from an upper window. It was echoed by a hundred voices from the street. Stones began flying, picked from the debris of the houses Caesar’s agents were demolishing. An angry faction, seizing opportunity to pounce on their political o
pponents, surged between the litters and the praetor’s representative and in a second there was a street fight raging. The two lictors, theoretically sacred in their persons, raised their fasces over the official’s head and hurried him to safety in the nearest house, while a troop of young patricians, asking nothing better than excuse to terrorize the mob, charged on horseback from a side-street in the direction of the Capitol. They were only armed with daggers but they swept the mob in front of them, and in a sort of back-eddy formed by that onslaught the two litters swayed into the Forum, where the bearers set them down beside a statue on which men swarmed and around which sweating men were packed like herrings in a barrel.
Tros emerged out of the litter and by sheer strength scuffled himself standing-room. He shouted to Orwic to stay where he was, but the Briton at the risk of daggers fought his way beside him. They were facing the temple of Castor and Pollux, whose platform was thronged with patricians, one of whom was trying to address the crowd while others roared for silence, and no single word could be distinguished from the din. There was a sea of arms and hot, excited faces where the patricians tried to win the mob’s attention. On the opposite side of the Forum, where the shutters had been raised on money-changers’ windows and every statue held its crowd of men like corpses on a gibbet, other orators were roaring themselves hoarse. There were cries of:
“Who defeated Spartacus?”
“Pompeius Magnus! Let him be dictator!”
“Who conquered Asia?”
“Pompeius Magnus!”
“Down with Cato! He assails our liberties!”
“Caesar! Caius Julius Caesar! The most generous, the most capable, the most glorious — Caesar! Caesar! Memmius!”
The last was Caesar’s candidate for consul.
Cheers, groans, cat-calls drowned the efforts of each faction to popularize their favorite. There were scuffles and fist-fights going on in thirty places simultaneously, but there was no room for a general melee; public peace was preserved by the utter impossibility of concerted action where men were fainting for lack of breathing room and could not rally to their friends or reach their enemies. A young patrician, standing high above the crowd’s reach on the balustrade that flanked the temple platform, was amusing himself by flinging copper coins, but none dared stoop to pick them up for fear of being trampled underfoot. Six others in a group yelled “fire!” to try to cause a stampede, but that failed because it was impossible to move in any direction.
The only uninvaded steps were those of the praetor’s office, guarded by a row of lictors, whose fasces, vertically held in front of them, were still such sacred symbols of Rome’s majesty as even that crowd dared not violate. The building, wedged between the massive temple of Castor and Pollux and a smaller one, more delicately built, that showed the influence of Greece, was blunt, uncompromisingly Roman, dignified and solid, raised above the level of the Forum on a concrete base that formed the platform and provided cells for prisoners as well as offices. Its brick-work, unadorned since Sulla’s day when the stucco had been damaged in the rioting and afterward removed entirely, gave a gloomy, ancient aspect to the building that was only partially brightened by the stucco columns recently erected to support a roof over the platform. On wooden boards on either side of the open door were public proclamations, and on the platform was a table and a chair, but no man seated at it. That platform was the only vacant space in sight; even the bronze beaks of the rostra, at the Forum’s farther end, were invisible behind a swaying sea of faces.
Suddenly the din ceased. There was silence as if Rome had caught her breath. The hammering of demolition stopped abruptly and the dense crowd swayed as every face was turned toward the door of the praetorium.
“Cato!”
It was a murmur, but it filled the Forum. He came slowly through the open door, the purple border of his toga emphasizing the dignity and matter-of- factness of his stride. He had a tablet in his right hand, which he studied, hardly glancing at the crowd, and he appeared entirely to ignore the half-a- dozen men who followed him, three on either hand. He was a round-headed, obstinate looking veteran, in contrast to their elegance and air of self- advertisement; the more they postured and acknowledged themselves conscious of the crowd, the greater seemed his dignity.
“Citizens!” he said abruptly. Even breathing ceased. There was a dead, flat silence — noncommittal. No man seemed to expect pleasantries. “It is your inalienable privilege to elect the officials of the Republic by ballot. However, certain individuals, ambitious to hold office for their private gain, have set the disgraceful example of bribery, corrupting public morals and preventing the election of such candidates as will not, for the sake of honesty, or can not purchase votes. This scandal I regard it as my duty to abolish. There shall be no bribery while I am praetor. I have caused to be deposited with me by each of these candidates for office whom you see before you a sum of money from his private fortune which would ruin any of them should he forfeit it. This money will be forfeited into the coffers of the state in the event of proof of bribery. So cast your ballots at the time of the election honorably, as becomes a Roman citizen, each voting for that candidate who seems to him to merit confidence.”
He made no gesture — simply turned, looked sharply at the six men on the platform, and strode sturdily in through the door. There was a moment’s silence, then a man laughed. Agitators, scattered at strategic intervals, cackled cynically until all the crowd was laughing. Cries from over near the rostra broke on the babbling din:
“This upstart believes he is Cato the Censor! He will abolish the games next! He will have us all eating turnips and wearing sackcloth!”
But the crowd, as volatile as mercury, had seen the humor of the situation. It turned its laughter on the candidates for office, booing them until they followed Cato in a hurry. There was a surge then as men were hustled off the rostra to make room for orators who sought with shout and gesture to claim the crowd’s attention. But the mob would have none of them; it began melting, pouring along the Via Sacra, spreading the news of Cato’s master-stroke and carrying the din of laughter down the narrow streets until all Rome seemed aroar with monstrous humor. Before Tros could straighten out his clothing, mussed by the crush of the crowd, the whole Forum was empty except for groups of arguing politicians. All except two of the lictors retired, and they sat at ease on stools on either side of the praetorium door.
“They are used to squalls — well used to them!” said Tros, and taking Orwic by the arm he bade the litter-bearers follow him to the praetorium steps and wait there.
As he reached the top step he met Cato face to face. The Roman, with only one slave following, stopped, framed in the doorway and stared at him hard, then glanced at the sumptuous litters and their slaves in Egyptian livery.
“Those slaves are better dressed than many a Roman,” he remarked, with a sarcastic gesture answering Tros’s salute. “Who are you?”
“Praetor, I am Tros of Samothrace. I seek audience with you alone.”
Cato’s florid, stubborn face grew wrinkled as a dry smile stole along his lips.
“You are an alien,” he said. “You think the business of Rome may wait while I listen to your importunities?”
“Aye, let Rome wait!” Tros answered. “Caesar has the reins of fortune in his hand.”
“You are Caesar’s messenger?”
“I am Tros of Samothrace and no man’s messenger. I seek an audience with you.”
“Enter.”
Cato turned his back and led the way along a narrow passage into a square room lined with racks on which state documents were filed with parchment labels hanging from them. There were several chairs, two tables and one secretary, bowed over a manuscript. Cato dismissed the secretary. He stared, glanced suddenly at Orwic and sat down.
“Be brief,” he said abruptly.
Tros made no haste. He studied him, mistrusting ordinary methods. There was nothing subtle about Cato; the man’s elementary simplicity and downrig
htness expressed themselves in every line. His windy gray eyes, steady and keenly intelligent, betrayed unflinching will. His wrinkles spoke of hard experience. The iron-gray hair, worn short, suggested a pugnacity that was confirmed by the lines of mouth and chin. His hands, laid calmly on his knees, were workmanlike, unjeweled, strong — incapable of treachery; the voice, well modulated, courteous but carrying a note of irony and incredulity.
A little too much bluntness and Cato would construe it as a challenge; the merest hint of subtlety and he would close his mind. Too much politeness would stir suspicion; rudeness he would take as an affront to Roman dignity. Exaggeration he would instantly discredit; under-statement he would construe literally. He was difficult. Tros would have preferred a man more vulnerable to emotion.
“I am from Britain,” Tros remarked at last. “This is a prince of Britain.” He nodded to Orwic, who saluted with aristocratic dignity.
“You have come in very gaudy litters,” Cato answered. “Whose are they?”
“Helene’s. Lacking other means of—”
“Can’t you walk?” asked Cato. “I am praetor. I invariably walk.”
“I can walk when I will,” Tros answered. “Having no lictors to make me a way through the crowd I did well to borrow litters that the crowd would let pass. It is of no importance how I came. I will speak of Caesar.”
“You carry tales against him? I have heard them all,” said Cato. He closed his mouth tight, as a man does when he reins impatient horses.