A Murder on the Appian Way

by Steven Saylor

  When I looked toward Cicero’s house, I saw that I was not alone in my apprehension. Intervening houses and trees blocked my view of the street, but of the house itself I could clearly see some shuttered windows in the upper story and a portion of the roof. Two figures were perched there, as Belbo and I were perched on my roof, peering over the edge at the street below. By the glare of the slanting morning light I instantly discerned the thick-necked, grim-jawed silhouette of Cicero. Crouching close behind him, reaching out to make sure that his master did not lean too far, was the slighter silhouette of Cicero’s lifelong secretary, Tiro. They were still for a long moment, as if frozen by the cold morning air; then Cicero reached back for Tiro’s shoulder. They put their heads together and anxiously conferred. From the way they drew back and craned their necks, trying to see but not be seen, I gathered that the bizarre funeral cortege was passing directly below them. The dirge of the horns and flutes became shriller, the shivering of the distant tambourines more manic. Intent on the spectacle below, Cicero and Tiro took no notice of my scrutiny.

  The procession apparently came to a halt before Cicero’s house. Cicero bobbed his head forward and back, like a nervous quail. I could imagine his dilemma—he was afraid to take his eyes away from the mob, and yet the merest glimpse of him might incite them to violence. Horns blared, flutes trilled, tambourines rattled.

  At last the cortege moved on and the dirge faded away.

  Cicero and Tiro sat back, sighing with relief. Then Cicero winced and gripped his stomach. As the heel to Achilles, so the belly to Cicero; his breakfast had turned against him. He rose, still crouching, and moved crablike up the roof with Tiro following behind. Tiro turned his head and saw us watching. He touched his master’s sleeve and spoke. Cicero paused and turned his face toward us. I raised my hand in neighborly greeting. Tiro waved back. Cicero stayed motionless for a moment, then clutched his stomach and hurried on, disappearing over the edge of the roof.

  Meanwhile, below us in the street, more men in black kept running by in parties of two and three, stragglers rushing to catch up. Most of them took the Ramp. I tried to see where they were all headed, but my view of the Forum was mostly of beaten copper roofs gleaming in the sunlight; every now and again I could catch a glimpse of tiny figures moving in the spaces between. They all seemed to be gathering before the Senate House at the far end of the Forum, where the sheer rock face of the Capitoline Hill forms a natural wall.

  From my position, I had a clear view of the front of the Senate House. Broad marble steps led up to the massive bronze doors, which were closed. I could see only a tiny portion of the open space in front of the Senate House, but this included a clear view of the Rostra, the raised platform from which speakers address the populace. Already the space between the Rostra and the Senate House was filled with a crush of black-clad mourners.

  The funeral dirge, which for a while had faded out of hearing, now returned, rising from the Forum. Echoing up from the valley, the harsh music sounded more confused and discordant than ever. Suddenly it was overwhelmed by a great shout from the crowd. The body of Clodius had arrived. A little later I saw the bier as it was carried onto the Rostra and propped up for the crowd to see, just as it had been displayed on the steps of Clodius’s house the night before. What a tiny thing it looked, and yet even at such a distance there was still something shocking about that glimpse of naked flesh amid so many black-clad mourners and so much cold, chiseled stone.

  A speaker mounted the Rostra. I could hear only faint echoes of his voice. As he paced back and forth across the Rostra, waving his arms, pointing to the corpse of Clodius and raising his fists, the crowd broke into a thunderous roar. From that point on the noise of the mob rose and fell but never quite subsided.

  “What’s going on?”

  I turned my head, startled. “Diana, go back down the ladder at once!”

  “Why? Is it dangerous up here?”

  “Very. Your mother would have a fit.”

  “Oh, I hardly think so. She held the ladder for me. But I think she’s afraid to come up herself.”

  “As well she might be.”

  “And how about you, Papa? I should think an old fellow like you would be more likely to lose his balance than I would be.”

  “How did I ever come to have such an impertinent child?”

  “I’m not impertinent. Just curious. It’s like the siege of Troy, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Like Jupiter up on Mount Ida, watching the battlefield down below. They’re all so tiny. It makes one feel … godlike.”

  “Does it? Jupiter could send down thunderbolts or messengers with wings. And he could hear what was being said. Having a view hardly makes me feel godlike. Quite the opposite. It makes me feel powerless, watching from a distance like this.”

  “You could go down and join them.”

  “Put myself at the mercy of that mob? There’s no telling what they might do next—”

  “Papa, look!”

  Like a storm-churned flood, the crowd seemed suddenly to overflow the broad square in front of the Rostra, surging in wave after wave onto the steps and terraces of the surrounding temples and public buildings.

  “Papa, look! The Senate House!”

  The broad steps were inundated by the mob, which rose like a black flood tide to lash against the tall bronze doors. Bolted from within, they stood against the tide, but soon I began to hear a low, thudding, repetitive boom. It was hard to see exactly what was happening, but the mob seemed to be assaulting the doors of the Senate House with some sort of makeshift battering ram.

  “Impossible,” I said. “Incredible! What are they thinking of? What do they want?”

  All at once the doors gave way. A moment later a cheer of triumph rose from the crowd. I looked back to the Rostra. The speaker was still ranting, striding back and forth and exhorting the mob with wild gestures, but the body of Clodius had disappeared. I frowned, puzzled, then caught sight of the naked body on its black-draped bier proceeding with odd, jerky movements toward the steps of the Senate House. It seemed that the mob was passing the bier from hand to hand above their heads. I suddenly had a vision of the mob as a colony of insects, and the corpse of Clodius as their queen. I shivered and felt an intimation of vertigo. With one hand I reached for Diana, putting my arm around her shoulder, and with the other I held more firmly to the tiles of the roof.

  The bier reached the foot of the Senate House steps, stalled for a moment, then tilted upward and began to ascend. The mass of the crowd, able to see the body again, produced another loud roar of mingled triumph and despair. The bier reached the top of the steps and was propped upright. A man stepped up beside it, waving a burning torch. He seemed to be giving a speech, though it was hard to imagine that the roaring crowd could hear him any better than I could. Even at such a distance, I was almost certain that the speaker was Sextus Cloelius, Clodius’s wild-eyed lieutenant, the man who had spoken of riots and revenge against Milo the previous night.

  After a while, still waving his torch, he turned and entered the Senate House. The bier was carried in after him.

  “What can they possibly be thinking?” I said.

  “ ‘Burn it down,’” said Belbo. “Wasn’t that what the fellow said, the one who pounded on the door?”

  I shook my head. “He was raving. Besides, he must have meant burning down Milo’s house, or maybe Cicero’s. He couldn’t possibly have meant …”

  Sometimes, uttering the impossible can suddenly make it seem quite possible after all. I stared at the roof of the Senate House, as if by concentrating I could see through it to perceive what Sextus Cloelius was up to. Surely not—

  And then I saw the first wisps of smoke, streaming wraithlike from the shuttered windows set high along the walls of the Senate House.

  “Papa—”

  “Yes, Diana, I see. They must be cremating the body, inside the building. The idiots! If they aren’t careful—”

  “T
hey hardly look to me like the sort to be careful,” said Belbo, tilting his head earnestly.

  A little later the first flickering tongues of flame appeared at one of the windows. One after another the shutters caught fire. Heavy black smoke began to pour from the windows, then from the open doorway. Sextus Cloelius ran out of the building, waving his torch triumphantly over his head. The crowd fell silent for a moment, probably as awed as I was by the enormity of what had happened. Then they released a roar that must have been heard all the way to Bovillae.

  It was heard in Cicero’s house, at least. From the corner of my eye I saw a movement on his roof. He had returned, along with Tiro. The two of them stood upright, no longer crouching, and watched the spectacle in the Forum below. Tiro clutched his face. He was weeping. How many happy hours had he spent in that building, copying down his master’s speeches in the shorthand he invented, ordering his army of clerks about, paying witness to the great career he had done so much to foster? Slaves can be very sentimental.

  Cicero did not weep. He crossed his arms, set his jaw in a hard line and stared grimly at the orgy of destruction below.

  “There!” said Diana. She was pointing at Cicero. “There! That’s what Jupiter must have looked like, gazing down at Troy.”

  Knowing Cicero far better than my daughter did, and certain that there was nothing remotely godlike about him, I was about to correct her when Belbo interrupted.

  “You’re right,” he said. “The very image!”

  Their shared certainty forced me to take another look. Diana was right. I had to concede it. As Cicero looked at that moment, watching the destruction of the Senate House by Clodius’s mob, so great Jupiter might have looked when he brooded on Mount Ida and watched the mad clash of mortals below.

  4

  Whipped by the cold wind, the blazes shot higher and higher until the whole Senate House was engulfed by flames. The mob danced on the marble steps, hooting and laughing while they dodged cascades of cinders and ash.

  The fire began to spread, first to the complex of senatorial offices to the south of the Senate House. The threat of the mob had already emptied most of the buildings, but after the flames started a few panic-stricken clerks came rushing out, carrying armloads of documents. Some tripped and fell, others zigzagged madly, dodging the taunting mob, dropping their burdens. Wax tablets scattered like tumbling dice. Scrolls unfurled and streamed like pennants in the breeze.

  Then the wind changed. The flames spread west of the Senate House, to the Porcian Basilica. One of the great buildings of the Forum, it was a hundred and thirty years old, the first basilica ever built. Its distinguishing features—the long nave terminating in an apse with colonnaded aisles on either side—are now duplicated in buildings all over the empire. Many of the wealthiest bankers in the world kept their headquarters in the Porcian Basilica. It took hardly an hour for the fire to reduce its venerable majesty to a smoldering pile of rubble.

  It was the bankers, I learned later, desperate to salvage what remained of their records, who finally organized a large contingent of freedmen and slaves to battle the flames. Acting out of pure selfishness, they may have saved a large part of Rome from going up in smoke. The firefighters formed long, snaking lines across the Forum and through the cattle market all the way to the banks of the Tiber, where they filled buckets with water and passed them up to pour on the flames, then passed the empty buckets back again. From time to time a few rowdies broke away from the mourners’ frenzied revelry to harass the firefighters, pelting them with stones and spitting on them. Scuffles broke out. A cordon of bodyguards, also sent by the bankers, arrived to protect the bucket-passers.

  It was a mad day. Rome seemed wracked with fever, delirious. With Clodius consigned to the purifying flames, and the Senate House along with him, his mourners carried on their unconventional funeral celebration. Could they have planned such madness in advance, or did they make it up as they went along, inspired by the dancing flames and the billowing smoke, invigorated by the charred tang in the air? At midafternoon, they held a funeral feast. Before the smoldering Senate House they set up tables, covered the tables with black cloths and spread out a banquet.

  While the firefighters continued their frantic efforts, the Clodians drank and ate in honor of their dead leader. The poor and hungry of the city came out to join them, at first meekly and then, seeing that they were welcome, in jubilation. Vast quantities of food arrived—great urns full of blood-black sausages, pots of black beans, loaves of black bread, all suitably black for a feast to honor the dead, washed down with blood-red wine. Meanwhile the confused, frightened, curious citizens of Rome—those who lacked the safe vantage of a Palatine rooftop to watch what was going on—skirted the edges of the Forum, cautiously peeking around corners and peering over walls, gawking variously in outrage, delight, disbelief and consternation.

  I spent much of the day on my roof, watching. So did Cicero. He would disappear for a while, then reappear with various visitors, many of them senators, as I could tell from the purple border on their togas. They would take in the view, shake their heads in disgust or gasp in horror, then disappear again, talking and gesticulating. There seemed to be some sort of all-day meeting going on in Cicero’s house.

  Eco came by to see me for a while. I told him he was mad to venture out on such a day. He had stayed clear of the Forum, and though he had heard the rumor that the Senate House was destroyed, he had thought it was only that, a rumor. I took him up on the roof so he could see the spectacle for himself. He headed back to Menenia and the twins soon after.

  Even Bethesda overcame her distrust of the ladder and ventured up on the roof for a while to see what all the fuss was about. I teased her that the sight of so much rioting must have made her homesick for Alexandria, seeing that the Alexandrians were so famous for rioting. She didn’t laugh at the joke. Neither did I.

  The feasting and the firefighting down in the Forum continued until well after nightfall. Toward evening Belbo brought me a bowl of hot soup and climbed back down. A little later Diana joined me with her own steaming bowl. As we sat alone on the roof, the sky darkened to deeper and deeper shades of blue verging into black. In every season, twilight is the most beautiful hour in Rome. The stars began to show in the firmament, glittering like bits of frost. There was even a kind of prettiness about the flickering lights down in the Forum, now that darkness hid the ugliness of charred wood and blackened stone. The fires had largely died down, but the deepening gloom revealed smoldering patches of flame in the ruins of the Porcian Basilica and the senatorial office buildings.

  Diana finished her soup. She put down the bowl and pulled a blanket over her shoulders. “How did Clodius die, Papa?”

  “From his wounds, I should think. Surely you don’t want me to describe them again.”

  “No. I mean, how did it happen?”

  “I don’t know, really. I’m not sure that anyone does, except whoever killed him, of course. There seemed to be quite a bit of confusion about it at his house last night. Clodia said there was a skirmish of some sort down on the Appian Way, near a place called Bovillae, where Clodius had a villa. Clodius and some of his men had an altercation with Milo and some of his men. Clodius got the worst of it.”

  “But why did they fight?”

  “Clodius and Milo have been enemies for a long time, Diana.”

  “Why?”

  “Why are two men usually enemies? Because they want the same thing.”

  “A woman?”

  “In some cases. Or a boy. Or a father’s love. Or an inheritance, or a piece of land. In this case, Clodius and Milo both wanted power.”

  “And they couldn’t both have it?”

  “Apparently not. Sometimes when two ambitious men are enemies, one of them has to die if the other’s to go on living. At least that’s how it usually works out, sooner or later. It’s what we Romans call politics.” I smiled without mirth.

  “You hate politics, don’t you, Papa?”


  “I like to say I do.”

  “But I thought—”

  “I’m like the man who says he hates the theater but never misses a play. He claims it’s his friends who drag him along. Even so, he can quote every line of Terence.”

  “So you secretly love politics.”

  “No! But it’s in the air I breathe, and I don’t care to stop breathing. Put it another way: politics is the Roman disease, and I’m no more immune than anyone else.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Certain diseases are peculiar to certain tribes and nations. Your brother Meto says that up in Gaul there’s a tribe in which every person is born deaf in one ear. You’ve heard your mother say that there’s a village on the Nile where everyone breaks out in hives at the approach of a cat. And I read once that Spaniards suffer a form of tooth rot that can only be cured by drinking their own urine.”

  “Papa!” Diana wrinkled her nose.

  “Not all diseases are grossly physical. The Athenians are addicted to art; without it they become irritable and constipated. Alexandrians live for commerce; they’d sell a virgin’s sigh if they could find a way to bottle it. I hear the Parthians suffer from hippomania; whole clans go to war with each other to lay claim to a fine breeding stud.

  “Well, politics is the Roman disease. Everyone in the city catches it sooner or later, even women nowadays. No one ever recovers. It’s an insidious sickness, with perverse symptoms. Different people suffer in different ways, and some don’t suffer at all; it cripples one man, kills another, and makes yet another man grow fat and strong.”

  “So is it a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Just a Roman thing, Diana. And whether it’s good or bad for Rome, I can’t say. It’s made us the rulers of the world. But I begin to wonder if it won’t be the end of us.” I stared down at the Forum, no longer like Jupiter watching the plain of Ida—more now like Pluto surveying the fiery pits of Hades.