“So, Papa, the mystery of the prisoners on the road is solved.”
I nodded. “Not Clodius’s men after all, just hapless travelers who happened to stumble upon the fracas.”
“I can see why Eudamus and Birria hunted them down, but why didn’t they kill them on the spot? Why did they spare them?”
“Their recklessness had already gotten their master into enough trouble for one day. Who knew who these five fellows were, or whether some powerful patron might be offended if they were killed? Milo must have thought it was better to simply hold them prisoner until the storm passed. Instead, the storm only kept building. You heard what Philemon said: just before they escaped, Milo had finally made up his mind to get rid of them. Probably some slave in Milo’s villa took pity on them and helped them get away.”
“There were skeptics in the crowd. I suppose it is a rather incredible story.”
“But it all sounds only too credible to us, eh, Eco?”
The next morning, Pompey’s legislation to reform the law courts, proposed a month before, was officially voted on and approved by the Senate. Immediately, Appius Claudius brought formal charges against Milo, accusing him of the crime of political violence in the murder of his uncle. Under Pompey’s new rules for the courts, each side was allowed ten days to prepare for the trial. Rome held its breath.
If convicted, Milo would be subject to immediate, permanent exile and the confiscation of almost all his possessions. He would be disgraced and dispossessed. He would be finished in Rome forever.
But what if he was absolved? I tried to imagine the reaction in the city. I could envision only endless flames, rubble and bloodshed. Could even Pompey with his troops contain such a whirlwind? Reason, morality and simple pragmatism argued that any verdict other than guilty was impossible, except …
Except that Milo had Cicero on his side. And as I had learned from long, sometimes bitter experience, with Cicero for the defense, anything was possible.
30
The trial of Titus Annius Milo began on the morning of the fourth day of the month of Aprilis, with the examination of witnesses in the courtyard of the Temple of Liberty. Presiding over the court from a raised tribunal was the former consul Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, a grim-jawed, humorless former consul handpicked by Pompey himself and, purely as a formality, approved by a vote of the people’s assembly. Testimony was given before a panel of 360 potential jurors who sat on raised bleachers on either side of the courtyard. This panel had been selected from a list of eligible senators and men of property drawn up by Pompey. Of these, eighty-one would ultimately be chosen by lot to make up the jury.
Milo and his advocates, Cicero and Marcus Claudius Marcellus, sat with their secretaries on benches facing the tribunal, as did the prosecutors, Clodius’s nephew Appius Claudius, Publius Valerius Nepos, and Marc Antony. Also present were numerous officers of the court, including a battery of secretaries to record the testimony in Tironian shorthand.
A huge crowd gathered at the open end of the courtyard to view the proceedings. Those with foresight sent slaves ahead to save places for them. Eco and I, with our long experience of trials, had managed to secure excellent seats in the tenth row; Davus and one of his fellow bodyguards had arrived well before dawn with our folding chairs, and dozed on them until we arrived. Latecomers without chairs crowded into every vacant nook and cranny and continually tried to push their way in from the Forum.
Pompey was not present. Nor were Pompey’s soldiers, who seemed so omnipresent everywhere else in the city. Even Pompey would not dare to post armed troops at a Roman trial. Surely they would not be needed; even the Clodians would not dare to disrupt a Roman trial. A political gathering was one thing. A public trial, the most sacred of Roman institutions, the cornerstone of Roman justice, was another matter.
The first witness to be called was Gaius Causinius Schola, one of the men who had accompanied Clodius on horseback that day on the Appian Way. He testified that Clodius’s party had met and passed Milo’s larger party close to the tenth hour of the day; that a scuffle had broken out among the rearguard of the two parties, for reasons he did not know, though he suspected that Milo’s men had started it; that when Clodius turned and cast a dark look at Birria, the gladiator hurled a spear at Clodius and wounded him, knocking him from his horse. Fighting broke out, and Schola himself was knocked from his horse and driven into the woods by Milo’s slaves. He remained in hiding until well after dark, then made his way to Clodius’s villa, where he found that the place was in shambles and that the foreman and the tutor Halicor had been murdered. The next day he returned to Rome.
In essentials, Schola’s story matched what I had learned from Felicia, though in the finer details he cast Clodius in an even more innocent light.
When the time for cross-examination arrived, a thrill of anticipation passed through the crowd as Milo, Cicero and Marcellus conferred. Milo and Cicero remained seated. Their colleague Marcellus stepped forward.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Let’s see Cicero!”
“No, let’s see Milo—with his head on a stick!”
Marcellus ignored them. He was a seasoned orator, used to the give and take of debates in the Senate and catcalls from the rabble at trials. “So, Schola,” he began, “you claim that the incident on the Appian Way occurred at the tenth hour of the day. And yet—”
There was an eruption of jeering from the crowd, drowning him out. Marcellus scowled and waited for the noise to subside, but as soon as he opened his mouth again, the jeering recommenced, even louder. He opened his arms in an appeal to Domitius on the tribunal, then gave a start as a stone the size of a child’s fist came hurtling through the air and struck him in the back. He whirled about and stared at the crowd with a look of utter shock on his face.
The mob, still screaming and jeering, began to rush toward the tribunal, pouring in along the sides of the seated crowd, knocking down bystanders and stampeding over broken folding chairs. Eco and I seemed to be safe enough, since we were seated near the center of the seated spectators with plenty of occupied chairs all around us. Then a group of men came scrambling right through the midst of the seated crowd, stepping on people’s laps and shoulders.
Domitius rose to his feet and shouted furiously at the prosecutors. They shrugged helplessly, making an elaborate mime of being unable to hear him and equally unable to do anything about the unruly crowd. The panel of potential jurors in the bleachers, men of substance who were not easily intimidated, shook their heads and looked thoroughly disgusted. Milo, Cicero and Marcellus, together with their secretaries, gathered up armfuls of scrolls and wax tablets and rushed to join Domitius on the tribunal. As the mob drew closer and showed no sign of stopping, Milo and his party retreated into the Temple of Liberty, leaving Domitius to stand with his hands on his hips, defying the mob to violate a sacred temple. But the mob seemed satisfied to have silenced Marcellus and driven Milo to flight. They occupied the tribunal and in a jubilant mood began to stamp their feet and recite lewd chants about Milo’s wife Fausta. When it became evident that order was not going to be restored, jurors and peaceful spectators who had not already fled began to disperse. Eventually there was a rumor that Pompey was coming with a troop of armed soldiers. This caused the mob to abandon the tribunal and scatter in all directions.
Thus ended the first day of Milo’s trial.
The next day began much as the first, except that the room for spectators was more constricted, thanks to the soldiers who now flanked the courtyard on either side. At Domitius’s insistence, Pompey had assigned troops to keep order during the trial. Roman justice would be carried out with the assistance of Roman steel.
The hearing of witnesses resumed with the testimony of various persons from the vicinity of Bovillae, beginning with Felicia. Like an actor finally allowed to have a major role, she seemed determined to make the most of her time as a witness. She flashed her incongruous smile and projected her sultry demeanor while the advocates e
xamined and cross-examined her; many of the spectators, meanwhile, seemed to be examining her in another way. The day was off to an appropriately bizarre beginning.
Her brother Felix testified next, about the comings and goings of the victims and their pursuers, including the bound prisoners, who were now known to be Philemon and his companions. Philemon himself testified, reiterating the story he had told at the contio. The wife of the slain innkeeper at Bovillae did not appear; she was still in seclusion down in Rhegium, I assumed. Her sister and brother-in-law, the current keepers of the inn, gave secondhand testimony about what the widow had told them and described the gory aftermath.
The Virgo Maxima told of the visit by an unknown woman offering thanks to the goddess for the death of Publius Clodius. This account so inflamed the Clodians that for a while it seemed there might be another disturbance. Pompey’s soldiers eventually moved to drive off some of the more vocal agitators. Order was restored, but by this point Domitius was ready to adjourn the court for the day.
The third day of testimony began with the last of the witnesses from the vicinity of Bovillae. Senator Sextus Tedius was called. He rose from the front row of spectators and hobbled before the court, using a cane and dragging his lame left leg. I was in the second row of spectators that day and was close enough to see his daughter Tedia sitting next to the chair he had vacated, looking after him with a worried expression. Normally she would have assisted him, I thought. Probably he did not care to be seen accepting a woman’s help in front of the court.
Senator Tedius repeated the story he had told me: that he had left for Rome in his litter accompanied by his daughter and some slaves, that he had encountered Milo, who warned him of fictitious bandits, but had pressed on to Bovillae, where he found Clodius’s abandoned body in the road, apparently dragged there by his killers, and had sent it on to Rome in his litter. It was now evident that Tedius must have arrived while Eudamus and Birria and their men were off in the woods hunting for Philemon and his companions. After dispatching Clodius to Rome, Tedius returned by foot toward Aricia, and told of seeing the prisoners being marched up the road while he rested at a spot close to the new House of the Vestals.
A man named Quintus Arrius, a colleague of Clodius, testified that he had helped to interrogate Clodius’s slaves after the incident. One of them, a personal secretary, had confessed under torture that for months he had provided information on Clodius’s movements to an agent of Milo’s. Therefore, Arrius suggested, Milo was regularly kept apprised of Clodius’s comings and goings, and could have premeditated the apparently chance encounter on the Appian Way. Cicero, during cross-examination, scoffed at this idea, pointing out that Schola had testified on the first day that Clodius left his villa suddenly, upon hearing the news of the death of Cyrus the architect; therefore, how could Milo, even with an inside source, have predicted their encounter?
Then Cicero called a witness himself: Marcus Cato, who descended from the bleachers where the potential jurors sat. Cato, perhaps the only person in the court even more staid and conservative than Domitius the judge, gave secondhand testimony to the effect that a certain Marcus Favonius had passed along a remark to him which Clodius had made exactly three days before the fatal incident.
“And what was this remark, this jewel, this bit of wisdom from the lips of Publius Clodius?” said Cicero.
Cato looked at Domitius and the panel of jurors. “Clodius told Favonius that Titus Annius Milo would be dead within three days.”
There was a stir of excitement in the court. “Cato’s a liar and a drunk!” someone yelled. “What’s he doing sitting with the jury if he’s a witness?”
Cicero spun about. “Who impugns the judgment of Pompey? It was the Great One himself who personally selected Marcus Cato to sit among the jurors, and why? Because Cato’s integrity and honesty are absolutely beyond doubt. Any man who says otherwise only shows himself to be a fool.”
This was true enough. Whatever one thought of his politics, Cato was not a man to lie. But the story he told was only secondhand; Clodius supposedly said something to Favonius, who said something to Cato. And Cicero, I noticed, made no refutation of the accusation that Cato was a drunkard. A lifetime of hard drinking showed in the statesman’s rheumy eyes.
Whatever effect Cicero had hoped to achieve by Cato’s testimony was entirely negated by what followed.
The last witnesses to be heard were Sempronia and Fulvia. Each told how Clodius’s body had arrived at his house on the Palatine borne in a stranger’s litter, unaccompanied by friends or any sort of explanation. They described the shocking condition of his corpse. They explained how the surviving friends and slaves who had been with him made their way back to Rome one by one, each adding another horrifying detail to the catastrophe that had occurred on the Appian Way. They spoke of Clodius’s young son, Publius, who was missing and unaccounted for all that night, and of their grief and worry when they learned of the slaughter at Clodius’s Alban villa. Sempronia—dour, smug Sempronia—broke down and wept, and seemed to become the image of every man’s anxious, fretful grandmother. Fulvia, who began with a stiff, emotionless recitation of the facts, ended with a shrieking lament that eclipsed even her agony on the night of her husband’s death. She wept, pulled at her hair and tore her stola.
I heard more weeping nearby, and saw that the daughter of Sextus Tedius had covered her face with her hands. Her father stared straight ahead, apparently embarrassed by such a display.
But Tedia was not the only one who shed tears. I thought it could only be a miracle that kept the Clodians from erupting into another riot, until I looked around and saw that many of them were weeping uncontrollably.
Cicero did not dare to cross-examine the women. The court adjourned at the tenth hour.
Thus ended the third day of Milo’s trial, and the last day of testimony. One hundred days had passed since the death of Publius Clodius. One more day, and the fate of Titus Annius Milo would be decided.
Late that afternoon, the tribune Plancus held a final contio on the subject of Clodius’s death. He urged Clodius’s followers to come out in force the next morning to hear the actual pleading of the case. The speeches for the prosecution and defense would be delivered in the open Forum, which would accommodate a great many more spectators than the courtyard of the Temple of Liberty. Those who had loved Clodius must make themselves seen and heard, said Plancus, so that the jurors could know the will of the people, and they must encircle the court completely, so that once the outcome of the trial became evident, the treacherous coward Milo would have no opportunity to slip away before the verdict was announced.
That night, over dinner, Eco and I gave Bethesda a full account of the day’s events. She seemed to approve of Fulvia’s performance. “A woman’s grief is sometimes the only weapon she has. Think of Hecuba and the Trojan women. Fulvia has used her grief where it will have the most effect.”
“I wonder why they didn’t call Clodia to testify,” said Diana, who had been so listless throughout the meal that I thought she wasn’t listening.
“That would only have detracted from Fulvia’s grief,” said Eco. “And it would have distracted the jurors, reminding them of certain rumors of what went on between Clodia and her brother.”
“And after what Cicero did to her the last time she appeared at a trial, I should be surprised if she ever appeared at one again,” said Bethesda. “Has she attended this trial?”
“I haven’t seen her,” I said, and changed the subject.
Like many people in Rome that night, I imagine, I had a hard time sleeping. I tossed and turned and finally got out of bed. I went to my study and looked for something to read. I scanned the little title tags that hung from the scrolls in their pigeonholes, muttering to myself.
“Now what is the play that has that famous quote, about the gods bringing about an unexpected end? Euripides, isn’t it? And why is it on my mind tonight? Oh, yes, I know. Because it always reminds me of the trial of Sextus Ro
scius, when I first worked for Cicero; his first great triumph in the courts. And when it was all over—almost over—I remember quoting that bit of Euripides to Tiro. Tiro was so young then, only a boy! I was so young then, too …
“But what is the play? Not The Trojan Women or Hecuba—that was Bethesda, who mentioned Hecuba at dinner tonight. No, it’s from … The Bacchae!”
And there it was at my fingertips. I pulled it from the hole, found some weights and unrolled it on a table.
It was one of the oldest books I owned, but was still in good condition. The passage I was thinking of was at the very end, delivered by the chorus of frenzied Dionysian revelers:
The end anticipated
has not been consummated.
But god has found a way
for what no man expected.
So ends the play.
What no man expected …
Could Cicero pull it off? Could he deliver a speech—one of those famous, logic-twisting, doubt-defying, hilarious, wrenching speeches of his—that would actually convince the jurors to declare Milo not guilty? It seemed impossible. But so had many another case where Cicero had snatched triumph from despair. If anyone could do it …
As I was rolling up the scroll, I ripped a bit of parchment at the top. I cursed. It was such an old scroll. When and where had I gotten it? Ah, yes: Cicero himself had given it to me, as he had given me many books since. This had been the first. He had even inscribed it, as I recalled.
I unrolled it enough to read the message he had written across the top, in his own hand:
To Gordianus, fondly, with bright hopes for the future.
My blood froze. I had known all along, of course. Still, to see the proof before me …
I found the message that had been left for Bethesda and put it side by side with the scroll.
Do not fear for Gordianus and his son. They have not been harmed.
They will be returned to you in time.
A Murder on the Appian Way Page 38