Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “Wait! Please!”

  The face turned back, scowling.

  “I asked the man who was here earlier to send someone to help my concubine,” he declared breathlessly. “I promised him money. He said he would ask. Do you … do you know what happened?”

  “No,” replied the guard shortly, and turned away again.

  “No, wait! Please! I would pay you, too.…”

  But the man’s footsteps retreated. He pressed his face against the bars of the window and saw the armored back retreating along a walkway of dark tufa stone that ringed a well covered by a grating. The guard turned right and disappeared.

  He inspected his cell—rough brick, a tiny box—and found a dank and noisome corner containing an encrusted bucket, which he used as instructed. Then he curled up on the floor in the opposite corner, shivering. Maerica’s face appeared again to his imagination, and he pressed his hands against his eyes. After a few minutes’ struggle with the grief and the guilt, he gave up and began to weep.

  After another long dark time, and with his head aching worse than ever, he went back to the dirty corner and vomited air and bile from an empty stomach. Then he returned to the clean corner and prayed to Isis and Serapis, and to Apollo and Asklepios, gods of healing, to help the woman he loved.

  After another interminable silence a light appeared in the window of the door, making him realize that it had become completely dark. He sat up with a start, then winced at the pain in his head. The lock clicked, and the door opened. A guard came in with a jug and a loaf of bread on a tray; another man stood in the doorway behind him, holding up a lantern. The light showed the cell clearly for the first time: a bare cubicle with stained walls and a dirty tufa-stone floor. The first guard set the tray down on the floor and prepared to leave.

  “Wait!” Hermogenes gasped. “Please, I’ve been asking about my concubine, who was injured—”

  The guards went out, and the door closed. Hermogenes staggered up and over to the door as they locked it. “Please!” he begged. “She was hurt. Statilius Taurus knows her, he would want you to help. I have money, I can pay—”

  “You have money in there?” asked the man with the lantern. He was different again from the two Hermogenes had seen earlier.

  “No, but I have property, I have money in banks, I have friends here in Rome. I can pay for help.”

  “He isn’t Roman,” said the man who’d carried the tray. He sounded surprised.

  “You get all sorts in here,” replied the man with the lantern. “Foreign kings, even.”

  The man who’d held the tray peered through the bars at Hermogenes. “That one don’t look like a king.”

  “Don’t know who he is,” replied the lantern bearer unconcernedly.

  “Please,” said Hermogenes, clutching the ragged edges of his self-control. “I am an Alexandrian businessman. All I want is to know what happened to my concubine. I asked one of your comrades to send help to her, but I don’t know whether he did. I promised him money. I would be glad to pay it, if he would come back and tell me what happened, and I would pay you, too, for news. I am very worried about her.”

  “We don’t know anything about it, Greekling,” said the lantern bearer, though with regret. “We only came on shift an hour ago. If you talked to someone this morning, he was in a different unit. Nothing to do with us. Ask the magistrate at your hearing.”

  He hit the door. “What am I charged with?” he demanded. “When is this ‘hearing’? Where am I?”

  “Don’t you even know?” asked the man who’d carried the tray.

  “You’re in the Mamertine Prison, Greek,” said the lantern bearer. “Where they keep the enemies of the state.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the well in the floor. “Down there is the Tullianum, where they kill the enemies of the state. Maybe you’ll see it, maybe you won’t. As to the rest, we don’t know. Our unit is responsible for providing guards here overnight until the end of the month, and that’s all we know about it. We’re not responsible for what the law does with you: we just make sure you don’t leave before it does it.”

  “Please!” he began again, but the two men laughed and went away.

  He stood in the dark, clinging to the edge of the window, watching the lantern retreat. It winked out suddenly, and he remembered that they’d dragged him down stairs to bring him here—at least, he thought he remembered stairs. The Tullianum. He’d heard that name before— “He starved to death in the Tullianum,” and “They were strangled in the Tullianum”—but he wasn’t sure where it was. Somewhere central, he thought. That had to be good news: it meant that he wasn’t too far from the Vicus Tuscus, and if the first guard had sent someone quickly, that someone might have been in time. Unless Maerica had bled to death already. He wondered how badly she’d been hurt, and flinched at the memory of blood.

  He turned back to his corner, then remembered the tray the guards had brought, and felt for it in the darkness. He nearly knocked the jug over, but caught it in time. It contained water, and he brought it back to the corner with him. His stomach was still queasy, and he did not want the bread, but he was very thirsty.

  He wondered how big the Mamertine Prison was, and whether there were presently any other prisoners in it or whether he was alone. He wondered if there was anyone dying down in the Tullianum. The water he had drunk suddenly churned in his stomach.

  He went back to the door and called softly, but there was no reply. Everything was black, and he couldn’t even make out the grating over the top of the dark well. Probably he was alone in the prison. The guards had gone upstairs after bringing him the tray, and he hadn’t heard them visit any other cells, though he might have been too dazed to take it in; that blow to the head had affected him badly. He supposed that it was a good sign that he could appreciate that—if any signs were good anymore.

  Even if there was some poor wretch dying in the Tullianum, there was nothing he could do for him. He hadn’t even been able to help Maerica. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to save her even if he’d behaved sensibly and bribed the guardsmen at once.

  He remembered her saying “Something terrible will happen,” and his complacent assumption that if it did, it would happen to him, and he began to weep again. Even if he couldn’t have saved her, he should never have left her to die alone.

  There was another long dark interval. The image of some miserable enemy of Rome dying in the blackness nearby refused to leave his mind. It began to seem as though he could see the man, lying naked in the filth of the prison’s heart—and then there were several men, their bodies marked by torture, their faces plain to see despite the darkness, swollen from the garotte that had killed them. They clustered around him, whispering among themselves and staring at him. “Is he one of us?” they asked each other, in voices like the twittering of bats. “Is he one of us?” He tried to answer them, but he could not speak, and then he saw that he didn’t know the answer to the question himself. More of them came, and more, until he thought that he was looking at all those whom Rome had slaughtered in her rise to power. Then Maerica was standing over him, pale as bleached linen, her tunic soaked with blood.

  He woke trembling and choking. She was not there. He had dreamed. He used the latrine bucket, then huddled up in his corner and managed to sleep again. He woke once more and finished the water in the jug. The gray light was coming through the window in the door again, so he supposed that it was day.

  At last came another sound of footsteps. He glimpsed a face peering through the window at him, and then the door was unlocked and another pair of guards tramped in. They were complete strangers, both in armor, one with the sideways crest to his helmet that meant he was a centurion. The ordinary guardsman was carrying a spear; the centurion had a set of heavy iron manacles.

  “Get up!” ordered the centurion.

  He braced himself against the wall and got up. “Please—” he began.

  “Turn around!”

  He turned to face the wall, a
nd the centurion chained his hands behind his back. “Please,” he tried again. “My concubine was injured just before I was arrested. I have been trying to—”

  “Quiet!” snarled the centurion. “Now, we’re taking you to see the prefect of the city, and we expect you to behave. Give us any trouble and you’ll regret it, do you understand?”

  “I understand.” At least they would take him to see Taurus.

  “Good. No talking. You keep your mouth shut unless the prefect asks you to speak. Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” The centurion seized his arm and marched him out of the cell.

  There were only a few cells in the Mamertine, arranged to face into the middle of a rough trapezoid of brick, with the well of the Tullianum in the center. Hermogenes glanced into it as he was marched past: it looked as though there was a sizable room down there, but it was pitch-black, and he couldn’t see if it contained a victim. It stank of filth and pain.

  Just beyond it, there was an entranceway and a short flight of steps. The man with the spear went up it first, then Hermogenes, then the centurion. They emerged through a doorway, and Hermogenes found himself blinking and half blinded by daylight. The air was blissfully warm. The two praetorians marched their prisoner down a corridor to a larger room where four more guards stood waiting.

  “Jupiter, he’s a mess!” exclaimed one of them, looking Hermogenes up and down in disgust. “Should we clean him up first?”

  “No time,” said the centurion. “The general wants him now.”

  He expected that they would march him out into the street and across the city, but instead he found himself escorted along another corridor and up a flight of stairs, then across a grand marble landing and into a room.

  There were frescoes, glass in the windows, a carpet on the floor. Titus Statilius Taurus was sitting in a high-backed chair under the window at the far end of the room, wearing his scarlet cloak and a gilded breastplate worked in relief with the she-wolf of Rome. On a couch to his right sat Lucius Tarius Rufus, dressed in consular purple, with his freedman Macedo beside him in crimson. The guards escorted Hermogenes into the center of the room and stopped with a stamp of attention.

  “Jupiter!” exclaimed Taurus, as the guard had, looking the prisoner up and down. “Centurion, why is the prisoner in this state?”

  “He was involved in the incident on the Vicus Tuscus before his arrest, sir,” replied the centurion smartly, “and he resisted the arrest.”

  “I—” Hermogenes began.

  “No,” said Taurus quietly, and the centurion, who’d been about to hit the prisoner, lowered his hand at once. The general leaned forward slightly in his chair, his dark eyes implacable. “Understand me,” he said in Greek. “You will keep silent unless I give you leave to speak, or you will be gagged.”

  Hermogenes stood silent a moment, shaking with rage and despair. “Your men left my concubine lying in the street to bleed to death,” he said at last, in the same language. “A woman you knew, whose courage you approved, who believed you to be honorable!”

  Taurus gestured to the guards. There was a brief exchange of glances and some fumbling, and then one of them came forward with a piece of cloth which he shoved into the prisoner’s mouth. It tasted of ash and oil: armor polish. Another man came up with a cord and secured the gag before he could spit it out.

  “Get him a seat,” ordered Taurus. “He looks like he’s about to fall over.”

  Two of the men fetched a small bench from beside the wall, put it behind the prisoner, and pushed him down on it. Hermogenes sat there, shackled, gagged, battered and filthy, his mouth burning with the taste of ashes. In silence, he cursed Rome.

  “So,” said Taurus, turning to his friend Rufus and speaking Latin again, “this is the man who has been causing you so much trouble?”

  “Yes,” said the consul, smiling widely. “Yes. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “My secretary has the documents I mentioned. He says they are genuine.”

  The consul’s smile faded slightly and was joined by a look of embarrassment. “Well…”

  “Explain to me what this man has done to deserve the arrest I ordered.”

  “He threatened me,” declared Rufus, his face darkening. “He tried to blackmail me.”

  “With what?” Taurus asked evenly.

  Rufus glanced uneasily at the guards. Taurus flicked a hand at them. “Centurion, stay here. The rest of you go outside.”

  The guards trooped out, leaving only the centurion to stand silently by the door.

  “He threatened to summon me for debt,” said Rufus, angrily now. “Me, a victor of Actium, to be summoned from the curial chair by an Egyptian! And he said he would send a letter to that overbred idiot Cornelius Scipio if I did anything about it!”

  “Did ‘anything’?” asked Taurus. “What do you mean?”

  There was a moment of silence. “I could not submit to taking orders from an Alexandrian moneylender!” Rufus declared vehemently.

  Taurus grunted, regarding his friend levelly. Rufus couldn’t meet the gaze, and shifted uneasily in his seat. “It would disgrace the consulship!” he protested.

  Taurus grunted again. “Pollio was looking for him. Do you know why?”

  “Yes. The fellow tried to sell the debt to Pollio when he realized it was going to be hard to collect. And you know Pollio: he’d do anything to disgrace us.”

  “I know he’d do anything to disgrace me,” Taurus answered coldly. “I never noticed that he particularly disliked you. How much is this debt?”

  Rufus cast an uneasy look at his freedman.

  “Four hundred thousand sestertii, Lord Statilius Taurus,” Macedo supplied in a tone of deep respect. “Plus some interest.”

  “Four hundred thousand sestertii,” repeated Taurus. “Not a great sum to a man of your resources, Lucius, surely? Why didn’t you just pay it? The documents are genuine: the man has title.”

  “Why should I pay an Egyptian?” Rufus demanded proudly.

  “Because you are a Roman,” declared Taurus, “and more than that, you are a Roman consul, entitled to carry the emblems of the Roman state, the symbols of its power to enforce its laws. If you break those laws, you dishonor more than yourself, Lucius: you dishonor Rome.”

  Rufus looked down, angry but also ashamed. Macedo glared at Taurus indignantly.

  “I looked into this Alexandrian,” Taurus resumed, unhurriedly. “The archives say that at the conquest of Egypt his family were listed as friendly toward the emperor—or, at least, as hostile to the monarchy, a position they had held as far back as the reign of the last queen’s father. His father gave financial support to Aelius Gallus for the expedition against Arabia, and was rewarded for it with the citizenship. My own man of business informs me that he is much sought after as an investor by the shipping syndicates of Alexandria, since his reputation both for honesty and fair dealing, and for shrewdness and discernment in committing his money, do much to ensure the success of an enterprise. This debt he was attempting to claim from you is one he inherited from an uncle, a prominent man of business in Cyprus, whose ruin last year was much lamented on the island. The son of my friend Quirinius, who was proconsul there at the time, went so far as to say that it has done harm to the reputation of Rome, since it was clearly caused by your default. Lucius, I ask you again: why didn’t you pay your debt?”

  “I meant to!” Rufus protested resentfully. “I did repay some of it. But then I had better uses for my money, and then … you know that my lands have not been profitable, Titus; you know that it has been a terrible strain for me to afford the purple.”

  “And because of that I have had an innocent man arrested and thrown into the Mamertine—a prison which should only hold the enemies of the state?” Taurus demanded.

  Rufus fidgeted and grimaced. Macedo said softly, “The Egyptian is a man who would injure your friend, Lord Statilius Taurus, and who would bring shame on the consulship of Rome. He is an
enemy of the state.”

  “I was speaking to my friend, freedman,” Taurus replied coldly. “Not to you. Lucius, if I give you this man, what will you do with him?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “I see,” said Taurus. “You should know, Lucius, that Pollio is aware of his arrest, and has also asked me for him. In fact, Pollio claims that the man is a common thief who stole a valuable statue from his house, and that he needs to question him to determine what he did with it.”

  “Pollio just wants to disgrace me,” said Rufus at once. “Probably the Egyptian is a thief, but the reason Pollio was looking for him was so that he could use him to injure me. He is the very last man who should be given charge of him.”

  Taurus looked at him darkly, then turned to the centurion. “Tell the men to admit Publius Vedius Pollio.”

  The centurion saluted and went out.

  “No!” protested Rufus in horror.

  “No?” repeated Taurus, turning back to him. “You say that probably this Greek did steal from Pollio, but you would deny Pollio the right even to question him about the theft? This, after you as good as admit that you intend to kill the man for no greater crime than that of being your creditor? You are going to have to do better than that if you want my help, Lucius.”

  “You can’t—” began Rufus, sweating, then stopped himself. He looked anxiously at his freedman.

  “Lord,” said Macedo, “surely you cannot want to see a Roman consul summoned for debt by an Egyptian moneylender?”

  “Of course I don’t want to see anything so disgraceful!” replied Taurus forcefully. “If the Roman consul paid his debt, it would not happen! You have land, Lucius, that is worth a very great deal more than four hundred thousand sestertii: what is to prevent you from selling some of it?”

  “I…” Rufus faltered—and then the guards admitted Pollio.

  The old man was wearing a toga, its snowy folds loosely draped over a tunic that appeared to be made of gold. He waddled forward between the centurion and another soldier, his pointed teeth revealed in a smile. “Lucius!” he exclaimed, nodding at Rufus, and “Titus! Thank you for catching my thief. Hercules, doesn’t he look a villain! Why have you had him gagged?”