by Mike Ashley
Actually, I was about ready for a little boredom the day I was thrown off the ship onto the mole at Rhodes. My last port of call, Alexandria, had furnished an overabundance of excitement, culminating in my being carried, bound and gagged, from the palace of Ptolemy and hurled aboard the first departing Roman warship. Thus, when the immense, spike-bristling harbor chain was lowered to let the galleys Swan, Neptune and Triton pass, I was not entirely displeased to see the place, even if it wasn’t Rome.
The captain of the Swan, one Lichas, directed his men to toss my chests and bags ashore. Last of all came my slave, Hermes. The boy dropped to all fours and dry-heaved, an activity he had been pursuing nonstop since we had struck open water upon passing Pharos.
‘You are a sore loser, Captain,’ I said, standing and gathering up the shreds of my dignity. I had whiled away the voyage winning most of the money on the ship at dice.
A little delegation of town dignitaries had hurried down to the harbor to greet the three-ship flotilla. They seemed puzzled upon beholding my convict treatment. Rogues, persons of bad character and those who draw bad luck are often cast unceremoniously ashore by mariners, but such persons rarely wear the red-striped tunic of a Roman senator. An important-looking fellow stepped forward, looking back and forth between me and the captain, his expression more than a little bemused.
‘Welcome, Captain Lichas. How comes it about that you thus manhandle a Roman senator?’ The man spoke beautifully cultured Greek.
Lichas hopped ashore and handed the man a scroll. ‘King Ptolemy and Metellus Creticus, Roman ambassador to his court, would esteem it a great favor if you will keep this troublemaker confined to the island until he is sent for.’
The man scanned the scroll and raised his eyebrows. ‘My, my. Senator, you do seem to have earned yourself some enemies.’
‘I saved the Republic and Egypt from a disastrous war and this is the thanks I get.’
Lichas snorted. ‘Alexandria was in a state of riot when we left. You could see the smoke for miles out at sea.’ Like most mariners in the Roman service, Lichas was actually a Greek. We don’t take to the water naturally.
‘Then, Senator,’ said an older fellow, ‘I extend to you the hospitality of our island. I am Dionysus, president of the city council. This,’ he gestured gracefully toward the one who had spoken first, ‘is Cleomenes, the harbormaster.’ That worthy bowed, and the others were introduced. These Greeks knew how to treat a senator, however irregular his arrival. They also knew that today’s rebel, exile or reprobate could well be tomorrow’s proconsul.
For a while they chattered on and on about the city’s many cultural attractions. Having just come from Alexandria, whose Museum held the greatest collection of books and scholars in the world, my interest in such matters was less than minimal. I was nonetheless extravagant in my praise of their beautiful city and their distinguished selves. If I was to be stuck here for a while, I wanted as much local good will as possible.
After accepting a number of invitations to dinner, Hermes and I made our way up the slope into the city in search of an inn. Until I could find a congenial resident Roman bound to me by hospitium, I preferred public lodgings. Many of the local Greeks would have readily extended me hospitality, thrilled to entertain a genuine senator, but then I would run the risk of having to listen to a lot of talk about philosophy.
‘This could turn out to be a pleasant stay, Hermes,’ I said, fondling the merrily clicking purse tucked into my tunic.
‘Anything’s better than a ship,’ he said, already much recovered from having his feet on dry land. ‘Still, we’re in exile among foreigners.’
‘But the natives are civilized, the city is famous, we’re flush with money and, for the first time in years, I’ve no official duties. It’s vacation time, Hermes. From now until I’m summoned to Rome, we can take it easy and live as we please.’
It is with such statements as these that we furnish the gods with endless amusement.
The first days passed exactly as I had anticipated. I dined with local dignitaries, attended some athletic contests, saw the sights and generally lived a life of pleasant dissipation. My hosts were attentive, but when they weren’t talking about cultural matters the subject was always the petty politics of their little republic. In Rome, men of my station lived and breathed genuine power politics, played on a world stage. Compared to the life-and-death stakes of games played for rule of provinces and command of armies, the little political feuds of Rhodes seemed piddling affairs. Nonetheless, these were matters of import to the locals and I paid diligent attention. After all, I might someday be given the task of conquering Rhodes, and a knowledge of regional affairs could come in handy.
‘It’s the Populars behind all this, no doubt of it,’ said Eudemus, whose hospitality I was enjoying that afternoon. Some seven or eight of us reclined upon the spacious terrace of his beautiful villa overlooking the harbor.
‘Populars, eh?’ I said, listening with only half an ear while I held out my cup for more wine. Greek drinking cups are almost as shallow as saucers, and it takes a steady hand to avoid spillage. I was most accomplished at this art. ‘We’ve had them in Rome for generations. I didn’t know they were expanding their operations.’ This was an alarming prospect. Leave it to Clodius to export Roman street politics to the foreigners.
Dionysus set my fears at ease. ‘This is not your party, Senator. They’ve been here for centuries, too: malcontents and rogues always demanding privileges to which they are not entitled by birth. I suppose they are an inevitable consequence of a republican form of government.’ I had learned that, like Rome, Rhodes had a severely limited democracy, in which real power was restricted to a handful of noble families.
‘No doubt,’ I mumbled around a mouthful of olives. I spat the pits over my shoulder. ‘What are they up to here?’
‘In the old wars between the Greek states,’ said Gylippus, a prominent shipping magnate, ‘the Populars were always trying to set one or another of the allies or visiting navies against the best people. Fortunately, Sparta had a wise policy of intervening in such cases.’
My admittedly spotty reading of history told me that the Spartans had made a practice of installing vicious tyrannies wherever they had influence, but I long ago learned the futility of arguing over other people’s version of their own history.
‘They’re up to the same old tricks again,’ said Dionysus.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘Old Mithridates is finally gone and the power of the pirates is smashed for good. This part of the world is finally at peace, thanks to Rome.’
‘For which our gratitude is immense,’ Gylippus said dryly. ‘But, that being the case, the common scum have switched their intriguing to Rome itself.’
‘Passing a few bribes in the Senate, are they?’ I said, looking around for yet another refill. ‘No harm in that. The Senate’s full of men who’ll promise to send out an army, slaughter the lot of you and put the beggars in power. They’ll just pocket the money and do nothing. It’s done all the time.’
‘A few years ago,’ said a landowner named Aristander, ‘your Julius Caesar was here and the Populars made much of him, entertained him lavishly.’
‘They did the same last year when Pompey was here,’ said Dionysus.
This, for me, cast a pall over the convivial gathering. I had hoped that here, at last, I could be free of those two names. ‘They’ll have accomplished nothing with Pompey,’ I said. ‘He’s far too conservative to take the popular side in anything. Caesar is famous for his popular sympathies at home, despite his patrician birth, but that’s no more than practical politics. He’s been elected one of next year’s consuls. Once he’s back in Rome after his time as a proconsul, he’ll forget it was the mob that put him in power.’
Needless to say, I knew little about Caesar at that time.
‘I fear that our Populars believe otherwise,’ said Cleomenes, the harbormaster. ‘They’re agitating for the right to put some of their own on the cit
y council. They claim it’s so that the common people will have representation, but we know that they intend to betray our ancient independence and sell Rhodes to the highest bidder.’
‘And who might that be?’ I asked. ‘Mithridates is gone. Egypt amounts to nothing. Pompey destroyed the pirates. Parthia has no ships, and therefore no use for an island. Only Rome is left, and we just conquer what we want.’
‘Very true,’ Gylippus acknowledged. ‘But baseborn traitors practice treachery out of pure habit.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I suppose they can’t be blamed for sucking up to Pompey. Everybody does, these days.’
‘Speaking of outsized persons,’ said Dionysus, ‘have you visited our Colossus, Senator?’
‘I thought it toppled ages ago,’ I said.
‘So it did, during an earthquake almost two hundred years ago. It stood only fifty-six years.’ He sighed for the loss of the island’s most famous attraction. ‘But even the shattered fragments are a wonder. The head alone is larger by far than most other sculptures.’
‘I must have a look at it,’ I murmured, not terribly excited. My stay in Egypt had likewise inured me to huge monuments. With all its immense pyramids, temples and statues, there were places in Egypt where you could stand in one spot and just glancing around see more masonry and statuary than was possessed by the rest of the world combined. The prospect of a heap of scrap bronze failed to stir my interest.
Nonetheless, a day or two later, my steps led me to the spacious plaza where once the towering statue of Helios stood in splendor. Hermes accompanied me as usual, packing along a satchel that held my bath items, some snacks I’d purchased at a market, and a skin of decent local wine, all basic supplies for a day of idling and sightseeing.
‘Are those feet up there?’ Hermes exclaimed, gawking.
‘I believe so.’ The pedestal, itself as large as a good-sized temple, was still tolerably intact. Atop it stood a pair of bronze feet the size of triremes, the nail of the smallest toe larger than a legionary’s shield. Having beheld this odd spectacle, it took a few moments to realize that the green hillocks strewn all over the plaza were actually the rest of the statue.
The torso was almost shapeless, collapsed from its own weight, but the lesser members were quite recognizable once the eye and mind adjusted to their size and whimsical juxtapositions. Here the extended finger of a vast hand pointed portentously toward the shop of an oil merchant. There, a well-shaped knee seemed to grow from the crook of an elbow. The long points of the god’s solar crown had once been highly polished, their gleam visible to ships far out at sea. Now, the laundry of local housewives dried on lines stretched between them.
Abruptly, the quiet of the day was shattered by an unearthly howl. I imagined that Cerberus might make such a noise to greet a particularly distinguished visitor to the underworld. Then, on second thought, it occurred to me that Cerberus would howl with three voices. Whatever, it was a most impressive noise.
‘It’s a ghost!’ Hermes cried. He had picked up a good many local superstitions during our stay in Egypt.
‘They shun daylight,’ I told him. ‘Come along. I think it came from the god’s laundry rack.’
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked, taking a surreptitious pull at the wineskin.
‘No, but this is the closest thing to excitement that’s happened since we got here.’
The head of Helios, bigger than my house in the Subura, lay tilted so that the right cheek and jaw lay against the pavement, the spikes of the crown on that side bent at odd angles. The sound, which had diminished to a series of low moans, seemed to emanate from the neck.
We found a woman standing before the cavernous opening, hands clasped to her mouth, a basket of damp tunics forgotten at her feet. It had been her scream, echoing about within the god’s cranium, that had made the unearthly sound.
‘I knew it had to be something like that,’ Hermes muttered.
Next to the basket, a small, brown dog was placidly lapping from a dark pool. Flies buzzed busily around the dog’s head. A crowd gathered rapidly, attracted by the singular shriek.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked the woman. Wordlessly, she pointed into the god’s hollow head. Hermes and I stepped inside. A dark trickle led from the pool within. Holes and cracks in the bronze skin admitted a dim light, enough to see that a body lay about five paces within, head toward the opening, which was now crowded with gawkers. Hermes crouched by the corpse.
‘Looks like someone smashed this one’s head in,’ he reported. ‘Blood and brains all over.’
Outside, a wail went up, from the men as well as the women. ‘Murder! Murder!’ and so forth.
Hermes looked up in annoyance. ‘What’s all the fuss about? It’s just a body.’
‘Perhaps this is an uncommon occurrence here,’ I hazarded. In Rome, the corpse of a murder victim scarcely rated a glance from passersby. I’d known less uproar to be raised over a murdered praetor than these Greeks were showing for someone whose identity they couldn’t yet know.
Careful not to touch the body, I took a fold of the man’s tunic between thumb and fingers and rubbed it back and forth. ‘First-class material,’ I commented.
‘He’s wearing a silk diadem with spangles on it,’ Hermes reported. Then, a moment later: ‘The spangles are real gold, not gilded tin.’ Trust the little thief to discern that in the dimness, by touch alone.
I went to the neck opening and beckoned toward a broom-wielding municipal slave. ‘Go to the home of Dionysus, president of the city council. Inform him that someone of importance has been murdered.’ The man dashed off and I summoned another. ‘Get a priest qualified to purify the body. I want a look at him in the light.’
I was just a visitor, but I was accustomed to taking charge in situations like this and no one else seemed to know what to do. I turned to an idler. ‘Is there such a thing as a city watch here?’ Unlike Rome, many Greek cities have police forces.
He shrugged. ‘Only at night. They’re usually down by the docks, where the sailors stay.’
Dionysus arrived shortly, bustling up with a few other town notables in tow. A very sizable crowd had gathered by this time, of all ages, sexes and conditions. There was much babbling, the gist of it being that extraordinary bad luck had to be in the offing, what with a murder taking place inside the head of the island’s tutelary deity. I was wondering about that myself. But then, if the locals used his crown to support clotheslines, he couldn’t be all that sacrosanct.
‘Senator,’ Dionysus puffed, ‘what has happened here?’
‘I think we’re about to find out,’ I said, nodding toward a priest whose slaves cleared him a way through the crowd. One slave carried a box that doubtless contained religious paraphernalia. Another shouldered a litter of poles and woven leather straps.
While the priest and his staff went within, I pointed to the dark-brown, congealed puddle. Someone had taken the dog away but the flies still swarmed merrily.
‘That’s been here several hours, at least. I’ve investigated enough murders and gathered up enough Roman dead from battlefields to know.’
‘I believe you are correct,’ said the president, ‘but this seems a strange place to commit murder. A person of importance, you say?’
‘Well-dressed, at any rate.’ The crowd roundabout seemed to be turning ugly. I had seen the phenomenon before. All it takes is a rumor, an omen, some unexpected happening like an eclipse of the sun, and a happy crowd can become a murderous mob in minutes. But these people had no target upon whom to vent their unease. Or did they?
After a brief purification, far less complex than the Roman variety, the slaves loaded the body onto the litter and carried it into the daylight. There came a gasp from the watchers, including Dionysus and the other officials.
‘It’s Telemachus, the high priest of Helios!’ Dionysus said. Now the women of the crowd set up a lamentation worthy of a chorus from Euripides.
‘Was he such a popular man?
’ I asked, astonished at the display.
‘Not just popular,’ said Dionysus, ‘but a Popular.’ This made a very neat word play in Greek, but I could tell that he wasn’t just coining a witticism for our mutual amusement.
‘Your high priest was a Popular?’ I said, amazed. ‘I might expect that in Rome. Most of our high priesthoods are held as a part of public office. I thought yours were hereditary.’
‘They are. But even priests are not immune from the degrading attractions of politics.’ I had heard that sort of talk before. All my life, in fact. Any place where power has through long tradition been wielded by a handful of families, anyone else who tries to enter the charmed circle is doing something improper if not downright depraved.
‘Here’s the murder weapon,’ said Hermes, emerging from inside the giant’s head. He had been my servant long enough to fancy himself an expert investigator. He held up his trophy with pride. It was a bronze statuette about as long as a man’s forearm, its base covered with a ghastly mess of blood, brains and hair. I took it from him and examined it. It depicted a nude, standing man wearing a solar crown and had a decidedly familiar look.
‘Is this a miniature of the Colossus?’ I asked Dionysus.
‘Why, yes, it is. The local artisans make them by the hundreds. Visitors buy them as keepsakes. People here send them as gifts to friends, as pledge-tokens and so forth.’
I looked the thing over. ‘It’s an odd choice of weapon. If I were planning to kill someone, I think I’d choose something better designed for the task.’
‘Perhaps in Rome you are more conversant with these activities,’ he sniffed.
‘It goes without saying. Is there any way to determine who made this?’
‘I’ve no idea. Why do you ask?’
‘It could be significant.’
‘Significant in what sense? Our respect for Rome is very great, Senator, but you are not an official here,’ he reminded me.