The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Throughout the next two days I was pestered by people who knew that I had been with Apollonius when he had been summoned to Aradus’ bedside. I soon became impatient with them because I had troubles of my own, whose pressure on my heart and mind increased inexorably. My first thought after quitting the company of Demetrius and Apollonius had been to find Nauma and see how she was faring – but she was nowhere to be found. The house of Aradus was in such confusion that it was not easy to pursue my search, and I was eventually persuaded to leave it for the morrow, but when I went back again and still found no trace of her I became very anxious.

  Galanthis said that she did not know where Nauma was, and did not seem to care. None of the Phoenician’s other servants had seen her go, or knew of anywhere she might have gone. I could not believe that she had left the city without even pausing to say goodbye to me, but there was no trace of her within its walls.

  It was a mystery – far more of a mystery, so far as I was concerned, than the death of Aradus. It seemed obvious to me that the two events were connected somehow, and it seemed so to the rumour-mongers too, who quickly began to speculate that Nauma had been the instrument of Bassus and Galanthis, and had been sent away lest she tell what she knew. I was sure that this was untrue, because Bassus swore to me that he had no knowledge whatsoever of the girl’s whereabouts, but I was sorely confused as to what the real situation might be.

  In the end, I decided to take my problem to Apollonius. I felt, however, that I had to speak to him alone, for I knew Demetrius would certainly be angry with me and I suspected that Damis would laugh at me. While I awaited my opportunity I tried to look at the matter as he would undoubtedly look at it, through the eyes of a philosopher, so that I would not seem too much of a fool when I laid it out before him.

  Night had fallen for the second time since the betrothal feast by the time I finally found the chance to be alone with Apollonius. Demetrius and Damis had gone to their beds, and so had everyone else – even Cynics need sleep, but Apollonius, it seemed, had progressed beyond mere Cynicism to some further realm of mental existence.

  ‘I need the benefit of your wisdom,’ I told him.

  ‘Perhaps you do,’ he agreed. ‘Come walk with me, and we shall see what benefit we can derive from careful discussion.’

  We walked together in the moonlight, up the hill that stands above the southern quarter of the town. We paused on a ridge, from which we could look back over the rooftops, towards the quays where the merchants’ ships loaded and unloaded their goods. While we went I told him everything – not merely that Nauma had disappeared, but everything. I told him how I felt about her, and how it had weakened my faith in the doctrines of Demetrius and forced me to take the ideas of Bassus more seriously than before. I told him that I could not see why philosophers could not live like other men rather than in retreat from society, or why they were better not to marry. I told him that I could not see why love was such a threat to the philosophical calmness of mind, although I was beginning to understand that the passions aroused by its loss might blot out the capacity for reason.

  ‘Your reason does not seem to me to have been entirely blotted out,’ Apollonius said. ‘Tell me, Menippus, what is it that you fear most? Is it the possibility that you may never see your lovely dancer again, or the possibility that she might not have been what you supposed?’

  I paused to consider that question carefully, knowing that my answer would determine what he thought of me. In the end, I said: ‘What I fear most is that she might have been murdered, to prevent her telling what she knew about the death of Aradus.’ I knew it was a risk, but I had carefully thought over what Apollonius had said when he was asked to judge the cause of the merchant’s death – and I remembered the ghost of a smile which had haunted his final statement.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I doubt that you need fear that. Would you really rather think that she is alive, but does not care about you? Many men, I suspect, would rather think that she had loved them so dearly that only death could keep her from them.’

  ‘I would rather she were alive,’ I said. I hope that I was telling the truth. ‘I would rather that, even if it meant that she was only amusing herself with me until the time came to do what she had to do.’

  ‘And what do you think she did?’ he asked me, although he knew as well as I did.

  I was unable to look him in the eye, but I answered him. ‘When she kissed Aradus at the conclusion of her dance,’ I said, slowly, ‘something passed from her mouth to his. He did not open his mouth to cheer, you see, when she had finished, although he pounded the table with all his might. It was one of those sweetmeats, I suppose. The poison was hidden inside a hard sugary coat, unreleased until he had sucked it through.’

  Apollonius said nothing in reply to that. He looked out over the city of Corinth as if he were weighing it in the balance – and not merely the city but everything it signified: its history; its commerce; its role in the affairs of empire.

  ‘What kind of poison was it?’ I asked him, delicately.

  ‘I had seen the symptoms before,’ he said, eventually. ‘Always in association with the bite of a snake – usually the Egyptian cobra. In Alexandria they call it Cleopatra’s last lover’

  ‘The asp,’ I said, to demonstrate that I had knowledge of my own.

  ‘What puzzled me when I attended Aradus,’ Apollonius went on, ‘is that the bite of the asp is very rarely fatal, in my experience. Whatever they may say about Cleopatra, I have never seen anyone but a small child die of a cobra bite. In India they have much bigger snakes called hamadryads, whose bite is said to be far more deadly, but I saw snake-charmers in India who had little or no fear of the creatures they employed. It’s not easy to know which rumours are to be trusted and which are not, is it, Menippus?’

  It did not seem necessary to confirm my agreement with that judgement.

  ‘Surely she cannot have known what she was doing,’ I said, ‘else she’d never have allowed such a treacherous thing into her mouth. If she was ordered to do it by her mistress, why? If she was paid to do it, by whom? And how was the poison obtained? There is no cobra nearer than Persia or Palestine.’

  ‘I watched the snake-charmers of India most carefully,’ Apollonius told me. ‘They would not have told me their secret, of course, even if I had not been silent at the time, so I felt that I had to find it out. I made a game of it – I made games of many such quests while I was clinging to my silly vow. At first I thought that they were simply quick enough to avoid the strikes of their playthings – there are creatures call mongooses which kill cobras easily enough by means of their agility. Then I wondered whether the charmers might build up a tolerance to the bites. In the end, I caught one unawares while he was preparing his toys. He was milking its venom into a wooden cup, extracting the creature’s entire supply of poison. He had five snakes in all; I imagine that he built up a concentration of venom far greater than any ordinary bite was likely to communicate. He simply threw it away – I thought at the time that it was profligate, that such a commodity might be saleable. Perhaps it can be stored indefinitely in a vial, or preserved in some sticky syrup like the one in the centre of one of those horrible sweetmeats you urged me to try.’

  The sweetmeats had not seemed horrible to me while I sucked them at the feast – but they have always seemed so since I talked to Apollonius.

  ‘Who gave it to her?’ I wanted to know. ‘Was it Galanthis?’

  ‘Galanthis had nothing to gain,’ Apollonius said. ‘She is dependent on the generosity of Bassus now – and you know better than I what that is worth.’

  ‘Bassus, then?’ I whispered. ‘Can he really have been so desperate?’

  ‘You know better than I,’ Apollonius repeated.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘In any case, had he been minded to put his father away he’d never have chosen such a method and he’d have found a far more convenient time. But who, then?’

  ‘Who is left?’ he parried. />
  I still remembered the ghost of his smile. He had already delivered his verdict: it was the manner in which Aradus had lived his life that had determined the manner of his death.

  ‘Marcellus Cato?’ I suggested. ‘Is it possible that the governor murdered Aradus? Is that why you said nothing when he declared that no murder had been committed? Did you think he would strike you down if you denounced him?’

  ‘I think he recognized the hand of his masters, as I did,’ Apollonius said. ‘Perhaps he was meant to. There are those in Rome who reckon that it is always a good idea to remind dissatisfied exiles that they have not been forgotten. Calidius is a more likely assassin. It was he who fetched me to see the body, he who studied me most carefully as I made my replies. I think we understood one another well enough, Calidius and I. I am an ancient philosopher, he is an ambitious centurion – we have no reason to quarrel. The likelihood is that he and the girl were working in collusion. You must hope so, if you told me the truth. A mere pawn would be dead by now, but not a skilled executioner whose services would soon be needed elsewhere.’

  I thought about those possibilities for a minute or two before moving on to the next question. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should Rome want Aradus dead?’

  ‘I’m a philosopher,’ Apollonius said, ‘not an oracle. I can only guess.’

  I did not need to tell him that I rated a philosopher’s guesses far more highly than an oracle’s pronouncements. I simply said: ‘Go on.’

  ‘We must consider the time and the place,’ he said. ‘Assassins usually work by night, brutally and secretly. When they work by day, it is because they have a point to make. If Cato might have been expected to find a message in the incident, so might others. This was not merely a murder; it was the interruption of a feast celebrating the betrothal of two people long connected by their business. Did you look closely at any of those coins which the dancer let fall?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘I have never used money,’ Apollonius said. ‘It has always been a point of pride – but perhaps it was also a stubborn refusal to submit to temptation. Money is so fascinating, is it not? Such a wonderful invention. Whatever tales we tell of the military genius of Alexander, the true heart of the Greek empire was coin. Before Athens, all cities grew their own food in their own fields; Athens was the first to obtain its food by trade, putting its artisans to work in the manufacture of goods for the marketplace, and it was money which made the marketplace possible. For four centuries after Solon, it is said, the Athenian drachma held its real value: sixty-seven grains of silver before Alexander, sixty-five thereafter – and then came Rome. The denarius held its real value while Augustus was emperor, but Tiberius and Claudius began the debasement which Nero completed. Now, the value of a coin is determined by the authority of the emperor whose head is stamped upon it rather than by the value of the metal it contains. Anyone with the skill to make alloys and a crude stamp can increase the supposed value of their metal four- or five-fold by making an image of the emperor. Small wonder that they do – and small wonder that the Romans resent that kind of usurpation. They think of forgery as the rot that might eat away their empire from within, refusing to admit that the real rot is the pretence that an emperor’s authority can sustain more value in a coin than it would have in ordinary barter.’

  I did not know for sure that Aradus had been a forger, or a dealer in false coin, but I knew that it was more than likely. Corinth lay on the trade routes linking Rome to the east, to lands which resented Roman dominion even more than Greece. It was common knowledge that since Nero had debased the coinage so dramatically every metalworker in Asia Minor was seeking to take advantage of the excessive purchasing power of their stock-in-trade. Every merchant at the top table had probably taken a hand in such dealings – and Marcellus Cato too.

  ‘All that glisters is not gold,’ I murmured, ‘and all that sparkles is not silver.’ I did not mean it literally, and Apollonius knew it.

  ‘I dare say that she liked you well enough,’ he said, softly. ‘You’re a handsome youth, after all – but she always knew that you were a philosopher. You are a philosopher, Menippus, no matter what Demetrius may think – and there are more paths than one to enlightenment, and more ways than one to cross the barriers which block the way. Be a Cynic by all means, but be a realist too. Love if you can; marry if you must – but choose your lovers and your wife with the same care you’d use in choosing a philosophy. There’s a good deal of false coin in every marketplace in the world, and I doubt that the world will ever see the end of it now it’s begun.’

  He was still staring over the rooftops at the distant quays.

  ‘They say that Corinth was a great city,’ I reflected, ‘before the Romans came . . .’ I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. All cities had been great before the Romans came, just as all merchants had been honest and all pigs had had wings.

  Apollonius said nothing more. He waited for me to move on, and I did. I led the way back down the hill, thinking about murder and justice and love. I didn’t ask Apollonius why he hadn’t declared that Aradus had been murdered, preferring to let his scrupulously truthful words be misinterpreted and misused. It wasn’t that he was scared of retribution; it was because he was a philosopher. Rome was the murderer and false money the motive; Rome was also the law and the falsifier of the money. Apollonius stood aside from all of that; the truth he sought was a higher and finer kind.

  ‘A man does not have to be as self-denying as you are in order to cultivate wisdom,’ I told him, defensively. I meant every word, but I was amazed by my own temerity in framing it as a positive statement rather than a cringing question. ‘There is room even in a wise man’s heart for a little lust and a little comfort.’

  ‘Perhaps there is,’ he answered. ‘I purged myself so ruthlessly in the fever of my youth that I could not recover any such impulse if I tried, but you might find a better way. At any rate, you must find your own way. By all means learn all you can from Demetrius and Bassus, but in the end it is yourself that you must know, yourself that you must make, yourself that you must prove.’

  I knew that. I know it still, and I am not dissatisfied with what I am. I would not want to be a magician or a prophet, even in an Age of Miracle-Workers.

  ‘I do love her,’ I told him, as we parted. ‘I fear that without her love, I’ll never be as good a man as I might have been.’

  ‘She might return, in time,’ Apollonius said, more kindly than I deserved. ‘If she loves you, she’ll come back.’

  She never did, of course.

  [Author’s Note: The only account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana to have survived into modern times is that written by Philostratus in the 3rd century AD. This was allegedly based on memoirs compiled by Damis of Nineveh, a disciple and companion of Apollonius, although some commentators have suspected that these never existed, Philostratus having invented them to lend weight to his rather fanciful account. The statements and opinions attributed by Menippus to Damis in the story are, of course, all derived from Philostratus.]

  A GREEN BOY

  Anthony Price

  Anthony Price is probably best known for his novels about David Audley of British Intelligence that began with The Labyrinth Makers (1970). My own favourite is Our Man in Camelot (1975), set at an archaeological excavation on a suspected Arthurian site. Price has written a couple of short stories set in Roman Britain, ‘The Boudicca Killing’ and the following, both featuring the investigations of the battle-weary soldier Gaius Celerius, during the early years of the Roman occupation.

  From Gnaeus Julius Agricola to Marcus Publius Lupus, greeting!

  You are absolutely right, of course: this year’s campaign has been prosecuted with special vigour because our esteemed general and governor has been thirsting for a great victory of his own in Britain ever since his unfortunate experience long ago at the hands of that frightful woman Boadicea.

  You are right, too, about our little scandal, though thi
s did not occur during field operations, but rather while we were settling the army into winter quarters.

  To be brief, my dear Lupus, we began to lose valuable corn convoys in ambushes along the northern road network. In view of the late season and the high prices prevailing this loss was serious in itself; but more disturbing was that Marcus Florentius, whom I had promoted to be chief of local intelligence, smelt treachery.

  Florentius, as you know, has a nose for such things, yet in this instance was quite unable to substantiate his suspicions with proof. The convoys had been utterly destroyed, the waggons burnt and the men massacred. Moreover he could produce no motive for any betrayal, since the civilian teamsters are carefully recruited from the tribes’ hereditary enemies, and the tribesmen themselves are now far too poor to be able to bribe any of our officers, even supposing they possessed the impudence to attempt it.

  In deference to Florentius, however, I agreed to send a senior agent undercover – none other than your old staff quartermaster, Gaius Celer, whose unique knowledge of the area and routes concerned (he sited most of those forts himself) commended him to me.

  In fact he had no luck and losses continued to mount, until he received news of an ambush less than a day’s journey from our main forward supply depot. As usual it was a corn convoy, but this time a soldier of the escort had escaped.

  Celer assumed this would be some addle-pated Batavian, and rode half the night to get to him while the details would be still fresh in his mind; instead, to his astonishment, he found a probationer-officer – one of those babies the governors over the water foist on the legions to do someone (not Caesar!) a good turn, a green boy who –