No other city I know can match the sheer vitality of Rome at the hour just before mid-morning. Rome wakes with a self-satisfied stretching of the limbs and a deep inhalation, stimulating the lungs, quickening the pulse. Rome wakes with a smile, roused from pleasant dreams, for every night Rome goes to sleep dreaming a dream of empire. In the morning Rome opens her eyes, ready to go about the business of making that dream come true in broad daylight. Other cities cling to sleep – Alexandria and Athens to warm dreams of the past, Pergamum and Antioch to a coverlet of Oriental splendour, little Pompeii and Herculaneum to the luxury of napping till noon. Rome is happy to shake off sleep and begin her agenda for the day. Rome has work to do. Rome is an early riser.
Rome is multiple cities in one. On any given hour’s journey across it, one will see at least several of its guises. To the eyes of those who look at a city and see faces, it is first and foremost a city of slaves, for the slaves far outnumber citizens and freedmen. Slaves are everywhere, as ubiquitous and as vital to the life of the city as the waters of the Tiber or the light of the sun. Slaves are the lifeblood of Rome.
They are of every race and condition. Some spring from a stock indistinguishable from their masters. They walk the streets better dressed and more finely groomed than many a free man; they may lack the toga of a citizen, but their tunics are made of material just as fine. Others are unimaginably wretched, like the pockmarked, half-idiot labourers one sees winding through the streets in ragged files, naked except for a cloth to cover their sex, joined by chains at the ankles and bearing heavy weights, kept in line by bullies with long whips and further tormented by the clouds of flies that follow wherever they go. They hurry to the mines, or to galleys, or to dig the deep foundations of a rich man’s house on their way to an early grave.
To those who look at a city and see not humanity but stone, Rome is overwhelmingly a city of worship. Rome has always been a pious place, sacrificing abundantly (if not always sincerely) to any and every god and hero who might become an ally in the dream of empire. Rome worships the gods; Rome gives adoration to the dead. Temples, altars, shrines, and statues abound. Incense may abruptly waft from any corner. One may step down a narrow winding street in a neighbourhood known since childhood and suddenly come upon a landmark never noticed before – a tiny, crude statue of some forgotten Etruscan god set in a niche and concealed behind a wild fennel bush, a secret known only to the children who play in the alley and the inhabitants of the house, who worship the forsaken and impotent god as a household deity. Or one may come upon an entire temple, unimaginably ancient, so old it is made not of bricks and marble but of worm-eaten wood, its dim interior long ago stripped of all clues of the divinity that once resided there, but still held sacred for reasons no one living can remember.
Other sights are more specialized to their region. Consider my own neighbourhood, with its odd mixture of death and desire. My home sits partway up the Esquiline Hill. Above me is the quarter of the morgue workers, those who tend the flesh of the dead – embalmers, perfume rubbers, stokers of the flame. Day and night a massive column of smoke rises from the summit, thicker and blacker than any other in this city of smoke, and carrying that strangely appealing odour of seared flesh otherwise found only on battlefields. Below my house, at the foot of the hill, is the notorious Subura, the greatest concentration of taverns, gaming houses, and brothels west of Alexandria. The proximity of such disparate neighbours – purveyors of death on one hand and of life’s basest pleasures on the other – can lead to strange juxtapositions.
Tiro and I descended the paved footpath that dropped steeply from my front door, passing the blank plaster walls of my neighbours. ‘Be careful here,’ I told him, pointing out the spot where I knew a fresh load of excrement would be waiting, slopped over the wall by the inhabitants of the house on the left. Tiro skipped to his right, barely avoiding the pile, and wrinkled his nose.
‘That wasn’t there when I came up the steps,’ he laughed.
‘No, it looks quite fresh. The mistress of the house,’ I explained with a sigh, ‘comes from some backward little town in Samnium. A million times I’ve explained to her how the public sewers work, but she only answers: “This is the way we did it in Pluto’s Hole,” or whatever her stinking little town is called. It never stays long; sometime during the day the man who lives behind the wall on the right has one of his slaves collect the stuff and cart it off. I don’t know why; the path leads only to my door – I’m the only one who has to look at it, and the only one likely to step in it. Maybe the smell offends him. Maybe he steals it to fertilize his gardens. I only know it’s one of life’s predictable routines – the lady from Pluto’s Hole will throw her family’s shit over the wall every morning; the man across the way will carry it off before nightfall.’ I gave Tiro my warmest smile. ‘I explain this to anyone who’s likely to visit me between sunrise and sunset. Otherwise you’re likely to ruin a perfectly good pair of shoes.’
The pathway broadened. The houses became smaller and drew closer together. At last we reached the foot of the Esquiline and stepped into the wide avenue of the Subura Way. A group of gladiators, heads shaved except for barbaric topknots, came staggering out of the Lair of Venus. The Lair is notorious for cheating its customers, especially visitors to Rome, but natives as well, which is one of the reasons I’ve never patronized it, despite its convenient proximity to my house. Cheated or not, the gladiators seemed satisfied. They staggered into the street grasping one another’s shoulders for support and bellowing out a song that had as many tunes as there were voices to sing it, still drunk after what must have been a very long night of debauchery.
At the edge of the street a group of young trigon players broke and scattered to get out of the gladiators’ way, then reformed to begin a fresh round, each taking his turn at the points of a triangle drawn in the dust. They slapped the leather ball back and forth, laughing loudly. They were hardly more than boys, but I’d seen them going in and out of the side entrance to the Lair often enough to know that they were employed there. It was a testament to the energy of youth that they should be up and playing so early, after a long night’s work in the brothel.
We turned right, proceeding westward along the Subura Way, following the drunken gladiators. Another road descending from the Esquiline emptied into a broad intersection ahead. A rule in Rome: the wider the street or the greater the square, the more crowded and impassable it will be. Tiro and I were forced to walk in single file, threading our way through the sudden congestion of carts and animals and makeshift markets. I quickened my pace and called back at him to keep up; soon we caught up with the gladiators. Predictably, the crowd parted for them like mist before a heavy gust of wind. Tiro and I followed in their wake.
‘Make way!’ a loud voice suddenly called. ‘Make way for the dead!’ A cluster of white-robed embalmers pressed in upon our right, coming down from the Esquiline. They pushed a long, narrow cart bearing a body that was wrapped in gauze and seemed to float in a cocoon of fragrances – attar of roses, unguent of clove, unnameable Oriental spices. As always the smell of smoke clung to their clothing, mixed with the odour of burning flesh from the vast crematoria up on the hill.
‘Make way!’ their leader shouted, brandishing a slender wooden rod of the sort one might use to discipline mildly a dog or a slave. He struck nothing but empty air, but the gladiators took offence. One of them slapped the rod from the embalmer’s hand. It flew spinning through the air and would have struck me in the face had I not ducked. I heard a squeal of painful surprise behind me, but didn’t bother to look. I stayed low and reached for Tiro’s sleeve.
The press of the crowd was too thick for escape. Instead of quietly turning back, as circumstances recommended, strangers were suddenly pushing in from all sides, smelling the prospect of violence and afraid they might miss seeing it. They were not disappointed.
The embalmer was a short man, pot-bellied, wrinkled, and balding. He rose to his full height and a little beyond, s
training on tiptoes. He shoved his face, twisted with rage, against the gladiator’s. He wrinkled his nose at the gladiator’s breath – even from where I stood I caught a whiff of garlic and stale wine – and hissed at him like a snake. The sight was absurd, pathetic, alarming. The huge gladiator responded with a loud burp and another slap, this one knocking the embalmer backwards against the cart. There was a sharp crack of bone or wood, or both; the embalmer and the cart collapsed together.
I tightened my grasp on Tiro’s sleeve. ‘This way,’ I hissed, indicating a sudden opening in the crowd. Before we could reach it the breach was filled with a crush of new spectators.
Tiro made a peculiar noise. I wheeled around. The noise was less peculiar than the expression on his face. He was looking downwards. There was a hard, heavy nudge against my ankles. The cart had spilled its contents onto the street. The body had rolled face-up against my feet, its gauzy shroud unwinding behind it.
The corpse was that of a woman, hardly more than a girl. She was blonde and pale, the way that all corpses are pale when drained of their blood. Despite the waxiness of her flesh, there was evidence of what had once been considerable beauty. The tumble had ripped her gown, baring a single breast as white and hard as alabaster, and a single nipple the colour of faded roses.
I glanced at Tiro’s face, at his lips parted with spontaneous, unthinking lust, yet twisted at the corners with an equally spontaneous revulsion. I looked up and spotted another opening in the crowd. I stepped towards it, pulling on Tiro’s sleeve, but he was rooted to the spot. I pulled harder. There was sure to be real trouble now.
At that instant I heard the unmistakable metallic slither of a dagger pulled from its sheath and glimpsed a flash of steel from the corner of my eye. It was not one of the gladiators who had drawn the weapon – the figure was on the opposite side of the cart, in the midst of the embalmers. A bodyguard? One of the dead girl’s relatives? An instant later – so quickly there was no sense of motion at all, only of displacement – both figure and glint of steel were on the nearer side of the cart. There was a strange ripping noise, tiny but somehow final. The gladiator bent double, clutching his belly. He grunted, then moaned, but the noise was submerged in a loud collective shriek.
I never actually saw the assassin or the crime; I was too busy trying to push through the crowd, which scattered like kernels of grain from a ruptured sack the moment the first drop of blood fell to the paving stones.
‘Come on!’ I shouted, dragging Tiro behind me. He was still staring over his shoulder at the dead girl, unaware, I thought, of what had happened. But when we were safely away, well beyond the scuffling and confusion that continued around the upset cart; he drew up alongside me and said in a low voice, ‘But we should stop and go back, sir. We were witnesses.’
‘Witnesses to what?’
‘To a murder!’
‘I saw nothing. And neither did you. You were looking at the dead girl the whole time.’
‘No, I saw the whole thing.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I saw a murder.’
‘You don’t know that. The gladiator may recover. Besides, he’s probably just a slave.’ I winced at the flash of pain in Tiro’s eyes.
‘We should go back, anyway,’ Tiro snapped. ‘The stabbing was just the beginning. It’s still going on, see? Half the marketplace has been pulled into it now.’ He raised his eyebrows, struck by an idea. ‘Lawsuits! Perhaps one of the parties will be needing a good advocate.’
I stared at him, quietly amazed. ‘Master Cicero is a lucky man, indeed. How practical you are, Tiro. A brutal stabbing takes place before your very eyes, and what do you see? A business prospect.’
Tiro was stung by my laughter. ‘But some advocates make a great deal of money that way. Cicero says that Hortensius employs no fewer than three servants whose only job is to roam the streets, keeping an eye out for likely cases.’
I laughed again. ‘I doubt that your Cicero would care to take on that gladiator for a client, or the gladiator’s owner. More to the point, I doubt that they would care to deal with your master, or with any other advocate. The interested parties will seek justice in the usual way: blood for blood. If they don’t care to take on the job themselves – though the stabbed man’s friends hardly look cowardly or squeamish to me – they’ll do what everyone else does, and hire one of the gangs to do it for them. The gang will find the assailant, or the assailant’s brother, and stab him in return; the new victim’s family will hire a rival gang to return the violence, and so on. That, Tiro, is Roman justice.’
I managed to smile, giving Tiro permission to take it as a joke. Instead, his face became more clouded. ‘Roman justice,’ I said more sombrely, ‘for those who can’t afford an advocate, or perhaps don’t even know what an advocate is. Or know, and don’t trust them, believing all courts are a sham. It’s just as likely that what we saw was the middle of such a blood feud, not its beginning. The man with the knife may have had nothing to do with the embalmers or the dead girl. Perhaps he was just waiting for the right moment to strike the blow, and who knows why or how far back the quarrel goes? Best to keep your nose out of it. There’s no one you can call upon to stop it.’
This last was true, and a constant source of astonishment to visitors from foreign capitals, or to anyone unaccustomed to life in a republic: Rome has no police force. There is no armed municipal body to keep order within the city walls. Occasionally some violence-weary senator will propose that such a force be created. The response on all sides is immediate: ‘But who will own these police?’ And they are right. In a country ruled by a king, the loyalty of the police runs in a clear, straight line to the monarch. Rome, on the other hand, is a republic (ruled at the time of which I write by a dictator, it is true, but a temporary and constitutionally legal dictator). In Rome, whoever plotted and schemed to get himself appointed chief of such a police force would simply use it for his own aggrandizement, while his minions’ biggest problem would be deciding from whom to accept the largest bribe, and whether to serve that person or stab him in the back. Police would serve only as a tool for one faction to use against another. Police would merely become one more gang for the public to contend with. Rome chooses to live without police.
We left the square behind, and the Subura Way as well. I led Tiro into a narrow street I knew of, a shortcut. Like most streets in Rome, it has no name. I call it the Narrows.
The street was dim and musty, hardly more than a slit between two high walls. The bricks and paving stones were beaded with moisture, spotted with mould. The walls themselves seemed to sweat; the cobblestones exhaled the odour of dampness, an almost animal smell, rank and not entirely unpleasant. It was a street never touched by the sun, never dried by its heat, or purified by its light – filled with steam at high summer, coated with ice in winter, eternally damp. There are a thousand such streets in Rome, tiny worlds set apart from the greater world, secluded and self-contained.
The alley was too narrow for us to walk side by side. Tiro followed behind me. From the direction of his voice I could tell that he kept glancing back over his shoulder. From the timbre of his voice I knew he was nervous. ‘Are there a lot of stabbings in this neighbourhood?’
‘In the Subura? Constantly. In broad daylight. That’s the fourth I know of this month, though it’s the first I’ve actually witnessed. The warmer weather brings it on. But it’s really no worse in the Subura than anywhere else. You can have your throat slit just as easily on the Palatine, or in the middle of the Forum, for that matter.’
‘Cicero says it’s Sulla’s fault.’ The sentence began boldly but ended with an oddly stifled catch. I didn’t have to see Tiro’s face to know it had reddened. Rash words, for a citizen to criticize our beloved dictator. Rasher still for his slave to repeat it carelessly. I should have let the matter drop, but my curiosity was piqued.
‘Your master is no admirer of Sulla, then?’ I tried to sound casual, to set Tiro at ease. But Tiro did not answer.
‘Cicero is wrong
, you know, if that’s what he thinks – that all the crime and chaos in Rome is Sulla’s fault. Bloodshed in the streets hardly began with Sulla – though Sulla has certainly contributed his share of it.’ There, I had put my foot onto thin ice myself. Still Tiro did not respond. Walking behind me, not having to meet my eyes, he could simply pretend not to hear. Slaves learn early to feign convenient deafness and a wandering mind. I could have stopped and turned around to face him, but that would have been making too much of the matter.
Yet I would not let it go. There is something about the mere mention of the name Sulla that fans a fire in every Roman, whether friend or foe, accomplice or victim.
‘Most people credit Sulla with having restored order to Rome. At a very high price perhaps, and not without a bloodbath – but order is order, and there’s nothing a Roman values more highly. But I take it Cicero has another view?’
Tiro said nothing. The narrow street wound to the left and right, making it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Occasionally we passed a doorway or a window, slightly recessed in the wall, always shut. We could hardly have been more alone.
‘Of course Sulla is a dictator,’ I said. ‘That chafes the Roman spirit: We are all free men – at least those of us who aren’t slaves. But after all, a dictator isn’t a king; so the lawmakers tell us. A dictatorship is perfectly legal, so long as the Senate approves. For emergencies only, of course. And only for a set period of time. If Sulla has kept his powers for almost three years now instead of the legally prescribed one – well, then, perhaps that’s what offends your master. The untidiness of it.’
Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) Page 3