The Corpus Conundrum

by Albert A. Bell

  If I sing your praises after you’ve extolled me, I’m afraid I’ll look like I’m just returning the flattery, not offering an impartial judgment. I genuinely do believe all your writing is first-rate. I have to admit, though, that I especially like those works in which you talk about me. The reason is quite simple—you excel when you write about your friends, and I take the greatest pleasure in your work when you write about me.

  Pliny, Ep. 9.8

  Chapter I

  When the hounds began to bay, my scribe, Hylas, and I looked up from our work. Seated in the shade on the side of a ridge, we could not see the dogs, and the trees, beginning to put out leaves, muffled some of their howling.

  “They sound odd,” I said.

  “Yes, my lord. We haven’t heard anything quite like that today.”

  Throughout our day of hunting the dogs had barked lustily whenever they rousted game and yelped once when a boar turned on them just before they drove it into the nets, but this was the first time we had heard such a melancholy, almost mournful, sound.

  “Well, Tranio will let us know if there’s anything we need to be concerned about.”

  Hylas smiled. “Yes, my lord. I’m sure he will.”

  We both knew that Tranio, steward of this estate, wouldn’t take a step without coming to me. He served my uncle capably for years and has served me well since my uncle’s death five years ago, but his unwillingness to take responsibility on his own shoulders is the reason I will never put him in charge of one of my larger properties.

  I tried to turn my attention back to the wax tablet I was writing on, but the dogs had broken my concentration. I gazed around me, hoping fervently that Tranio would not bring any news about what was upsetting the dogs. I did not want anything to disturb the tranquility of this day. It was proving to be as ideal a spring equinox as one could want. All the elements of nature seemed to be in balance—the afternoon sun bright but not too hot, the breeze cool, yet not too strong. I leaned my head back against a tree and closed my eyes for a moment.

  My life seemed to be regaining some balance as well. After a tumultuous year which had thrown me into direct conflict with the most powerful man in Rome and seen me gain—and then lose—a great deal, I was enjoying a period of calm, a chance to reflect, to read and to write.

  And what better place to do that than this villa, near Laurentum? It was my favorite of the houses I inherited from my uncle, who was also my adoptive father. I spent some happy days in my childhood here. My mother still prefers it to our house in Rome. This place possesses a kind of equilibrium of its own, sitting right on the shore but with a large expanse of woods behind it. It’s close enough to Rome for me to get here in half a day. Yet, when I’m here, Rome and its problems might as well be on the frontiers of the empire.

  Today I was hunting and writing. Odd though it might seem, in Rome writing is the more dangerous of those activities. What I had dictated to Hylas this morning was not something I ever intended to publish. I just wanted to set it all down so I would not be struggling to remember it thirty or forty years from now, should the Fates spin out the thread of my life that long, and so I would have what I knew to be a true account in case anyone else tried to twist the story.

  Rousing myself, I returned to the note I had composed to my friend Tacitus and finally found the ending I’d been searching for. When I looked up from the tablet, Hylas anticipated me, something he is quite good at, and stopped his pen in mid-stroke.

  “Are you ready to dictate, my lord?”

  “If it doesn’t interrupt your drawing.”

  Hylas, who’s several years older than I am, never seems to relax around me. We work together only when I’m here in the country, so I can’t blame him. He’s a portly fellow, whose dark eyes are always on the move. He acts ill-at-ease outside the library and withdraws to it every chance he gets, like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell.

  “I draw only in idle moments, my lord. I use only scrap pieces of papyrus. And I make all my inks and colors, at my own expense.”

  “I have no objections to your art work, Hylas. It’s quite good. In fact, when I redecorate the triclinium this summer, why don’t you try your hand on one of the walls?”

  He beamed. “Thank you, my lord. I never thought I would have that opportunity.”

  “We’ll start with one wall. Now, back to business.” Trying to ignore the renewed howling of the dogs, I began to read what I had written as Hylas took it down:

  Gaius Pliny to his friend Cornelius Tacitus, greetings.

  You’ll be amused to hear that I have caught three boars, three very fine ones. You, you will say? Yes, I. And I didn’t even have to give up my laziness or the quiet I sought out here to do it. I have been sitting by the nets. Around me are my pens and papyrus, not spears or hunting gear. I’ve been thinking about a certain matter and making some notes, so that even if I come home with my hands empty I’ll at least have full notebooks. You shouldn’t scorn this sort of mental activity. It’s amazing how one’s mind is stimulated by the stirring of one’s body. Just being surrounded by the solitude of the woods and the quiet which hunting requires is a great incentive to thought. The next time you go hunting, I urge you to take along your notebooks as well as a supply of food and drink. You’ll discover that Diana doesn’t wander the hills alone. Minerva frequents them too.

  “You’ll want two copies, of course, my lord?”

  “Yes. And have one ready to send tomorrow morning.”

  Hylas and I looked up as Tranio came rushing up the slope to where we were sitting, thrashing his way through the brush. A tall, slender man, he pulled off his cap and held it in front of him with both hands, bending over and gasping from the exertion. “My lord, we’ve found ... something.” He took a deep breath. “Something you need to ... to take a look at.”

  I put down my tablets in annoyance. “Don’t make me play guessing games, man. What have you found?”

  “It seems ... it’s a body, my lord.”

  “A body? Do you mean a person’s body?” I would sacrifice a ram to a deity I did not believe in if he could mean anything else.

  “Yes, my lord, a corpse. Please, come quickly.”

  So much for equilibrium. Tranquility, ave atque vale, as Catullus put it. I grudgingly got up and followed Tranio for a hundred paces or so, down the incline and across a brook, with Hylas trailing behind me. Around a clump of bushes that were just starting to put out leaves stood several of my servants, craning their necks and elbowing one another for a better view.

  “Step back, lads,” Tranio said. “Let the master take a look.”

  As the servants stood aside, the first thing I saw was a pair of legs—a man’s bare legs, I thought, with dark hair on the smooth, pasty skin.

  “Who found him?” I asked.

  “The dogs did, my lord,” Tranio said. “But it’s strange. They won’t go near him. They just stand here barking and howling.”

  The dogs circled the body. But Tranio was right. They whined as though disturbed or frightened by something and wouldn’t get within several paces of the dead man, like the dogs in the Iliad who wouldn’t get close to Hector’s body.

  “Has anyone moved him or touched him?”

  “No, my lord. I thought it best you see exactly what we found.”

  That much I was glad to hear. In a situation like this even the position of a body and anything found close to it can help explain what happened. Of course, Tranio probably had decided to leave the body alone not out of concern for any investigation I might make. Like any servant—slave or freedman—he just didn’t want to be held responsible for whatever had happened or might happen.

  I forced my way through the clump of bushes and stepped over
the body. It had a layer of dead leaves strewn over it, as though someone had tried to keep the man warm or hide him rather than bury him or as though he had pulled them over himself. I broke a fresh branch off a shrub and brushed them away.

  What lay before me was a nondescript man with dark hair still damp from last night’s light rain. At first glance I would have estimated his age at about forty, but the longer I looked at him, the less certain I became about that. He looked like a statue that, in spite of being in excellent condition, has an aura of great age about it. Lying on his back, arms at his sides, he wore a ragged tunic but no sandals.

  I could have believed he was sleeping, except that I could not detect any sign of breathing, even when I bent over and put my ear next to his nose. His chest was not rising and falling in the least. Nor did I feel his heart pulsating when I placed my hand on him. He did not even react when an ant crawled onto his face.

  Leaning back on my haunches, I tried to get an overall impression of the man. Something about his appearance struck me as odd. The length of his hair—longer than I was accustomed to seeing on a man—and his untrimmed beard made him look like someone from an earlier time, perhaps a Cynic philosopher from several hundred years ago.

  “Shall we move him out here, my lord,” Tranio asked, “so you can see him better?”

  “Not yet.”

  Before moving the man I examined as much of him as I could see. There were no blood stains on the front or sides of his tunic. Nor was there any evidence that he had lost control of his bowels or bladder, as frightened men often do in their death throes. He had not received a blow to his head. His neck showed no sign of abrasions from a rope, nor did his wrists or ankles. I could not immediately detect any discoloration or odor which a poison might produce, but against the earthy aromas rising from the wet forest floor around me I might be missing something. If the body were decaying, I couldn’t miss that, yet I did not notice the odor of death, even when I put my face close to him and took a deep breath. All I could detect was a fetid smell, more like that of an unbathed man in an unlaundered tunic.

  The servants drew back when I flexed one of the man’s arms, then lifted one of his legs and bent it. There was no stiffness at all. That meant he had been dead either a very short time—too short a time for decay and the death-stiffness to set in—or long enough for the stiffness to pass, which usually takes almost two days. But if he had been dead that long, the odor should be quite strong and the first signs of decay would be evident. Insects and animals would have begun to devour him. Or were they—with the exception of that one bold ant—all shying away from him as my dogs were?

  “We’ve been here since shortly after dawn,” I said. “Did anyone see other people down in this area?”

  The servants shook their heads, looking at one another guiltily, as servants do when they’re hoping someone else will say something so they won’t have to.

  I stood and leaned back against a tree. Nothing I was seeing made sense. The color and general condition of the body suggested that the man wasn’t even dead. The lack of any sign of breathing told me that he must be dead. But if he was dead, he had been here only a few hours at most. We were at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest road. Did someone kill him and carry him in here, or did he die on this spot?

  In either case, what—or who—caused his death? If he was dead. And why was he out here, with no traveling gear, not even a pair of sandals? He seemed completely unknowable. I felt like the Cyclops hearing Odysseus say, “My name is οὔτις—nobody.” The Cyclops said he would eat Nobody last. Could I say I had found Nobody lying in the woods?

  With all the servants and animals trampling around in the wet woods, I could not tell anything about how Nobody got here. The position of his body was not that of a man who had fallen or been thrown down. For all I could conclude, he might have laid down for a nap or been placed there—I would even say posed—by someone else.

  Getting on my knees again, I surveyed the ground around the body one more time. Once he was moved, I would not be able to reproduce the exact conditions under which he was found. I had to remember everything—his position, the imprint around the edge of his body. All of it could ultimately be important in determining what had happened to him.

  Then it hit me. Even a drawing would be helpful, if it was accurate enough. “Hylas, do you have writing materials?”

  “Always, my lord.” The scribe patted the bag he carried over his shoulder.

  “Draw me a picture of this scene. Use your largest piece of papyrus, even if it’s a new one. The rest of you, stand back and let him work.”

  Hylas appeared self-conscious as he sketched Nobody, but in a short time he produced a very good likeness of the man and the area around him.

  “All right. Move him out there in the open,” I finally said. “Get the blanket I was sitting on and put it under him.”

  My servants dawdled, as reluctant as the dogs to have contact with the body. The cleverest one ran to get the blanket. The others, no doubt cursing themselves for their slow thinking, finally grabbed the body by the feet and under the shoulders and lifted it. Nobody sagged into a limp V. The dogs howled frantically.

  “Hold him there,” I said, brushing away debris clinging to his back. I expected to see a blood stain on his tunic, but there was none. The servant who had gone for the blanket returned and the others lowered the man onto it as I bunched his tunic up under his arms so I could examine the body.

  He was wiry, but not in the way that soldiers are. His thin, hard body was more like that of an ascetic philosopher who had lived a life devoid of luxury. He appeared to have been healthy, with no wasting disease of any sort. He was not circumcised, and he bore no marks—such as a brand—that would identify him as a slave or former slave. The only unusual feature of his body was a birthmark, a purple splotch vaguely suggestive of a bird’s head, on the left side of his chest, above the nipple.

  “Make a sketch of that,” I told Hylas.

  While he worked all other constructive activity had come to a stop as word of this find spread, and the rest of my servants gravitated to the spot. A couple of them had the dogs on leashes, but the animals kept up their racket.

  “Do any of you recognize this man?” I asked.

  “He’s nobody I know,” Tranio said. I almost laughed as the others muttered their agreement. He was indeed Nobody.

  I returned to my examination. What puzzled me most at the moment was the lack of dark splotches on any part of the body. During his extensive military service, my uncle had observed that, when a person dies, discolorations, almost like bruises, develop after a short time on whatever side of the body is lowest. Even if the person is moved later, those discolorations remain. If Nobldy had been lying here dead, in this position, for more than a couple of hours, discolorations should be evident on his back and buttocks. If he had lain dead somewhere else for a while, in another position, before being moved here, there would be dark spots somewhere on him.

  “Put him on his stomach,” I said.

  Grumbling at having to touch him again, the servants turned Nobody over. His bare back showed no marks of a whip. That in itself did not prove he’d never been a slave. I would not have a slave of mine whipped unless he did something that threatened my life or my mother’s. Fair treatment creates stronger loyalty, I find, than punishment or the threat of it. I take seriously Seneca’s axiom: “Treat your inferiors as you would have your superiors treat you.”

  “Take him to the cart,” I said. “We’ll go back to the house.”

  “What about the nets and our gear, my lord?” Tranio asked.

  “Leave someone here to guard it and then send the cart back for it.” I barely managed to avoid snapping at him. He’s old enough to be my father, but he seems incapable of making even the most obvious decisions.

  As the servants carried out my orders, I knelt beside the spot where the man had been lying and pressed my hand into the leaves. I must have looked as tr
oubled as I felt. Tranio asked, “Have you found something, my lord?”

  “No ... no. Nothing ... Just leaves.” But those leaves convinced me that I had to summon Tacitus and get his help.

  “Must you take him back to the house, my lord?” Tranio asked as we walked behind the cart.

  “I don’t see what else we can do.”

  “We should turn him over to the duovirs, my lord. They’re supposed to investigate whenever a crime has been committed.”

  “Has a crime been committed?”

  “Well, I don’t know, my lord. You’re the one who’s so good at figurin’ out that sort of thing.”

  “But I don’t know what happened to this man, and I’d like to know before anyone else gets involved.” I snapped a dead twig off the tree I was passing and looked around to see if I could detect any signs of how someone got in and out of these woods without being seen. But there were no tracks, no broken limbs, no bushes trodden down, that couldn’t be explained by my servants’ activity.

  “We could just bury him, my lord,” Tranio said hopefully. “Not even bother the duovirs. They would appreciate that. He’s probably just a runaway slave who fell in with bad company.”

  “I’ve not seen anything to point to such a conclusion.”

  “Well, whoever he is, my lord, there’s nothing we can do for him now.”

  My exasperation with the man was near its breaking point. “Would you have me truss him up on a pole, like the boars?”

  “Now, my lord, I wasn’t meanin’ to treat him with such disrespect. You’re a kind man, but this fella has no claim on you.”

  “He is a human being, Tranio. And, as the playwright Terence said, ‘I consider nothing human alien to me.’ We can try to identify him. Tomorrow I’ll send people around to the neighboring estates to see if anyone is missing. He might be a son of one of those families.”

  Tranio shrugged. “As I said, my lord, he’s nobody I recognize, and I think I would know anyone from the families close around here. Not all the slaves maybe, but any children I certainly would know.”