Saturnalia (5 page)

“Soldiers are a credulous lot,” I said.

“Poison may also be absorbed through the skin. Added to one’s bathing or massage, oil would be a subtle means of administration. And some authorities believe that those unfortunate workers in mercury are subject to absorbing poisons through the skin, as well as inhaling deadly vapors.”

“A hazardous trade,” I observed.

“As is yours.” He stroked his neatly trimmed beard. “In speaking of poisons, one must not neglect the possibility of animal vectors.”

“I suppose one shouldn’t,” I admitted. “What do you mean?”

“The occasional poisonous serpent found in a victim’s bed may not always have wandered there by chance. And some persons are especially sensitive to bee and wasp stings. A hornet’s nest tossed into the window of such a person is an effective means of disposal. And at least one pharaoh is said to have died when a rival filled the royal chamber pot with scorpions.”

I winced at that one. “There are more ways of poisoning someone than I thought.”

“There are few subjects upon which so much ingenuity has been lavished as murder. This should present you with a unique challenge.”

“I must confess, old friend, that for the first time I approach an investigation in a spirit nearing despair. If the woman has acted with even the minimum of competence, murder
will be all but impossible to prove. And I know that Clodia is more than competent when it comes to murder.”

“A veritable Medea. Suspected of incest with her brother, too, I hear. And a great beauty to cap it all. A fit subject for poets and tragedians.” He had a Greek’s appreciation of such things.

“Catullus used to think so. I heard he finally got over his infatuation and found some other vicious slut to follow around like a puppy.”

“He has become much more of a sophisticate,” Asklepiodes said. “You remember him as a wide-eyed boy, just come to Rome and smitten by Clodia’s wiles. You were not immune to them yourself, if I recall correctly.”

The memory pained me. “And now I’m supposed to find evidence against her that probably doesn’t exist. She will laugh at me.”

“Many men have endured worse from her. You may come to me for treatment.”

“You have a medicine for humiliation? You should be rich as Crassus.”

“I have some excellent Cyprian wine. It produces the mildest of hangovers.”

I stood. “I may take you up on it.” I scanned the walls of the surgery. Asklepiodes had samples of nearly every weapon in the world. Each had attached a scroll describing the wounds it produced. “I wish everyone would use honest weapons like these,” I lamented.

“What a simple place the world would be,” Asklepiodes sighed. “We should then live in a golden age. As it is, the choice of weapons is broad. Even the subtlest poisons are crude compared to the weapon of choice favored in Rome today.”

“Which is?”

“The spoken word. I try to stay aloof from Roman politics, but you are a noisy lot.”

“We learned it from you Greeks,” I pointed out. “Pericles and Demosthenes and all that wordy pack.”

“You should have chosen the Spartans to emulate rather than the Athenians. They were stupid louts, but they had a soldierly appreciation of brevity in oratory. Anyway, I do not refer to your distinguished rhetoricians like Cicero and Hortensius Hortalus. Rather, I speak of the rabble-rousers.”

“Caesar and Clodius?”

“There are many others. I will not presume to address your own realm of expertise, but you would do well to inform yourself of their activities. I fear civil war is in the offing.”

“That’s a bit extreme. We haven’t had one in more than twenty years. A little rioting now and then does no great harm. It clears the air and drains off excess resentments.”

“A most Roman attitude. But this time it will not be aggrieved allies and
municipia.
It will be class against class.”

“Nothing new about that either. It’s been going on since the Gracchi. Probably earlier. It’s in our nature.”

“I wish you joy of it, then. Please feel free to consult me at any time.”

I thanked him and left. Actually, I was not as sanguine as I pretended with Asklepiodes, but I was reluctant to bare my fears about the Roman social ills with a foreigner, even if he was a friend. And if war between the classes was coming, the rabble-rousers among the commons were by no means solely to blame. My own family shared a good deal of the responsibility.

I was born an aristocrat, but I had few illusions about my peers. We had brought endless ills upon ourselves and
upon Rome and its empire through our own stupid intransigence. The extreme end of the aristocratic party resisted any improvement in the lot of the common Roman with the thoughtless, reflexive hostility of a dog guarding its dinner.

I pondered upon these things as I made my way back into the City proper. Rome had long since expanded beyond the walls marked out by Romulus with his plow. The Port of Rome, an extramural riverside district, had leapt the river to form the new suburb of the Transtiber. Huge building projects were in progress out on the Field of Mars, where once the citizens had formed up every year to enroll in their legions and vote upon important matters. They still went there to vote, although few bothered to serve with the legions anymore.

Before long, I thought, there would be more of Rome outside the walls than within. And where was all this excess population coming from? Certainly not from an increasing birth rate. In fact, many old families were dying out from lack of interest. The fertility of the Caecilii Metelli was a distinct exception.

No, Rome was filling up with peasants from the countryside and freed slaves. The peasants, once the backbone of the community, had been forced to sell their lands, bankrupted by huge, inefficient plantations worked by cheap slave labor, another ill my class had visited upon the Republic. And the slaves were themselves the loot of our endless foreign wars. The unfortunates who ended up on the plantations or in the mines were worked to death, but many were used for less arduous service in Rome, and few of them remained slaves for life. Instead, they were manumitted; and within a generation, two at the most, their descendants had full rights of citizenship.

In a street near the cattle market I saw a pompous, self-important
senator parading with his troop of clients behind him. Actually, some of them were in front, clearing the way for the great man. There must have been a hundred of them, and that was one reason for the proliferation of slave manumissions. One way to show off your importance was to be seen with a large
clientela,
and freed slaves automatically became your clients, bound by ties of duty and attendance. Really rich men had thousands. To top it all, I happened to know that that senator (he shall remain nameless; his sensitive descendants are very powerful these days) was himself the grandson of a freed slave.

I wander. I do that a great deal. In my youth I detested all the old bores who were forever lamenting the degeneracy of the times and the low estate to which the Republic had fallen. Now that I am old, I rather enjoy it.

In the cattle market itself I walked among the pens and cages and was very careful where I stepped. The air was redolent of the massed livestock and raucous with their bleats, bellows, cackles, and other noises. Despite its name, the Forum Boarium sold very few cattle except those intended for sacrifice. There was plenty of other animal life, though, from asses to sacrificial doves. You could buy them alive or a piece at a time, already butchered.

Besides the butchers, farmers, and livestock vendors, there were many other sorts of vendors’ stalls. But I was not looking for something to buy. In the Forum, I had noticed that the fortune-tellers’ stalls were gone, undoubtedly driven out by the censors or the aediles. This happened every few years, but they always drifted back. They had to be set up someplace and the cattle market was a good place to look, but I saw none.

Then I saw a man haranguing a goat vendor. The speaker wore a senator’s tunic like mine, but his toga was plain. He
held out his hand and the vendor sullenly handed over a number of coins. Collecting fines in the market meant this must be one of the plebeian aediles. The curule aediles wore a toga with a purple stripe.

“Pardon me, Aedile,” I said, walking up behind him.

He turned, his eyes automatically going to the purple stripe on my tunic. “Yes, Senator? How may I …” Then, at the same instant, we recognized one another. “Decius Caecilius! When did you get back?” He stuck out his hand and I took it, managing not to grit my teeth. It was Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, a man I detested.

“Just yesterday. Your rank suits you, Lucius. You’ve lost weight.”

He made a face. “Wretched office. I never have time to eat, and I spend my days crawling all over buildings looking for violations of the construction codes. It keeps me in shape. Ruinously expensive, too, since the sums contributed by the state were laid down about three hundred years ago and prices have gone up since. We have to make up the difference out of our own purses. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the year’s almost over.” Then he laughed jovially. He really did not understand how much I disliked him. “When will you stand for aedile, Decius?”

“In about five years, if I live that long. That’s when I meet the age qualification.”

“Start borrowing for it now,” he advised. “What brings you to the cattle market? I’d never come here if the job didn’t call for it.”

“I was wondering where the fortune-tellers had got to. They’re not in the Forum, and I don’t see them here either.” I felt a tug at the hem of my toga and looked down. A kid was nibbling on it. I jerked it away from the little beast and determined
that no serious damage had been done. The kid looked disappointed and went to join its nanny.

“We ran them out of the City back at the first of the year,” Bestia said. “You know what a passion for order Caesar has. As consul and
pontifex maximus
he made it our first order of business to drive them outside the gates. They can’t even come into the city to shop without a permit from one of the aediles.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“They’ve pitched their tents out on the Campus Martius by the Circus Flaminius. I thought you were one of those people who don’t believe in omens. What do you want with a fortune-teller?”

“It always pays to be careful,” I told him. Bestia was one man with whom I definitely did not wish to discuss an investigation.

“Well, that’s where you’ll find them. Come on, admit it: You’ve got some well-born lady pregnant and you need to arrange for an abortion.”

“You’ve guessed it. Caesar’s wife.”

He hooted. “And she’s supposed to be above suspicion!” After four years Romans still found Caesar’s incredibly pompous and hypocritical pronouncement hilarious. We were laughing less and less at Caesar though.

I thanked him and left. Bestia had been neck deep in Catilina’s crackpot conspiracy and had almost certainly been involved in murder. He’d gotten away clean, though, because he’d been acting as Pompey’s spy within the movement. There was little use in striking a pose of moral superiority. It was all but impossible to accomplish anything in Roman public life without having to deal with odious men like Bestia. He wasn’t even among the worst of them.

It was a long walk out to the Circus Flaminius, but who
minds walking after days at sea and on horseback? I left the City proper through the Porta Carmentalis near the southern base of the Capitol. This is the spot where the Servian Wall has two gates within a few paces of each other, but only one of them could be used because the other was opened only for triumphal processions.

I wasn’t looking for any fortune-teller in particular, but I needed to test the atmosphere of a world that was almost entirely unknown to me: the strange underworld of the witches.

Italian witches came in three sorts that I knew about. There was the
saga,
or wise woman, who was usually a fortuneteller and learned in herb lore and occult matters. They were seldom perceived as malevolent and the authorities periodically drove them from the City only because they sometimes predicted political events and the deaths of important men. These predictions could easily come true, considering how superstitious the citizenry were, and how heavily Rome relied on rumors for information.

Next there was the
striga,
a true witch or sorceress. These women were known to cast spells, lay curses, and use the bodies of the dead for unclean rites. They were much feared and their activities were strictly forbidden by law.

Last of all was the
venefica
previously mentioned: the poisoner. I did not plan to go looking for one of those just yet. And, for obvious reasons, they did not publicly cry their wares like ordinary vendors.

The Campus Martius had once been the assembly and drill field for the City’s legions, but its open spaces were getting fewer as buildings encroached. Once the only really large structure there had been the Circus Flaminius, but everything was now dominated by the huge Theater of Pompey and its
extensive complex, which included a meeting hall for the Senate. Since its completion, most Senate meetings had been held there. At least the place had enough room. Sulla had almost doubled the number of senators without building a correspondingly large Senate chamber. Now, twenty years later, despite deaths and purgings by the censors, there were still far too many to fit comfortably in the old Curia.

I saw the tents and booths immediately upon coming in sight of the Circus Flaminius. They were brightly colored and painted in fanciful designs with stars, serpents, and lunar crescents being favored motifs. They also seemed to be doing a brisk business, another sign of unsettled times. As in so many other matters, Rome had two distinct traditions in fortune-telling: the official and the popular.

On an official level, the state had augurs who were elected and who interpreted omens according to a strict table of significance, mostly concerned with birds, lightning, thunder, and other things of the air. They did not foretell the future, but rather, they received the will of the gods concerning a given subject at a particular time. This was a bit rarified for the common people, so from time to time the state resorted to the Etruscan
haruspices,
who interpreted the will of the gods by the robust technique of examining the entrails of sacrificial animals. Rarest of all were consultations of the Sibylline Books, which occurred only at times of calamity or extraordinary omens and were in the keeping of a college of fifteen distinguished men.