Saturnalia (8 page)

“Decius!” He sprang to his feet and enveloped my comparatively diminutive hand in his huge paw, the palm of which felt as if it were covered with articulated metal plates. He had been a galley rower in his youth, and he had never lost the horny hands of that profession.

“I hear you’re prospering, Titus,” I said.

“So I am,” he said, self-satisfaction enveloping him like a toga. In another man it might have been a repellant attitude, but Milo accepted the largesse of
Fortuna
the way a god accepts worship. He looked like a god, too, which never hurt him with the voters. He turned and gestured toward his companion. “I believe you know Publius Sestius?”

Now I remembered. “Of course. We were both quaestors
when Cicero and Antonius Hibrida were consuls.” It was coming back to me and I held out my hand, which Sestius took. “We never saw much of each other. I remember that you were returned first at the polls and got attached to the consuls’ personal staff. I was in the treasury.”

“It was a memorable year,” Sestius said, which was a diplomatic way to put it. He had the look of an aristocrat who was also a street brawler. The same, I suppose, might have been said of me.

Milo clapped his hands and a thug brought in a tray with a pitcher of wine and cups, along with the usual nuts, dried figs, dates, parched peas, and so forth. Despite his wealth, Milo had no comely serving girls, cultured valets, or entertainers among his staff. Every member of the household was eminently capable of defending the house and their master.

“Publius and I are working out our strategy for next year’s tribunician elections,” Milo said. “We’ll probably spend most of our time in office undoing all the harm Clodius will do next year. Clodius will get Cicero exiled, so we’ll get him recalled. That’s going to take some hard work.”

“I’ve just had an odd encounter with Clodius,” I said, glancing significantly at Sestius.

“And you’re still alive? Speak freely, Publius is no friend of Clodius.”

Briefly, I sketched out my odd interview with Clodius. Milo listened with his customary intense attention. No nuance of anything he heard ever escaped Milo. At the end of it, he tossed a handful of salted peas into his mouth.

“I fear you are not going to make Clodius a happy man. That harpy poisoned Celer as sure as the sun comes up every morning.”

“Why?” I asked. “She’s malevolent and she despised her
husband; but she had to be married to somebody, and Celer wasn’t as objectionable as most she would have been attached to. He had a fine house, and he left her free to do pretty much as she pleased.” This constituted a happy marriage, among my class.

“Celer got a bit too hostile toward her little brother toward the end,” Milo said.

“That’s right,” Sestius concurred. “Decius, you’ve been away from Rome too much of late. Last year Metellus Celer, as consul, opposed Clodius’s bid to transfer to the plebs. He was certainly not alone in that, but he got downright violent about it. He was losing his sense of moderation in his last months in office.”

“It was a busy year,” I observed. “I heard that Caesar and Pompey and Crassus made up their political differences.”

“Temporarily,” Milo said. “It won’t last. But for now the usual feuds are dormant. Caesar got Clodius transferred to the plebs to clear his path to the tribuneship, got him adopted by a man named Fonteius to do it, and guess who presided as augur at the adoption?”

I ran the list of augurs through my memory, trying to recall which of them were still alive and in Italy. “Not Pompey!”

“Pompeius Magnus himself,” Milo confirmed.

“The world is getting to be a very odd place,” Sestius said. “If you can’t count on people like that to slit one another’s throats, what can you count on?”

“Things will be back to normal soon,” Milo said. “Clodius is going to make such a mess of things next year that people will demand a return of order.”

I had my doubts. “Clodius is ridiculously popular,” I
said. “Is it true that he plans to make the free distribution of grain a guaranteed right of the citizens?”

“A radical concept, isn’t it?” Sestius said.

“It won him his tribuneship as nothing else could,” Milo commented, picking up a few nuts. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”

“You’re joking!” Sestius said. “If the grain dole becomes institutionalized; instead of an emergency measure, not only will we lose one of our most powerful political tools, but every freed slave, ruined peasant, and footloose barbarian in Italy will head straight for Rome to sign up!”

“They already do that anyway,” I pointed out.

“It’s no cause for rejoicing,” Sestius grumbled.

“We’ll sort things out,” Milo said confidently.

It may seem odd that men like Clodius and Milo and Sestius could speak with such sanguine assurance, as if they were about to reign as kings rather than serve as elected officials, but the tribuneship had made a great comeback in the last few years. Sulla had all but stripped the Tribunes of the People of all their powers, but one after the other, each year’s tribunes had passed laws in the Popular Assemblies restoring them. Now they were more important than ever, and they had the immeasurable power to introduce new legislation and carry it through the assemblies. This was the power that gave or withheld proconsular appointments, apportioned the state’s treasure, and got people exiled. The consuls themselves were relatively powerless by comparison, and the Senate had become a debating club. Real power lay with the commons and their elected representatives, the tribunes.

I promised to keep Milo apprised of the situation and
left his house, wondering whether I should go to Clodia’s house armed. I also regretted that I had not thought to ask Asklepiodes whether there existed a reliable means to
avoid
being poisoned.

T
HE HOUSE OF THE LATE METELLUS
Celer was located low on the slope of the Esquiline, in a district that had somehow escaped the worst of the fires that periodically swept the city. It was a relatively modest structure. It had been in the family for several generations and so was on the scale common to the days before the Punic Wars, when even the greatest families were little more than wealthy farmers.

Hermes accompanied me in a mixed state of alarm and anticipation. Clodia frightened him as she frightened everybody. But she also belonged to that new generation of Romans who affected to love things of beauty for their own sake, rather than for their value as loot. To this end she surrounded herself with beautiful things, including slaves. Clodia was a familiar sight in the slave markets, always shopping for new beauties as she discarded those past their peak of comeliness.

This was another of her many scandalous traits. Most well-bred people, including my own family, pretended that they never bought slaves but used only those born within the household. When they wanted slaves from the market, they discreetly sent stewards to do the buying. Not Clodia. She liked to look over the livestock herself, examining teeth with her own eyes, punching for wind and squeezing for muscle tone with her own hands.

“Try not to get caught doing anything improper with the girls,” I cautioned Hermes.

“Of course not, Master,” he said with patent insincerity. “But you do want me to pump them for information, don’t you?”

“Quit drooling. Yes, I want to know if they have any knowledge of Celer’s death or if Clodia had any strange visitors. Well, I know she has all sorts of strange visitors, but what we’re looking for are witch women, mountebanks, the sort of people who are likely to be peddling poisons.”

This was a pretty far-fetched hope. Clodia had traveled widely for a woman, and she might have picked up exotic poisons almost anywhere. It was the sort of thing she would shop for. But there was a chance that she had acquired her poison openly, right here in Rome. Aristocratic felons like Clodia often took few precautions to conceal evidence of their crimes. They considered themselves above suspicion, or at least above prosecution.

I knew I was in for an interesting evening the moment the door opened. In the past, Clodia had been allowed to exercise her taste only within her own quarters. The rest of the house was a typically drab, stuffy Metellan establishment. That rule had gone up with the smoke of Celer’s funeral pyre.

The
janitor
who opened the door to us looked like one of
those Greek statues of ephebic athletes, all flowing muscles and perfect skin, and dense, curly locks. Except for his scalp he had been fully depilated, a common affectation of highborn women but rarely encountered in men except for Egyptian slaves, and this boy was clearly not Egyptian. The only concession to modesty Clodia had allowed him was a gauzy pouch that bagged his genitals, supported by a thin string about his hips. His only other covering was a gilded and jeweled neck ring by which he was chained to the doorpost.

“Welcome, Senator,” the boy said, smiling to show perfect, white teeth. “My Lady and her guests are in the triclinium.”

We passed through the atrium with its flanking rooms and its niche for ancestral death masks and on into the peristyle. It was usually open to the sky, but an elaborate awning, decorated with golden stars, had been drawn across it to keep out the cold breeze. Beneath the awning the pool now featured a graceful sculpture of a dancing faun, and fat, ornamental carp disported themselves in the water below. Between the pillars bronze chains supported beautifully wrought Campanian lamps.

Everywhere I looked I saw splendid works of art and craftsmanship. I also noticed that Clodia hadn’t bothered to inlay the floors with mosaic in the new fashion. Not much point in it, since she wouldn’t be staying. All of her treasures were portable and would go with her.

“Decius!” Clodia came for me, her gown floating around her body like colored air. She was still one of the most beautiful women in Rome and about thirty-three years old that year, her body unmarked by childbearing, hence the near-transparent Coan gowns she favored. The sheer stuff was woven on the island of Cos and the censors always tried to ban
it from the City, or at least keep respectable women from wearing it. Clodia’s respect for public morals laws was minimal. Her face was youthful, marred only by a certain hardness about the mouth and eyes. She used cosmetics sparingly, unlike so many women.

“How good to see you,” she cried, taking my hands in both of hers. “It’s been far too long since I’ve seen you. Fausta told me all about that exciting business in Alexandria. The court there sounds wonderful.” Clodia and Fausta were best friends, even though Fausta was soon to marry Milo, the deadliest enemy of Clodius. Politics.

“I am sure Princess Berenice will receive you like a queen should you choose to visit,” I assured her. Berenice was even loonier than most Egyptian royalty.

“Come along and meet my other guests. You know some of them.”

“Lead on,” I said. “But sometime this evening I must speak with you privately.”

“I know,” she whispered conspiratorially. Conspiracy was something she enjoyed. “But you mustn’t bring up the subject at dinner. Oh, Decius, I am
so
glad that you and my brother have made up your silly quarrel!” She was laying it on a little thick, even for Clodia. But then she practiced moderation in nothing, not even insincerity. “Now come with me.” She looped an arm through mine and we went into the triclinium, which opened off the roofed portion of the peristyle.

Here some changes had been made. Clodia did not favor the cozy intimacy of the common dining room, so she had knocked down a couple of interior walls and made one room out of three. As I recalled the layout of the house, she had sacrificed Celer’s bedroom and study to expand her triclinium.
The couches and cushions were as lavish as any I had seen in Rome, even in the house of Lucullus.

“Well, Clodia,” I said, “it isn’t quite as princely as Ptolemy’s palace, but it’s close.”

She smiled, accepting it as a true compliment. “Isn’t it splendid? There’s hardly a furnishing in the room that hasn’t been forbidden by the censors at one time or another.”

“Sumptuary laws never work,” I said. “The people who pass the laws are the only ones who can afford to break them.” This wasn’t strictly true, because rich freedmen, barred from higher office, were becoming more and more a fixture in the City.

Some of the guests were admiring the wall paintings. These, at least, were not forbiddingly expensive and had been applied to smooth out the effect of knocking three different rooms into one. They were of a style just coming into fashion: a black background with ornamental pillars painted on at intervals. The pillars were strangely spindly and elongated, as if they had been stretched. Here and there along their length were little platforms holding potted plants and bowls of fruit, similarly elongated. Atop the pillars were fanciful terminals consisting of stacked globes or drooping cones. I suppose they were intended to be whimsical, but I found the style dreamlike and faintly disorienting, as if you were seeing something you half-remembered and couldn’t quite place.

“Decius, have you met the tribune Publius Vatinius?” She took me to a tall, soldierly man. He looked like the sort who loves to carry out his superior’s most atrocious orders.

“I am always happy to meet another Caecilius Metellus,” he said. The ubiquity of my family was a byword in Rome.

“Tribune Vatinius was responsible for securing Caesar’s extraordinary commission in Gaul,” Clodia gushed. If there
was anything she loved more than luxury it was power politics.

“A most unusual expedient to deal with the Gallic situation,” I said.

“It’s a reform long overdue,” Vatinius asserted.

“Reform? Do you mean this is something we can look forward to seeing again?”

“Of course. We have to stop pretending we live in the days of our ancestors. We have a vast empire all over the world, and we try to govern it as if Rome were still a little Italian city-state. The way we change offices every year is absurd! A man no sooner learns his task or the territory he is to govern when he is out of office.”

“Who would want to hold an office like the quaestorship or the aedileship for more than a year?” I objected.