The Tribune's Curse (24 page)

Ariston and his slaves had left without ceremony and in haste. Had he left in fear? And, if so, of whom was he afraid? Did he fear that I would return with more questions to discern his guilty secret? Or was he afraid of the same violence that had been visited upon his erstwhile student, Ateius Capito? I suspected that it was the latter. If so, I could scarcely blame him. Being caught up in the power games of the great Romans was like being trapped between the stones of a great mill.

I could find nothing of any interest within, so I went back outside, closing the door behind me. Another promising lead had been eliminated. There were not even any neighbors I could question. It would have been of some use to know whether he had started packing the moment I left his house, or when he got the news of Ateius’s death.

All the way back through the gate and into the City, I pondered this turn of events. Crassus, a
pontifex
and an augur, but
not one of the Board of Fifteen charged with authority over the Sibylline Books, had taken it upon himself to consult them on the question of Rome supporting Ptolemy. To do so he would have needed some sort of interpreter, and who better to perform that service than the famous authority Ariston of Cumae, a man who hailed from the home of the sibyl herself?

So Crassus had suborned the interpretation he wanted from Ariston. There was the possibility that the Books really
had
said that we should not back Ptolemy with an army, but somehow I doubted it. Crassus had a way of getting what he wanted. Ariston had responded to bribery or threats. He lived simply in Rome, but for all I knew, he had been buying a fine estate for his retirement down in Cumae. Or perhaps he had just wanted to stay alive—a perfectly understandable motive. It was unlikely that I would learn anytime soon. I had neither time nor resources to scour Italy for a fleeing magician.

I turned my steps southward, wending my way toward the Via Sacra. There remained one site I had not yet visited in my double investigation.

The house of Ateius Capito was even more thronged than it had been on my previous visit. This time, instead of petitioners, the street outside was crowded with the sort of idlers who continually haunt the nightmares of those who must administer the City: the perpetual malcontents who seem to do no work, but are available at all hours to shout, argue, and riot. A couple of the remaining tribunes were there to keep them in a state of spirited outrage.

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as
Death to the aristocrats!
and
The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood!
and
May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends!
All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has
an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form.

Men nudged one another as I approached, casting one another significant glances, as such men are wont to do. I have no idea what it is that they hope to convey by these gestures, but they seem to enjoy the exercise. Perhaps it gives them a feeling of importance.

“You are not welcome here, Senator,” said a tribune I recognized as Gallus, the cohort of Ateius in his strenuous efforts to deny Crassus the Syrian command.

“Why do I need to be welcome?” I demanded. “I have been appointed
iudex
with praetorian authority. That calls for no welcome.”

“You’re one of
them!”
yelled a meager-faced villain.

“One of what?” I said. “One of the citizens?”

“You’re an aristocrat!” the man shouted back.

“Oh, shut up, the lot of you!” I shouted. “I wasn’t appointed by just any praetor! I was appointed by Titus Annius Milo! I imagine that name is known to you.” Now their growling died down. They may not have been among Milo’s adherents, but like most of Rome’s street toughs, they feared him.

“No need for a riot,” Gallus said reluctantly. “What do you want here, Senator?”

“I want to speak with Ateius’s Marsian friend, Sextus Silvius.”

The men nearest the door looked at one another. “He’s not here,” one of them said.

“Is that so? Where might he be?”

“We—we don’t know. Some of the tribune’s closest friends have left the City. When a tribune can be murdered, who is safe?” The man looked to the others for agreement and support. I realized that they were at a loss how to act. The leaders of Ateius’s little
factio
had disappeared.

“They were probably murdered as well!” said another of the door crowd. The grumbling rose.

I turned around. “Tribune Gallus! I wish to speak with you in privacy. Come with me.”

“You have no authority to order me, Senator,” he blustered, for the sake of his audience. “But, unlike the
factio
of Crassus and Pompey and the rest of the aristocrats, I respect the institutions of Rome.” He addressed the crowd. “My friends, I will return as soon as I have straightened this man out.”

We walked down the street, out of sight and hearing. A few streets away there was a little park surrounding a shrine to the
genius loci
of the district, here represented in the traditional fashion as a sculpted snake climbing a stubby column. Withered garlands draped its base, and pigeons pecked at the offerings of bread and fruit left by the people of the neighborhood. I took a seat on a stone bench, and Gallus sat beside me.

“Tribune, in the emergency meeting called by Pompey after the departure of Crassus, you said that you had no foreknowledge of the outrageous behavior of Ateius that day.”

“And I spoke nothing but the truth,” he insisted. Here, away from his crowd, he spoke reasonably, as one public servant to another. “After the
lustrum
I went to the Temple of Vesta with Pompey and my fellow tribunes, and we all swore this before her fire.”

“Very well. I need to know certain things about the tribune Ateius.”

“I knew him only in our shared public functions,” he said, apparently anxious to distance himself from the man.

“That is, principally, what I need to know. On what matters did the two of you cooperate?”

“Why, on denying Crassus the Syrian command, of course. Everyone knows the harm that will be done to Rome if he—”

“What other business?” I pressed.

“There was no other business. Not for Ateius Capito!”

“Do you mean to say that the two of you spent almost an entire year in office doing nothing but opposing Crassus?”

“Nothing of the sort! Why, I worked with Peducaeus on getting the river wharfs rebuilt, and petitioning the
pontifex maximus
to extend Saturnalia for an extra day and reform the calendar, which has gotten into dreadful shape, and there’s the whole business of the agrarian laws and the land commissioners to be sorted out—”

I held up a hand to stanch the flow of words. Everybody was complaining about overwork these days.

“I can see that you’ve exhausted yourself in service to the People, as every tribune should. Did Ateius Capito concern himself with none of these pressing matters?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no. It was only Crassus, as far as Ateius was concerned.”

“What about all the petitioners who mobbed his home? How did he keep their support?”

“The vast bulk of those people do nothing but take up a tribune’s time. Often as not, they just want an important ear to hear their complaints. If they do have real problems, they are usually so petty that they can be solved by a freedman with a few coins to pass around. Ateius’s staff handled those. The few with substantial grievances to address, Ateius passed on to the other tribunes. He wasn’t very popular among us.”

“Didn’t that strike anyone as odd? The office of tribune is just one step on a man’s political career. Any man of sense uses it to make contacts, do favors that will profit him later on, even, perhaps, enrich himself a bit, within legal limits. How was Ateius supporting his rather expensive office if all he did was alienate the richest man in the world?”

“Ateius came of a substantial equestrian family; you’ve seen his house.”

“Oh, come now, none of that! You know as well as I that if he wasn’t doing profitable political favors for important people, he had to be buying the support he needed. That requires a great deal more than the fortune of a substantial equestrian family. Whose money was he spending, if not his own?”

“He was passing out the silver rather freely,” Gallus said. “But I was not about to ask. The possible sources are rather limited, you know.” The last words were mumbled, as if he was reluctant to say even this much.

I knew exactly what he meant. Crassus certainly wasn’t financing his own opposition. That left the two men with the most to gain from the elimination of Crassus: Pompey and Caesar. The conference at Luca the previous year had supposedly patched up their differences, but nobody mistook it for anything but a temporary political expedient, to keep things at home quiet while two of the Big Three were engaged in foreign service and the third was occupied with the all-important grain supply.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about Capito? Any unusual visitors he may have had, foreigners who may have been seen with him, any other odd behavior?”

“Senator, I rarely saw him except in the Forum when we dealt with that single issue. I was far too busy to socialize with him. His enthusiasm for foreign religions and sorcery was well-known, but public life in Rome is ridden with crackpots.”

“All too true. Well, Tribune, I thank you for your cooperation.” We both stood.

“This is a vicious business,” Gallus said. “I hope you find who murdered him. He was a tribune and shouldn’t have been touched while he was still in office.” He adjusted the drape of his toga. “Aside from that, I’m glad the bastard’s dead.”

I went back to the Forum, stopping on the way to snack at the stands of some street vendors. With commendable moderation, I washed it down with nothing stronger than water.

I hailed a few friends as I crossed the Forum, but I did not stop, instead climbing the lower slope of the Capitol to the Tabularium, the main archive of the Roman State. There I located the freedman in charge of the Censor’s records.

“How may I help you, Senator?” he asked. He was surrounded by slaves who actually looked busy for a change, that year being one in which the Census was taken.

“I need the records pertaining to the late tribune Caius Ateius Capito’s qualifications for office.” The fitness of candidates to stand for office coming under the purview of the Censors, Capito would have deposited a statement of his age, property, and military and political service with them. The man went off, shaking his head at this unreasonable imposition on the time of a busy, busy official. It was getting to be an old story.

I waited for him amid the rustlings and cracklings of papyrus, the rattlings of wooden binders containing wax tablets, the thumpings of lead seals as the slaves and freedmen went through the motions of the most notoriously tedious job required by the constitution. It was a good thing we only had to do it every five years.

“Here you are, Senator,” the archivist said, handing me a small roll of papyrus. I unrolled it and read.

There was not much to it. Ateius stated that he possessed the minimum property required for equestrian status, that he had been enrolled in the equestrian order by the Censors Cornelius Lentulus and Gellius Publicola, fifteen years before. He had served with the legions for the required number of campaigns, under Lucullus, Metellus Creticus, Pompey, and Philippus, he of the famous fishponds. Most of his service had been in the East, I noticed—Macedonia and the wars with Mithridates and Tigranes and their heirs, for the most part, plus the bandit-chasing that inevitably takes up so much of an army’s time in that part of the world, even when it is nominally at peace. Perhaps, I thought, it was during these years that Ateius acquired his taste for strange,
foreign religions and magic. The Eastern world is rank with sorcery.

Of previous electoral offices he had none, but then none are required to hold the office of tribune. He had, however, served on the staffs of several serving officials, in the purely informal fashion that prevailed in those days. There was no need for him to list them in his declaration to the Censors, but, like so many of our lesser political lights, he seemed to feel compelled to boast of his associations with the mighty. One of these jumped out at me immediately: three years previously, he had served as assistant to the aedile Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, provider of wonderful Games and scourge of all vile cultists who could not pony up his price.

I returned the scroll to the surly freedman and went out onto the portico atop the broad steps of the Tabularium. The view of the Forum was a good one that day, the clear light of winter bringing out the whitened togas of the candidates, who were doing what I should have been doing. The next year’s praetors and consuls, the aediles and tribunes and quaestors, were out there—hardly an honest man among them, to my way of thinking. Always excepting Cato, of course, who was standing for praetor. He was the one incorruptibly honest man in public life. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stand Cato.

I descended the steps. I had lost my most promising lead, but the absence of Ariston made my thoughts drift back to that other suspect foreigner, Elagabal. Elagabal was from Syria. Ateius Capito had served in Syria under more than one proconsul. The connection was tenuous, but it was there. Roman men with ambitions for public office had to serve in a specified number of campaigns, and that meant going wherever there was a war. I had served in Spain and Gaul, but had the timing been different, I might have served in Syria instead. But now I remembered something Elagabal had said just as I left his house that I realized I
should have followed up on, only I had failed to understand its implications.

T
HE HOUSE WAS UNCHANGED
, and I hoped that I would not find it deserted, as I had the house of Ariston. Over its door brooded the serpent swallowing its own tail, and I now remembered that I had seen a ring in that shape on the finger of Ateius the one time I had spoken with him. At my knock, the hulking guard opened the door.