Oracle of the Dead

1

I first heard of the Oracle of the Dead during the year of my praetorship. I was praetor peregrinus, traveling all over Italy and hearing cases that involved foreigners. It was an extremely agreeable way to spend a year in office and it kept me out of Rome, where things were getting very ugly that year. I spent much of the year in and around Baiae, partly because I had the use of a villa near there and partly because it was a very pleasant place and I could do pretty much as I liked.

“It’s not far from here,” Sextus Plotius told me. He was a director of the bronze founder’s syndicate, a very prominent local eques and, most importantly, he served the best Chian vintage I ever tasted. “Been here forever, maybe from the time of the Aborigines. It’s said that Odysseus and Aeneas both consulted the Oracle there.”

Baiae is, of course, named for its founder Baios, the steersman of Odysseus. Half the towns I have been in, including Rome, claim to have been founded by a Trojan War veteran or a near descendant of one. This is odd since, if you credit Homer, so many people were killed there that it’s hard to believe so many town founders could have survived.

“How wonderful!” Julia gushed. “Can we see it?” My wife was much more interested in religious matters than I. I had already visited the far more famous Cumaean Sibyl, also nearby, and had not been impressed.

“Actually,” I said, “we have a perfectly good mundus in Rome, my dear.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” she insisted. “The mundus just gives us access to the souls of our dead in the underworld. There’s no oracle.”

“And the dead know the answers to all things,” our host added.

I knew that I would end up going to see this marvel. I have never understood why people attribute such omniscience to the dead. Nobody thought most of them were knowledgeable while they were alive and I don’t anticipate a postmortem education. Even if they want to contact us, why expect them to tell the truth? Most people are liars while alive, so why shouldn’t they continue as such after death? People have such unrealistic expectations.

So, the next morning, I found myself occupying a monstrous litter on its way to the Oracle. Besides myself, my wife, and Plotius, the litter held Julia’s cousin, also Julia but nicknamed Circe, and Antonia, a sister of Marcus Antonius, the famous one, Caesar’s loyal supporter, soon to be Master of Horse and, in time, triumvir. Behind us in another litter were a few others of our party: my freedman Hermes, a kinsman named Marcus Caecilius Metellus, and a few others whose names escape me now. Being a praetor and holding imperium, I traveled in considerable state in those days, with a whole gaggle of attendants. I’d left my lictors at my villa, since it was a day on which official business was forbidden.

It was an enjoyable trip, because traveling through the Campanian countryside is always enjoyable. Campania holds some of the fairest land in all of Italy. It was once held most unreasonably by a pack of Campanians and Samnites and Greeks and such before we conquered it and settled a lot of good, dependable Roman citizens there to keep the natives in their place. In time we came to a temple on the beautiful bay, with a fine view of the water and the island of Capreae beyond. At the moment we arrived, a fleet of galleys set out from the nearby naval harbor, walking across the water on their oars like aquatic centipedes, adding to the picturesque aspect of the scene, like a fresco come to life.

The ladies made the usual delighted noises as we disembarked from our prodigious transports. Looking around, I gave the temple some attention. It was a strange one, even for southern Campania, where many odd gods are worshipped. It had recently been refurbished to traditional Greek taste, in the Doric style like most Greek temples in Italy. But I could see that it was far older and had been built on a plan I had seen only in certain very ancient ruins, most of them in Marsian territory.

Even odder than the temple were the priests waiting to greet us. Atop the steps were six men in white robes wearing laurel chaplets, clearly devotees of Apollo and quite conventional, but at the bottom were six more robed in black, three men and three women. They wore wreaths of asphodel, a funerary plant, and the priestesses held a number of black dogs on leashes.

“Is there one temple here or two?” I asked Plotius.

“Two, really. The upper temple is dedicated to Apollo, as you can see. The cave of the Oracle of the Dead lies beneath it.”

“Those look like priests of Hecate,” Circe said. “The asphodel is sacred to her.”

“And the black bitch is her tutelary animal,” Antonia added. Like many other aristocratic Roman ladies, they knew far too much about foreign cults, especially the less reputable ones. Hecate is Thracian in origin, though she used to be worshipped widely in southern Italy.

“How fitting,” Julia said. “Ulysses and Aeneas both invoked Hecate before entering the underworld.” She caught my look. “Well, after all, Aeneas was an ancestor of my family.” Sometimes I wondered about Julia.

Plotius made the introductions. The chief priest of Apollo was named Eugaeon, and I have forgotten the others. They extended the customary welcome, all the more enthusiastically because I was a Roman praetor. While they did this, they ignored their black-robed colleagues. It was as if these people did not exist. I refrained from asking, willing to go along with whatever local custom prevailed.

Then we got the tour of the temple. As I had thought, the interior revealed far greater antiquity than the exterior with its veneer of white marble and its new, Doric columns. It was murky inside, despite the coating of white paint, which covered what appeared to be older paintings and low-relief carvings. The statue of Apollo was pretty but looked out of place in this gloomy setting. He was in his rarely depicted aspect as Apollo the Far-Shooter, holding a bow with a quiver of arrows by his thigh. This is Apollo in his aspect as avenger. I was certain that one of the old terra-cotta images had once occupied its plinth, or perhaps one of wood. There were rude Italian gods in this place for many centuries before the Greeks came with their graceful deities.

Back outside, we were turned over to the other lot for the real purpose of our visit. They stood where we had first seen them. None of them had as much as touched the lowest temple step. To my surprise, the first to greet us was one of the women.

“Does the praetor seek wisdom?” she asked, oddly.

“Well, I have a fair store of it already,” I began. Julia hit me in the ribs with an elbow. “I can always use more, of course.”

“Praetor,” Plotius said, “this is Iola, chief priestess of the Oracle.”

“The Oracle is the source of all knowledge,” she said in that thrillingly portentous voice employed by religious charlatans everywhere.

“Then it has some competition,” I observed. “The Sibylline Books, the various prophetesses situated here and there-” another elbow from Julia.

“Frauds,” Iola said succinctly.

“How so?” I asked.

“They claim to speak for gods. Our Oracle communicates with the dead. Have you ever known a god personally?”

“Well, they’ve only come to me in dreams,” I admitted.

“But I will wager you have known a great many dead people.”

“Um, never thought of it that way,” I said, flustered as always when some total loon employs good logic.

She nodded. “Just so. Come with me.” She turned and led us around to the rear of the temple, with the other sacerdotes and bitches in attendance.

“Why is the entrance around the back?” I wanted to know.

“To face the sunrise,” the priestess explained. “At sunrise on Midsummer Day, the sun is positioned precisely in the center of the doorway and shines straight down the shaft.”

“That must be impressive,” I said. Roman religion does not make a great thing of the solstices and equinoxes, except to have festivals in their general vicinity, such as Saturnalia. This may have been because, prior to Caesar’s reform of the calendar, it was so difficult to predict when they would fall.

The ground fell away behind the temple, so that the cave entrance was situated in the center of a middling hillside. The area around it was positively overgrown with vegetation associated with death, funerals, and graves: asphodel and hemlock, myrtle, cornel, towering cedar, and other, equally evocative plants.

“It’s a gloomy gardener that planted this place,” I said.

“Nothing was planted here, Praetor,” said Iola. “All is as it has always been. The growth here obeys the will of the gods we serve.”

“Don’t be such a Skeptic, dear,” said my ever supportive wife.

The entrance was smaller than I had pictured, and less rugged. It was a tall, narrow doorway surrounded by facing stones carved in a peculiar and antiquated fashion, the designs being similar to the ancient figures and patterns I had seen plastered over in the temple. The stone was deeply weathered and stained and bore no writing in any language. It looked older than the Lapis Niger and I suspected that it predated the appearance of writing in Italy. For the first time I began to take seriously the suggestion that this shrine was indeed Aboriginal. Just before the entrance, instead of the usual altar, there stood a broad stone table laden with cult objects: more chaplets of asphodel, miniature thyrsi or wands of cornel wood tipped with small pinecones, amulets depicting a tripartite woman’s face, caps of dogskin, and so forth. There was also a tray of cups and a pitcher, all carved from wood and blackened with age.

“First,” Iola said, “you must be purified and protected by the apotropaic rites.” This involved a great deal of chanting and fumigation with incense, sprinkling with water from a holy spring, followed by more chanting, and culminating with the sacrifice of a black dog. Iola broke a sprig from one of the cedars, dipped it in the dog’s blood, and painted our foreheads, our feet, and our hands with it.

It was all very conventional. I had been hoping for something more exotic.

Iola poured the cups full of something from the pitcher. Like just about everything else in the vicinity, the liquid was black. I knew that she expected us to drink the stuff. Sure enough, each of us was handed a cup and watched expectantly. Julia and the other women knocked theirs back as if they’d never heard of Socrates. I eyed my cup dubiously and the men of the party watched me.

For a while I toyed with the idea of throwing the cup away and going back to the villa. I reflected, however, this was some sort of religious charade, not a likely assassination plot. You don’t murder somebody you intend to fleece. So I swallowed the vile liquid and the rest did the same. It was predictably bitter and I was pretty sure I detected oil of wormwood among the ingredients.

We were draped and garlanded with leaves and hung with amulets. Fortunately, only the freedmen of the party were required to wear the dogskin caps, which they accepted with poor grace, Hermes in particular. He had been getting arrogant since I freed him, so perhaps this little humiliation was beneficial.

One of the still-speechless priests or acolytes or whatever brought a flaming torch and the others produced small torches from someplace and ignited them. The flames were streaked with green, a bit of mummery I recognized: certain preparations of copper, mixed with firewood or any other burning medium, will produce green flame. The blackrobed torchbearers filed into the cave entrance and we followed.

My first impression of the cavern was one of disappointment. In the first place, it was not a natural cavern at all, but a man-made tunnel, and not a very big one at that. Its roof was so low that the taller members of the party had to duck their heads somewhat. It was so narrow that the walls brushed the shoulders of the men of the party. The closeness was quite oppressive, though from the giggles I heard behind me, the younger men and women were enjoying it. The smoke from the torches may have contributed to the carefree mood of the young people. Besides the acrid copper scent, I detected a smell of burning hemp. I had encountered this in Egypt and it is known to encourage merriment.

Soon the giggling stopped as the pervasive gloom affected everyone. Every few steps a small niche was cut into the wall, in which burned the flame of a small lamp. With this bit of light added to that of the torches and my improving night vision, I could discern the tool marks on the walls. Every bit of this tunnel had been cut from solid rock, and as we progressed along the down-sloping passage, I was struck by the incredible amount of labor and time that must have been expended in its carving, for surely only a single man could have worked on the rock face at one time; perhaps two if one worked crouching while a second leaned over him, standing. All the same, it seemed an unreasonable way to carve a tunnel. A small gang of miners could have made a wider tunnel in much less time.

Still, there it was. It had been cut with great care, the walls perfectly plumb, the floor smooth and sloping with great regularity. The ceiling was somewhat of a mystery, for what appeared to be centuries’ worth of torch soot obscured it. It seemed more like something Egyptians would do than Italians. We are no slouches at stonework, as witness the wonderful masonry of our Cloaca Maxima, built when Rome had kings, and still as sound and perfect as the day the stones were first set in their courses. We carve away whole hillsides and tunnel through mountains to build our roads and aqueducts, but these projects are sensibly planned and carried out for practical purposes: to facilitate transport or carry water or conduct sewage away from a city.

This tunnel to Hell was something else. It was an uncanny work, produced at an immense cost in time and labor for purely occult purposes. My mood seemed to grip the others as well. They became very silent except for occasional shudders and gasps. I do not know whether it was the effects of the smoke or that drink or the stupefying monotony of the priestly chant, but we began to see and hear things (I questioned everyone later and confirmed that we had all experienced the same thing). Streaks of colored light began to dart among us and we heard whispering voices. I could not make out what they were saying, but they had that maddening quality so common to half-overheard conversations that if they were a tiny bit louder we might understand them.

The women became truly frightened, even Julia. We men maintained our stout Roman facade of Stoic impassivity to hide the quaking of our bowels. For make no mistake about it, we were all frightened. The hazards of battle and politics, the terrors of the natural world, these things may be dealt with employing one’s physical bravery, strength, and resources. But what may a mortal man do in the face of the supernatural?

Not that I truly believed that these people could take us to the underworld and communicate with the dead, but those feelings of dread are easily aroused under the right circumstances, and they had the circumstances in the form of that tunnel. Thoughts flitted through my mind like those flickering lights, of cleverly manipulated mirrors and hidden holes to bear the voices of whispering confederates. At the Museum in Alexandria I had seen many wonders, all of them performed openly by philosophers without the slightest recourse to supernatural means, but that had not been amid such surroundings.

The tunnel still took us down. It may be that the smoke and drink distorted our sense of time and distance. Sometimes the flames of the torches seemed to draw far ahead of us and every word spoken or chanted seemed to echo endlessly. As always when venturing underground, I found that the weight of earth and stone above me seemed to press down and I had to slow my breathing, knowing that it would take little for me to burst into panic, a state far too undignified for a praetor.

Just when I thought the whole ordeal had become unbearable, the air grew humid and there was a smell of sulfurous water. The tunnel opened somewhat and divided, one way sloping up, the other downward. We came to a room that would have seemed intolerably small for a proper shrine, but after the suffocatingly cramped tunnel it was almost like emerging into open air, though the light was still dim and the air full of smoke and mist.

In the center of the chamber was an altar decked with dead foliage and covered with innumerable bones that piled high and spilled onto the floor. Some of the bones were human, among them the skeletons of infants. Julia and Circe turned away in horror, but Antonia stared in fascination. She was as demented as the rest of her family.

“Here we pay tribute to the shades of the dead,” intoned Iola, “and to their queen, Hecate.” At that, one of the priests walked to the back of the chamber and thrust his torch into a bowl that contained twigs and brush. The flames rose, revealing an image of the goddess, hewn from the same stone as the surrounding walls. The women gasped, though it was only an archaic carving. The goddess was depicted holding her leashed hounds and she was three-faced, with the face on one side that of a young woman, that on the other an old hag, and the one in the center that of a mature matron, all of it done so crudely that it must have been made long before people in these parts knew anything about Greek sculpture.

The priest, if that was what he was, cast a handful of incense upon the fire and we were wreathed in fragrant smoke. Iola shouted what sounded like a prayer in some incomprehensible language, although I thought I caught a Marsic word or two.

Circe gasped. “The goddess moved!”

“Just the flickering light,” I muttered. Julia turned and glared at me.

“The goddess grants us permission to approach the Styx and summon her subjects for questioning,” Iola said.

The Styx? I thought. It was a long walk, but surely we haven’t come that far!

Now Iola took us down a side passage that descended just a short way and the smell of sulfur water grew more pronounced and the mist more dense. This time the other black-robed figures did not accompany us. There was a sound of rushing water and even my hardened, Skeptical faculties deserted me. We were headed for the Styx, and I wasn’t ready to cross it yet. I didn’t even have a coin beneath my tongue.

At last we came to a chamber full of steam and there before us was a rushing stream of water, literally boiling as if it had run through Vulcan’s forge before entering the chamber. We could not see the far side of the stream, for the fog obscured it. I had the impression that the distance was not great. In an odd way this was of some comfort to me. I had always heard that the Styx was a wide, slow-moving, black river, but if this was not the true Styx, it was certainly something uncanny.

I could see that most of my party were quite convinced that they were standing beside the river over which the gods swore their most solemn oaths, but their minds did not work like mine. I was puzzled by something else, something to me as strange as any supernatural manifestation: Somebody, long ago, had driven this tunnel, at the cost of great difficulty, straight down to this underground river, with absolute sureness and no hesitation. In the entrance tunnel I had seen no side shafts or exploratory excavations, as you see when miners search for metal-bearing ore. Whoever cut the tunnel knew exactly where he was going, and accomplished it in such a fashion that the doorway was precisely aligned with the sunrise on Midsummer Day.

Everyone jumped when we heard a hoarse, croaking voice from the river.

“Who seeks the wisdom of the Oracle?” I have heard ravens with more melodious voices.

“A praetor of Rome,” Iola said.

“Approach.”

“What?” I said. “I’m already here.”

“Praetor,” Iola said. “You must stand so that you actually touch the water.”

“But it’s boiling!” I protested.

“Wisdom does not come without cost,” she informed me.

“Go ahead,” said my beloved wife. “Don’t be so timid.” I heard chuckles from behind me. My loyal entourage, no doubt.

So, much against my better judgment, I stepped to the edge of the stream and just let the tips of my toes touch the water. To my surprise, while quite warm it was not truly boiling, despite the turbulence and foaming bubbles. Reassured, I went out ankle-deep. The bottom was perfectly smooth rock, not a trace of sand or gravel.

“What would the praetor know?” croaked the goddess or whatever it was.

Might as well ask something of consequence, I thought. “What will be the outcome of the current strife between Caesar and the Senate?” This was the great question on everyone’s mind, and a source of great dread.

“Caesar is doomed,” Hecate said baldly.

“Well, that’s plain enough,” I said. “Not like that old hag at Cumae who only babbles gibberish.”

“Decius!” Julia hissed. She suspected me of disrespect, no doubt.

“Well, then, will the Senate prevail, and our republican institutions remain safe?”

“The Senate is doomed,” she said.

“How can they both be doomed? Who will triumph ultimately, then?”

“Caesar will be victorious, and will rule for many, many years.”

“I take it back. She does speak gibberish. How can Caesar rule for many years, yet be doomed?”

“Praetor,” Iola said, “you have asked three questions and have been answered. Three questions are all that are permitted.”

“What? You never said that before we came down here.”

“Nonetheless, it is ancient custom. Three questions and no more.”

I felt cheated, but I am not certain why. More questions would merely have meant more such nonsense. I backed out of the water and went to rejoin my party. Hermes passed me a flask and I took a swig of good Falernian.

“Reverend Iola,” Julia said, “might I approach the goddess?” I suppressed a groan at her piety. She never talked to me like that.

“You may.”

Julia stepped into the water and I dreaded what was about to happen. I knew she would ask the goddess about a cure for her infertility, right there in front of all those people. Instead, to my surprise and somewhat to my relief, she screamed loudly.

“Julia,” I chided. “The water’s not all that hot.”

But she was pointing at the water a few feet before her. My thinning hair stood on end as I saw something surfacing there. I dashed forward and jerked Julia back. Now some of the other women were screaming. Some of the men, too, I think.

“What is it?” Iola gasped. Her eyes bugged out.

“Surely nothing can live in this water!” Antonia cried, hustling forward to get a good look.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s nothing living at all. It’s quite dead, in fact.” By now I saw that it was a white-robed corpse, floating on its stomach. “Iola, have your slaves take this unfortunate person from the water.”

She hissed her orders and a pair of black-robed slaves waded into the water and dragged the corpse ashore. They laid it on its back and I called for torches. A couple were lowered toward the bloodless face and a great collective gasp arose.

“Why,” I said, “if it isn’t Eugaeon, priest of Apollo!”

“How can this be?” Iola wailed. “How did the priest enter the sacred river?”

“I’m rather more concerned whether he did it willingly or unwillingly,” I said.

Sextus Plotius crowded forward and stared at the corpse, his face pale. “Praetor, I do not understand this. There is no access to this river except by way of this tunnel.”

“Surely it must surface somewhere near the temple,” I said. “And it would have to be upstream from here.”

He shook his head. “No, there is no flowing surface water in the vicinity. There are hot springs in abundance in Campania, but none nearer than ten miles from this spot. Even if one of them flows into this chamber, there is no way that he could have gone there, jumped in, and surfaced here in the time since we last saw him, no more than an hour ago.”

“Maybe he sneaked down here while we were undergoing the rites above,” Hermes suggested.

“Don’t speak foolishly!” Iola said. “The sacred black bitches of Hecate would never let a priest of Apollo approach the holy precincts. The very scent drives them wild.”

“Be that as it may,” I said, “the man is dead and may have been murdered. As praetor, I will investigate this.”

“Ah, noble Praetor Metellus,” Plotius said diffidently, “you are praetor peregrinus, in charge of cases involving foreigners. There seem to be none but natives here.”

“Nonsense,” I said, gesturing toward the black-clad devotees of Hecate, “these creatures are as foreign as a pack of Britons. I will take charge.”

“As you wish,” Plotius sighed.

“I want this body carried above into daylight,” I ordered. “Now, everyone, back up that tunnel, and I’d better not smell any smoke that doesn’t come from a torch or lamp.”

“But, Praetor,” Iola said, all but wringing her hands, “there are ceremonies we must perform. This holy place has been contaminated by death. There are lustrations and sacrifices. .”

“Do them later,” I told her. “I want none of your people to leave before I have questioned them, either.”

She bowed in an almost Oriental fashion. “As you wish, Praetor.”

So we made the long trudge back up the strange tunnel, but this time I had no leisure to ponder its oddity. What could this possibly portend? In spite of my matter-of-fact pose, I was almost as unsettled as the rest. First, the whole alien ritual and the descent into the uncanny tunnel, the weird river with its putative goddess, and now a man we had met so recently, dead in an unfathomable fashion. It was enough to unsettle a philosopher.

Then I cheered up. I had been getting bored, and now there was something interesting to do.

Clean air and sunshine quickly restored everyone’s spirits, except for Iola’s.

The slaves laid the body of the late Eugaeon upon the ground and I took a closer look at him. “Remove his clothing,” I instructed the slaves.

“Decius!” my wife cried, shocked. “That is terribly undignified!”

“Oh, he shouldn’t mind being naked. He’s Greek, isn’t he? Was Greek, I should say.” She whirled and stalked off, taking the other women of the party with her. Except for Antonia, of course, who came closer to get a better look.

With his clothes off, the man looked shrunken. He was not fat, as so many priests are. His face and body were typical for a man of about forty years, rather spare, but not underfed. The only thing strange about him was that he was completely depilated.

“Not a hair on him,” I remarked. “Is this required of priests of Apollo?”

“I wish more Roman men would do that,” Antonia said. “I think it’s attractive. I have all my slaves depilated.” Something else I really didn’t need to know about Antonia.

“Has someone gone to fetch the other priests? Maybe they can tell me if they’re supposed to be hairless.” One of my assistants ran off to fetch them. I could see no mark of violence on the front of the body. “Turn him over,” I told the slaves. No mark on the back, either.

“He must have drowned,” Hermes said.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “There are plenty of ways to kill a man that leave no mark on the body: poison and asphyxiation come immediately to mind.”

“Maybe he was frightened to death,” somebody suggested.

“He doesn’t have a frightened expression on his face,” somebody else pointed out.

“I never saw a corpse that wore any sort of expression at all,” I told them, “and many of the deceased were plenty frightened immediately prior to expiring.”

A moment later the boy sent to fetch the priests came running back. His name was Sextus Lucretius Vespillo, the son of a friend. He was about fourteen, had recently shaved his first beard for his manhood ceremony, and was rather easily excited. “They’re all gone!” he shouted. “Not a sign of them.”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose that tells us who killed the bugger.”

“But we don’t know he was murdered,” Plotius cautioned.

“Then why did they run off like Persians at the sight of a Roman?” I asked. “That looks like guilty behavior to me. I want a thorough search made for those priests. And I want all of you men mounted and out looking for those priests. Also for some way that Eugaeon got into that water. There has to be an access to the underground river somewhere nearby. It’s probably hidden, but don’t let that stop you.”

Julia returned when she saw that the body had been decently covered. “Ah, my dear, you can be of great assistance to me in this matter.”

“How so?” she said, suspiciously.

“You seem to be conversant with this Hecate cult.”

“I’ve studied the ancient religions. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on them.”

“Still, you know more than I do. And it seems that women play a leading role in this cult. I want you to question Iola and the other priests and priestesses or acolytes or whatever they are. Women seem to be more comfortable talking to women than to male officials.”

“For good reason,” Julia said.

“Exactly. I, in the meantime, will set up a temporary headquarters for investigation here at the temple.”

“Do you think the matter is all that important? You are a Roman praetor with imperium. You could assign one of your men to conduct the investigation. You have more important matters demanding your attention.”

I looked about at our strange surroundings; the funereal glade with the beautiful temple rising above it. “I am not so sure about that. This is a very odd business and we know how upset people can get when someone of local prestige gets murdered. People are on edge right now anyway. All this tension between Caesar and Pompey and the Senate has people expecting the days of Marius and Sulla to return.”

“That is preposterous,” she protested.

“Nevertheless, the fear is there. I want a quick end to this business before the whole countryside is up in arms over a common murder.”

But I was soon to find that there was nothing at all common about this particular murder.