The Sacrilege

Chapter V

I did not really believe that Celer would try to kill me. We were on good terms, and he and my father were close. I had not forgotten who his wife was, though. But it had been years since Clodia had last tried to have me killed, and I could not think why she would try to do away with me now. Her only possible reason would be that she thought I threatened her brother, for whom she had a more than sisterly fondness.

These things were much on my mind as I prepared for the day. This time, I did not neglect to tuck my dagger and my caestus into my tunic. Best to be safe. Accompanied by Hemes, I set out for Celer's house. I had no intention of confronting him with Nero's doings. In the first place, I did not yet have confirmation that any murder attempt had taken place. I would wait and watch.

I stopped at a corner barber's stall for a shave, then proceeded on toward the Palatine. I was at the base of the hill when I met a well-dressed procession headed toward the Forum, a grim-faced Celer at its head. He did not spare me a glance, and I was not about to attract his attention. I had seen that look before, in Gaul, and it usually meant that traitors were about to be executed. I fell in with the crowd of clients. I noticed that Caesar was there as well, equally grim-faced. I spotted my cousin-by-adoption Scipio Nasica the pontifex and stepped to his side.

"What's happened?" I asked him in a low voice.

"We don't know," he said, equally quiet about it. Everyone looked as if something terrible had happened. "A messenger came during the morning call. He took Celer and Caesar aside and spoke to them in private. Then they came out looking like they do now. Celer announced that an extraordinary meeting of the Senate has been called and has said nothing more."

My spine tingled. Ordinarily, this meant a major military disaster. I wondered where it had happened. Antonius Hibrida had turned in a string of defeats in Macedonia, so that should not come as a surprise. Perhaps the Germans were on the march again. I shuddered at the thought. The last time they had terrorized all Italy, and it had taken Gaius Marius to defeat them. Despite all his posturing, Pompey was no Gaius Marius.

The Forum had that look it always gets when everyone knows there is bad news in the air. Instead of the usual drifting, shifting mass, people gathered in tight little knots, each one feeding the other's ignorance with rumors and omens. I overheard talk of military disaster, civil war, invasion by foreign enemies, plague, famine, earthquake, and wondrous visitations by the Olympian deities, all before we reached the steps of the Curia.

Senators were bustling up the steps, eager to find out what had transpired. The lictors of the magistrates stood leaning on their fasces, trading omens like everybody else. As we reached the steps, Caius Julius left our little procession to speak with a matron so hatchet-faced she made him and Celer look cheerful by comparison. I asked my companions who this might be, and someone identified her as Caesar's mother. This was strange indeed. Roman women, however prestigious, were not supposed to take part in political matters.

Inside, the Curia vibrated with a low buzz, everyone apprehensive but also eagerly curious to know what had happened. Down in front, where all the greatest men were, stood the Consuls and the senior magistrates, the pontifexes and the Princeps. Something seemed decidedly odd about this group. Some of them, the Consuls in particular, looked amused.. There was an aura of barely suppressed hilarity among them, until Caesar joined them and they resumed their stony faces. The Consuls took their curule chairs and the rest of us sat on our benches. When all was properly ordered, Hortalus stood to address the Senate.

"Conscript fathers," he intoned, "I must address you on a grave matter." His voice to the ear was like honey to the tongue. "Last night, here in this sacred city of Quirinus, a most heinous act of sacrilege was perpetrated!" He paused for effect, and he got it. This was the last news anyone was expecting to hear. Serious offenses against the gods were rare, and usually involved unchastity in a Vestal Virgin. I noticed, however, that Hortalus had used the rare word sacrilegium. Sexual relations with a Vestal was always referred to as incestum.

"Last night," Hortalus went on, "during the ancient, holy and most solemn rites of Bona Dea, an impostor was discovered spying upon this ritual, which is forbidden to all men! It was the quaestor Publius Clodius Pulcher, who entered the house of the Pontifex Maximus by stealth, dressed as a woman!"

The Curia erupted into total uproar. There were calls for trial, calls for death. Mostly, there was just jabbering and whooping, and I did my share of it. I jumped around like a boy, clapping my hands with sheer joy.

"Now we'll be rid of him!" I said to someone near me. "Now he'll be condemned and given some awful ritual punishment, buried alive or pulled apart with red-hot pincers or something." It was a cheering thought, but my neighbor dampened it.

"He'll have to be tried first. Sit down and let's see what the pontiffs and lawyers say."

I hadn't thought of that. Cicero had gotten himself in plenty of trouble by urging the Senate to condemn the Catilinarians without jury trial, and no one had forgotten that. I sat. The Senators would be cautious about prosecuting him, worse luck.

The Consul Calpurnianus stood and held up a hand for silence, which he finally accomplished.

"Conscript fathers, before we can even discuss action, we must have some definitions so that we know what we are talking about. The distinguished Princeps Quintus Hortensius Hortalus has used the word 'sacrilege.' I will ask another distinguished jurist, Marcus Tullius Cicero, to explain this term for us."

Cicero stood. "In earlier times, 'sacrilege' was defined as the stealing of objects consecrated to a god, or deposited in a consecrated place. In more recent times, this word has been extended to cover all damage or insults done to the gods and to sacred places. If the conscript fathers so direct, I shall be most pleased to prepare a brief listing the sources and precedents for the legal charge of sacrilege."

"Caius Julius Caesar," said Calpurnianus, "as Pontifex Maximus, is it your judgment that this offense merits the name of sacrilege?"

Caesar stood and walked before the Senate as if he were officiating at his father's funeral. He pulled a fold of his toga over his head, solemn as a tragic actor.

"I do so judge it," Caesar intoned, "and it is to my unutterable shame that this unspeakable act should happen within the house of Caesar." This was the first time I heard him refer to himself in the third person, an annoying habit with which we were to become all too familiar.

"Then," said Calpurnianus, "with the concurrence of the Senate, I shall direct the praetor Aulus Gabinius to go with his lictors to the house of Clodius and place him under arrest."

"Just a minute, now!" shouted a Senator named Fufius, a notorious lackey of Clodius. "Publius Clodius is a serving Roman official and cannot be arrested or impeached while he is in office!"

"Oh, sit down and stop talking like an idiot!" barked Cicero. "Clodius is a mere quaestor, with no more imperium than brains. What's more, he has not yet gone to his place of duty to take up his office, and this offense has nothing to do with the discharge of official business."

"And let us not forget," said Metellus Nepos, all bland malice, "that during the Catilinarian emergency, serving Roman officials, including a praetor, were arrested. Might not a charge of sacrilege be as serious as one of treason?" This, of course, had nothing to do with Clodius but was aimed directly at Cicero, who had ordered those arrests.

I must say that, in the midst of all this legal and ritual dispute, the mood of most of the Senate was one of merriment. The whole affair was so absurd that it was like something happening in a play by Aristophanes. We would not have been surprised to see the principals don comic masks with wide-stretched mouths.

"Gentlemen," said Hortalus, "before we speak seriously of arrests and trials, I must remind you all of something. If we bring Publius Clodius into court, there will be testimony. In the course of that testimony, somebody, sooner or later, must speak of the rites of the Good Goddess." That gave us all pause.

Cato stood up. "Unthinkable! These sacred matters must not be made the subject of vulgar gossip in the Forum!"

"Step outside, Cato," shouted someone. "I'll wager a hundred sesterces nobody's babbling about anything else right now!"

"How can we have a trial," said the praetor Naso, "when the women who were present at the offense can't speak of what they were doing and no man can hear about it?" That set off another round of calls for action and protests against any such thing. I began to despair of anything constructive being decided. By now, I thought, Clodius must be on a fast horse headed for Messina, there to take ship for Sicily, where he could hide under the cover of his office until the furor died down in Rome.

Toward noon, there occurred a remarkable exchange. Everyone has heard some version of it, usually distorted beyond recognition by those who were not there or those who were but in later years grew too fearful to tell the truth. I am the only man now alive who was there that day, and this is how it truly happened, not how it ended up in Roman legend.

"Caius Julius," said the Consul Messala Niger, "without your speaking of forbidden things, do you know if any of the ladies who were present last night have any idea of what Clodius was up to when he entered your house dressed as a woman?" Everybody wanted to hear about this.

"My mother, the lady Aurelia, has told me there was talk that Clodius thus gained stealthy entrance to carry on a liaison with Pompeia." He drew himself up so straight and tall that I suspected him of wearing actors' buskins on his feet. "I have therefore resolved to divorce Pompeia forthwith!"

Celer stood. "Don't be hasty, Caius Julius. There is nothing going on between your wife and Clodius. He just wanted to spy on the rites. The fool has talked about nothing else for days."

Then Caesar made history, of a sort. Gazing around him like an eagle, he said, "She may well be innocent, but that is immaterial. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." You could have heard a pin drop in the Curia. The appearance of a god among us could not have been so stunning.

One of the many banes of my existence has been my laugh, which is high-pitched and raucous, and has on more than one occasion been likened to the braying of a wild ass. I could not help myself. I held it in as long as possible, then let it loose when the pain of suppression grew insupportable. It started as a snorting wheeze high up in my aristocratic Metellan nose and, an instant later, emerged like the sound of a legion's pack-train demanding their ration of oats.

In an instant, the Senate was convulsed. Vinegary old politicians who didn't laugh from one year to the next doubled over, laughing until their guts cramped. Solemn pontifexes had tears rolling down their wrinkled cheeks. Just outside the chamber, a whole bench of tribunes rolled about so helpless with laughter that they could not have interposed a veto if we had called for the beheading of every plebeian in Rome. I am sure that I saw even Cato smiling.

Since he is now a god, people think that Caius Julius must have been held in reverent awe since earliest youth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At this time he was forty years old, completely undistinguished politically and militarily, and highly regarded only in the popular assemblies, where he was good at currying favor with the mob. In the Senate he was a nobody. He had bribed his way to the supreme pontiff's position and he was renowned only for his extravagance and his questionable morals. Of Caius Julius Caesar two things were generally agreed: He had the biggest debts in history and he had almost certainly been buggered by King Nicomedes of Bithynia.

It was hearing that unbelievably sanctimonious pronouncement from such a source that convulsed the Senate. During all this hilarity Caesar stood like a statue of himself, his face devoid of expression. In later years, I lost a great deal of sleep wondering if he remembered that I was the first who laughed that day.

The meeting broke up with nothing decided. In no time at all, the story was all over the city. For months afterward stage comedies and wall scrawlings referred to Caesar's famous dictum. Anytime conversation flagged or a party seemed to be growing dejected, somebody would draw himself up and intone: "But Caesar's wife must be above suspicion," and everybody would laugh like rabid hyenas.

I walked down the steps of the Curia, mopping the tears from my face with a corner of my toga. No one could ask for better entertainment than this. Hermes came running up to me, and of course I had to explain everything to him. The jabber of the multitude in the Forum grew deafening. Between them, Clodius and Caesar had concocted the most memorable event of the year.

I went to the baths and was swamped by men who had not been there, demanding to know what was going on. I held forth for some time, not neglecting to call for the immediate arrest and trial of Publius Clodius. It was all so congenial that I had to remind myself that I was involved in deadly matters as well.

"I hope there's a trial," said a fellow Senator. "I've wondered for years what it is my wife does at that rite." It turned out that he spoke for a great many highly placed husbands. Others were more fearful of divine wrath.

"That woman Clodia must be involved," said a prominent banker. "She's his sister, and everyone knows that woman will do anything." This had occurred to me as well.

From the baths I went to the Statilian ludus, where I had to explain everything all over again to Asklepiodes. He knew little of Caesar and therefore missed the humor of the situation. And he had a Greek's love of mystery cults, so he was mildly scandalized by Clodius's sacrilege.

"Your Italian gods seem to lack the proper subordinates for punishing such transgressors," he said in his superior fashion. "Greek deities would have set the Friendly Ones after him."

I thought of those winged, serpent-haired creatures pursuing Clodius through the alleys of Rome, blood dripping from their eyes and their claws extended to rip flesh.

"It's a great pity," I admitted. "We don't personalize our gods in quite the way you Greeks do, and give them minions and servants. Some of our gods don't even have images."

"That is a very poor sort of religious practice, if you ask me," Asklepiodes maintained. "And the way you elect and appoint your priests, as if they were just ordinary officials. And most disgraceful is the way you appoint your augurs and give them a rule book for taking omens. Where is the art of divination without the divine afflatus?"

"That is because we are a rational and dignified people, and we are not about to conduct public affairs according to the ravings of a demented ecstatic. In times of crisis, I admit, we consult a sibyl, but I never heard that it did any real good."

"Because you Romans lack a true understanding of divine nature," he said stoutly.

"Nor have I ever heard of it doing Greeks any good. Even when their prophesies proved to be correct, the supplicant usually misinterprets it and comes to disaster."

Asklepiodes looked down his nose at me, a considerable feat since he was shorter. "It is always the occasional tale of irony that makes its way into legend. When approached in the proper spirit, sibylline oracles are usually quite reliable."

"I'll take your word for it," I told him.

"Now, on to less exalted matters. I fear I must bill you for one pig. A small one, originally intended for the gladiators' dinner."

My heart sank. "Then it was truly poison?"

"Healthy pigs are seldom struck dead by natural causes or the wrath of the gods. I fed it the pastries you gave me, and it was dead within an hour."

"An hour? That long? It must have been a weak poison."

"Not necessarily. Those instantaneous poisons one always hears about are fictitious. I have never encountered one that took less than an hour to kill a grown man, and most of them take much longer, accompanied by agonizing pains and convulsions. Somebody wanted you dead, my friend."

"Any idea what sort of poison?" I asked.

"I spoke before of the difficulty of this. I dissected the animal afterward and found no signs of hemorrhage. It did not go into violent convulsions. The poison might have been an extract of certain mushrooms, but it might as easily have been a decoction of Egyptian cobra venom which had been reduced and concentrated, then mixed with a stabilizing agent to form a powder."

"Cobra venom? That's a bit exotic. The boy had just visited a peasant herb-woman in the Forum. Do they traffic in such things?"

"They most certainly know mushrooms. Do not be fooled by appearances, Decius. She may never have attended lectures by learned physicians, but a peasant herbalist will have an intimate knowledge of the local plants and their properties. For all I know, there may be an herb or a root native to some local valley that produces a poison deadlier than any known to the school of Hippocrates."

"Or he might have obtained it elsewhere," I said.

"I marvel as always at your discernment in these matters. Most men are inclined to accept the quickest or most convenient answer to everything."

"It's what makes me so good at my work," I admitted. "There is a faculty in me that refuses to accept face value. If an explanation is easy or obvious, I get suspicious. If someone wants me to believe something, I suspect an ulterior motive."

"It must be a useful faculty indeed. In kings it becomes overdeveloped and they see assassins everywhere and overindulge themselves in executions."

"It's a good one for a man on the service of the Senate and People of Rome," I maintained. "And sometimes the lethal designs of enemies are real, as witness the unfortunate pig. How much for the animal, by the way?"

"Twelve sesterces."

"Twelve? That seems a bit steep for a small pig. Couldn't you have gone ahead and fed it to the gladiators? Surely the poison affected only the vital organs and could not have permeated the flesh."

"It is always inadvisable to take liberties with the diet of professional killers. Twelve sesterces, Decius."

I took out my purse and counted out the coins. "Now, as I see it, the boy may have been consulting the woman in her fortune-telling capacity, as she claimed. When I took his hand, I noticed that he was wearing a suicide ring. My slave Hermes followed him home and he vomited twice on the way. These seem to me to be signs of a very young and inexperienced conspirator, unused to murder. Well, he will be sorry he picked me for his maiden effort."

"And the fortune-teller?" Asklepiodes inquired.

"He probably wanted to confer about favorable signs or some such. I rather doubt he confided to her the nature of his mission, but a boy nervous enough to wear a poison ring would want to be sure that the gods favored that day for a momentous enterprise, or perhaps he wanted confirmation that he has a long life ahead of him."

"Yet he was a stranger to you. Who do you suspect set him upon you?"

"I have a short list this time, but more names may be added as I investigate further. Clodius, of course, but I think he would rather do me in with his own hand."

"Even Publius Clodius may have attained a certain discretion and maturity with the advance of years," Asklepiodes said. "I hear him spoken of as a promising figure in city politics."

"Oh, that. It just means he's the most successful criminal now operating."

"I also hear your good friend Titus Milo spoken of in the same fashion," he added.

"That's just because they're rivals. But Milo is my friend!" Sometimes I just could not understand Greeks.

"Now, you asked me to view the corpse of Aemilius Capito," the physician reminded me.

"Oh, right. I almost forgot. Being the would-be victim of a murderer makes you forget other people's problems in that area. What did you make of it?"

"Most odd," Asklepiodes said.

"How so?" My attention sharpened. "I thought it seemed rather ordinary, apart from the two-blow style of dispatching."

"That was the oddity. I persuaded the undertaker's men to allow me to examine the wounds closely. The persuasion will cost you another ten sesterces, by the way."

"Ten sesterces just to handle a corpse?" I said. "The necrophiles who lurk around the amphitheaters only pay five."

"Please!" he said, offended. "I did not 'handle' the corpse. That would be unclean. I examined closely. And one would expect the price to be higher for a Senator than for some poor, condemned wretch."

"It had better be worth it," I said, counting out yet more coins.

"It was most intriguing. The cut, or rather, stab in the throat was delivered with the most precise expertise. The blade was double-edged, no more than an inch wide, not a sica or a pugio, but rather an extremely sharp, flat-ground blade with a short point section." He gestured at the armory hanging on his walls. "I have nothing quite like it among my collection, but I think it must be rather like the sticking knife used to slaughter animals."

"That is odd," I admitted. "I know of nobody in Rome who kills like that. Perhaps that's why he knocked poor old Mamercus on the head first-to set him up for the artistic death-blow."

"Now I come to the oddest part," Asklepiodes said, relishing this slow process of revelation. "Come to it quickly," I said.

"When I examined the depression on the brow, I had no difficulty in identifying the weapon. It was a hammer, one with a round, flat face approximately one and one-half inches in diameter. The circular depression lay just above the nose, and it was twice as deep on the lower or nose side as on the upper side, toward the hairline."

"You speak as if this unevenness of depth were fraught with significance," I commented.

"And so it is. It means that the hammer blow was not delivered first, to stun the victim. Had that been the case, the depression would have been deeper toward the hairline. No, the murderer struck Capito with the hammer after he lay on the floor. He stood behind the body, about a foot from the top of the head, and struck downward at a rather sharp angle."

" After he was already down!" I said. "Whatever could have been his purpose? Capito was as good as dead when the knife blow was struck."

"Decidedly. A severed left carotid brings unconsciousness within a very few seconds, and death only a few seconds after that. There is no saving the victim. The hammer blow must have been for another purpose." He wandered over to his window and gazed down at the men practicing in the yard below. "It reminded me of something, and I think it was a thing I saw many years ago, but I cannot call it to mind. I do not have your facility for summoning up odd facts and putting them together."

I might have known. He probably knew something vital, but he couldn't remember what it was. I decided to be patient. My near-poisoning concerned me far more than the unfortunate Capito.

"Well, should you remember, please send for me."

"I shall. And should there be more of these murders, please feel free to consult me." He patted my shoulder as I left his quarters. "If I know you, there well be more of them."