Deadly Election

27

That shocked me. Could it be true? Had Sextus been knocking Julia about? Had she gone because he hit her?

I felt doubtful. Vibius Marinus had been boorish about informers (who wasn’t?) but on the whole he seemed too bland; he lacked the kind of intensity that I associate with violent men (I had encountered enough to know). I summed him up as impetuous, though only in the sense of misjudgement. He jumped in without thinking. He lacked measure and gravitas − but that is not the same as exploding with rage and using your fists.

I had seen him with his mother, with his children. All the same, how many violent men seem to outsiders to behave normally? In public, they conceal their brutality under a show of utter decency. How many friends and neighbours tell you, after a tragedy, that they had no idea? They are stunned. They would never have allowed it to continue − or so they maintain.

And how many times have I heard that while standing beside the pyre for some miserable, skeletal victim after the undertaker has told me privately that the poor woman had sustained many broken bones and scars over the years, before the attack that killed her?

If Vibius beat his wife, it explained why she might leave him − though if she was any kind of mother, why had she left behind her still-young children with a man who hurt her?

Even if Vibius hit Julia, Rome might be slow to call it reprehensible. Historically, Roman men had the right to chastise their wives and children, and if they committed crimes that shamed the family, to kill them even. The paterfamilias had been king, trial judge and executioner in his own household.

In theory he still was. Wives found ways around that system, mainly by ignoring the supposed rules.

We no longer lived in traditional times. Cruelty was frowned on, at least if the bruises were visible; love – or a pretence of love – was applauded. Even in cases of adultery, a husband or father was not legally permitted to put his wife or daughter to the sword, although if he caught her with a lover in his own house, he could slay the lover. Adulterers had to be quick at shinning out of windows. Women were wise to conduct love affairs in friends’ houses. The friends had to pretend not to know about it, else providing a love-nest was pimping.

Suppose a man went too far and did kill his wife or daughter. He was virtually let off if it happened in the heat of the moment. However, husbands who battered their wives for pleasure, or for no reason, or to hide their own guilt at screwing a prostitute, or when too drunk to know what they were doing, or too drunk to care, were denounced. Husbands had to protect the weaker members of their households. After all, if a man really needed to take out his temper on someone, he was supposed to knock the lights out of his slaves.

Wives could leave. Divorce was easy. Fathers had to take back brides who found married life unbearable. We were civilised nowadays. Fathers might curse but, after all, they could always find the returning daughter a new husband and offload her again. Under the rigid Augustan marriage laws, a divorced woman was supposed to re-wed promptly. She lost her right to receive legacies otherwise, assuming that bothered her. Really unhappy wives might think money did not matter.

There was a moral code, too. If people thought Vibius had caused the break-up of his family, the kind of family the law directly encouraged, that would lose him votes. He had two children; he was supposed to persuade his Julia to let him father three. In the kind of senate we had, some would disapprove of violence yet others would actually envy a man who had dared to chastise his wife. But the governing fathers would never let him get away with his deception.

What about the other candidates?

In general, I had thought marriage was so much the norm for would-be politicians I had not even asked the question. To be an aedile, a candidate must be thirty-six; since men tended to marry first in their early twenties it was likely they had all done so at one time. The only one I had ascertained as married was Dillius Surus, who notoriously lived off his very rich wife. Presumably, since she paid his bills, he paid her respect, though perhaps he drank so hard simply to endure having to be grateful to a woman some called unpleasant. Arulenus Crescens stood accused of refusing to marry his mistress, so he must be single now but had been married before and left a wife pregnant; it was possible he had ditched the latest mistress (a woman with a blowsy reputation) because he had wanted a more suitable wife for show. Laia’s brother, a widower, was making a new marriage, unusual only in cynically timing it for the election.

I decided to establish more facts, double-checking with the banking fraternity. No one else had so keen an interest in a man’s domestic background. I could either make a return visit to Nothokleptes or call on my own financier, Claudia Arsinoë. I did that. Arsinoë could be relied on to give me mint tea.

She lived and worked not in the Basilica Aemilia or anywhere else in the Forum, but above one of the bookshops that quietly inhabit the Vicus Tuscus at the back of the lawcourts. Her bank had a change-table among the élite financiers in the Clivus Argentarius, but private clients saw her at home. This was like visiting an auntie. I took flowers and had the posy tied with ribbon.

You had to allow for eastern formality. First, we pretended this was a catch-up on friends and family. She called for the mint tea. Sipping, she spoke well of my mother, and I asked after her health. Then we ran lightly through my investments. The weather came up for notice; we fanned ourselves wearily. I gave my opinion of her newest patisserie provider. She pressed more tea upon me. And another cake.

Arsinoë was a forty-year-old native Athenian, putting on the pounds. As a widow, she wore dull clothes and covered up. However, her hair, still naturally dark to all intents, was rarely veiled and held in place by a pointed gold stephane that any goddess would have coveted for her temple statue. She was deeply religious but she enjoyed worldly pleasures. Waiting for her missing fiancé never interfered with her colourful Greek social life. I had been invited to these gatherings. There was laughter, throbbing lyres, lashings of traditional food, resinous wine and utterly sad singing. Arsinoë loved a good cry. (Yes, I know: it’s hard to envisage a banker in tears.)

She was a good source. From her, I learned that Trebonius Fulvo had been married to the same woman for years, quite happily; she did not let him bully her and like many tough men he appreciated that. The louche Arulenus Crescens had had a couple of wives and several long-term mistresses, shamelessly overlapping these creatures and leaving behind children. Dillius Surus was the second husband of a woman who had married first extremely well – at least, well in Arsinoë’s terms: he had enviable pots of money and he left it all to his widow.

‘Being dead is good – why did she spoil everything by taking on an idiot?’ Arsinoë wondered.

Ennius Verecundus had a sweet young wife of a few years and a baby.

‘I bet they live with his mother?’

‘I believe they do, Flavia Albia.’

‘Disaster.’

‘Surely there can be good mothers-in-law? Kindly women who will help a new bride while she is learning, and become fast friends with her?’

‘Is that irony? This kindly woman is called Julia Verecunda.’

‘Oh, that witch!’ Arsinoë made a sign against the evil eye – well, that was what I assumed the gesture to be.

‘You know of her?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Has she money?’

‘None worth mentioning.’

‘She is putting her son up for election.’

‘He has cash. From his father, Ennianus. Verecunda is not allowed to touch it. I have heard she finds her husband’s prudence galling.’

Salvius Gratus was about to announce his engagement to an Aventine hide-importer’s daughter. (Arsinoë knew the details, even though Gratus had yet to announce it.) And Vibius Marinus, as I knew, was married with two children.

‘Ah, yes. Arsinoë, have you heard any rumours?’

‘Why, no! Tell me the gossip.’

‘One candidate is said to be a wife-beater. Since his Julia has gone missing from home, can it be Vibius Marinus? At least, that is the slur from Nothokleptes.’

Arsinoë made a short noise of disgust. ‘Nothokleptes is a useless bastard.’

‘Really!’ I chortled. ‘Have you heard any hint that Julia Optata may have left Vibius?’

‘No, I have not.’

‘By some coincidence, her mother is Julia Verecunda also.’

‘Pallas Athene!’ cried Claudia Arsinoë. ‘The mother-in-law has caused the rift. She is famous for quarrelling. She makes her daughters treat their husbands badly, leave them for better ones. She loves to see families disintegrate and to know she is responsible.’

‘What makes her like that?’ I wondered.

‘A wicked nature. Hating is her character.’

‘And she brought her children up to be the same? Are they all aggressive?’

‘No need to teach it to them,’ scoffed my banker. ‘Venom came with her milk, like a sorceress. But the family character was there before their birth. Their very blood is poisoned.’

Even allowing for Greek drama, this boded ill for Vibius. I felt sympathy for the other son-in-law, Volusius Firmus, and more still for Ennius, the natural son in this unhappy-sounding family.

‘You know your road,’ declared Arsinoë. She tended to declaim like a fortune-teller, though her fees were cheaper and you didn’t have to watch her handle mummified gizzards. ‘You better go and see this horrible cow. Tell her I send a howling Fury in hot wind if she harms one hair of you.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

Arsinoë jumped on me and smothered me with hugs as if she thought she might never see me again. I took that as her Athenian love of the theatre. If she really had been a fortune-teller, I might have found it worrying.