Oracle of the Dead

5

For breakfast we had cherries in cream to go along with the fresh, hot bread I insisted on every morning. Cherries had been introduced into Italy only about seventeen years before this time, and they were still something exotic and a bit of a luxury. Lucullus had brought cherry trees from Asia as part of his triumphal loot after his victories over Mithridates and Tigranes. He had planted a lavish orchard, and had made seedlings and cuttings available at nominal cost.

Julia finished a dish of them and called for more. “Long after people have forgotten who Mithridates was,” she said wistfully, “they will praise Lucullus for the gift of cherries.” She was passionately fond of the little fruit, and had a cook whose only employment was dreaming up new ways to prepare and present them.

“An estimable accomplishment,” I admitted. “It’s been my misfortune to campaign in places already well picked over, or else that have nothing of culinary interest to offer. Britannia is just more of Gaul, only colder, and the Germans eat little except meat.” These two being the only places I had visited ahead of most Romans. Egypt and Cyprus and the rest were well-worn territory where we’d already looted whatever was useful.

Along with her second helping, Julia received a letter. She opened it and read while popping cherries into her mouth. As usual she took her time. From Uncle Julius she had learned the useful skill of reading silently, something I had never fully mastered. I dipped hot bread in a pot of honey and waited, knowing that it was no use trying to hurry her. From the intensity of her attention, I knew that it was something significant. Making me wait was annoying to me, something she enjoyed.

“Well, who’s it from?” I demanded at last.

“It’s from my aunt Atia.” This woman was actually a niece of Julius Caesar, married to Caius Octavius, who had been proconsul in Macedonia and had died about eight years previously. Octavius had been what we called novus homo, a “new man,” meaning that he was the first of his family to achieve curule rank at Rome. After his death she had married the very distinguished Lucius Marcius Philippus.

“Well, what does she say?”

“She tells me that young Octavius is the darling of the public. You’ll recall that he delivered the eulogy at his grandmother’s funeral last year. Everyone was astonished that so young a boy could speak with such dignity and eloquence.”

“I remember the event.” I had attended the funeral, since there was a family connection, but I was busy politicking for the office of praetor and paid little attention to the speakers.

“Atia hints that Caesar may wish to adopt young Octavius.”

This almost made me choke on a cherry. It wasn’t so surprising that Caesar might want to adopt. He was famously infertile, despite his multiple marriages and innumerable affairs. The death of his single, beloved daughter had devastated him and severed the last connection between him and her husband, Pompey. But little Octavius?

“Why would Caesar want to adopt that wretched little brat?” I exclaimed.

“He is of the noblest lineage, at least on his mother’s side,” Julia said. “Caesar has spent a great deal of time with him and is clearly impressed with his intelligence and potential.”

“Then he’s losing his grip. There are plenty of others with family connections that are better candidates for adoption. Even Brutus, dull as he is.”

“You only think he’s dull because he’s a serious student of philosophy. Do you know what I think? I think you secretly imagined that Caesar might favor you.”

“Me!” I sputtered.

“Admit it! You’ve been close to him, you married his niece, you were his closest confidant in Gaul, you practically wrote his account of the Gallic War yourself.”

“I was a glorified secretary, transcribing his wretched scrawl into something readable. At best I amused him, which is a poor recommendation for adoption. Besides, he’s barely ten years older than I am.”

“That is a nonsensical objection. Men adopt sons older than themselves, for sound political reasons. Clodius, for instance, was a patrician. He wanted to stand for the office of Tribune of the People, which is barred to patricians. So he had himself adopted into a plebeian family, his adoptive father a man his own age.”

“That particular adoption was met with a good deal of senatorial opposition.”

“It was an extreme example, I admit. But it was done, and the adoption of young Octavius by Julius Caesar makes far more political sense.”

“I suppose,” I sighed, no longer very interested. “After all, what is there to inherit? It’s not as if he’s passing on his offices, which must be won politically. He’s built a substantial fortune where he used to have a mountain of debt, that’s something. Otherwise, there’s the prestige of a very ancient patrician name. He’ll get nominated for some of the priesthoods, at least.”

“Decius, envy ill becomes you.”

“Envy? Where did that come from?” However, she would say no more, for which I was thankful.

That morning, I held court. Ordinarily, I would have sat in one of the nearby towns, but it seemed that the countryside had come to me instead, so I employed my temporary tribunal on the temple site. Since it had become as noisy as a Greek funeral, I had my lictors call for silence. When the noise abated a little, I addressed the mob.

“This is not a festival day, no matter what people around here seem to think. It is a day appointed for official business. I won’t put a stop to your activities, but I insist upon decorum and quiet. Anything boisterous will be heavily fined.” A threat to a man’s purse is usually more effective than a threat to his body. Things quieted down and I proceeded with what was almost a routine court day: a Syrian merchant accused of selling an inferior dye as the pure murex (I dismissed the case for lack of evidence); a Cretan slave dealer who accused his citizen colleague of embezzlement (I sentenced the citizen to be sold into slavery, and would have liked to give the Cretan the same treatment).

I was about to adjourn for the afternoon when I saw an odd group of men making their way toward my podium. There were about a dozen of them, all wearing togas, some with senator’s stripes on their tunics, a few wearing red sandals with the ivory crescent of the patrician fastened at the ankle. In the forefront was a man who walked barefoot. He wasn’t even wearing a tunic, just an old-fashioned toga wrapped around his stocky, muscular body.

I covered my eyes and groaned. “The gods have deserted me. Cato is here.”

“Did you forget to sacrifice?” Hermes asked.

“It must have been a greater offense than that.” Marcus Porcius Cato was my least favorite senator and almost my least favorite Roman, now that Clodius was dead. The men who constantly accompanied him were what we had come to call “Catonians”; men who admired or professed to admire Cato’s harsh, abrasive style. Most of them were just looking for an excuse to be rude.

“Hail, Praetor!” Cato yelled, saluting. He was always a stickler for the honors due public office.

“And a fine afternoon to you, Marcus Porcius. I think it’s time to break for lunch. Will you join me?” My lunch was already laid out beneath an awning nearby. A praetor usually has guests, so there was always at least enough for twenty people on the tables. As soon as I left the podium, the fair went back to full roar.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said, as we took our seats. No couches for an informal luncheon like this.

“I didn’t expect to find you presiding over a country fair.”

“Sometimes these things happen. Are you on your way to Sicily?” He had served as praetor a few years before, during the consulship of Domitius and Claudius.

“Not until after the elections. I’ve been sent down to sort out the matter of the Campanian lands.”

“Good luck with it,” I said. “Nobody has been able to sort out that mess as long as I can remember. Too many conflicting interests.”

“The only conflicts are those of greed,” he said, taking a cup from a servant, draining it at a gulp, and holding it out for more. “And it may not be a problem much longer. Pompey wants that land to settle his veterans and the Senate is looking to Pompey to save their necks from Caesar. He’ll probably get what he wants.”

“What has them panicked this time?” I asked.

“Caesar wants to stand for consul in absentia.”

“I know all about that. Why not let him?”

“It flouts all traditional law!” Cato barked. “Since the days of Romulus, any man on foreign service who wished to stand for consul has had to return to Rome to stand for office.” His pseudo-Catos growled agreement. They were good at growling.

“Would it hurt to bend the law just a little, just this one time?” I said, knowing how it would enrage him.

“The law isn’t something you can bend and trim to suit the occasion. Who knows where it could end!”

“This course could end in civil war,” I pointed out.

“What of it?” said one of his sycophants. “Pompey is the greatest general in the world, and his soldiers are the most numerous and the most loyal. He will crush Caesar like a gnat.”

“Pompey’s been away from the wars for a long time,” I said. “His soldiers have been living at ease while Caesar’s have been fighting almost constantly for eight years. I agree it won’t be much of a match.”

“Time enough to worry about war if it comes,” Cato said. “I have another message for you. Pompey wants this business that’s upsetting the district settled quickly.”

“Oh?” I said. “And has the proconsul of the Spanish provinces some sort of authority over the praetor peregrinus?” I realized that Pompey had spies in this area and they had fast horses if he was keeping up with events here almost as they were happening. During the time he was proconsul of the Spanish provinces, the Senate had allowed him to govern those provinces through his legates while he remained in Italy to oversee the grain supply. His proconsular status forbade him to enter Rome, so he lived in a villa south of the City.

“He has a vested interest in southern Campania,” Cato said. “His clientela is vast in this region and he wants nothing upsetting the peace here.”

“Is that so?” I said, feeling my face growing red. Or maybe that was just the wine. “A pack of dead priests should be of no concern to him.”

“Oh, but he finds it of great concern. That temple is one personally endowed by Pompey. That makes those priests his clients.”

I found myself gaping foolishly and quickly stuffed a fig into my mouth to give it some occupation. Then I washed it down with some undiluted wine and said, in the quietest voice I could manage, “Why have I not heard of this? The priests never mentioned such a thing. I do not see Pompey’s name engraved on the pediment.”

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus,” Cato said, giving that honorific a sarcastic twist, “has no need to aggrandize his name through so trifling an act. He’s built whole cities and temples the size of sports stadiums.” He held out his cup for a refill. Cato was another believer in undiluted wine, probably the only taste we shared. “This temple has for generations been under the patronage of the Pedarii, a very ancient patrician family.”

“The Pedarii?” I said. “I’m no genealogist, but I thought that family died out before Hannibal learned to use an elephant goad.” I remembered the name only vaguely, from some poems about the early days of the Republic.

“They are very distinguished,” Cato said, “but fallen into poverty long ago, and unable to support senatorial pretensions.”

“So Pompey has a stake in this business?” I suppressed a groan. “Next you’ll be telling me Caesar’s family donated the land or paid for the statue.”

“Eh? Why should I say such a thing?”

“Never mind. You’ve made my life sufficiently complicated, thank you.”

“Sometimes you make no sense, Metellus.”

That evening, Cato and his coterie went on to Cumae, which he had chosen as the headquarters for his mission. Capua was a much larger city, and closer to Rome, but he reasoned that it was too faction-ridden and too dominated by great Roman landlords. Whatever he lacked, and it was much, Cato had sound political instincts.

That evening I invited the historian, Lucius Cordus, to dinner. Since I didn’t want a lot of political and social blather to dominate the conversation, the only other diners were Julia, Hermes, and the philosopher Gitiadas. I had come to appreciate his incisive intelligence. Five was an almost scandalously small number of participants at an important man’s dinner, but I considered this simply an extension of my workday.

After the first courses and a bit of small talk, I got down to business. “Lucius Cordus, what can you tell us about the Pedarii? They were once prominent in Rome, but I thought they had long since died out. Today I learned that a remnant still live here and are patrons of the Temple of Apollo.” I had already told Julia of what Cato had told me.

“Ah, the Pedarii,” Cordus said. “In fact, that name has turned up in my recent researches on your behalf, Praetor. It seems that one Sergius Pedarius, a half-legendary figure, was a comrade-in-arms of the Brutus who was the first consul, after the Etruscan kings were expelled from Rome. The family was prominent during the early years of the Republic, but never consular.”

“Was Sergius a praenomen or a nomen?” I asked him. By our generation, the name Segius was used only as a nomen, but far back in history, it had been a praenomen.

“It was a praenomen. The Pedarii were never connected with the gens Sergia,” Cordus informed us. “At some point in history, about the time of the First Punic War, the Pedarii were afflicted by a series of catastrophes. Their lands were flooded, many of their livestock died. Then, in a pestilence that afflicted most of Italy, their district was especially hard-hit, and many of the family members perished, along with their slaves and peasant tenants. In those days, senatorial families were nowhere near as wealthy as they are now. The survivors sold their lands and moved south, to the land of some distant relatives. Here they prospered modestly and were esteemed for their status as patricians, but they never returned to Rome, where once they had been great.”

“As Romans among Greeks and Campanians,” I said, “their situation must have been precarious.”

“Although as Romans they weren’t part of the local conflicts,” Cordus said, “and by endowing the temple as soon as they had a bit of surplus wealth, they acquired the status of local patrons, though there are many families far wealthier.”

“I shall have to meet with the heads of the family,” I said. “I wonder why they have not presented themselves before this? Usually all the most prominent people present themselves to the Roman praetor upon his arrival.”

“Perhaps,” Julia opined, “they are embarrassed to show themselves, having become so humble since their family’s heroic origins.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they shall hide no longer. I want to see them.” Something else occurred to me. “Cordus, yesterday young Vespillo and I visited the putative mundus on the property of Porcia. Do you know anything of it?”

“It is one of several such in the vicinity. I believe that it is the largest and the oldest. According to the local legend, Baios, the steersman of Odysseus, descended into it to visit the underworld and ask the shade of King Agamemnon whether he should found his city nearby-but you know already what I think of such legends.”

“Not to mention that the underworld is not very far down. I tossed in a stone and heard it strike just moments later. There was an altar nearby and someone had left the usual offerings of bread and wine, but also some small arrows. Does this mean anything to you?”

“Arrows?” He considered for a while. “This is very odd, and I had been thinking upon this very subject.”

“You had?” I said, surprised.

“Yes. You see, in our Temple of Apollo, he is depicted with a bow and arrows.”

“ ‘Apollo the Far-Shooter,’ ” I said, “as he’s described in the Iliad and elsewhere, as in the story in which he and his sister slaughtered the children of Niobe.”

“Exactly. Well, every year at the Festival of Apollo, small arrows are among the offerings brought to the god, although the petitioners usually bring them after dark.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “Apollo is a solar deity, and his sacrifices always take place in the daytime.”

“Because Apollo of the Bow is the god in his aspect as avenger. The arrows mean the petitioner is asking his aid in taking vengeance upon his enemies.”

“Quite interesting,” I said. It seemed there was no way I could keep the gods out of my investigation.

“Cordus,” Julia said. “You said you had been thinking about this very subject. Why is this?”

“Because I was struck by an odd coincidence in names. Do you recall the Greek name for Apollo Far-Shooter?”

I thought about it. “Why, it’s-” Then the light dawned. “It’s Apollo Hecatebylos.”

“Exactly. I am sure that it is a mere coincidence in sounds, but the first three syllables of the cognomen form the name of the goddess of the temple below.”

“Could this have some bearing upon the rivalry between the temples?” I asked.

“It is possible, though I am at a loss to explain why. Confusion among the names of gods is not unknown, sometimes causing an alteration in their forms of worship.”

“That’s interesting,” Julia said. “Can you give us an example?”

“Well, there is the case of the god Plutus, from very ancient times honored as the god of wealth. People confused his name with that of Pluto, Roman god of the underworld, whom we identify with the Greek Hades. As a result, most people think of Pluto as a god of wealth, which was not his original role at all.”

“I am intrigued,” I said, “by something you brought up at our earlier meeting, that Hecate is not an oracular deity. Yet Apollo is. In fact, the most prominent of the oracles-those of Delphi and Cumae and Dodona and such-are priestesses of Apollo. Might this have been a source of this strife? Do the devotees of Apollo see those of Hecate as usurpers of their god’s functions?”

“Perhaps taking advantage of the local peoples’ confounding of the two names?” Julia put in.

Cordus nodded. “Quite possible.”

“But,” said Gitiadas, “this conflict has been going on for centuries. Why have these multiple murders occurred now?”

“That is the question,” I agreed, “and it causes me to think that these murders have little or nothing to do with the ancient strife between the strangely superposed rival temples. I think it is something local, immediate, and most likely based on something mundane, such as money.”

“That would be disappointing,” Julia said.

“We have seen a great many murders in our time,” I told her. “Were any of them motivated by anything elevated? It’s always politics, power, jealousy, insult to personal honor, or money. Usually, money. Men seldom prize their own honor or their wives’ chastity above their purses.”

“My husband is a Cynic, to the extent that he can be said to have a philosophy at all,” Julia commented.

“The doubt of human motives is one of the bases of Cynical philosophy,” Gitiadas said. “Or, should I say, the doubt of human motives as stated. Diogenes said that when a man claimed to be doing something for honor, or for patriotism, or for love of his fellow man, or any other such high-flown reason, you could be certain that the real motive was something base and shabby. This is a perfectly respectable philosophical premise, and the older I get, the more I am persuaded that it is true.”

“Alas, it is so,” Cordus agreed.

“That is because you are all men,” Julia informed us. “Men gain wisdom with age but continue to behave like boys their whole lives.”

“My wife is not an admirer of the male gender,” I told them. “Her uncle Caius Julius always being the exception, of course.”

“One must always make an exception for such men,” Gitiadas said, smiling.

“My husband has an unreasoning distrust of Caesar. He suspects a Sulla-like dictatorial ambition. This is quite foolish. His Diogenean example is an underhanded way to question a great man’s integrity.”

We were straying onto dangerous ground. “But, returning to the question of the temple and its annihilated clergy, there is the matter of the girl, Hypatia. It is clear to me that she was killed because she had some part in the murder of the priests. She was primed to tell me what she did, but someone thought she was going to tell me more and she was silenced.”

“What might she have known?” Julia wondered.

“For one thing,” I said, “the identity of the person who killed her, who is probably also the one who suborned her into her part in the murder. It seems to have been someone she trusted.”

“A lover, perhaps?” Julia said. “After all, she was pregnant.” This was news to our guests, and Julia explained.

“This adds another dimension,” Gitiadas said. “Now there is scope for jealousy, love, treachery, betrayal, and a host of other motives. You should have invited the playwright. I’m sure he is far better regarding matters of the heart than dusty philosophers and historians.”

“Just more complication,” I groused. “As if this matter didn’t have enough of that already.”