The River God

3

The Forum was still crowded, even though it was the hour for the midday meal. Many bought food from street vendors and ate standing while conducting business or making political deals or just idling about. True denizens of the City often prefer hunger to leaving the Forum. After all, what could be better than standing at the center of the world? I couldn’t think of anything. It certainly beat fighting and freezing in Gaul.

Before the Basilica Julia, a group of candidates for the next year’s offices stood about, making sure that they were seen. It was too early yet to don the candidus and make a show of it, but they were letting no one forget who would be in a position to do them a favor in the coming year.

I wanted to get to the Tabularium, but family policy dictated that I stride up to one young man, take him by the hand, slap him on the shoulder, and greet him loudly. This was a young kinsman just beginning his political career, Lucius Caecilius Metellus.

“Good to have you back in Rome!” I shouted, as though the boy were deaf. “I hear great things about your service in Gaul!”

“Just basic military work, Aedile,” he said, with becoming modesty. At his age it might have been genuine.

“Nonsense!” I bellowed. “I’ve heard you won the Civic Crown! I’ve never won that one and neither,” here I scanned the other faces ostentatiously, “has anyone else here!” The older men grinned at this shamelessness; but the younger ones, also standing for quaestor, reddened.

“It was just a piddling earth fort,” he demurred. “Anyone with legs could get atop that wall.”

“But,” I yelled, “it takes the balls of a hero to be first, especially when the other side is packed with painted, savage Gauls!”

After many more fulsome compliments, some of them actually deserved, I felt I had done my duty and left him to the crowd of well-wishers who had assembled to see who this prodigy might be. I scanned the clot of candidates for Milo, who wanted the consulship for the next year, and Clodius, who was standing for praetor, but saw neither of them; and a good thing that was. They were both so prominent that they would probably not don the candidus until a day or two before the election. In recent months, any time they or their supporters met in public, blood on the pavement soon followed.

I did see one of my least favorite Romans though.

“Greetings, Aedile,” called Sallustius Crispus, his swar thy, greasy face split by an ugly smile. “That performance was outrageous, even for a Metellus. I know you are busy, but might you spare me a few minutes? We could retire to a stall for some lunch.”

I did some quick political calculations. Sallustius liked me no more than I liked him. He was an enemy of Cicero and Milo, my good friends. On the other hand, the weasely little bastard had insinuated himself into the confidence of everyone of importance, and his knowledge of Roman lowlife was comprehensive. His fund of political and civic gossip was unmatched, if you could sort out the nuggets of truth from the bulk ore of lies. Being a Caecilius Metellus, these calculations took me approximately half a second.

“I would be most pleased to.” I turned to Hermes. “Run along to the Tabularium and get those records we spoke about. I shall be there presently.” I caught Sallustius’s look of annoyance that I had not said which records I wanted. It could be of no interest to him, but he wanted to know everything.

We found a stall in a side street just off the Forum and sat at a table beneath an awning.

“You’re holding up well beneath the burdens of office,” he said, as a server poured us watered wine. “But the year is young yet. I hate to think what you’ll look like by December.”

“Don’t remind me. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep or a regular meal since the first of the year. It beats Gaul, though.”

“You’ll be able to brag that Rome was a better city after your year in office.”

“If it’s still standing.”

“The whorehouses can’t be that disorderly,” he said, referring to the common belief that the aediles spent most of their time supervising the lupanaria. Some of them, in fact, were known to.

“The whorehouses don’t concern me. They haven’t changed in a thousand years. The streets are in bad shape but not desperate yet. The public buildings are fine, since Caesar and Pompey got into a contest to see who could restore the most and get their names slathered all over the City. Foreign cults don’t interest me at all.”

I leaned across the table. “Rome has two great problems right now that concern my office: buildings that won’t stay up, and drains that won’t stand another fiood. You may end up standing atop the Capitol with your candidus fiuttering in the breeze as you cadge votes.”

“That bad, eh?” he said, fingering his acne-pocked chin.

“The watermen say so, and they’re seldom wrong about the river.”

“Talk of that insula crash is all over the City. Five hundred dead, I hear.”

“Cut that in half, but it’s still bad enough. It’s fiagrant corruption in the building trades, and I intend to root it out.”

“Most commendable,” he murmured.

“I believe I detect a note of doubt in your voice.”

“It is certainly not that I am dubious of your sincerity, my friend. Your devotion to duty is such that even Cato remarks upon it. It rivals your tactlessness and capacity for making dangerous enemies, but it strikes me that you know little about the building trades.”

“Admittedly so,” I said, a bit surprised at the turn this conversation was taking.

“Have you Metelli no business at all besides politics, war, and farming?”

“What else is there? For people of our class, virtually everything else is forbidden. The gens Caecilia isn’t patrician, but we’ve been consulars for centuries. If I engaged in trade, I could get booted out of the Senate come the next censorship.” I pondered a moment. “Of course, there is always Crassus, but he is a law unto himself. He made his fortune in land and slaves. Since the law defines even City land as agricultural and even the most highly educated slaves as livestock, he was staying within the law. It didn’t hurt that he could buy the goodwill of almost any censor. He was a censor himself, for that matter.”

Sallustius spat out an olive pit. “Ah, yes, the noble practice of agriculture, which these days means sitting on the terrace of your country estate and watching your slaves toil, by law dating back to-oh, I don’t know, Numa Pompilius maybe. The only sources of wealth lawful for a senator are plunder from war and the fruits of the land. That last one, more specifically, can be stretched to mean all products of the land, including those to be found beneath it.”

“True. A good many senatorial families own mines. Marius got rich that way.”

“And what else comes out of the ground?” he asked, coaxingly, apparently getting to his point.

“Oh, well, there’s timber, stone, clay for pottery and tiles, and-brick-” These last words trailed off aimlessly as the light began to dawn. Sallustius really did have a clever way of bringing these things out.

He grinned and nodded, dipping a crust into the bowl of oil. “Exactly. Building materials. It’s even marginally acceptable to manufacture bricks yourself, since they’re of pure clay fired with wood, which is to say, molded and cooked rather than manufactured in the strict sense of the word.”

“You’re saying that I may not be investigating just crooked building contractors, but highborn, infiuential people?”

“Perhaps your neighbors of the curia.”

“But, surely, such senators would merely be engaged in selling raw materials to the contractors. They would not necessarily have anything to do with the contractors, selectively choosing faulty and inferior materials to maximize profit.” My lawyer’s mentality was asserting itself unbidden.

He nodded solemnly. “One would certainly hope so.”

“And what might your interest be in this matter?”

“Like you, I am a member of the Senate. While the Sallustii may not be as noble a family as the Caecilii, we are of respectable antiquity.” This was putting it mildly, at least the first part. Sallustius was a Sabine from the mountains of the central peninsula, about as remote from the City as you could get and still be a Roman citizen. He had come to Rome a few years previously to ingratiate himself with powerful men and launch a political career. He had settled on Clodius and his patron, Caesar, as the men of the hour.

I suppose I should not have held the man’s alien and obscure origins against him. After all, many of the best men of the day were from outside, Cicero and Milo to name the most famous. And there is no doubt at all that most of the very worst were native Romans who could trace their bloodlines back to Aeneas. It is just that Sallustius embodied all the most scurrilous caricatures of the newly arrived parvenu: vulgar, unscrupulous, ill-mannered, thick-skinned, poorly educated, unaccomplished, and generally unpleasant.

“Forgive me for being obtuse, but I still don’t quite understand what you wish to convey.” Of course, I was fairly certain that he had already delivered his message; but I wanted him to set it forth plainly, for the sake of later court testimony if need be, but he was not to be so easily led.

“I merely wished to point out a likely pitfall in your investigation, one you may wish to avoid.”

I was about to gag on all this ambiguity. “As always, I will go wherever the evidence takes me. And now,” I finished off my cup and stood, “it takes me to the Tabularium.”

“Good fortune, then. I shall follow your progress with interest.”

I felt no need for his interest, but diplomatically fore-bore to mention the fact. Instead, I wondered how he had learned so quickly of my investigation. But in the small, involuted world of Roman politics, it seemed that everybody got wind of everything at once. I’d spent most of the previous day at the disaster site; I’d spoken to the Interrex, I’d sent that heap of timber to the Temple of Ceres. Word had gotten around.

I have spent most of my long life in Rome, and I have dedicated much of that time to the City and its peculiar ways. Few things in Roman life are so intriguing as the spread of news and rumor. As near as I can figure it, slaves are the prime conduits. They are everywhere, from the lowest dives to the chambers of the noblest and most powerful. They hear everything, although people tend to speak as if slaves had no ears. They accompany us everywhere, and they talk to each other. Once I tried to trace a particular report and found that it had been transmitted rather the way a pernicious disease is spread from one sufferer to another.

A certain eques named Lollius, whose house was on the Esquiline near the city wall, had returned unexpectedly early from a trip and caught his wife in bed with none other than the Dictator Caius Julius Caesar, who was much given to activities of this sort. It seems that Lollius was more old fashioned and touchy than most men of the day, and there ensued an unseemly farce in which Caesar ended up bleeding copiously from his great Julian beak.

It happened that a party of revelers, returning from a wedding, passed by Lollius’s door just in time to see Caesar, laurel wreath askew and blood staining his tunic, stagger forth and collapse into his sedan chair. Moments later, the woman ran screaming from the house, naked and closely pursued by her aggrieved husband, who was slashing away at her with great, whistling strokes of a ?agrum.

While the half-drunken party collapsed with laughter, certain of their slaves got the story from the janitor chained to the doorpost of Lollius’s house. Assisting their tipsy masters homeward, they spread the word. Among the first recipients were the chair slaves of the Vestal Servilia, who were bearing her from a service at the Temple of Juno Lucina. From there, they bore the news down the great Suburan Way the whole distance to the Forum, where they deposited their mistress in the House of the Vestals and rushed out to gossip with the slaves lounging around in the Forum, which is what most slaves do when they can get away with it.

From the Forum, the story spread outward like an explosion of noxious gas from an eruption of Aetna. It reached me in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus atop the Capitol, where Caesar had summoned the Senate for a meeting. I believe the subject was to be the confirmation of Cleopatra as queen of Egypt, but we never got around to discussing the matter. Word of the incident made its way up the Capitol faster than water could have run down it.

When Caesar arrived, his gilded chaplet restored to order atop his bald pate, wearing a snowy tunic and the purple triumphal robe that he had taken to wearing on all public occasions, its color matched that of his nose. Even as he strode importantly into the temple, a senator named Sextus Mummius, a satirical poet of some reputation, was declaiming an extempore ode upon the vengeance of Vulcan on the occasion of surprising his wife, Venus, abed with Mars. It was full of scurillous references and bawdy allusions, and Caesar turned purple from hairline to toes as the whole Senate erupted with laughter at his expense. In those days there were some subjects about which any Roman, even a dictator, could be laughed at to his face.

Having traced the origin and path of the story, I later calculated that, from the passing of the wedding party to the door of Lollius to the tale reaching the Temple of Jupiter, no more than three-quarters of an hour had elapsed. Such is the passion of Romans for spreading gossip.

In any case, I found myself climbing that selfsame hill, although not all the way to the top. The Tabularium, where the censors’ records are kept, is located somewhat less than halfway up. I went up the long stairway past the Temple of Concord, a deified virtue much needed in Rome that year, and entered the archive through a basement entrance. The long, beautiful facade of the building, as seen from the Forum, is actually the second story of the eastern side.

It was to that splendid colonnade that I climbed, and there I found Hermes, lording it over the archival slaves as personal assistant to the Aedile. They had scrolls and tablets spread out on the long tables.

“As you requested, Aedile,” intoned the freedman in charge of the censors’ records, “these are the documents pertaining to the recent censorship of Valerius Messala Niger and Servilius Vatia Isauricus.”

The two men were among the most distinguished Romans of their day, as censors usually were. It was also traditional that they be hidebound conservatives, and these two certainly qualified on that account. Vatia Isauricus was also among the oldest members of the Senate, having served as consul during Sulla’s dictatorship.

Messala Niger was a much younger man, but just as much a die-hard adherent of the aristocratic party and a patrician of the Valerian family to boot. That put him in the same camp as my own family, and of the anti-Clodian and anti-Caesarean faction as well.

Censors at that time were elected every five years, and their duties were strictly defined. They conducted the five-yearly census of the citizens, carried out the lustrum to ritually purify the army, reviewed the list of junior office holders for admission to the Senate, and purged that body of unfit members. Most important for the purpose of my investigation, they handed out the public contracts for such things as tax collection, road repair, supplying military equipment, and so forth. Men were willing to offer heavy bribes to secure those contracts. Other men took to bribery to get into the Senate or to be readmitted after expulsion by previous censors. It was for this reason that the censors were mostly old, distinguished, and rich. It was thought that such men were less amenable to bribery.

I have never understood the logic of this line of reasoning. Men are often rich because they are greedy. And a man who was greedy when young is rarely less so in old age. As for good breeding, I never noticed that a long pedigree reduced anyone’s share of evil qualities. In fact, high social position often as not bestows greater power and scope to exercise those very qualities. Such was the traditional belief nonetheless, and who was I to question tradition?

“May I know what we are looking for?” the freedman asked.

“At the moment I am interested solely in the public contracts. But not tax farming. Specifically, the work of civic construction and demolition, and I would very much like to see the name of one Marcus Caninus in there.”

The freedman sighed. “All right, let’s get to it.” To the slaves: “Break them down by subject first before looking for specific names. Place all relevant documents here,” he rapped on the center of the table. “All others are to be returned to their proper bins. When all the irrelevant documents have been eliminated, we shall divide the remainder and each search for the things the honored aedile needs to know.” This seemed like an eminently sensible system to me. I don’t know what we would do without the State freedmen. They keep the Empire going while we enjoy the loot.

“Splendid,” I commended him. While this first stage of the labor was underway, I paced along the colonnade enjoying the fine view of the Forum, which, due to the aforementioned rivalry between Caesar and Pompey, looked better than it had in years. The rivalry was still friendly at that time, and all Rome profited from it. Each man sought to refurbish buildings and monuments to the glory of his own family.

Pompey had repaired all his father’s monuments and had renovated the Temple of Castor and Pollux in his own name, but he had saved the really spectacular work for his immense theater and its adjacent complex of public buildings out on the Campus Martius.

Caesar, whose family was far more ancient and extended, had done more in the Forum. As Pontifex Maximus he had restored the house of the Pontifex Maximus and the adjacent House of the Vestals, along with a restoration of the Temple of Vesta, which he had had the good taste to leave in its simple, primitive form. He had restored the trophies of Marius, a gesture much appreciated by the commons, who still worshipped the crazy old butcher. Marius had been Caesar’s uncle by marriage, and the old Marians were still his main power base.

As aedile he had completely repaved the Forum and its adjacent markets and renovated every building associated with his family. It was one of the most ancient, so that was a lot of buildings.

I pondered this profusion of white marble and brilliant gilding admiringly, comforted in the knowledge that these two great men were willing to squander such immense sums to buy the goodwill of their fellow citizens. There was only one grating fact to mar my pleasure. I couldn’t see the front of any new or renovated building without reading their names.

Looking out over the roof of the Temple of Saturn, I saw a group of men round the corner of the Basilica Sempronia. All wore green tunics, and something in the swagger of their walk said they were up to no good.

“Hermes,” I said, “come here.” He put down the scroll he had been studying and leaned on the waist-high railing, his sharp gaze following the path of my pointing finger. “Please tell me those are slaves from the stables of the Green Faction.”

“I suppose I could,” he allowed, “if you didn’t mind me lying to you. Those are Plautius Hypsaeus’s men. There are so many gangs these days that they’ve taken to wearing different colors to keep each other sorted out during the street brawls.”

“So that’s why the last dead Clodians I saw in the streets had orange stripes on their tunics,” I said.

“And why Milo just gave all his men new white tunics, although he claims it’s just so they’ll look smart when they follow him around in public. Aufidius’s boys have red borders on their tunics, Scaevola’s wear sky blue-” He went on, reciting a list of lesser mobs, each now with its own insignia.

The Plautius Hypsaeus he mentioned was yet another of our political gangsters. Like Milo, he was a candidate for consul for the coming year. It says much of Roman politics of the time that three candidates for the highest offices were gang leaders.

“Uh-oh,” Hermes said. “Look over there.” He was pointing to another group of men crossing the Via Sacra near the Temple of Venus Cloacina to the north. These had the same swagger, and their tunics were red bordered. Aufidius was a lesser gangster, but he supported Milo, Hypsaeus’s rival. “A silver denarius says they’re fighting before the redstripers are past the urban praetor’s platform.” Bloodthirsty little wretch.

“Not a chance,” I said. “They’re outnumbered, so they’ll run over there to Sulla’s Numidian War monument and put their backs against it, if they’ve got the sense of a goose.”

“Done,” Hermes said. “If first blood falls between the platform and the monument, the bet’s off.”

As I had anticipated, the two little mobs caught sight of one another across the Forum and stopped in their tracks like two dog packs with their necks bristling. I could almost see their fingers moving as they counted; then the men in green charged forward as those with the red stripes sidled toward the old monument, one Caesar had never bothered to restore since Sulla had been his enemy and had stolen the glory of that campaign from Marius. The red-striped Aufidians just managed to reach the monument and turn at bay as the Hypsaeans caught up with the hindmost man and brought him down with a brick. Hermes slid the denarius along the railing toward my hand. I picked it up and tucked it beneath my belt.

Down below, some women started screaming, and people mounted the steps of temples and basilicas to enjoy the show. The bullies of these gangs were often ex-gladiators who had served their time, so there was sometimes skilled fighting to be seen.

When neither side could make the other run with sticks and bricks, the forbidden blades appeared and the blood began to fiow in earnest.

“New bunch!” Hermes cried, as a little gang of men wearing yellow headbands ran in from the direction of the Temple of Vesta and attacked the green-wearers from behind.

“Who are these?” I asked Hermes.

He shrugged. “Never saw them before. They’re good.”

A general engagement now prevailed in the Forum. A few veteran brawlers wearing no discernible colors had joined in, apparently just for the fun of it. The state freedman who, along with his staff, had been ignoring all the noise, turned from his records at a renewed outburst of screaming and looked at the fighting mob disdainfully.

“Rome should have a decent police force. I am from Pergamum, and my city has never been disgraced by such a scene.”

“We’ve always done well enough without police,” I said. He was right, of course. Rome desperately needed a reliable police force, but you don’t just admit such a thing to a foreign-born freedman.

“If this is doing well enough, you can have it,” he said, turning back to the stacks of documents.

Foreigners often act as if law and order were the highest of civic virtues, especially those from the civilized and monarch-ridden eastern part of the world. Romans were disorderly in those days, but at least they didn’t spend their lives kissing the backside of a king. Unlike now.

Hermes and I enjoyed the show in the Forum for a while longer. Two well-known swordsmen of the day, Thracian dagger fighters, climbed on the monument and dueled to great applause and encouragement. Hermes won his denarius back on that one. On the whole, although it lacked pomp and solemnity, gilded armor and colorful plumes, it was almost as good as the munera.

“Aedile?” said the freedman. “As much as I hate to interrupt your-”

“Think nothing of it,” I said, waving aside his apology. “It’s all but over. Nothing much left to do except mop up the blood. What progress have we made?”

“We,“ he said, emphasizing the word, “have separated all the documents relating to the public contracts let by authority of that censorship. I have marked two that featured the name you mentioned.” The stack he indicated was much reduced but still substantial.

“Excellent. Have these delivered to my house in the Subura. I shall need to peruse them at leisure.”

He looked at me as if a malicious god had just transformed me into a sheep. “You want me to allow state documents to leave the Tabularium?” Judging by his tone of voice, I might have asked him to break into the House of the Vestals and bugger all the virgins.

“Exactly. The Tabularium is not a temple or any other sacred place. It is state property dedicated to the storage of state documents. As an official of the State in pursuit of his duties, I require that these documents be taken to my home.”

He folded his arms and stared at me down his long, Graeco-Syrian nose, no small feat since I was far taller than he. “Not without the express order of a censor or one of the consuls.” There is nothing to match the hauteur of a state fiunky.

“The censors stepped down from office last year,” I said, “and the consuls have not yet taken office due to irregularities in the election of last year.”

“Well, then, you must simply do your perusing here.”

Behind him the state slaves grinned. One of them winked at me and made the universal hand sign for a transfer of funds.

I draped an arm over the freedman’s shoulder. “My friend, let us take a little walk and speak together.” We promenaded along the beautiful colonnade, where scholars and officials studied a multitude of state documents at the long tables, the southern exposure affording them the best possible reading light. As we walked, heads close together, we negotiated.

Luckily for me, the man did not want his bribe in the form of cash, of which I had little to spare; but he knew that I would be a praetor within a very few years, and there was a promotion he very much desired, which, in that office, I would be in a position to grant him. He likewise wanted to name the state slave to be manumitted and placed in his own present post. I knew that it was from that man he would receive his cash bribe, making his transaction with me more like a respectable exchange of favors. By the time we returned to the table, we had come to an agreement, and he directed some of the slaves under his charge to box up the documents and deliver them to my house.

This was a fairly straightforward transaction as such things were practiced at the time. A straight transfer of money was crass and vulgar, but a mutual exchange of favors was much esteemed. It was an unfair, inefficient, and corrupt system; but at least it worked, after a fashion. The First Citizen has spoiled it all by creating a bureaucracy made up of his own freedmen, handpicked by him and educated to their tasks, subject to periodic review and promoted or demoted accordingly. It is awesomely efficient and service is much improved, but the freedmen owe their loyalty only to him.

I prefer the old way.