The River God

7

I didn’t even get as far as the Temple of Ceres the next morning.

“Aedile!” The shouter was a man I recognized, a freedman from the staff of Publius Syrus, the famous actor and playwright. “Please come to the theater! My patron says that it is an emergency!” The man was quite excited, but then he was a Greek, and his master was a Greek-Syrian, and all Greeks are excitable people. They invented philosophy just to get themselves under control.

The previous year I had contracted with Syrus to provide the theatricals for my upcoming Games. The first Games of the calendar year were to be the Megalensian Games, celebrated the next month. These were not nearly as lavish as the really big celebrations of the fall, the Roman Games and the Plebeian Games. But I was determined to make the first spectacles as splendid as possible to set the tone for my aedileship.

“What is the problem?” I asked. “I have a great many duties to-”

“It can’t wait!” he yelled, cutting me off. “You have to come at once!”

“Don’t talk to the Aedile like that, you jumped-up foreign catamite!” Hermes shouted at him.

“No, Hermes, we’d better go,” I said. “I can’t risk anything spoiling my show.”

So we followed the man down toward the Sublician Bridge. Near the bridge towered the giant theater erected a few years before by Aemilius Scaurus during his aedileship. At this time there were two theaters in Rome worth the name: the Aemilian and the Theater of Pompey. Pompey’s was built on the Campus Martius and was made of stone. The Aemilian was made of wood.

I had chosen the Aemilian for a number of reasons. Pompey’s theater had been damaged during his triumphal games when his elephants stampeded; then he burned a town onstage, and the proscenium caught fire and the damage was not yet repaired. Also, it was far from the City center and seated perhaps forty thousand spectators. The Aemilian was a far shorter walk for most citizens, it held eighty thousand people, and, best of all, it wasn’t built by Pompey. I didn’t want people watching my games and thinking about Pompey.

And just because it was built of wood instead of marble doesn’t mean it was not splendid. The vast, semicircular structure shone all over with paint and gilding, which I had had renewed. It was decorated with mosaics in semiprecious stones, amber, and tortoise shell, each arch of its upper galleries displaying a fine statue. It was equipped with huge awnings against the sun and a system of fountains that would spray a fine, perfumed mist over the audience in hot weather. These latter features would not be required for the Megalensian Games, but I would definitely need them for the Apollinarian Games, which were celebrated in the hottest days of summer.

As we entered the cavernous building, we were struck by the powerful smells of fresh paint, turpentine, pitch, and fresh-cut wood. Like all large, wooden structures that are open to the sky, the theater required constant maintenance. And, like all others of its sort, it made constant noise, an almost musical chorus of groans, creaks, and squeaks as changing temperature and every buffet of wind made the whole structure move, timber fiexing against timber, boards stretching and pulling against nails, the huge masts that would support the awning whipping back and forth as if they wanted to go to sea like all the other masts.

Publius Syrus was on the stage, rehearsing his cast and chorus, his support crew, and all the rest of the multitude he needed to get a whole set of theatricals presented. Most of us, seeing only the performance, which involves a mere handful of people, are never aware of what a mob is required to present a single play.

“Ah, Aedile,” Syrus cried, catching sight of me, “you have come!” As if I needed to be told this. But artists like Syrus had to be handled delicately.

“As always, I am prepared to drop everything to consult with my Master of Theatricals,” I said heartily. “Is anything wrong with the plays?”

“The plays? Of course not! They shall be superb!” All this declaimed with many broad gestures. Then, more calmly, “If, that is, there is a theater to celebrate them in.”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

“Come with me, Aedile.” He looked up at the stage. “The rest of you, continue practicing! You have only days to master your roles and your duties!”

“Have the seat cushions arrived yet?” I asked, scanning the nearby seats. “I ordered seat cushions, good ones made of Egyptian linen, stuffed with raw wool. No grass or hay, mind you. Newly sheared raw wool.”

“It’s far too early for that, Aedile,” Syrus insisted. “They’ll just get wet. You don’t want cushions delivered until a day or two before the festival.”

“Well, they’d better be in place by the first performance or heads will fall.” I was especially determined to have these cushions because everyone would think I was being terribly extravagant. Actually, one of my clients dealt in wool and cloth, and when the performances were done he would dismantle the cushions and get me back at least three-quarters of my outlay. Best of all, the cushions would outrage Cato. He always went into frothing frenzies anytime an innovation appeared that made people more comfortable.

We walked into a passage beneath the stage, and Syrus praised himself and his work. “Aedile, I have rewritten the scene where King Ptolemy tries to burgle the house of Crassus. Instead of finding Crassus in bed with Caesar’s wife, he discovers General Gabinius in bed with the wife of Crassus!”

I nodded. “The news from Egypt has it that Gabinius has been very successful. He really needs to be smeared and lampooned and slandered.”

Syrus smiled happily. “My very thought. Too much praise attracts the jealousy of the gods, so we will be doing him a favor.” Syrus was the foremost practitioner of this sort of political satire. It was considered scandalous, and various senators had tried having it declared criminal; but it was wildly popular with the plebs, so the tribunes saw to it that no such legislation was passed. Everyone who could hired Syrus to libel and belittle their political rivals and enemies. Sooner or later, someone was going to hire him to give me this treatment, and I was not looking forward to it.

“How are the rehearsals for Agamemnon coming along?” I asked him.

Syrus looked as if he had bitten into something sour. “It is not the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Aedile. It is Antigone, which is by Sophocles, you will recall.”

“Ah, yes, I always confuse those old buggers. They all sound alike to me, but my wife is very fond of them. Rehearsals going well, are they?”

He closed his eyes. “Beautifully, Aedile. Tears and pity and terror shall be the order of the day.”

I didn’t see that it mattered very much, but I was trying to be polite. Nobody would want to attend the tragedy anyway, except for scholars like Cicero and high-born ladies and whatever protesting husbands they could drag along. What the plebs loved were the comedies and satyr plays, the mimes, and the Atellan farces; and I planned to deliver these in good measure. I wasn’t going to be as radical as Pompey, though, and provide large animals and armies clashing in mock battle on stage. It was dangerous, and his innovation had been a failure anyway, spreading panic and dismay. Such activities properly belonged in the arena, not the theater. The Roman public was extremely conservative about this sort of thing.

We came out onto an outside gallery used by the scene shifters and other workmen of the theater. The gallery ran along the straight side of the semicircle, and it was cluttered with heaps of rope, buckets of paint, parts of the crane used for lowering gods into the action, and so forth. It all looked like total chaos to me; but to those whose business it was, it was as orderly as the arrangement of a seagoing vessel.

“Look down there, Aedile,” Syrus said, leaning over a railing and pointing downward.

I did likewise, and so did Hermes. The theater backed almost against the riverbank, and the gallery upon which we stood projected out over the mud fiat like a balcony. Below us, a crew of workmen were shoring up the building with heavy wooden beams. The muddy, turbid water of the Tiber was already within a few yards of their feet.

“They arrived at first light this morning, sent by the agent of Aemilius Scaurus. It seems we are to be fiooded. What am I to do?”

“Why, carry on, of course! This building has survived the high water of the last few years. Maybe it will survive this as well.”

“But suppose it doesn’t!” he cried excitedly. “All will be ruined! What shall we do then?”

I took him by the arm. “Now, Publius Syrus, you just leave all the petty details to me. If this theater is destroyed, we can always move operations to Pompey’s, much as it would pain me to do so.” I steered him toward the tunnel that led back to the stage. “Just go back and drill your troops. Whatever happens in the next few days, the water will have subsided by the Megalensian Games. I will see to everything.”

Muttering to himself, shaking his head, wringing his hands, he retreated into the interior. As if I didn’t have enough on my hands already, I had to deal with temperamental artists, too.

“Let’s go talk to these men,” I told Hermes. There was a rickety stairway leading from the gallery to the mud fiat. Downriver to our left was the Sublician Bridge. Before us the river itself had achieved alarming breadth and swiftness of current. The bridge, like the upriver Aemilian (built by an ancestor of the Aemilius who built the theater), was lined with gawkers, pointing at the water, gesturing, and doubtless all exclaiming how they, personally, had predicted this very thing. People always do that.

Most of the workmen appeared to be slaves, but these were not unskilled foreigners like the gang we had seen demolishing the wreckage of the insula. These men knew their business, and they were constructing a stout brace beneath the overhang of the huge theater, with heavy timbers set horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, resting atop blocks of cut stone. To my unpracticed eye, it all looked very secure. What made me uneasy was that my eye was, indeed, unpracticed.

Bossing the crew was a man whose clothes were of better material than those of the workmen. His hair and complexion were a bit darker than those of a typical Roman, though he wore a citizen’s ring.

“I’m the plebeian aedile Metellus,” I told him. “What is the likelihood that your work here will save this building in a severe fiood?”

He bowed slightly. “I am Manius Florus, freedman of Manius Florus. My patron’s firm has been retained by the steward of the proconsul Aemilius Scaurus to try to preserve his theater from the coming high water. To answer your question, Aedile, all will depend upon the fiood itself. If the current is terribly swift, the bank here could be eaten away so severely as to drop the whole structure into the river.

“However,”-he swept an arm wide, taking in both bridges-”situated as it is, here between these two fine, strong bridges, I have hopes that it will be spared that. It has been my experience of such fioods that the upstream bridge,” he pointed toward the Aemilian, “will break much of the force of the current here in the bend and redirect it toward the center of the stream, where it can do little harm. That bridge has survived many, many fioods over the centuries.”

“I truly hope you are right,” I said.

Hermes came up to me. “I think you had better look at this,” he murmured. It was unlike Hermes to murmur. I followed him to the heavy framework. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. Into the surface of the timber was scratched, in large, crude letters, HERMES.

“You wanted me to see this?” I demanded. “I know you can write your name.”

He gave me a look of exasperation. “I didn’t put this here this morning.”

“Eh?” My mind was not working at full power that morning.

“Look.” He poked with a fingernail at a blob of sap that had oozed from the cut. It was soft, but a thin crust had formed over it. “This is one of those timbers I scratched my name on the day before yesterday. They were loaded on the wrecker’s carts. Isn’t this illegal?”

I swore luridly, something I did well. “This is an outrage! The law states very clearly that condemned wood is not to be used in any aspect of construction or shipbuilding. It is to be employed only as firewood or for funeral pyres!”

“It shouldn’t surprise you by now that people are fiouting the law,” Hermes pointed out.

“No, but this time it involves a building I need for my Games! Manius Florus!” I bellowed.

The man ran up, startled. “Aedile? Is something wrong?”

“Something is very wrong.” I pointed at the offending beam. “Where did this timber come from?”

“My patron had me pick up this wood at the salvager’s yard out by the Circus Flaminius. It is where we usually get timber for braces, scaffolding, bleachers, and so forth, anything that isn’t going to be part of a permanent structure.”

“This beam,” I said, “until two nights ago, was part of an insula that fell down. All of its materials were condemned by my order.”

He didn’t seem particularly shocked. “Well, it’s perfectly sound wood, I can assure you of that. Certainly, it is too green to use in an insula, but it is perfectly adequate for this purpose.”

“Who owns the salvage yard?” I demanded.

“A man named Justus. He’s a freedman, but I don’t know who his patron might be.”

“Well, get back to your work. I don’t want this theater fioating away.” I went back to the stairs. “Come along, Hermes, we have some people to see.”

We went back through the theater and Hermes’s importunate words interrupted my thoughts.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” he said, “if this whole place”- he rapped his knuckles against the solid-seeming wall of the passage-”was built by whoever built that insula?“

A chill gripped my heart as we walked out into the vast cavea, and I looked up at the seats that ascended, row upon row, incredibly high, like a staircase in a palace of the gods. Above them the sky-piercing spears of the awning masts stood arrayed in their curving rank, gilded tips gleaming in the morning sunlight. The theater could be seen by travelers miles from the City. Now I looked at it with new eyes, picturing those seats filled to capacity with spectators, picturing them all standing and saluting formally as I entered the theater to take my place as giver of the Games. Picturing them-

“All the gods protect me!” I said. “What if this whole, rickety, wooden basket comes crashing down with eighty thousand Roman citizens in the stands? During my Games! The name of Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger will stink worse than a week-old mackerel as long as Rome stands! I’ll be right up there with Tarpeia and Brennus and Hannibal when the people chant execrations upon Rome’s greatest enemies and traitors! If I don’t manage to open my veins quickly enough, I’ll be impaled on a hook and dragged through the streets and be crucified outside the Capena Gate!”

“Senators don’t get crucified,” Hermes protested. “Slaves and foreigners get crucified.”

“They’ll pass a new law just for me! The tribunes of the plebs will demand it!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hermes said uneasily. “It’s stood like this for at least five years. It’ll last another. I wish I hadn’t said anything.”

I wished he hadn’t, too.

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, I recalled, had been an aedile in the mold of Caesar, squandering immense sums on public works, of which the lavish theater was only one, to buy favor with the public. He had also donated a luxurious bathhouse to the City. It was the first of Rome’s really large balnea, and he provided free admission to all citizens for a year, together with bathing oil and towels. He gave numerous public banquets and paid for regular doles of bread and oil for the poorest citizens, although he never went to Caesar’s extreme of paying everyone’s home rent for a year.

It was, needless to say, a wildly popular tenure of office, and he had been given the urban praetorship practically without having to stand for it. After stepping down from his curule chair, he was given Sardinia to govern. Sardinia was a proconsular province, so he held the title of proconsul without having to be consul first.

It was the custom for politicians, having ruined themselves and descended far into debt, in order to pay for their public offices, to squeeze their provinces; and Scaurus duly squeezed Sardinia, so much so that he was prosecuted for corruption and extortion immediately upon his return to Rome. Flush with plundered wealth, he had no difficulty in getting a jury to see things in a sympathetic light, and he had recently been acquitted. It was a fairly typical career of the times. It took a prosecutor like Cicero to get a Roman jury to return a verdict of guilty against a Roman magistrate on behalf of provincials.

We tended to wink at these little escapades on the part of our promagistrates. You had to lose a foreign war to get Roman citizens to take an interest in what you did while away from the City. Unfortunately, this attitude rested upon a wholly erroneous assumption: that a man could go to a foreign land and behave like a rapacious, unregenerate criminal, then come home and act like an honest citizen. It never seemed to work that way.

Luckily for me, the house of Aemilius Scaurus was not far from his theater, next to the old city wall near the Flumentana Gate. It was a fairly imposing building, but built back in the days before there was any such thing as a fashionable neighborhood in Rome. Like most such older mansions, it had shops and slum housing crowded right against it, and behind it was a tiny market specializing in fresh and preserved garlic.

The janitor admitted me, and a few minutes later a portly individual appeared, his eyes widening slightly at sight of me. He was bald with a bland, doughy face and rings on every finger. The tip of his nose was decorated with a large, purple wart.

“Welcome, Aedile! This is most unexpected. I am Juventius, steward of my patron’s City property. I trust all is well at the theater?”

“Well enough so far,” I said. I had never met the man, but one of my clients had made arrangements to rent the theater for my Games, so this must have been the man he dealt with. “The workmen are reinforcing the structure right now, but the rest is up to the river.”

“I have already sacrificed to Father Tiber,” he said. “Let us hope that he finds it acceptable.”

“You performed the sacrifice?” I asked. Ordinarily, all religious observances are overseen by the head of the household, not a subordinate.

“Yes, the proconsul left the City yesterday to spend some time at one of his country estates.”

“He did, eh? Wanted to be on higher ground, or is he hiding out from Sardinian assassins?”

The man’s obsequious smile faltered. “Sir?”

“I need to speak with your master, and I find him fied from the City. Most of us go to our country estates in the hottest days of summer. Why such haste to be away?” Of course I had no authority to demand explanations for the actions of a man of such rank, but if you hold office you can accomplish a lot just by being pushy and obnoxious. Flunkies like this one have an ingrained habit of groveling to authority.

“Why, Aedile, I–I-.” He gathered himself and said, “Actually, I believe he went to oversee the planting of a new vineyard. Yes, that was it, a vineyard. Couldn’t wait until summer for that.” The man had probably never set foot outside the city walls in his life, and I doubted he’d know a vineyard from a fish pond.

“Did Aemilius leave orders to contract with the firm of Manius Florus to shore up the theater against the coming fiood?”

“Oh, yes sir. The family of Florus is among my patron’s clientele. He has given them a great deal of business in the course of his many public works.”

“Then it seems that I need to speak with Manius Florus in your master’s absence.” I turned to go.

“But, sir, is something wrong?” I had the poor fool badly rattled.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with.” Then I thought of something and turned around. “Which estate has he gone to?”

“Why, the one near Bovillae, sir. Shall I dispatch word that you need to speak with him, Aedile?”

“Don’t bother.”

I walked from the house. Bovillae again. Lucius Folius and his wife had come from Bovillae. A supposed heir had made off with their bodies for interment at Bovillae. I don’t believe in coincidence.

We passed through the city wall at the Flumentana Gate and into the sprawling Circus Flaminius district. Like the Trans-Tiber, the Flaminius was far less congested than the City proper. Unconfined by walls, houses and businesses could be located on extensive lots; and in this district, many businesses that required plenty of room had been established, such as the salvage yard we were looking for, as well as those that employed a hazardous level of fire. The kiln yards of several pottery and brick factories were located in the district.

By asking at a few lumberyards, we came to the salvage business run by the freedman named Justus. The premises consisted of nothing more than a small, one-roomed building in a corner of a sprawling yard, where heaps of rough timber, finished beams, and planks rose to twice a man’s height, given some protection from the elements by crude roofs set atop high poles. Teams of slaves in dingy brown tunics, their hair pale with sawdust, loaded wood onto the carts of builders or unloaded wood from the carts of wreckers.

I found Justus sweating along with his workmen, loading a wagon with what appeared to be wood so deteriorated that it was useless for any purpose save burning. He was distinguishable from the slaves solely by his citizen’s ring, made of plain iron. When he caught sight of me, I crooked a finger and he walked over, brushing debris from his hands.

“You’re the Aedile Metellus, aren’t you?” he asked.

Unlike the curule aedile, the plebeian aedile rated no insignia of office: no lictor bearing the fasces, no curule chair, no purple border on one’s toga. “You’ve seen me before?”

“At the elections. Someone said that crowd around you was the largest assemblage of ex-praetors, ex-consuls, and ex-censors in Rome.”

“There is nothing like a distinguished family for that helpful boost at the polls,” I said.

“How may I be of service, Aedile?” The man’s eyes were bright and direct; he did not seem in the least nervous or guilty, although he was speaking to a man who could have him severely punished for infractions of the civic codes.

“I am tracking several cartloads of condemned timber. They were salvaged yesterday and the day before from an insula that collapsed in the night. The contractor who hauled away the wreckage was one Marcus Caninus.”

“Oh, yes sir. That was all delivered here.” He looked around. “In fact, it looks as if most of it is still here.”

“That lumber was condemned,” I told him. “It was my impression that all such rubble was to be carried out to the landfills.”

“That’s true for brick and mortar and tile, but decent wood is always salvaged for other purposes. So is good cut stone, if the building it was part of didn’t burn.”

“Is that how the building codes read?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never read them. But the custom has always been that as long as a building wasn’t destroyed by fire, and didn’t fall because it was built of inferior materials, we can salvage the stone for reuse. A good earthquake will keep us stocked with cut stone for years. When a really big project comes along, like Pompey’s Theater, you can bet that salvaged stone was used everywhere the builder could get away with it. Just the outer facing was cut especially for the project.”

For a man like this, ancient custom carried far more weight than any law written down in a book he’d never seen.

“But this building collapsed because it was not built to code,” I said, “and I condemned its materials myself, so how does it come to pass that some of that very material is in use this morning, by the contractor Manius Florus, shoring up the river side of the theater of Aemilius Scaurus?”

“Oh, that. Well, you see, that wood’s not being used in a permanent structure. For temporary structures, bracing and so forth, it’s all right to use such wood. It was perfectly good timber anyway, if a bit green.”

I rubbed my forehead, which was beginning to ache. Here was yet another free interpretation of the law. I decided that I was going to have to drag all those laws and building codes out of the Tabularium, have them carved in stone, and set them up in a public place. Another expense I could ill afford.

Justus scratched his own curly head, causing a minor snowfall of sawdust. “How did you know that it was timber from that insula, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I take my duties as aedile seriously,” I told him. “I put secret markings on the wood to thwart those who would fiout the laws of the Republic.”

He nodded admiringly. “Smart move.”

“Here’s more of it!” Hermes shouted. He had been wandering among the piles of timber, and now he was kicking at some heavy beams. I walked over to join him, and Justus hurried along beside me.

“These are those joists we saw in the basement,” Hermes said. “See, here’s one of those woodpecker holes.” He nudged at the heavy beam with a toe.

“Yes, this was taken from the insula,“ Justus said, frowning. “Caninus brought it by and dumped it here, then said he needed some weak, rotten old timbers, the same size. Usually, those are sold off for funeral pyres. Why pay for good wood if you’re just going to burn it? Anyway, nobody important had died recently, so I had what he needed. I asked him what he wanted it for, and he said that men who don’t ask stupid questions don’t get their tongues cut out. I can take a hint as well as the next man.”

“I know where that wood ended up,” I said, thinking of the courtyard of the Temple of Ceres.

Justus squatted and looked at the hole Hermes had kicked. He stuck a finger into it, then withdrew the finger and studied its tip. “This isn’t any woodpecker hole,” he announced.

“Squirrel, then?” Hermes asked.

Justus laughed. “Don’t know much about wood, do you?”

“Enlighten us,” I said.

“Well, sir, somebody bored this hole with an auger, the way you do when you’re going to fasten two timbers together with a heavy spike.”

Hermes and I looked at each other. “Remember those tools we saw in the basement?” the boy asked.

“Justus, I want a close look at all these timbers,” I ordered.

He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The slaves came running, and he barked orders. Within minutes, all the timbers were laid out in good light in an orderly fashion, so we could walk around them. The slaves stood by to turn them over at my instruction.

“More holes,” Hermes said, pointing at two no more than an inch apart.

“Here, look at this,” Justus said. He was squatting by the end of one of the shattered timbers. The ragged end still displayed three parallel furrows. “It was bored through here. That’s why it snapped at this point. That insula didn’t just collapse, Aedile, it was brought down on purpose.”

Hermes had his knife out in one hand, brushing with his other hand at the surface of a timber where he had spotted a circular depression. He stuck the tip of his knife into the edge of the depression and, slowly, carefully, pried upward. A long, whitish cylinder appeared and a moment later Hermes had a six-inch candle impaled triumphantly on his blade. Its base had been rubbed with soot or some other dark substance to blend with the wood.

“Remember all those candles we found fioating in the water down in that basement?” Hermes said.

“Justus,” I said, “you are the expert on wood. What does this tell you about the man who did it?”

“Aside from that he was a cold-blooded murderer, you mean? Well, he didn’t know much about timber or about building. This was done pretty haphazardly, drilling holes here and there. If he’d known anything about construction, where the main stress points are and so forth, he could have brought the place down with no more than a dozen holes drilled close together at the right points on the right timbers, three or four holes per timber.”

“Could he have escaped in time?” I asked.

“Most likely. Heavy timbers like this make a good deal of noise just before they go. If he’d known what to listen for, and had a good way out prepared, he might have had a few seconds to get clear. The way this looks,” he waved a hand over the ruined wood, “it gave way all at once, in six or seven places, just dumped the whole insula into the basement.”

“Justus,” I said, “I want you to hide these timbers. Cover them with trash or something. I am going to want to use them as evidence in court.”

A look of alarm crossed his face.

“Don’t worry, you have nothing to fear. It is clear to me that you are guilty of no wrongdoing.”

“To be honest, sir, it’s not you or the courts that worry me.”

“I intend to arrest Marcus Caninus immediately,” I assured him, “for tampering with my evidence if nothing else.”

“I’ll do as you order, Aedile.”

Something occurred to me. “Was Justus your slave name?”

“Yes, sir. I was manumitted along with fifty others to celebrate the birth of my master’s first grandson.”

“And you didn’t take your former master’s name?” I asked, that being the usual custom.

“Well, sir, I did, but I never use it. I suppose it’s the name that’ll go on my tombstone; but Justus isn’t a foreign name, and I’ve been used to using it all my life. Besides,” he lowered his head sheepishly, “I’m just a working man, doing the same work I did when I was a slave. I’d feel foolish going around calling myself Marcus Valerius Messala Niger.”

I left the salvage yard with much to think about.