The Venus Throw

Chapter Twenty

Bethesdawas prescient. In the morning, when we went down to the Forum to watch the trial, Clodia was already there in the great square in front of the Rostra, seated behind the prosecutors in the midst of a great many of her retainers. She was pale and her eyes were listless, but the crisis had apparently passed. She looked in our direction and smiled wanly-not at me, I realized, but at Bethesda, who nodded and smiled in return. For me Clodia had no smile, only a raised eyebrow, as if to ask if I had any last bit of information to give her. I pursed my lips and shook my head. Eco had still not returned, and none of my nets had snagged a fish.

It was the day before the beginning of the Great Mother festival. For six days Rome would celebrate with games and competitions, religious processions and plays, private parties and public ceremonies. After the festival, members of the Senate would briefly reconvene before taking their traditional Aprilis holiday at their country estates. Rome would shut down, like a great gristmill grinding to a halt. On the eve of all this, the mood in the Forum was a combination of rush and relaxation- hectic hurry to take care of final business together with the delicious anticipation of the coming days of indolence and pleasure.

This giddy mood was heightened even more by the raucous atmosphere which always attends a major trial, especially a trial as rich with the promise of scandal as this one. With no other courts in session, every advocate in Rome was in attendance, and with so much recent debate over the Egyptian situation and Dio's death, most of the Senate had come to watch. Those wise enough to plan ahead had sent slaves to the Forum at dawn to put down folding chairs and hold places for them. I had sent Belbo to do just that for Bethesda and myself. I scanned the cluttered rows and spotted him waving to us from an excellent place near the front, just behind the benches where the seventy-odd judges would sit. We made our way to our seats. Before Belbo withdrew to the great crowd of gawkers and idlers that continued to gather at the periphery, I told him to keep an eye out for Eco, who might still show up at the last moment.

Before us, beyond the judges' benches, was the open square, from which the advocates would deliver their speeches. To the left sat the prosecutors with their assistants and witnesses. This was where Clodia sat. Barnabas sat next to her, and nearby I recognized "Busy Fingers" Vibennius and several others who had taken part in the fruitless chase at the Senian baths.

Directly opposite the prosecutors, to our right, were the benches of the defendant, accompanied by his advocates, family, supporters and character witnesses. The parents of Marcus Caelius were dressed all in black, as if in mourning. His mother's eyes were puffy and red and her cheeks were wet with tears; his father had white stubble on his jaw and unkempt hair, giving him the look of a man half crazy with worry. The parents of every accused man show up in court looking just the same. If Caelius had children, they would have been standing in rags, weeping. Such traditional means of evoking pity in the judges began so long ago that no advocate would consider allowing his client's family to show up looking less than wretched.

Seated beside Caelius were his two advocates. Cicero was looking leaner and sharper than when I had seen him last; a year of bitter exile had trimmed his belly, taken in his jowls and polished his eyes to a fine glitter. Gone was the fat complacency that had settled on him after his year as consul and his triumph over Catilina. In its place was a look at once haunted and eager-haunted because he had learned that Rome could turn viciously against him, eager because he had successfully lashed back at his enemies and was again in the ascendant. The eagerness in his eyes recalled the headstrong young advocate I had first met many years ago, but the hard set of his jaw and the bitter line of his lips belonged to a much older man. As an advocate Cicero had been ambitious, unscrupulous and brilliant from the very beginning-a dangerous man to take on in a court of law. Now he looked more formidable than ever.

As for Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome seemed to have stopped aging in recent years. He was a few years older than I, but looked closer to forty than sixty. Some joked that Crassus had made a deal with the gods to let him grow richer with passing time instead of older. If so, even that deal was not sweet enough to satisfy him; he looked as stern and discontented as ever. Crassus was a man who could never succeed enough for his own satisfaction. This restlessness drove him from triumph to triumph in the arenas of finance and politics, setting a pace that his less gifted colleagues could not hope to match and bitterly resented.

Beside these two old foxes, Marcus Caelius looked strikingly young and fresh, almost boyish. A good night's sleep or some other tonic had erased the slack dissolution I had seen on his face at the Salacious Tavern. Caelius had always been a mime of sorts, able to put on roles and shrug them off to suit the moment, and for this occasion he mimed the bright-eyed innocence of youth with uncanny precision. His cleverness had gotten him into trouble before; in recent years he had strayed from his mentors Crassus and Cicero, perhaps even betrayed them in the pursuit of his own fortunes. They might reasonably have turned their backs on him now, but all differences had apparently been reconciled. They were three foxes sitting in a row.

I turned my eyes from the defense to the prosecution. Leading them was young Lucius Sempronius Atratinus. If Caelius looked fresh beside his weathered advocates, Atratinus looked positively childlike. He was only seventeen, barely a man in the eyes of the law. But youthful passion can count for much with Roman judges, who have sat through too many speeches to be much impressed by false indignation or tired blustering, no matter how experienced the advocate. Young Atratinus's interest in prosecuting Caelius was the extension of a family feud; it was Atratinus's father, Bestia, against whom Caelius made his notorious pun about the "finger of guilt." Atratinus's pursuit ofCaelius's destruction was a virtuous act in the eyes of a Roman court, where loyalty to fathers counts for so much.

Flanking Atratinus were his fellow prosecutors. I knew little about them. Lucius Herennius Balbus was a friend of Bestia's and more familiar to me by sight than by ear; I had never heard him argue a case, but the sight of his well-fed body scurrying back and forth in the Forum (like a giant egg wearing a toga, Eco had once said) was impressed on my memory. Publius Clodius was the third prosecutor-not Clodia's brother, but one of his freedmen, who accordingly bore the same name; thus the Clodii were represented among the prosecutors in an indirect way, as they no doubt preferred, by name but not by blood.

Gnaeus Domitius, the presiding magistrate, mounted his tribunal. The judges were sworn in. The trial commenced with the reading of the formal charges.

There were five charges in all. The first four dealt with incidents of violence against foreign dignitaries, whose persons were sacrosanct; violence against them was technically violence against their protector, the Roman state, and so qualified for prosecution under the law against political terror. The charges were grave: that Marcus Caelius master-minded attacks at Neapolis to intimidate the newly arrived Alexandrian delegation; that he instigated a riot against the delegation at Puteoli; that he perpetrated arson against the delegation during their stay at the property of Palla, on their way to Rome; that he attempted to poison the head of the delegation, Dio, and subsequently took part in Dio's murder.

To these was added another, new allegation: that Caelius had attempted to poison Clodia. There were reactions of surprise among many in the crowd, including Bethesda.

"What are they talking about?" she whispered.

I shrugged and tried to look ignorant.

"You told me she was ill, not poisoned!"

I put a finger to my lips and nodded toward the defendant's bench, where Crassus had risen to make a statement. "It should be noted by our presiding magistrate Gnaeus Domitius and by the judges that this final charge is a new one, appended by the prosecution only yesterday, in fact. The defense has hardly been given the customary amount of time to prepare an argument in response to so serious an accusation. Thus we would be within our rights to protest the inclusion of this charge, indeed, to insist that it be thrown out and argued in a separate trial, or, if it is to be included, to demand a postponement of this trial. Further, given that this is a court convened solely to try cases of political violence, it hardly seems suitable to include a charge of attempted poisoning against a private citizen. However, as the prosecution seems to believe that this charge is in fact related to the others, and as my esteemed friend and colleague Marcus Cicero assures me that he is fully prepared to defend our client against it, we make no objection to its inclusion in this trial."

Crassus nodded gravely to the presiding magistrate and the judges and sat. On Cicero's face I saw the quiver of a smirk, barely repressed. It was a look I knew well; the great orator was feeling smug about some-thing. Could it be that he was secretly pleased to have the charge of the attempted poisoning of Clodia included among the rest? What conjurer's trick was he planning this time?

Formalities concluded, the trial could begin. The three prosecutors would speak first, then Caelius and his advocates would respond. After the orations, witnesses for both sides would deliver their statements.

Given the number of speakers and the numerous charges to be discussed the trial would surely last for more than one day.

A Roman trial is only ostensibly about establishing guilt or inno-cence. At Rome, all trials are to some extent political, and a trial for political violence is overtly so. Roman judges are not merely citizens seeking the truth about a specific act; they are a committee of the state and their purpose is to make a political as well as a moral judgment. A trial typically deals with the whole life of the accused-his reputation family connections, political affiliations, sexual practices, virtues, vices. Judgment is rendered not merely on whether the accused did or did not commit a specific crime, but on the entire character of the accused, and for the good of the body politic as a whole. Cicero himself put it plainly at a trial held the year before his own exile: "When rendering their verdict, judges must consider the good of the community and the needs of the state."

Moreover, everyone knows that judges are more influenced by the orations of the advocates than by the testimony of the witnesses who follow. "Arguments count for more than witnesses," as Cicero has often said. The deductions a good orator draws from the internal evidence of a case (asserting, "Because of this, it stands to reason that…") are more persuasive than the bald statements of any given witness, no matter that the witness testifies under oath (or in the case of slaves, under torture).

Atratinus rose to deliver the first speech. His clear young voice carried exceedingly well, and his oratorical delivery, if not polished to a dazzling shine, had the ring of sincerity.

Atratinus dwelled exclusively on Caelius's character-his well-known dissipation, his extravagance, the disreputable haunts he was known to frequent. Atratinus's righteous indignation would have sounded forced and false coming from many older advocates, but Atratinus was young and unsullied enough to be credible when he frowned on Caelius's excesses.

Caelius was untrustworthy, said Atratinus. No wise man would turn his back on Caelius, or else Caelius was likely to slander and mock him, as he had slandered and mocked his own mentors behind their backs, chose who were at this very moment closest to him; his notorious lack of respect for these men was sadly evident to everyone else in the court except themselves, apparently. Now that he had finally gotten himself into more trouble than he could handle, the crass opportunist was only too happy to make use of the elders he had betrayed, not only his mentors, but his own father, whom he had abandoned to go live by himself in a Palatine apartment where he could indulge all his vices away from paternal

and make fun of the humble house on the Quirinal Hill from which he had fled, and to which he had now unwillingly returned in his distress. There were more sincere ways to show respect to one's father, Atratinus insisted, pausing with a meaningful smile so that no one would miss the example he himself presented.

Nor would it be wise for any woman to turn her back on Caelius, he said, for the fellow was capable of far worse than mockery and slander- as we would see when the charge of the attempted poisoning of Clodia was dealt with by another speaker.

Atratinus played on these themes of dissipation and disreputable conduct, turning them over and over as a man turns a jewel in his hand, to see the various ways it catches the light. By turns he sought to outrage the judges, to appeal to sentiment, to make them laugh.

Politically, he said, Caelius had flirted with the cause of the depraved revolutionary Catilina. Sexually, he had assaulted the wives of Roman citizens; witnesses would be called to verify these charges. Witnesses would also be called to attest to Caelius's violent nature; there was the case of a senator named Fufius whom Caelius had beaten up at the pontifical elections in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. And if these indications of Caelius's character were not damning enough, con-sider the way he swaggered and strutted and spat out his speeches when playing the prosecutor at other men's trials, or debating in the Senate. And the appalling color of the stripe on his senatorial toga! Where everyone else's was traditionally somber, almost black, his was a garishly bright, bold purple. At the reminder of this impropriety, I saw quite a few judges nod their gray heads.

Worst of all-because it was this vice which most seriously threat-ened to destroy the republic-was Caelius's extravagance with money. In this Caelius represented the very worst aspect of his generation, which was set so firmly apart from wiser, more senior men such as the judges, as well as from less experienced but more virtuous young men of Atratinus's age, who looked on the spendthrift habits of men like Caelius with dread and dismay. What would become of the Republic if such men were not stopped? They squandered fortunes on licentious behavior and spent huge sums on electoral bribery, corrupting everyone and everything they touched. Then, finding themselves bankrupt, as they inevitably must, and stripped by their own debauchery of all moral sense, such men resorted without hesitation to the most fiendish crimes to replenish their coffers. To get his hands on Egyptian gold, Caelius had covered his hands with Egyptian blood. In so doing he had cast a bloody stain on the dignity and honor of the Roman state.

"If ever there was a case which proved the sad necessity for courts such as this one, this is that case. If ever there was a man who full deserved the condemnation of this court, Marcus Caelius is that man." So Atratinus concluded.

I turned to Bethesda and asked what she thought. "Rather too young for my taste," she said. "But a pleasant voice."

The freedman Publius Clodius spoke next. His speech dealt with the first three charges against Caelius. Where Atratinus had shown a kind of prim distaste at having to pollute himself with cataloguing Cae-lius's crimes, Clodius attacked with the relish of a man wielding a red-hot poker. He did not hesitate to make crude jabs and thrusts, but he also pulled back from time to time, confident in his weapon's power to inflict damage even from a distance. Paroxysms of disgust were punctuated with abrupt full stops, during which, standing stock-still and emotionless, Clodius would deliver some of his most acid comments, eliciting gasps and laughter from the crowd. It was a technically dazzling speech.

The virtues or vices of Caelius's character might ultimately be matters of opinion, he conceded, especially in a time when so many Romans had become sadly confused about such things, but the outrages committed against the Alexandrian envoys were simple matters of fact. A hundred of the most respected men in Egypt had come to Rome to petition the Senate. As ambassadors, they carried the protection of the gods and the state. Yet they had been met with unremitting violence, intimidation, fire and ultimately murder. Word of this scandal had spread from the Pillars of Hercules to the borders of Parthia, undermining Rome's prestige with her subjects and allies and inflaming her already precarious relations with the volatile kingdom of Egypt.

The places and dates of these attacks were well documented. The prosecution would produce witnesses who would swear that in each in-stance — at Neapolis, at Puteoli, and at Palla's estate-Marcus Caelius had been seen in the vicinity shortly before the attack, in the company of known assassins. Further, as other witnesses would attest, Caelius had been heard shamelessly bragging in public about his part in the massacres. What sort of man was so imprudent as to boast of engineering such atrocities? Clearly,a man with the depraved character of Marcus Caelius.

Clodius proceeded to give a vivid account of each attack, piling on gory details, painting tableaus of pity and terror, invoking the shades of the unavenged dead.

Why, he asked, had Marcus Caelius perpetrated such violence? The reason was obvious: for financial gain. A man like Marcus Caelius, from a humble but respectable family, could hardly engage in the high living he was famous for without incurring massive debts. Witnesses would be called to document his reckless spending habits. If Caelius wished to dispute these witnesses, and if he had nothing to hide, let him open his private account books for the court. Was he willing to do that? If not, why not? Because, Clodius alleged, those account books would reveal the payments Caelius had received to mount his campaign of terror against the Alexandrian envoys. To finance his own disgusting pleasures, Caelius had sold out the good name of the whole Roman people. Clodius's indignation came to an appropriately thunderous climax that had the crowd stamping their feet with appreciation. He returned to the bench mopping sweat from his forehead like a boxer.

I turned to Bethesda and raised an eyebrow. "Well?"

"Everybody knows that freedmen try harder," she said. "But all that blustering and waving of arms only makes me nervous."

"I noticed you fidgeting. Afraid for your precious Marcus Caelius?"

" 'Oratory is all very well when there are no facts to go on,' " she said. I looked at her amazed, as I always am when she unexpectedly quotes some old Roman proverb. It's natural of course that she should pick up such things from me and from going to trials, but there's some-thing jarring about hearing them repeated with an Egyptian accent. "And so far," she said, "they've said nothing about the death of Dio, nor about any attempt to poison Clodia."

"I suspect that will come next."

Lucius Herennius Balbus mounted the Rostra to conclude for the prosecution. If Atratinus had played outraged youth, Herennius was the stern, admonishing uncle, castigating Caelius's character from an older, wiser, but no less scandalized perspective. He began and ended his speech by reciting the litany of Caelius's vices. In between, he dealt with the death of Dio and the "bare escape" of a certain Roman lady who had the misfortune to know more about Caelius's crimes than was healthy for her.

That lady, he said, would testify about a loan which she had made to Caelius, ostensibly to put on games in his hometown for the sake of his political career-when in fact no such games had taken place. The money she lent him had been used to bribe slaves in the house of Lucius Lucceius, in an attempt to murder Dio by poison, and thus put an end once and for all to the decimated Alexandrian delegation by destroying its leader. That particular plot had failed, but Dio, alerted to the danger, had fled to another house, and it was there that he eventually met his end. By whose hand, everyone in the court must know: the assassin Publius Asicius. Never mind that Asicius had been acquitted at his own trial; it was common knowledge that the prosecution and defense had conspired together to throw the case in Asicius's favor. Caelius and Asicius, partners in so many other vices, had been partners in this outrage as well-witnesses would be called who would place the two very close to the house where Dio was staying on the night of his murder. Like a tree with many branches, the Alexandrian delegation had been ruthlessly hacked away, limb by limb, until only the trunk remained. Caelius had not been satisfied until that, too, was destroyed.

Here Herennius delivered an encomium to Dio, reciting his many honors and achievements, naming the men who had bravely given him shelter in his days of despair, mourning the loss of so brilliant a philosopher, lamenting the shame that had been visited upon Rome by his murder.

What of the final charge against Caelius, that of ruthlessly seeking the death by poison of a great Roman lady, the descendant of one of the city's oldest and proudest families, the widow of one of her most distin-guished citizens? The lady was present and would, strength permitting, testify herself to the outrage plotted against her.

At one point, Caelius had aligned himself with the lady's brother- just one more of his fickle, never-to-be-trusted alliances-and this brought him into the lady's acquaintance. Sad day for her! Young and good-looking, Caelius was a quite charmer, to be sure-proof of that was the fact that he'd talked two men he'd stabbed in the back into repre-senting him today! Using all his skills he had charmed the lady out of a rather large loan. Later, she had cause to regret her trust in the scoundrel, not only because the loan was never repaid-typical, predictable! — but because with mounting horror she realized the use to which Caelius had put the money. His Egyptian coffers had run dry, but his mission was not yet finished, so he used her gold to bribe another man's slaves to poison Dio. The realization shocked the lady to her senses. Disgusted with Caelius's indecency and his murderous bent, outraged that she had been duped into financing his crimes, she decided to do something about it; she agreed to appear as a witness at this trial. A brave act, to make herself the enemy of a murderer-and almost fatal, as it turned out. To silence her, Caelius decided to poison her.

"Those of us who have attended all too many trials for murder know the sad pattern," said Herennius, lowering his voice to a confidential tone. "Let a man once descend to using poison on another human being and, sooner or later, he will try the same thing again. Poisoning becomes a habit, a secret vice, like certain other things men do in the dark. Until he is stopped, by the law or by the gods, a poisoner will repeat his vile crime over and over again."

Thus, having fallen into this vice with his attempt on Dio-if indeed it was his first poisoning! — Caelius not surprisingly resorted to poison to rid himself of the troublesome lady. He tested the stuff first on one of his own slaves. (Not on one of his old, trusted slaves, to be sure; Caelius had purchased a slave specifically to test his poison, as one might buy a cheap garment intending to use it as a rag and then throw it away. If he cared to deny the fact, let Caelius produce that slave in court alive and well.) Then Caelius approached some of the lady's slaves (like a typical poisoner, repeating the same mode of operation) and tried to bribe them to administer the poison. But the loyal slaves betrayed the plot to their mistress, and she cleverly sought to trap Caelius's agent in the act of handing over the deadly stuff.

Herennius proceeded to give a completely straight-faced account of the disaster at the Senian baths, which provoked some snickering among the spectators; the story had made the rounds. To verify the incident, he said, the slaves whom Caelius had thought to suborn would testify. So that they would not have to suffer the indignities of torture, and to reward them for their loyalty, these slaves had been manumitted and would testify as freedmen.

Herennius sighed with exasperation. "Caelius's attempt to poison Dio failed. So did his first attempt on the lady. But still Caelius did not give up! Only hours ago, the lady came very close to death, thanks to Caelius's relentless, insidious efforts to do her in. Look at her now, at her pale face and languid eyes, at her helpless trembling! One need only see her to know that something truly terrible has transpired. 'What awful thing was done to her?' you ask. But no, I shall refrain from relating the sordid details of this latest, almost successful attempt to murder her. Since the gods have seen fit to spare her from Caelius's murderous plots, let her tell the story. Let the tale of her hairbreadth escape emerge from her own shocking testimony. I only pray to the gods that she will continue to recover and be strong enough to testify!"

Regarding this latest outrage, the judges would also hear the written confession of the wretched slave girl Caelius had seduced into betraying her mistress. Her testimony was even now being extracted under torture, as the law required.

There would also be a third, surprise witness to corroborate. Her-ennius cast a chilly smile at the bench opposite. "That man's testimony should be of special interest to the defense, I imagine. The esteemed Marcus Cicero himself has declared this witness to be 'the most honest man in Rome.' Wait until you hear what that fellow has to tell us about the attempts to poison this lady, Cicero! I wonder what you'll have to say then about the depraved murderer sitting beside you!"

This struck me as a clever but dangerous ploy on the part of Her-ennius, to leave a damaging revelation to his witnesses so that it could emerge as a surprise at the very end of the trial, rather than to include it in his oration, where he could shape and deliver the accusation himself The advantage was the sympathy to be stirred by a poison survivor telling her own story; the defense would be hard-pressed to anticipate and neutralize ahead of time any surprises that might emerge from such testimony. Who, I wondered, was this alleged "most honest man in Rome"? I looked at Cicero to catch his reaction and found him, oddly enough, staring straight at me.