Finished Business (24 page)

‘You’re not too upset with me, I hope, sir?’ Felix said. ‘Or disappointed? After all, it was for the best. And I did keep you alive.’

True. Between Gaius and Messalina, not to mention Cerialis’s hit-men over on the Janiculan, this time round by rights I should’ve been for the urn half-a-dozen times over. Besides, in the ten years I’d known him I’d developed a sneaking admiration for the devious sod.

‘No, no hard feelings, pal,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you around.’

I left.

Well, that was that, then, I thought as I hobbled out the gate and into the waiting litter. You win some, you lose some. This one I’d definitely lost, although maybe – Messalina apart – Rome had come out ahead. We’d just have to see what kind of a job Claudius made of things. Personally, I was pretty optimistic: at least, like I said, despite surface impressions and popular opinion, the guy was no idiot. Plus, whatever she believed to the contrary, Messalina was no Livia, either; I’d had enough to do with that brilliant, cold-minded bitch to be certain of that. Valeria Messalina wasn’t even in the same league. So one of these days the lady was going to overreach herself, and it’d serve her right …

There was only one box I hadn’t ticked, and it wasn’t one that Felix could help with, nor could anyone, for that matter: Naevia Postuma’s firm conviction, backed up by the changes he’d made to his will regarding Perilla’s – and my – bequest, that her uncle knew he was going to be murdered. Or, at least, was going to die very, very shortly. Oh, sure, he may have guessed that he was a marked man, but that didn’t quite explain things.

Me … well, ever since my conversation with the Wart just before Sejanus was chopped, I’ve kept an open mind where the casting of horoscopes is concerned. And if Tiberius knew, thanks to the astrologer Thrasyllus, exactly when he was going to cash his chips in and who his successor would be, then I couldn’t see any problem in Naevius Surdinus having got his information in the same way. Weird, sure, but if it ticked the box when no other explanation did then weird I could take. The same went for Postuma’s Alexander; whether you liked it or not – and, as I say, personally I didn’t have a problem there – he’d been absolutely spot on about the assassination. Plus, from what I knew of the bastard in life, he and Gaius would’ve been bosom buddies and kindred souls. Given the fact that he did still exist on some sort of astral plane, his wanting to shove his ectoplasmic oar in made perfect sense.

So we’d just have to shrug and move on, wouldn’t we?

Maybe, at present, though, not all that far, or all that fast. Renatius’s wine shop wasn’t much out of our way, or if it was then what the hell: I hadn’t had a proper cup of wine for days, and I reckoned that I was owed one. The future could look after itself for the next couple of hours.

I pulled aside the curtain and gave the litter guys their new orders.

T
he story is set between November and January AD 40/41. As I’ve done with all the political Corvinus books, I’ve kept (I hope!) more or less strictly to the historical facts as far as I know them, even where these are a little surprising. Herennius Capito’s evidence under torture and Gaius’s discounting of it were as I’ve given them, as was the emperor’s rather strange response to his soothsayer’s warning to ‘beware of Cassius’ by recalling Cassius Longinus from Asia while ignoring the much more immediate threat posed by Cassius Chaerea, who was one of his eventual assassins. Introducing a reason for the anomalies in the form of a trusted advisor who was actually part of the conspiracy himself made a great deal of sense. To me, at least.

I have, though, made two changes, both minor, both dictated by the demands of the plot. First of all, ‘my’ two conspiracies are closer together in time by at least two months than the real ones actually were. The upshot of the second, of course, was unalterable where the date was concerned – Gaius had to be assassinated on 24 January AD 41 – so I left it alone; the first conspiracy was unmasked at some time in the autumn or very early winter the previous year.

The second change had to do with the fate of Sextus Papinius; ‘my’ Papinius died just before the first conspiracy came to light, while the historical one was arrested and executed with the other conspirators. I don’t feel too guilty about this; if the young man died slightly sooner than he would have done, death from a broken neck is far cleaner than death by torture would have been.

Oh – and one more slight departure from the historical facts, again for plot reasons. In January 41, the real Messalina would have been heavily pregnant with Claudius’s son Britannicus, who was born in February of that year; accordingly she is very unlikely to have been present at a public dinner party, and certainly not in the sylph-like condition I ascribe to her. Readers well up on their history will just have to forgive me.

Unlike the entire Surdinus ménage and the murder itself, my conspirators are real enough, albeit drastically trimmed in number to avoid over-complexity of plot; however, the connection between the two conspiracies, and, of course, their different nature and Messalina’s involvement in them, are complete inventions of my own – although all three factors can, I think, be defended as at least possible. Interestingly enough – although I decided not to include the fact in the body of the text – the day after the assassination, 25 January, was Messalina’s birthday; a gift for a dedicated conspiracy-theorist like me. Being elevated at a stroke from her position as the wife of a second-rate imperial to that of the empire’s First Lady would have been quite a birthday present, particularly given the historical Messalina’s character, and I really can’t help feeling that the timing of Gaius’s death was deliberate on someone’s part.

Regarding the lady herself. It may have surprised fans of Robert Graves’s
I, Claudius
– of which I’m very much one – that ‘my’ version of Messalina is about ten years older and had been married before, but this is probably so: her father, Valerius Barbatus, was dead by AD 20, and at the age of more than twenty-one it is more than likely that she had had a husband previous to Claudius – although who he was, and whether she was a widow or a divorcee, isn’t known, at least as far as I’m aware. When I’ve referred to him or the marriage in the text I’ve left things deliberately vague.

As for the assassination. ‘My’ Gaius, of course, dies offstage, but you may be interested in how Suetonius (writing, admittedly, eighty years after the event) describes things:

On 24 January at about the seventh hour [i.e. early afternoon], his stomach still being slightly out of sorts as the result of a heavy meal the previous day, Gaius was in two minds about leaving his seat in the theatre to take a lunch break; however, his friends persuaded him to go out with them. In the covered walkway which they had to pass through, he met a group of boys, sons of distinguished families, who had been brought over from Asia to stage a theatrical performance and who were currently rehearsing. He stopped to watch them and give them some encouragement, and if the leader of the troupe had not said that he was unwell, would have liked to take them back into the theatre with him and have them perform straight away. From this point on, there are two versions of what happened. Some authorities have it that while Gaius was talking to the boys Chaerea came up behind him, and shouting ‘Take that!’ struck him on the neck with his sword, wounding him seriously; and then that the tribune Cornelius Sabinus, another of the conspirators, stabbed him face-on, in the chest. Others say that Sabinus told his NCOs (who were also in the plot) to disperse the crowd before asking Gaius – as was the military custom – for the watchword. When Gaius answered ‘Jupiter’, Chaerea shouted ‘That’s confirmed!’ and on his turning round split his jawbone at a stroke. The emperor lay hugging himself on the ground and shouting ‘I’m still alive!’ but the other assassins finished him off, inflicting no fewer than thirty wounds, including sword thrusts to his genitals. For the word in everyone’s mouth was ‘Give it to him again!’ At the first sign of trouble, his litter men ran to his aid, using their poles as weapons; they were closely followed by his German bodyguard, who not only killed a number of the assassins but also some of the senatorial bystanders.

(Suetonius,
Caligula
58; my translation)

Two last, general things that I’m often asked about, so perhaps some explanation is called for: purple stripes and time of day/dates. First, the stripes.

An ordinary male citizen would, on formal occasions, at least, wear a plain white toga (my ‘mantle’); hence my use, for the Roman-in-the-street, of the term ‘plain-mantle’. My broad-stripers are members of the senate, which was composed of magistrates who held, or had held, at least the rank of
quaestor
(junior finance officer). They wore togas with a broad purple stripe at the edge.

The second class of purple-stripers were the
equites
(knights) – my ‘narrow-stripers’, so named for obvious reasons. A good phrase to define them (which Michael Grant uses in his excellent translation of Tacitus) would be ‘gentlemen outside the senate’. The knights were variously Rome’s businessmen (senators were forbidden to engage in trade), imperial administrators (some important posts – e.g. Egyptian governor and commander of Praetorians – could only be held by an
eques
) and members of ‘senatorial’ families who for one reason or another had never held office: Corvinus would be one of these.

As to time of day and dates. The first is easy: the Roman day began at dawn and ended at sunset, and it was divided into twelve hours, as was the period sunset to dawn, where the hours were grouped into four ‘Watches’ of three hours each. This meant, of course, that the length of a Roman hour varied depending on the time of year, and it played merry hell with the calibration of any time-keeping device other than the sundial. Water-clocks (
clepsydrae
) were a particular headache.

Dates are more complicated, because the Romans didn’t use our consecutive numbering system. Instead, calculation was based on three key points in any given month (probably, originally, market days): the Kalends, Nones and Ides (because the Greeks used a different system, the Latin expression ‘on the Greek Kalends’ meant the same as our ‘never in a million years’). The Kalends were always on the first day of the month; the other two dates were normally on the fifth and thirteenth respectively, except that:

In March, July, October, May

The Nones are on the seventh, the Ides the fifteenth day

Which explains why Julius Caesar was murdered on the fifteenth, not the thirteenth of March.

Now, this is where it gets tricky, so take a deep breath before reading the next bit.

The Romans not only counted backwards from the next key date; they counted inclusively.

So 24 January would be – as I’ve given it in the text, rather tongue-in-cheek because I’m sure that mathematicians will jump on it as a mistake – nine (not eight) days before the Kalends of February.

Except when …

The system breaks down for the day immediately before a key date; so if it had existed, the Roman Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) would’ve been ‘the day before the Kalends of January’, while 30 December would be ‘three days before the Kalends’.

No such thing as ‘two days before’, you see …

I trust that’s all perfectly clear. You can now indulge in hours of innocent amusement working out the birthdays of your loved ones, pets and so on by Roman reckoning. Have fun.

I hope you enjoyed the book.

David Wishart