Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (64 page)

‘You may ask: what is this fear and terror that drives away the best of the advocates and leaves Sextus Roscius with only a rank beginner to defend his very life? To hear Erucius speak, you would never guess there was any peril at all, since he has deliberately avoided naming his true employer or mentioning that secret person’s vicious motives for bringing my client to trial.

‘What person? What motives? Let me explain.

‘The estate of the late, murdered Sextus Roscius – which by any ordinary course of events should now be the property of his son and heir – embraces farms and properties exceeding six million sesterces in value. Six million sesterces! That is a considerable fortune, amassed over a long and productive lifetime. Yet this entire estate was purchased by a certain young man, presumably at public auction, for the astonishing sum of
two thousand
sesterces. Quite a bargain! The thrifty young buyer was Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus – I see the very mention of his name causes a stir in this place, and why not? He is an exceptionally powerful man. The alleged seller of this property, representing the interests of the state, was the valiant and illustrious Lucius Sulla, whose name I mention with all due respect.’

At this point a soft hissing filled the square like a rain of mist on hot stones, as men turned to one another and whispered behind their hands. Capito clutched at Glaucia’s shoulder and croaked into his ear. All about me nobles in the gallery crossed their arms and exchanged grim glances. Two elderly Metelli on my right nodded knowingly to each other. Gaius Erucius, whose plump jowls had abruptly turned scarlet at the mention of Chrysogonus, gripped a young slave by the neck, spat an order at him, and sent him fleeing from the square.

‘Let me be frank. It is Chrysogonus who has engineered these charges against my client. With no legal justification whatsoever, Chrysogonus has seized the property of an innocent man. Unable to enjoy his stolen goods to the fullest, since their rightful owner still lives and breathes, he asks you, the judges of this court, to alleviate his anxiety by doing away with my client. Only then can he squander the fortunes of the late Sextus Roscius with all the carefree dissipation he aspires to.

‘Does this seem right to you, Judges? Is it decent? Is it just? In opposition let me put forward my own demands, which I think you will find more modest and more reasonable.

‘First: let this villain Chrysogonus be satisfied with seizing our wealth and property. Let him refrain from demanding our lifeblood as well!’

Cicero had begun pacing back and forth across the podium, following his habit of pacing in his study. All uncertainty had left his voice, which had emerged more vibrant and stirring than I had ever heard it before.

‘Second, good Judges, I beg this of you: turn your back on the wicked schemes of wicked men. Open your eyes and your hearts to the plea of an innocent victim. Save us all from a terrible danger, because the peril that hangs over Sextus Roscius in this trial hangs over every free citizen in Rome. If indeed, at the end of this inquiry, you feel convinced of Sextus Roscius’s guilt – no, not even convinced, but merely suspicious; if one shred of evidence suggests that the horrendous accusations against him might possibly be justified; if you can honestly believe that his persecutors have brought him to trial for any other motive than to satisfy their own insatiable greed for loot – then find him guilty and I will not object. But if the only issue at hand is the rapacious avarice of his accusers and their lust to see their victim eliminated by a perversion of justice, then I ask you all to stand upon your integrity as senators and as judges, to refuse to allow your offices and your persons to become mere instruments in the hands of criminals.

‘I urge you, Marcus Fannius, as chairman of this court, to look at the enormous crowd that has gathered for this trial. What has drawn them here? Ah, yes, the nature of the accusation is sensational in the extreme. A Roman court has not heard a case of murder in a very long time – though in the interim there have certainly been no lack of abominable murders! Those who have gathered here are sick of murder; they long for justice. They want to see criminals harshly punished. They want to see crime put down with frightful severity.

‘That is what we ask for: harsh punishments and the full severity of the law. Usually it is the accusers who make such demands, but not today. Today it is we, the accused, who appeal to you, Fannius, and your fellow judges, to punish crime with all the vehemence you can muster. For if you do not – if you fail to seize this opportunity to show us where the judges and the courts of Rome stand – then we have clearly reached that point where all limits to human greed and outrage have been swept aside. The alternative is anarchy, absolute and unbounded. Capitulate to the accusers, fail to do your duty, and from this day forward the slaughter of the innocent will no longer be done in the shadows and hidden by legal subterfuge. No, such murders will be committed here in the very Forum itself, Fannius, before the very platform where you sit. For what is the aim of this trial, except that theft and murder can be committed with impunity?

‘I see two camps before the Rostra. The accusers: those who have laid claim to the property of my client, who directly profited from the murder of my client’s father, who now seek to goad the state into killing an innocent man. And the accused: Sextus Roscius, to whom his accusers have left nothing but ruin, to whom his father’s death brought not only grief, but destitution, who now presents himself before this court with armed guards at his back – not for the protection of the court, as Erucius sneeringly implies, but for his own protection, for fear he may be murdered on the spot before your very eyes! Which of these parties is truly on trial here today? Which has invited the wrath of the law?

‘No mere description of these bandits will suffice to acquaint you with the blackness of their characters. No simple catalogue of their crimes will make manifest their degree of high-handedness in daring to accuse Sextus Roscius of parricide. I must begin at the beginning and recount for you the whole course of events that have led to this moment. Then you will know the full degradation to which an innocent man has been subjected. Then you will understand completely the audacity of his accusers and the unspeakable horror of their crimes. And you will see as well, not fully but with frightening clarity, the calamitous state into which this republic has fallen.’

Cicero was like a man transformed. His gestures were strong and unequivocal. His voice was passionate and clear. Had I seen him from a distance I would not have recognized him. Had I heard him from another room I would not have known his voice.

I had witnessed such transformations before, but only in the theatre or on certain religious occasions, when one expects to be startled by the elasticity of the human vessel. To see it occur before my eyes in a man I thought I knew was startling. Had Cicero known all along that such a change would come upon him in his moment of need? Had Rufus and Tiro? Surely they must have known, for there was no other way to account for the serene confidence that had never left them. What had they all been able to see in Cicero that I could not?

Erucius had entertained the crowd with melodrama and bombast, and the mob had been well satisfied. He had threatened the judges to their faces, and they had suffered his abuse in silence. Cicero seemed determined to stir true passion in his listeners, and his hunger for justice was infectious. His decision to indict Chrysogonus from the beginning had been a bold gamble. At the very mention of the name, Erucius and Magnus were thrown into a visible panic. Clearly they had expected a meek opposition that would offer as rambling and circumstantial an oration as their own. Instead Cicero plunged into the tale up to his neck, omitting nothing.

He described the circumstances of the elder Sextus Roscius, his connections in Rome and his long-standing feud with the cousins Magnus and Capito. He described their notorious characters. (Capito he compared to a scarred and hoary gladiator, and Magnus to an old fighter’s protégé who had already surpassed his master in wreaking havoc.) He specified the time and place of Sextus Roscius’s murder, and noted the odd fact that Mallius Glaucia had ridden all night to take a bloody dagger and report the death to Capito in Ameria. He detailed the connection between the cousins and Chrysogonus; the illegal proscription of Sextus Roscius after his death and after all such proscriptions had ceased by law; the useless protestations of the town council of Ameria; the acquisition of the Roscius estate by Chrysogonus, Magnus, and Capito; their attempts to eliminate Sextus Roscius the younger and his flight to Caecilia Metella in Rome. He reminded the judges of the query applied to every crime by the great Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla:
who profits
?

When he approached the matter of the dictator, he did not flinch; he seemed almost to smirk. ‘I remain convinced, good Judges, that all this took place without the knowledge, indeed beneath the notice, of the venerable Lucius Sulla. After all, his sphere is vast and wide; national affairs of the utmost importance claim all his attention as he busily repairs the wounds of the past and forestalls the threats of the future. All eyes are on him; all power resides in his sure hands. To build peace or wage war – the choice, and the means to carry it out, are his and his alone. Imagine the host of petty miscreants who surround such a man, who watch and wait for those occasions when his attention is fully concentrated elsewhere so that they may rush in and take advantage of the moment. Sulla the Fortunate he truly is, but surely, by Hercules, there is no one so beloved by Fortune that there does not lurk within his vast household some dishonest slave or, worse still, a cunning and unscrupulous exslave.’

He consulted his notes and refuted every point of Erucius’s oration, ridiculing its simplemindedness. He countered Erucius’s argument that Sextus Roscius’s obligations to remain in the country had been a sign of discord between father and son with a long digression on the value and honour of rural life – always a pleasing theme to citified Roman ears. He protested that the slaves who had witnessed the murder could not be called as witnesses, because their new owner – Magnus, who now kept them hidden away in the house of Chrysogonus – refused to allow it.

He meditated on the horrors of parricide, a crime so grave that a conviction demanded absolute proof. ‘I would almost say that the judges must see the son’s hands sprinkled with blood if they are to believe a crime so monstrous, so foul, so unnatural!’ He described the ancient punishment for parricide, to the crowd’s mingled horror and fascination.

His oration was so exhaustive and lengthy that the judges began shifting in their seats, no longer from the alarm of hearing Sulla’s name, but from restlessness. His voice began to grow hoarse, even though he occasionally took sips from a cup of water hidden behind the podium. I began to think he was stalling for time, though I couldn’t imagine why.

For some while Tiro had been absent from the bench of the accused – relieving himself, I had assumed, since I felt a growing need to do the same thing myself. At that very moment Tiro came hobbling briskly along the gallery, leaning on his crutch, and took his place at the bench. From atop the Rostra Cicero looked down and raised an eyebrow. Some sort of signal passed between them, and they both smiled.

Cicero cleared his throat and took a long draught of water. He took a deep breath and for a brief moment closed his eyes. ‘And now, Judges, we come to the matter of a certain scoundrel and exslave, Egyptian by birth, endlessly avaricious by nature – but look, here he comes now with a splendid retinue trailing behind, down from his fine mansion on the Palatine, where he dwells in opulence among senators and magistrates from the oldest families of the Republic.’

Alerted by Erucius, Chrysogonus had at last arrived.

His bodyguards made short work of clearing the last row of the gallery, where a few lucky members of the crowd at large had taken the only seats left over by the lesser nobles. Heads turned and a murmur passed through the square as Chrysogonus strode to the centre of the bench and sat. He was surrounded by so many retainers that some were left standing in the aisles.

I turned my head with the rest to catch a glimpse of the legendary golden locks, the lofty Alexander-like brow, the strong, broad jaw which today was set in a hard, grim line. I turned back to look at Cicero, who seemed to be physically girding himself for attack, drawing up his thin shoulders and lowering his forehead like a charging goat.

‘I have been making inquiries about this exslave,’ he said. ‘I find he is very wealthy, and not ashamed to show it. Besides his mansion on the Palatine he has a fine country retreat, not to mention a host of farms, all of them on excellent soil and close to the city. His house is crammed with Delian and Corinthian vessels of gold, silver, and copper – among them a mechanical boiling urn which he recently bought at auction at so exorbitant a price that passersby, hearing his final bid, thought that a whole estate was being sold. The total value of his embossed silver, embroidered coverlets, paintings, and marble statues is beyond computation – unless one might compute the precise amount of plunder that could be looted from various illustrious families and heaped up in one house!

‘But these are only his mute possessions. What of his speaking possessions? They comprise a vast household of slaves with the most exquisite skills and natural endowments. I need hardly mention the common trades – cooks, bakers, garment makers, litter bearers, carpenters, upholsterers, dust maids, scrub maids, painters, floor polishers, dish washers, handymen, stableboys, roofers, and medical experts. To charm his ears and soothe his mind he owns such a host of musicians that the whole neighbourhood rings with the continual sound of voices, strings, drums, and flutes. At night he fills the air with the din of his debaucheries – acrobats perform and lewd poets declaim for his pleasure. When a man leads such a life, Judges, can you imagine his daily expenses? The cost of his wardrobe? His budget for lavish entertainments and sumptuous meals? One should hardly call his dwelling a house at all, but rather a factory of dissolution and vice, and a lodging house for every sort of criminal. The entire fortunes of a Sextus Roscius would hardly last him a month!