John Maddox Roberts - [SPQR Roman Mysteries 8.6]-Mightier Than The Sword

The wonderful
thing about being
Aedile
is that you get to spend
your days poking through every foul, dangerous, rat-infested,
pestilential cellar in Rome. Building inspection is part of the job,
and you can spend your whole year just prosecuting violations of the
building codes, never mind putting on the Games and inspecting all the
whorehouses, also part of the job. And I'd landed the office in a year
when a plebeian couldn't be
Curule Aedile.
The
Curule
got to wear a purple border on his toga and sat around the markets all
day in a folding chair, attended by a lictor and levying fines for
violations of the market laws. No, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus got that
job. Well, he never amounted to anything, so there is justice in the
world, after all. Mind you, he got to be Triumvir some years later, but
considering that the other two were Antony and Octavian, he might as
well have been something unpleasant adhering to the heel of Octavian's
sandal.

And the worst
thing was, you didn't have to serve as
Aedile
to
stand for higher office! It was just that you had not a prayer of being
elected
Praetor
unless, as
Aedile,
you put on splendid Games as a gift to the people. If you gave them
enough chariot races, and plays and pageants and public feasts and
Campanian gladiators by the hundred, then, when you stood for higher
office, they would remember you kindly. Of course the State only
provided a pittance for these Games, so you had to pay for them out of
your own pocket, bankrupting yourself and going into debt for years.
That was what being
Aedile
meant.

That was why I
was in a bad mood when I found the body. It wasn't as if bodies were
exactly rare in Rome, especially that year. It was one of the very
worst years in the history of the City. The election scandals of the
previous year had been so terrible that our two Consuls almost weren't
allowed to assume office in January, and the year got worse after that.
My good friend, Titus Annius Milo, politician and gang leader, was
standing for Consul for the next year, as was the equally disreputable
Plautius Hypsaeus. Milo's deadly enemy and mine, Publius Clodius
Pulcher, was standing for
Praetor.
Their mobs
battled each other in the streets day and night, and bodies were as
common as dead pigeons in the Temple of Jupiter.

But that was in
the streets. Another plebeian
Aedile,
whose name
I no longer recall, had charge of keeping the streets clean. I resented
finding them in my nice, peaceful if malodorous cellars. And it wasn't
in one of the awful, disgusting tenement cellars, either, uninspected
for decades and awash with the filth of poverty and lax enforcement of
the hygienic laws.

Instead, it was
in the clean, new basement of a town house just built on the Aventine.
I was down there inspecting because in Rome honest building contractors
are as common as volunteer miners in the Sicilian sulphur pits. My
slave Hermes preceded me with a lantern. He was a fine, handsome,
strapping young man by this time, and very good at controlling his
criminal tendencies. Unlike so many, the basement smelled pleasantly of
new-cut timber and the dry, dusty scent of stone fresh from the quarry.
There was another, less pleasant smell beneath these, though.

"There's a stiff
here, Master."

"Oh, splendid.
And I thought this was going to be my only agreeable task all day. I
don't suppose it's just some old beggar, come down here to get out of
the weather and died of natural causes?"

"Not unless
there's beggars in the Senate, these days," Hermes said.

My scalp
prickled. There were few things I hated worse than finding a
high-ranking corpse. "Well, some of us are poor enough to qualify.
Let's see who we have."

I squatted by the
body while Hermes held the lantern near the face. Sure enough, the man
wore a tunic with a senator's wide, purple stripe. He was middle-aged,
bald and beak-nosed, none of which were distinctions of note. And he
had had at least one enemy, who had stabbed him neatly through the
heart. It was a tiny wound, and only a small amount of blood had
emerged to form a palm-sized blot on his tunic, but it had done the
job. Three thin streaks of blood made stripes paralleling the one that
proclaimed his rank.

"Do you know
him?" Hermes asked.

I shook my head.
Despite all the exiles and purges by the Censors, there were still more
than four hundred Senators, and I couldn't very well know all of them.

"Hermes, run to
the Curia and fetch Junius the secretary. He knows every man in the
Senate by sight. Then inform the
Praetor
Varus.
He's holding court in the Basilica Aemilia today and by this hour he's
dying for a break in the routine. Then go find Asklepiodes at the
Statilian School."

"But that's
across the river!" Hermes protested.

"You need the
exercise. Hurry, now. I want Asklepiodes to have a look at him before
the
Libitinarü
come to take him to the
undertaker's."

He dashed off,
leaving the lantern. I continued to study the body but it told me
nothing. I sighed and scratched my head, wishing I had thought to bring
along a skin of wine. Not yet half over, and it was one of the worst
years of my life. And it had started out with such promise, too. The
Big Three were out of Rome for a change: Caesar was gloriously
slaughtering barbarians in Gaul, Crassus was doing exactly the opposite
in Syria, and Pompey was sulking in Spain while his flunkies tried to
harangue the Senate into making him Dictator. Their excuse this time
was that only a Dictator could straighten out the disorder in the city.

It needed the
straightening, although making a Dictator was a little drastic. My life
wasn't worth a lead denarius after dark in my own city. The thought
made me nervous, all alone with only a corpse for company. I was so
deeply in debt from borrowing to support my office that I couldn't even
afford a bodyguard. Milo would have lent me some thugs but the family
wouldn't hear of it. People would think the Metelli were taking the
Milo side in the great Clodius-Milo rivalry. Better to lose a Metellus
of marginal value than endanger the family's vaunted neutrality.

After an hour or
so Varus appeared, escorted by his lictors. Junius was close behind,
his stylus tucked behind his ear, accompanied by a slave carrying a
satchel full of wax tablets.

"Good afternoon,
Aedile,"
Varus said. "So you've found a murder to brighten my day?"

"You didn't
happen to bring any wine along, did you?" I said, without much hope.

"You haven't
changed any, Metellus. Who do we have?" His lictors carried enough
torches to light the place like noon in the Forum. The smoke started to
get heavy, though.

Junius bent
forward. "It's Aulus Cosconius. He doesn't attend the Senate more than
three or four times a year. Big holdings in the City. This building is
one of his, I think. Extensive lands in Tuscia as well." He held out a
hand and his slave opened the leaves of a wooden tablet, the
depressions on their inner sides filled with the finest beeswax, and
slapped it into the waiting palm. Junius took his stylus from behind
his ear and used its spatulate end to scrape off" the words scratched
on the wax lining. It was an elegant instrument of bronze inlaid with
silver, befitting so important a scribe, as the high-grade wax befitted
Senate business. With a dextrous twirl he reversed it and began to
write with the pointed end. "You will wish to make a report to the
Senate,
Praetor?"

Varus shrugged.
"What's to report? Another dead Senator. It's not like a visitation
from Olympus, is it?"

Yes, the times
were like that.

"I've sent for
Asklepiodes," I said. "He may be able to tell something from the
condition of the body."

"I doubt he'll be
able to come up with much this time," Varus said, "but if you want,
I'll appoint you to investigate. Make a note of it, Junius."

"Will you lend me
a lictor?" I asked. "I'll need to summon people."

Varus pointed to
one of his attendants and the man sighed. The days of cushy duty in the
basilica were over. I said, "Go and inform the family of the late
Senator Auius Cosconius that they have just been bereaved and that they
can claim the body here. Junius should be able to tell you where they
live. Then go to the contractor who built this place. His name is…" I
opened one of my own wax tablets. "… Manius Varro. He has a lumber yard
by the Circus Flaminius, next to the temple of Bellona. Tell him to
call on me first thing tomorrow morning, at my office in the Temple of
Ceres."

The man handed
his torch to a companion and conferred with Junius, then he shouldered
his
fasces
and marched importantly away.

Asklepiodes
arrived just as Junius and Varus were leaving, trailed by two of his
Egyptian slaves, who carried his implements and other impedimenta.
Hermes was with him, carrying a wineskin. I had trained him well.

"Ah, Decius," the
Greek said. "I can always count upon you to find something interesting
for me." He wore a look of bright anticipation. Sometimes I wondered
about Asklepiodes.

"Actually, this
looks rather squalid, but the man was of some importance and somebody
left him in a building I was inspecting. I don't like that sort of
thing." Hermes handed me a full cup and I drained it and handed it back.

Asklepiodes took
the lantern and ran the pool of light swiftly over the body, then
paused to examine the wound. "He died within the last day, I cannot be
more precise than that, from the thrust of a very thin-bladed weapon,
its blade triangular in cross-section."

"A woman's
dagger?" I asked. Prostitutes frequently concealed such weapons in
their hair, to protect themselves from violent customers and sometimes
to settle disputes with other prostitutes.

"Quite possibly.
What's this?" He said something incomprehensible to one of his slaves.
The man reached into his voluminous pouch and emerged with a long,
bronze probe decorated with little golden acanthus leaves and a
stoppered bottle, rather plain. Asklepiodes took the instrument and
pried at the wound. It came away with an ugly little glob of something
no bigger than a dried pea. This the Greek poked into the little bottle
and restoppered it. He handed the probe and the bottle to the slave,
who replaced it in his pouch.

"It looks like
dried blood to me," I said.

"Only on the
surface. I'll take it to my surgery and study it in the morning, when
there is light."

"Do you think he
was killed somewhere else and dragged down here? That's not much blood
for a skewered heart."

"No, with a wound
like this most of the bleeding is internal, I believe he died on this
spot. His clothing is very little disarranged."

He poked at the
feet. "See, the heels of his sandals are not scuffed, as usually
happens when a body is dragged."

I was willing to
take his word for it. As physician to the gladiators he had seen every
possible wound to the human body, hundreds of times over. He left
promising to send me a report the next day.

Minutes later the
family arrived, along with the
Libitinarii
to
perform the lustrations to purify the body. The dead man's son went
through the pantomime of catching his last breath and shouted his name
loudly, three times. Then the undertaker's men lifted the body and
carried it away. The women set up an extravagant caterwauling. It
wasn't a patch on the howling the professional mourners would raise at
the funeral, but in the closed confines of the cellar it was
sufficiently loud.

I approached the
young man who had performed the final rites. "I am Decius Caecilius
Metellius the Younger, plebeian
Aedile.
I found
your father's body and I have been appointed investigator by the
Praetor
Varus. Would you come outside with me?"

"Quintus
Cosconius," he said, identifying himself, "only son of Aulus." He was a
dark, self-possessed young man. He didn't look terribly put out by the
old man's passing: not an uncommon attitude in a man who has just found
out that he has come into his inheritance. Something about the name
ticked at my memory.

"Quintus
Cosconius? Aren't you standing for the tribuneship for next year?"

"I'm not alone in
that," he said. Indeed he wasn't. Tribune was the office to have, in
those years. They got to introduce the laws that determined who got
what in the big game of empire. Since the office was restricted to
plebeians, Clodius, a patrician, had gone to the extremity of having
himself adopted into a plebeian family just so he could serve as
tribune.

"Did your father
have enemies? Did any of the feuding demagogues have it in for him?" I
was hoping he would implicate Clodius.

"No, in recent
years he avoided the Senate. He had no stomach for a faction fight." I
detected a faint sneer in his words.

"Who did he
support?"

"Crassus, when he
supported anyone. They had business dealings together." That made
sense. Crassus held the largest properties in Rome. If you dealt in
real estate, you probably dealt with Crassus.

"I take it you
don't support Crassus yourself?"

He shrugged.
"It's no secret. When I am Tribune I shall support Pompey. I've been
saying that in the Forum since the start of the year. What has this to
do with my father's murder?"

"Oh, politics has
everything to do with murder, these days. The streets are littered with
the bodies of those who picked the wrong side in the latest rivalries
for office. But, since your father was a lukewarm member of the Crassus
faction at best, it probably has no bearing upon his death."