John Roberts - Oracle of the Dead

“Praetor,” said Gitiadas, “I confess I have never visited this Oracle and her mysterious tunnel, so much of this is new to me. You say that the water bubbled violently as if boiling, but it felt no more than warm?”

“Yes, that is how it was.”

“Bubbles are merely air moving through liquid. When water boils, air forms somehow and moves upward to the surface, by a process much debated among scholars. Other than by the boiling process, in order to make bubbles, air must somehow mix with the water from this layer of air in which we breathe, which exists above the level of the sea. If the water of the subterranean river has no access save the cave of the Oracle, where are all those bubbles coming from to make it froth so violently? The river must touch the air somewhere very near the spot where it enters the cave.”

This was amazingly good sense, and I couldn’t imagine why I had not thought of it before. I suppose one must be a philosopher to deduce things so logically. It gave me much to think about, and I fear I was rather withdrawn company for a while. Eventually the best wine came out-a Cretan vintage I had never heard of-and I got back to my duties as a guest.

“Does anyone know,” I asked, “why the cult of Hecate has lasted so long in these parts while it has died out almost everywhere else in Italy?”

“Hecate has the Oracle,” Porcia said, “but the Oracle was there before Hecate.”

“That’s just an old tale,” Sabinilla protested.

“Oh, tell us about it,” Julia urged.

“Well,” Porcia began, “we Campanians hold ourselves to be the original people of these parts, and we regard the Greeks and Romans as newcomers, but truth is there were people here even before we came here from somewhere else. I’ve heard them called Aborigines, but that’s just a name the Greeks gave them. They called themselves something else. It’s said they were great magicians, and they used to have all of Italy and the islands to themselves. They built their temples of huge stones and you can still see some of those here and there. It’s said they carved that tunnel down to the river, and they had the Oracle, or some sort of god, in that place. The temple above was built by their descendants on top of an even older one, before the Greeks changed it to their liking.”

I remembered the sense I’d had that the decorations of the temple covered older, cruder figures, and the carvings around the tunnel entrance had struck me the same way. About the Aborigines I was more Skeptical. Certainly, some sort of people inhabited Italy before the first Latins arrived, and I had seen some of those temples and monuments of ponderous stones as large as any the Egyptians had utilized that Porcia spoke of. But it seems to me that all the defeated and subjugated people in history somehow acquire the reputation of having been great sorcerers. I find myself wondering how, if they had such potent magic at their command, they always got themselves conquered by unmagical but soldierly people. To carve and move big stones all you need is a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and an odd idea of what it is the gods want.

“Personally, I don’t believe any of that,” Stabinilla said.

“Oh,” I asked. “Why is that?” I wondered if she shared my own doubts.

“The Aborigines were nothing but savages, like Gauls or Germans. There are none of those giant stone monuments here in Campania, or anywhere else in Italy that I ever heard. Whoever cut that tunnel had skill and good tools. I don’t think it could be older than the earliest Greek settlers. They had the skills and tools necessary. They knew how to survey and how to mine. No pack of primitives drove that tunnel straight down to an underground river.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Porcia put in. “Even a mathematician from Alexandria couldn’t find that river so far down. It was sorcery.” Then she went on in a lower voice, “But there’s some even stranger tales about that place.”

“Such as?” Julia asked.

“Well, there are some old tales that say the tunnel wasn’t driven down from the surface. Some think it was carved upward, from below.” There were gasps and mutters from around the table. People made gestures to avert evil. Talk of the underworld always makes people uneasy.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose it is relatively easy to find the surface from the river, compared to going the other way.”

“And the precise alignment on the solstice?” Julia asked.

“Well, underworld demons would know how to do something like that, wouldn’t they?” Porcia said. I couldn’t argue with that.

“What do you think, Gitiadas?” Julia asked.

“Here we only speculate,” the philosopher said. “We are presented with certain remarkable facts: a tunnel carved with great precision in alignment with a celestial event, an underground river with no known source or effluent, and the appearance of a corpse therein. From these things we can spin theories both natural and supernatural, but our speculations have little value, because we are not in possession of enough facts from which to draw informed conclusions.”

“You make uncommonly good sense, for a philosopher,” I commended, while Julia rolled her eyes, as she often did when I spoke with learned persons. “What we need is more basic facts. We need to know where that river comes from. We need to know who had it in for the priest and perhaps all the priests.”

“We also must dismiss those things that are facts but are nonetheless irrelevant to the case at hand. Too many facts can be as inimical to clear thought as too few.”

“Exactly!” I said. “Personally, I don’t care if that tunnel lines up with moonrise on the anniversary of Cannae. Nor does it matter if it was carved out by the Aborigines, the Greeks, or our host’s grandfather. The circumstances of this murder are both immediate and local, and we need to concentrate on these matters, not upon ancient tales.”

“Most astute,” Gitiadas commended. “And, one must ponder certain other matters concerning this killing.”

“Such as?” I queried.

“Well, there must be a motive for the slaying.”

“Mmmm. Here we are confronted with an embarrassment of riches. People are killed for a great many reasons. Speeding up an inheritance is a classic motive. Revenge is another and forms a whole subcategory in itself. An insult may be a call for vengeance, or a tit-for-tat killing as is common in blood feuds. I’ve known many killings to result from jealousy and more from political rivalry. Killing during a robbery is common, and manslaughter can be the result of an accident, as when a blow meant merely to chastise results in a broken neck or crushed skull. I could go on all evening on the subject of motive alone.”

“Then,” said Gitiadas, “you must eliminate all save those that may apply in this case. Another factor must be the means of murder, be it a weapon or an opportune circumstance.”

“People are killed with everything from swords to chamberpots,” I observed. “Daggers, garottes, spears, bricks, clubs-I even knew a woman who strangled her victims with her own hair. This is, I believe, the only case where the weapon was a sacred river.”

“If he was drowned,” Julia said. “That hasn’t been proven yet, nor whether it was murder at all, rather than an accident.”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I would be inclined to believe the death the result of an accident, if a rather bizarre one, save for one fact: the disappearance of the other priests. That makes it smell of foul play.”

“Has it occurred to anyone,” said the playwright, “to wonder why, of all times to carry out a murder, the perpetrator or perpetrators chose a day upon which the shrine was visited by a Roman praetor?”