John Roberts: The River God

A moment before the face of the theater hit the bridge proper I shouted, “Now!” We hurled ourselves off the railing and landed on the bridge, ten feet below us, plowing into a few citizens who were still trying to push their way off the bridge through the panicked crowd. Stars fiashed before my face as I was knocked almost unconscious.

But I had no leisure for oblivion, knowing what was coming. I located Hermes and hauled him to his feet. “Come on!” I bawled. “We have to be away from here!” He shook his head for a while, glanced toward the theater building, and wasted no more time. We forced our way through the crowd fieeing the bridge. Hermes drew his stick from beneath his belt and I still had my caestus on my left hand. These helped.

When we were atop the bridge abutment, we paused and looked back. The theater was jammed against the bridge, and it was folding up. Between the power of Father Tiber and the immovable massiveness of the old stone bridge, it was like a bird’s nest being crushed between the hands of a giant. The siding split and peeled away as huge beams shot out, piled against each other, crowding and fiying as the immense building fiattened, pieces of it rising, almost toppling over onto the bridge, all of it accompanied by a noise audible for miles.

Then, just as it seemed that the bridge had to give way or the no longer recognizable theater fall on top of it, the shattered hulk began to sag, falling back into the water as fioating timbers shot out from beneath the arches on the downriver side. The river was shredding the building and washing it out beneath the bridge.

Slowly, as the wreckage subsided beneath the bridge rail, we walked back out onto the Sublician. By the time I reached the middle, the theater, so vast and imposing just minutes before, was a pile of miscellaneous wood, getting smaller by the second as its pieces washed away. Suddenly, in the whirling eddies below me, surrounded by splintered timbers, a white, terrified face stared up at me. Then I saw Marcus Aemilius Scaurus disappear into Father Tiber as the fragments of his folly closed over his head.

All around me I heard the crowd chanting something over and over, again as if they were watching a chariot race or a fight between champions. I raised my eyes to the eastern bank, which looked like a jawbone with a tooth knocked out of it. Gradually, I understood what the people were shouting: “Ti-ber! Ti-ber! Ti-ber!” Yes, first and forever champion, Father Tiber was victorious once more.

JULIA FOUND ME AT THE TEMPORARY aedile’s headquarters I had established on the terrace before the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. I had been hearing the reports of my fellow officeholders even while Asklepiodes bandaged my many small wounds. Cato had Justus under guard, his searchers had a good lead on Harmodias and expected to bring him in soon, and he had men watching the dwellings of all the rest of the men on Lucilius’s list. Not the least of my satisfactions was that I would be clearing a good man’s name.

Julia had brought my best toga and a barber to shave me. I had already managed to wash up a bit in a horse trough.

“Why must you do these things, dear?” she asked, as Hermes helped her make me presentable. She threw her arms around me, and I protested.

“You know how our peers frown on public displays of affection,” I said.

She smiled. “Yes, old Cato will fall down in an apoplectic fit.”

“Well, in that case-” I grabbed her and planted a very sound kiss, to the horrified astonishment of half the Senate.

“The strangest thing,” I said, as she tried combing my hair in different styles, “is that with all the crime and fraud and greed these loathsome men perpetrated, it was the love of a slave that brought them all down.”

This brought her up short. “What do you mean?”

“Love and despair,” I said. “It was the slave who called himself Antaeus. When we found him, he could scarcely speak. He finally said something like, ‘Gala-Gala,’ and then ‘accursed.’ He was trying to speak the name of that poor girl, Galatea. He loved her, it seems. One of these men, Scaurus or Messala or Folius or all three, put the two of them up to the murder of Lucilius; and after that she was kept like a prisoner in the house of Folius. She must have tried to run because she was wearing a runaway’s collar when we saw her body.

“Antaeus tried to get Scaurus to buy the two of them out of that house, but he wouldn’t. The girl became the latest toy in that couple’s games. So the slave decided to murder them and disguise it as an insula collapse. He drilled holes in the support beams, and plugged them with candles in case someone should come into the cellar before he was finished. Maybe Messala promised the man his freedom if he would get rid of the Folii. They were an embarrassment to everyone. Or maybe he did it on his own. He may have planned to carry the girl off as the building collapsed behind them.

“But that night they let their games go a little too far, and the girl died under their whips. Antaeus decided to finish it. First he broke their necks, which as a wrestler he knew how to do efficiently, on the off chance that they might survive. Then he just kept drilling until it was over. He must have been very surprised to learn that he was alive.”

“How horrible!” she said, grimacing. Then, more practically, “Is this going to alienate you from your family?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care greatly. Their plan for Pompey will go through with or without Messala. If some of them turn out to be entangled in this, too bad. They’ve never been reluctant to use me to their advantage; I’m not going to let affection get in my way.”

Just then Cato approached and saluted the pair of us. “We have them, Decius Caecilius. We’ll bag the lot of them. Valerius Messala will be tough; it will take some time, but we will bring him down, too. Unfortunate that Scaurus won’t stand trial, but that was the finest manifestation of divine will in my lifetime.”

“Yes,” I said, standing as senators began to drift into the temple, “Father Tiber is the one god we see every day. We neglect him at out peril.” The setting sun gleamed from a cluster of white buildings out on the Campus Martius. I draped an arm around my wife’s shoulders. “Julia, it looks as if it will have to be Pompey’s Theater for my plays after all.”

Cato scowled first at my unseemly display, and then at the theater out there on Campus Martius. “And that’s another thing: That building is an abomination! Pompey stooped to every shameless subterfuge to build a permanent theater in Rome! Oh, I grant you that he built it outside the walls and put a temple on top of it, but still-”

That was Cato for you, a deeply tiresome man. He died splendidly, though. There are times that I wish I had died with him all those years ago in Utica.

These are the events of four days in the year 701 of the City of Rome, during the Interregnum of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica.