John Roberts: The River God

“Aedile!” chorused a small crowd of men, detaching themselves from the larger crowd of petitioners. These were my clients, who on most days called on me at my home at first light. They now had standing instructions to meet me at the temple except on days when official business was forbidden. This was the year when my clients earned their keep. Ordinarily I sent them home with gifts and thanks except when I needed a cheering section in the Forum, but not this year. This year I needed assistants, and the State wasn’t going to give me any.

Burrus strode importantly forward. He was my senior client, a retired soldier from my old legion in Spain. “Aedile, the supervisor of drains and sewers wants your attention, and he says this won’t wait.”

“They all say that.” I sighed, knowing full well what the complaint would be. “Let’s hear him.”

The man came forward, a freedman named Acilius, followed by a small group of freedmen who likewise served the City. All wore the harried look of such functionaries. It is a thing practiced even by those with no work to do at all. Perhaps those wear the most harried looks.

“Aedile,” Acilius began, “the drains must be cleaned, and you can delay no longer. For the last five years, the aediles have ignored them, and now all of them are utterly choked with mud and trash and unmentionable filth. It is a disgrace!”

“Well, they’ve gone for five years, why not another?” I did not want to face this problem. The voters remembered your aedileship for the splendor of the Games you put on, not for doing the necessary but disagreeable tasks that kept the City a functioning entity.

“Because,” he said, with malevolent satisfaction, “the river is rising, and the rivermen predict a fiood before the next full moon.”

“Sir,” Burrus said, “those men know the river better than you know politics.”

“You don’t need to remind me,” I told him, “but I don’t see how they can be so sure. The rains haven’t been heavy of late.”

“There was unusually heavy snow in the mountains,” Acilius said gloatingly. “It’s melting.”

“Bring me an assessment of the labor and funds necessary to clean and repair the drains,” I said. “I will consult with the other aediles, and we will get the job done.” I said this with more hope than confidence. My colleagues were more interested in putting on their career-boosting Games than in doing anything constructive for the City.

The sad fact was that the important office of aedile had become little more than a stepping-stone to higher office, and most ambitious men undertook it solely for that purpose. When one of them bothered to undertake the construction or restoration of a public building, it was usually a temple located in a prominent place, and then only because it entitled him to put his name on its pediment in letters two feet high.

Very few of us had the wealth to build a truly useful structure such as a bridge, basilica, or highway. Centuries before, an Appius Claudius had built the great Rome-Capua highway, the Appian Way, and his name will live forever. Quintus Fabricius built the bridge I had crossed twice that morning; and while it might not last as long as the Appian Way, it will ensure his memory for generations to come.

But it was the Games that had come more and more to dominate the office, and my own upcoming munera distracted me from my other duties as would an invading army bearing down upon the City. Quite aside from the plays, banquets, and chariot races of the regular ludi , which are costly enough, the exotic beasts and gladiators of the munera are staggeringly expensive.

I shook off the daunting prospect and turned to the crowd of petitioners, each of whom had a complaint that demanded the attention of a plebeian aedile. One would complain of the shocking state of the street in front of his place of business, another of the disorderliness of the whorehouse next door. Malicious citizens accused neighbors of infractions that would prove nonexistent, but an aedile could turn no citizen away, just as a tribune of the people was forbidden even to close the doors of his house during his year in office. I had to deal with them all.

While I endured this daily tedium and assigned each case to one of my clients for investigation and report, I allowed myself to envy the curule aedile. He got to wear a purple border on his toga, and all he had to do was sit around all day in his folding chair and supervise the markets, levying fines for infractions. The office that year had been held by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a man who had never amounted to much but who became famous anyway years later because he had a lot of soldiers behind him just when two more capable men needed them. They made him a triumvir .

I disposed of the last of the petitioners just before midday and went to see what Hermes had been able to discover. I found him going over the timbers, now laid out parallel to one another. He squatted by one, poking at it with his knife.

“Well?” I asked, walking up to him.

“Termites, all right.” He held up a handful of dusty wood pulp. His knife had pried up a slab of wood, revealing a honeycomb of tunnels beneath.

My mind pondered the legal ramifications of these malicious little insects. “Unfit wood, no doubt about it. The builder, when we find him, will, of course, claim that the infestation occurred after he built the insula . I am not intimately familiar with the nature of these loathsome little creatures and therefore will have to consult with one of the natural philosophers to find out if there was adequate time between the construction of the insula and its collapse for such an infestation to occur. Hermes, I want you to find out who might know about-”

“Trouble is,” he interrupted, “this isn’t the same wood we looked at before.”

I was caught in midthought preparing my denunciation, and this took a moment to penetrate. “What’s that?”

“I’ve been all over this timber. I’ve looked at every surface. Remember that first borehole I found? I marked it with a big X . It’s not here.”

“Maybe they missed one timber.”

He shook his head. “Look at this wood. Forget the termites. Look at how dry it is. The timbers in that cellar were still oozing sap. I’m no expert on wood either, but this stuff has to be older than I am, and it’s probably older than Titus Saufeius.” This last being a senator some ninety-seven years old and famous only for his longevity, having never held an office higher than quaestor.

“Well, well,” I said. “First we have a felonious but rather common instance of violation of building codes. Now we have what looks like conspiracy and tampering with evidence.”

“There’s always the chance some fool just sent the wrong lumber cart here,” Hermes said, playing advocate for the other side, just as I had taught him.

“Such negligence is always more than suspicious when an investigation is involved. Besides, there wasn’t a stick of seasoned wood in that house, unless it was part of the furniture. Every splinter of structural wood we saw was green. Somebody went to all the trouble to find this plausibly unsound wood and bring it here.”

“Looks that way,” he admitted.

“I think we’re going to have some fun with this.”

He grinned. “I thought you’d see it that way.”

The Forum was still crowded, even though it was the hour for the midday meal. Many bought food from street vendors and ate standing while conducting business or making political deals or just idling about. True denizens of the City often prefer hunger to leaving the Forum. After all, what could be better than standing at the center of the world? I couldn’t think of anything. It certainly beat fighting and freezing in Gaul.