John Roberts - The River God

Before the Basilica Julia, a group of candidates for the next year’s offices stood about, making sure that they were seen. It was too early yet to don the candidus and make a show of it, but they were letting no one forget who would be in a position to do them a favor in the coming year.

I wanted to get to the Tabularium, but family policy dictated that I stride up to one young man, take him by the hand, slap him on the shoulder, and greet him loudly. This was a young kinsman just beginning his political career, Lucius Caecilius Metellus.

“Good to have you back in Rome!” I shouted, as though the boy were deaf. “I hear great things about your service in Gaul!”

“Just basic military work, Aedile,” he said, with becoming modesty. At his age it might have been genuine.

“Nonsense!” I bellowed. “I’ve heard you won the Civic Crown! I’ve never won that one and neither,” here I scanned the other faces ostentatiously, “has anyone else here!” The older men grinned at this shamelessness; but the younger ones, also standing for quaestor, reddened.

“It was just a piddling earth fort,” he demurred. “Anyone with legs could get atop that wall.”

“But,” I yelled, “it takes the balls of a hero to be first, especially when the other side is packed with painted, savage Gauls!”

After many more fulsome compliments, some of them actually deserved, I felt I had done my duty and left him to the crowd of well-wishers who had assembled to see who this prodigy might be. I scanned the clot of candidates for Milo, who wanted the consulship for the next year, and Clodius, who was standing for praetor, but saw neither of them; and a good thing that was. They were both so prominent that they would probably not don the candidus until a day or two before the election. In recent months, any time they or their supporters met in public, blood on the pavement soon followed.

I did see one of my least favorite Romans though.

“Greetings, Aedile,” called Sallustius Crispus, his swar thy, greasy face split by an ugly smile. “That performance was outrageous, even for a Metellus. I know you are busy, but might you spare me a few minutes? We could retire to a stall for some lunch.”

I did some quick political calculations. Sallustius liked me no more than I liked him. He was an enemy of Cicero and Milo, my good friends. On the other hand, the weasely little bastard had insinuated himself into the confidence of everyone of importance, and his knowledge of Roman lowlife was comprehensive. His fund of political and civic gossip was unmatched, if you could sort out the nuggets of truth from the bulk ore of lies. Being a Caecilius Metellus, these calculations took me approximately half a second.

“I would be most pleased to.” I turned to Hermes. “Run along to the Tabularium and get those records we spoke about. I shall be there presently.” I caught Sallustius’s look of annoyance that I had not said which records I wanted. It could be of no interest to him, but he wanted to know everything.

We found a stall in a side street just off the Forum and sat at a table beneath an awning.

“You’re holding up well beneath the burdens of office,” he said, as a server poured us watered wine. “But the year is young yet. I hate to think what you’ll look like by December.”

“Don’t remind me. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep or a regular meal since the first of the year. It beats Gaul, though.”

“You’ll be able to brag that Rome was a better city after your year in office.”

“If it’s still standing.”

“The whorehouses can’t be that disorderly,” he said, referring to the common belief that the aediles spent most of their time supervising the lupanaria . Some of them, in fact, were known to.

“The whorehouses don’t concern me. They haven’t changed in a thousand years. The streets are in bad shape but not desperate yet. The public buildings are fine, since Caesar and Pompey got into a contest to see who could restore the most and get their names slathered all over the City. Foreign cults don’t interest me at all.”

I leaned across the table. “Rome has two great problems right now that concern my office: buildings that won’t stay up, and drains that won’t stand another fiood. You may end up standing atop the Capitol with your candidus fiuttering in the breeze as you cadge votes.”

“That bad, eh?” he said, fingering his acne-pocked chin.

“The watermen say so, and they’re seldom wrong about the river.”

“Talk of that insula crash is all over the City. Five hundred dead, I hear.”

“Cut that in half, but it’s still bad enough. It’s fiagrant corruption in the building trades, and I intend to root it out.”

“Most commendable,” he murmured.

“I believe I detect a note of doubt in your voice.”

“It is certainly not that I am dubious of your sincerity, my friend. Your devotion to duty is such that even Cato remarks upon it. It rivals your tactlessness and capacity for making dangerous enemies, but it strikes me that you know little about the building trades.”

“Admittedly so,” I said, a bit surprised at the turn this conversation was taking.

“Have you Metelli no business at all besides politics, war, and farming?”

“What else is there? For people of our class, virtually everything else is forbidden. The gens Caecilia isn’t patrician, but we’ve been consulars for centuries. If I engaged in trade, I could get booted out of the Senate come the next censorship.” I pondered a moment. “Of course, there is always Crassus, but he is a law unto himself. He made his fortune in land and slaves. Since the law defines even City land as agricultural and even the most highly educated slaves as livestock, he was staying within the law. It didn’t hurt that he could buy the goodwill of almost any censor. He was a censor himself, for that matter.”

Sallustius spat out an olive pit. “Ah, yes, the noble practice of agriculture, which these days means sitting on the terrace of your country estate and watching your slaves toil, by law dating back to-oh, I don’t know, Numa Pompilius maybe. The only sources of wealth lawful for a senator are plunder from war and the fruits of the land. That last one, more specifically, can be stretched to mean all products of the land, including those to be found beneath it.”

“True. A good many senatorial families own mines. Marius got rich that way.”

“And what else comes out of the ground?” he asked, coaxingly, apparently getting to his point.

“Oh, well, there’s timber, stone, clay for pottery and tiles, and-brick-” These last words trailed off aimlessly as the light began to dawn. Sallustius really did have a clever way of bringing these things out.

He grinned and nodded, dipping a crust into the bowl of oil. “Exactly. Building materials. It’s even marginally acceptable to manufacture bricks yourself, since they’re of pure clay fired with wood, which is to say, molded and cooked rather than manufactured in the strict sense of the word.”

“You’re saying that I may not be investigating just crooked building contractors, but highborn, infiuential people?”

“Perhaps your neighbors of the curia .”

“But, surely, such senators would merely be engaged in selling raw materials to the contractors. They would not necessarily have anything to do with the contractors, selectively choosing faulty and inferior materials to maximize profit.” My lawyer’s mentality was asserting itself unbidden.

He nodded solemnly. “One would certainly hope so.”

“And what might your interest be in this matter?”

“Like you, I am a member of the Senate. While the Sallustii may not be as noble a family as the Caecilii, we are of respectable antiquity.” This was putting it mildly, at least the first part. Sallustius was a Sabine from the mountains of the central peninsula, about as remote from the City as you could get and still be a Roman citizen. He had come to Rome a few years previously to ingratiate himself with powerful men and launch a political career. He had settled on Clodius and his patron, Caesar, as the men of the hour.