John Roberts - The River God

I suppose I should not have held the man’s alien and obscure origins against him. After all, many of the best men of the day were from outside, Cicero and Milo to name the most famous. And there is no doubt at all that most of the very worst were native Romans who could trace their bloodlines back to Aeneas. It is just that Sallustius embodied all the most scurrilous caricatures of the newly arrived parvenu: vulgar, unscrupulous, ill-mannered, thick-skinned, poorly educated, unaccomplished, and generally unpleasant.

“Forgive me for being obtuse, but I still don’t quite understand what you wish to convey.” Of course, I was fairly certain that he had already delivered his message; but I wanted him to set it forth plainly, for the sake of later court testimony if need be, but he was not to be so easily led.

“I merely wished to point out a likely pitfall in your investigation, one you may wish to avoid.”

I was about to gag on all this ambiguity. “As always, I will go wherever the evidence takes me. And now,” I finished off my cup and stood, “it takes me to the Tabularium.”

“Good fortune, then. I shall follow your progress with interest.”

I felt no need for his interest, but diplomatically fore-bore to mention the fact. Instead, I wondered how he had learned so quickly of my investigation. But in the small, involuted world of Roman politics, it seemed that everybody got wind of everything at once. I’d spent most of the previous day at the disaster site; I’d spoken to the Interrex , I’d sent that heap of timber to the Temple of Ceres. Word had gotten around.

I have spent most of my long life in Rome, and I have dedicated much of that time to the City and its peculiar ways. Few things in Roman life are so intriguing as the spread of news and rumor. As near as I can figure it, slaves are the prime conduits. They are everywhere, from the lowest dives to the chambers of the noblest and most powerful. They hear everything, although people tend to speak as if slaves had no ears. They accompany us everywhere, and they talk to each other. Once I tried to trace a particular report and found that it had been transmitted rather the way a pernicious disease is spread from one sufferer to another.

A certain eques named Lollius, whose house was on the Esquiline near the city wall, had returned unexpectedly early from a trip and caught his wife in bed with none other than the Dictator Caius Julius Caesar, who was much given to activities of this sort. It seems that Lollius was more old fashioned and touchy than most men of the day, and there ensued an unseemly farce in which Caesar ended up bleeding copiously from his great Julian beak.

It happened that a party of revelers, returning from a wedding, passed by Lollius’s door just in time to see Caesar, laurel wreath askew and blood staining his tunic, stagger forth and collapse into his sedan chair. Moments later, the woman ran screaming from the house, naked and closely pursued by her aggrieved husband, who was slashing away at her with great, whistling strokes of a ?agrum .

While the half-drunken party collapsed with laughter, certain of their slaves got the story from the janitor chained to the doorpost of Lollius’s house. Assisting their tipsy masters homeward, they spread the word. Among the first recipients were the chair slaves of the Vestal Servilia, who were bearing her from a service at the Temple of Juno Lucina. From there, they bore the news down the great Suburan Way the whole distance to the Forum, where they deposited their mistress in the House of the Vestals and rushed out to gossip with the slaves lounging around in the Forum, which is what most slaves do when they can get away with it.

From the Forum, the story spread outward like an explosion of noxious gas from an eruption of Aetna. It reached me in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus atop the Capitol, where Caesar had summoned the Senate for a meeting. I believe the subject was to be the confirmation of Cleopatra as queen of Egypt, but we never got around to discussing the matter. Word of the incident made its way up the Capitol faster than water could have run down it.

When Caesar arrived, his gilded chaplet restored to order atop his bald pate, wearing a snowy tunic and the purple triumphal robe that he had taken to wearing on all public occasions, its color matched that of his nose. Even as he strode importantly into the temple, a senator named Sextus Mummius, a satirical poet of some reputation, was declaiming an extempore ode upon the vengeance of Vulcan on the occasion of surprising his wife, Venus, abed with Mars. It was full of scurillous references and bawdy allusions, and Caesar turned purple from hairline to toes as the whole Senate erupted with laughter at his expense. In those days there were some subjects about which any Roman, even a dictator, could be laughed at to his face.

Having traced the origin and path of the story, I later calculated that, from the passing of the wedding party to the door of Lollius to the tale reaching the Temple of Jupiter, no more than three-quarters of an hour had elapsed. Such is the passion of Romans for spreading gossip.

In any case, I found myself climbing that selfsame hill, although not all the way to the top. The Tabularium, where the censors’ records are kept, is located somewhat less than halfway up. I went up the long stairway past the Temple of Concord, a deified virtue much needed in Rome that year, and entered the archive through a basement entrance. The long, beautiful facade of the building, as seen from the Forum, is actually the second story of the eastern side.

It was to that splendid colonnade that I climbed, and there I found Hermes, lording it over the archival slaves as personal assistant to the Aedile. They had scrolls and tablets spread out on the long tables.

“As you requested, Aedile,” intoned the freedman in charge of the censors’ records, “these are the documents pertaining to the recent censorship of Valerius Messala Niger and Servilius Vatia Isauricus.”

The two men were among the most distinguished Romans of their day, as censors usually were. It was also traditional that they be hidebound conservatives, and these two certainly qualified on that account. Vatia Isauricus was also among the oldest members of the Senate, having served as consul during Sulla’s dictatorship.

Messala Niger was a much younger man, but just as much a die-hard adherent of the aristocratic party and a patrician of the Valerian family to boot. That put him in the same camp as my own family, and of the anti-Clodian and anti-Caesarean faction as well.

Censors at that time were elected every five years, and their duties were strictly defined. They conducted the five-yearly census of the citizens, carried out the lustrum to ritually purify the army, reviewed the list of junior office holders for admission to the Senate, and purged that body of unfit members. Most important for the purpose of my investigation, they handed out the public contracts for such things as tax collection, road repair, supplying military equipment, and so forth. Men were willing to offer heavy bribes to secure those contracts. Other men took to bribery to get into the Senate or to be readmitted after expulsion by previous censors. It was for this reason that the censors were mostly old, distinguished, and rich. It was thought that such men were less amenable to bribery.

I have never understood the logic of this line of reasoning. Men are often rich because they are greedy. And a man who was greedy when young is rarely less so in old age. As for good breeding, I never noticed that a long pedigree reduced anyone’s share of evil qualities. In fact, high social position often as not bestows greater power and scope to exercise those very qualities. Such was the traditional belief nonetheless, and who was I to question tradition?