John Roberts: The River God

It was the worst year in the history of Rome. Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad. There was, for instance, the year that Hannibal defeated our legions at Lake Trasimene, and the year Hannibal obliterated our legions at Cannae. We learned a great deal from Hannibal. Perhaps the worst was the year Brennus and his Gauls overran the City, put it to the sack, and levied an extravagant tribute. In return he gave us one of our best epigrams. When the tribute was weighed out and the consuls protested that the weights were dishonest, the Gaul tossed his sword onto the balance tray and said, “Woe to the vanquished!” He had an excellent grasp of Latin for a Gaul. We took this lesson to heart and applied it ruthlessly to everyone who fell afoul of us in subsequent years.

But those things had happened centuries before. This was by far the worst year the City had endured in my lifetime. The year of Catilina’s conspiracy was a festival by comparison.

In the streets, the gangs of Clodius and Milo, of Plautius Hypsaeus, and several others clashed and rioted daily, abetted by a corrupt Senate whose members clucked collectively over the disorder while, privately and individually, they all supported one gang or another. The political situation was so chaotic that no one was certain, from one day to the next, who held the consulship. If Rome’s enemies could have seen how things were in the City, they would have stood amazed.

We did not lack for enemies that year. In the East, Crassus waged desultory war against a series of mostly unoffending nations, gathering strength and treasure for his projected war against Parthia. In the North, Caesar seemed determined to exterminate the entire Gaulish race. Not only that, but he had even made an assault upon the misty, myth-shrouded island of Britannia. The commons praised Caesar’s martial efforts because it is always pleasant to contemplate the slaughter of foreigners at a great distance. But the treasures fiowing Romeward from Gaul were more than offset by the hordes of cheap Gaulish slaves fiooding Italy, further depressing the value of everything, driving the few remaining southern Italian peasants off their land to make way for the ever-expanding, slave-worked latifundia .

As you may well imagine, this was the ideal time for me, Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, to rise up and fulfill my destiny as the savior of the State, but I couldn’t because I was too busy. This was the year of my aedileship.

Of all the offices of the Roman State, that of aedile is the most onerous, disagreeable, demanding, and, by a huge margin, the most expensive. The aediles have oversight of the markets, streets, and buildings of the cities. They have to prosecute usury, assure the honesty of building contractors, drive forbidden cults from the City, keep the sewers and drains clean and in working order, and inspect the brothels.

Worst of all are the Games.

The ludi are the official Games of the State, and they include plays in the theaters, chariot races, public feasts, and all the special celebrations in honor of the gods. The State provides only a stingy allotment for these activities, the sums set in a day when Rome and the Games were far smaller than they are now. Any cost beyond the allotment, which is to say about 90 percent of the expense by that time, have to be paid for by the aediles themselves.

And then there were the munera . For munera you needed wild beasts and gladiators, and a single munera could easily cost more than all the other Games of the year put together. Foreigners often think that the munera are State Games, but they are not. They are funeral games put on entirely at the expense of individuals. In the past, certain aediles, courting popularity, put on munera along with their required ludi . Soon, the populace expected and demanded them.

The ironic thing was that the aedileship was not strictly required for election to higher office. Theoretically, one was allowed to stand for the praetorship after a successful quaestorship, assuming that the age requirement was met. In reality, any such ambition was laughably futile. Your only hope of being elected praetor lay with the voters, who would elect you only if you had provided them with memorable Games. Hence, election to the highest offices was possible only if you had incurred the ruinous expenses of the aedileship.

Unless you were Pompey, of course. He was always the exception to the rules that applied to everyone else, even Caesar and Crassus. Pompey was elected consul without ever holding a single one of the lower offices. But then, much may be forgiven a hugely successful general whose unbelievably loyal legions lay encamped outside the gates.

The result was that the aedileship loaded the office holder with debts that would take years to pay off. It may be wondered that the officials in charge of ferreting out corruption were precisely the ones in debt and constantly in need of money. It was just one of the anomalies of our creaky, outdated, old republican system, a system that was soon to end, although we didn’t know that at the time.

Needless to say, my mind at the time was not upon the forthcoming death of the Republic, nor even upon my debts, which I knew to be inevitable. My thoughts were fully occupied by my multitude of duties, by the incredible burden of office. By the time I was no more than one-quarter of the way through the year of my aedileship, I was certain that things could not get worse. As usual, I was wrong.

It all began when a building collapsed.

“Another body here!” the public slave yelled, already bored with his task. It was perhaps the fiftieth corpse to be discovered in the ruins. The building was, or rather had been, to keep my tenses straight, a five-story insula of a sort becoming distressingly common in Rome at that time-a hulking block of low-grade timber and masonry, jammed with as many impoverished families as could be crammed into its upper stories, with a few decent quality fiats occupied by the well-to-do and modestly wealthy on the two lowest fioors, the ones with running water. Shops were usually at street level, but this one had been strictly residential. Sometimes a single insula covered an entire city block. They were crowded, dark, verminous, and as fiammable as an oil-soaked funeral pyre.

Oh, well, I suppose the poor had to live someplace. The occasional earthquake would bring down scores of them, and no small number collapsed from the ravages of neglect and inferior construction.

What made the one where we were working now so distressing was that it was all but new, its mortar scarcely dry, its wood still smelling sweetly of resin. This was not supposed to happen. Which is not to say that it did not happen anyway and with some frequency. The laws concerning building materials and standards of construction were rigid, specific, and fiouted quite openly. It was much cheaper to bribe an official than to build according to the law.

“Bring out the body,” I ordered the team of slaves who stood by with their tools and stretchers. These slaves were a degraded lot, the ones who tended the Puticuli, the public burial pits outside the City. They had this job because they had no qualms about handling corpses. In a disaster like this one, there was no way to perform the purification rites until the bodies were taken from the wreckage and laid out where the Libitinarii, the undertakers, could attend to them.

By this time, there was a long row of such corpses lying in the little plaza before the collapsed insula , many of them terribly mangled, others scarcely marked and probably victims of suffocation. There were infants and old people, young men and women, slave and free. A great throng of people milled around them, trying to identify relatives and loved ones, sobbing and apprehensive. There was a general, low-level moaning to be heard, interrupted from time to time by a loud, wailing outcry as some woman recognized a husband, father, or child among the dead.