John Roberts - The Tribune's curse

Somewhere near the Appian Aqueduct I decided that my right shoulder was now permanently six inches lower than my left. I was half-blind, but I looked around me anyway, and I saw the final, hard core of the Senate soldiering grimly on. Not many were friends of mine, but all were men whose reputations for toughness would not let them give up short of their final breath. I saw tunics stained with vomit and others stained with blood from lacerated shoulders. Blood poured in a steady stream from Clodius’s nostrils, drenching his tunic and running down his thighs. I didn’t dare look down at myself for fear of what I might see.

I heard a gentle grunt that didn’t sound much like anything a human might perform. Then a lowing sound, followed by a quizzical baa. I looked up in pure horror.

“Hercules help us!” I said, forgetting that because of the curse he didn’t hear. “They’re waking up!”

“Steady, back there,” Balbus said. “Not much farther to go now. They’ll stay quiet.” I saw that the back of his tunic, and Milo’s, were soaked with sweat. They were human after all.

But the beasts began to shift, and the litter rocked, and when that happened, we lost step. Each time, it took us longer to get back in step again. This was looking bad.

“How far is it to the river?” I gasped, sweat obscuring what little vision I had left.

“We passed the embankment awhile ago,” Cato growled out. “Are you blind, Metellus?”

“Just about.” Past the river? I tried to remember how far it was from the river to the gate, but I couldn’t, despite having walked the route a thousand times. Rome seemed like a totally strange place-a place I had never visited before. I had no more idea of its geography than that of Babylon. I wasn’t even sure that we were going in the right direction.

I had a sensation of floating. Gradually, a sense of pressure told me that I was lying on my back. My vision cleared enough to see that I was looking up at the clouds of late evening, tinged red on their westerly edges. I knew then that we had failed. And ritual law prescribed the procedure when a ceremony was not performed properly: you do it all over again, right from the first.

“Pity Pompey didn’t let us do this in full gear,” I remarked. “I’d like to fall on my sword.”

“Are you still alive, Metellus?” I’d have known that voice on the bank of the Styx.

“So I seem to be, Clodius. But I’m just not myself without lunch and my afternoon bath. How far did we get?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned. “I fell down awhile ago, and I haven’t been able to turn over.”

“On your feet,” said Milo. Something grabbed the front of my tunic, and I was hauled to my feet as easily as a doll of straw. I saw that Milo and Balbus and a few others were reviving the fallen and that the priests were leading the sacrificial beasts from the platform.

“We made it?” I asked.

“Of course we made it,” Milo said. “We’re Romans, aren’t we? But nobody attends a sacrifice on his back, so everyone stand up until it’s over. As long as you keep on your feet, we can continue, although a sorrier-looking lot I never saw.”

At last I looked down at myself, fighting off a wave of dizziness and nausea as I did so. I was covered with blood and less-reputable fluids, to which handfuls of flower petals adhered. My companions were in equally disheveled shape, and some of them far worse. But we had done something never attempted in living memory, and if the animals would just die without fuss, we could all go home and then brag about it for the rest of our lives.

A number of men staggered in while the final preparations were made. I later learned that only twenty of us made the entire three circuits, somehow carrying that tremendous weight for the last quarter-mile on our shoulders. Later, the Centuriate Assembly voted us special oak wreaths in honor of our feat. Those of Milo and Clodius were later burned on their funeral pyres, and I believe Cato had his with him when he died at Utica, many years later. My own still hangs among my achievements in the family atrium. I don’t know what happened to the other sixteen.

Just before the upper rim of the sun disappeared below the horizon, the priests finished their droning chant, and the flutes were stilled. The rex sacrorum nodded, the hammers swung, the knives flashed, and the beautiful but weighty beasts fell with their blood gushing out onto the sacred soil.

The rex sacrorum raised his hands and intoned: “The gods are pleased. Rome is purified. All may return home now and sacrifice to their household gods. Worship of the immortals may resume.”

And that was that.

With an arm over Hermes’ shoulders, I lurched slowly toward home through a City that seemed much relieved. We weren’t out from under the curse yet, but progress had been made.

“Maybe we should stop off at the baths first,” I said, my chest sending pains through my body with every word.

“You need it,” Hermes said, “but they’ve been closed down since yesterday morning. I don’t expect to see them back in operation before tomorrow.”

“Right. I forgot.”

I vaguely remember people shouting congratulations at me and people offering me wine that I tried and immediately threw up. I had been in pitched battles far less strenuous than that day’s exertion.

To my great amazement, my father reached my door at the same time we did. I was amazed because for my father to call on me rather than the other way around was all but unheard-of.

“Well-done, my boy,” he said as he went in through the front gate. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of triumphing and winning at the Olympics on the same day.

Julia gasped at the sight of me and immediately had the slaves hustle me off to the tiny bathing room just off the kitchen. There I stripped off my unspeakable tunic, and Hermes sluiced me down with lukewarm water while I stood in the little stone tub.

Damp-haired and still unshaven, but washed, dressed in a clean tunic, and feeling far better, I went to join my family. I found Julia making a fuss over my father in the triclinium . I took a chair, and Hermes began to knead my shoulder, which was already turning a lurid purple. Cassandra gave me a large cup of warm, honeyed water, and I found that, if I sipped at it slowly, I could keep it down.

Julia beamed at me proudly. “The whole City is buzzing with your praises,” she said. “Word reached the Temple of Vesta just moments after the sacrifice.”

“I have a summons to deliver,” Father interrupted, apparently thinking that I had already received more praise than a mere mortal could ever deserve. “While you were carrying out your duties, I was meeting with some of the sacerdotal authorities, and they wish to meet with you under conditions of utmost privacy. What they have to say to you must be heard by no others.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Of course you don’t understand!” he snapped. “Why should you? It is sufficient that they want to talk to you.”

“Do they wish to honor him in some way?” Julia asked innocently. She was anything but innocent.

“No, nothing like that. Your husband’s reputation as a snoop precedes him. They have an investigation for him to undertake.”

I thought I saw where this was leading. “Has anything been heard from Ateius?”

Father shook his head. “No, the villain’s vanished. It’s at times like this that we need a Dictator. The evil demagogue should be impaled on a hook and dragged down the Tiber steps. As it is, we’ll have to wait until he’s out of office, and then the best we can do is exile him.”

“I suppose they’ll want me to find him. As far as I know, he can be interrogated before a pontifical court, tribune or not. They have no imperium , but they can make it impossible for him ever to show his ugly face in Rome again. That’s not too far from being a death sentence.”