John Roberts - The Tribune's curse

“Does this satisfy you, Romans?” Pompey cried.

Now another man pushed forward. I knew him as a supporter of Clodius: a man named Vetilius. He shoved Folius aside, and there was a moment of lively, but fake, scuffling; then Vetilius stretched a pointing hand toward me.

“Everyone knows Milo and Metellus are close as teeth in a comb! Name someone else!”

Yes, please do! I thought.

“And yet,” Pompey said, “is Decius Metellus, one of the Twenty, not known to you all as a great man-hunter, who has brought many a malefactor to justice and revealed more than one plot against the State? He is the son of a Censor, a veteran of many wars, scion of an ancient and distinguished house, and nephew by marriage of our great, conquering general, Caius Julius Caesar!” I could almost hear Pompey’s teeth gritting through his praise of another man’s military glory.

“That is not good enough!” Vetilius shouted. “The People must have a representative here!”

“Then,” Pompey said, “overseeing this investigation on behalf of the People, I name the former tribunes Publius Clodius and Marcus Porcius Cato. Clodius voluntarily gave up his patrician rank to serve as your tribune, and Cato is famed for his honesty and integrity above all other Romans of his generation. Will that satisfy you, Citizens?” Everyone knew how Clodius and Cato detested one another.

Now Cicero stepped forward. There was a little muttering from old Catilinarians in the crowd, but mostly they were respectful.

“Romans! Citizens and Conscript Fathers assembled here on this dire night, listen to me! It is time to put aside politics and faction! In some terrible way we have offended the immortal gods, and we must not fight with one another while our sacred City lies beneath this cloud. I call upon the Pontifical College to review all this year’s ceremonies and festivals, to see if anything was ill done or omitted through oversight or malice.

“In the meantime, I call upon you all to reconcile yourselves while we determine where lies the guilt in this foul murder. I call upon those who stand here upon these steps to demonstrate their reconciliation, putting aside their disputes to serve the gods and the State as Romans used to, in the days of Scaevola and Fabius Maximus.” Good show, Cicero , I thought. Appeals to religion, history, and patriotism all at once.

Well-distributed voices in the crowd began to cry out, “Yes!” and “Show us!”

First, Milo put out his hand. Slowly, reluctantly, Clodius took it. Then both of them grinned, their eyes shooting flames all the while. Pompey put an arm around the shoulders of both. Then Cato and Cicero and I joined the loving little menage, and there was a veritable orgy of hand-shaking, back-patting, and embracing. The crowd loved it. They had never seen so many deadly enemies standing so close together without their swords drawn.

We drew apart and resumed our dignitas . I heard Cicero say, out of the corner of his mouth: “And I thought Plautus wrote implausible comedies!”

“Citizens!” Pompey shouted. “Disperse now to your homes, committing no unlawful acts to further anger the gods toward us. I bid the body of Ateius Capito be taken to the Temple of Venus Victrix, above my own theater. There, on the third morning after this, we shall celebrate for him as splendid a funeral as Rome has ever seen, at my own expense!” At this, a cheer went up.

Slowly, from its corners and fringes, the great mob began to break up. Like streams of light, torches meandered up the side streets, clumps of people broke away and dispersed, until finally only the hard core of the mobs of Milo and Clodius remained, along with the strong-arm supporters of some of the senators.

Pompey let out a gusty sigh. “Well-done, everyone.”

“How much of this was constitutional?” I asked.

“We’ll sort out the legal niceties later,” he said. “The important thing is, we’ve saved the City from destruction.”

“For tonight, anyway,” said Cicero. “By the way, that was an excellent idea, using your theater for the funeral. A funeral mob can turn ugly as any. This way, if they riot, we can close the gates and confine the destruction to the Campus Martius.”

“Of course,” I pointed out, “your theater and temple will almost certainly be destroyed.”

Pompey shrugged. “It needs repair, anyway. Those damned elephants.” He looked at me. “And, Decius, do try to find the guilty man or men before the funeral. It will do wonders to quiet the mob.”

“I hardly know where to start,” I said. “It’s not as if there were a shortage of suspects.”

“Just find us somebody , ” Pompey insisted. “Rome is full of people who aren’t really necessary.” He had a true military man’s disregard for the innocent victims of war, be it military or civil. “Well, let’s have a look at the wretched bugger.”

We walked down the steps. At the bottom, a few thugs lounged around the catafalque. Some of them, already bored, were rolling dice and knucklebones.

A senator let out a low whistle. “Someone did a thorough job. Looks like the lions have been at him.”

The body was indeed an alarming sight. The bizarre robe was in rags, and the remainder of his clothing was little more than bloody ribbons. A huge variety of wounds covered it-everything from round punctures to long, parallel gashes like those made by an animal’s claws. Clodius pointed to one such set of marks.

“I’ve seen gouges like that made by spiked caesti .” He looked up at me and smiled. “That’s your favored weapon, isn’t it, Metellus?”

“You should know,” I said. “You’ve kissed it often enough.” Amid laughs at his expense I took out my own caestus with its bronze knuckle-bar set with stubby spikes and held it against the indicated wounds. “If it was a caestus , it had longer spikes than mine, and they were wider set. Besides, even I could never hit that hard.”

“Milo could,” Clodius said. “Or even Senator Balbus here. We all know how strong they are.”

“Let’s have none of that,” Pompey warned. “We told the people that we’d set aside our differences and cooperate, and we will. Any of you who violates that agreement I’ll hound into exile and then to his death. There isn’t a man here who didn’t want to see this rogue dead, so there’s no sense pointing fingers just yet. I want full reports of this investigation every evening starting tomorrow.”

I could not tell whether Ateius met his fate with fear or anger or resignation, since his face was too lacerated to read any expression. Even the eyes were gone, and you could see every tooth in his mouth. Most of his scalp hung away from the skull in hairy, bloody flaps. It was ghastly, but I’d seen bodies mauled worse after gang fights, and all the damage done by bricks and nail-studded planks.

“Don’t get blood on your best toga!” Hermes hissed in my ear. “Julia will skin both of us!”

“Gentlemen,” Pompey said, “good evening to you. Once again, well-done. This was a good night’s work. We might not have been able to pull it off except that four of the men I named to the commission were seen by everyone carrying the sacrifices for the full three circuits a few days ago. The people still feel good about that. But this is not over yet-far from it.”

Clodius pointed to several of his men in turn. “You men haul this carrion over to the temple. Mind you be respectful.”

I addressed the remaining idlers. “Do any of you know where he was found?”

Vetilius came up to me. “I heard that some night-fishermen found him on the riverbank this evening, just before nightfall. Bodies aren’t all that rare in the river, but after the curse, everybody in Rome knew about that robe. They alerted the gate watch, and pretty soon the word was all over the City.”