John Roberts - The Tribune's curse

Men nudged one another as I approached, casting one another significant glances, as such men are wont to do. I have no idea what it is that they hope to convey by these gestures, but they seem to enjoy the exercise. Perhaps it gives them a feeling of importance.

“You are not welcome here, Senator,” said a tribune I recognized as Gallus, the cohort of Ateius in his strenuous efforts to deny Crassus the Syrian command.

“Why do I need to be welcome?” I demanded. “I have been appointed iudex with praetorian authority. That calls for no welcome.”

“You’re one of them!” yelled a meager-faced villain.

“One of what?” I said. “One of the citizens?”

“You’re an aristocrat!” the man shouted back.

“Oh, shut up, the lot of you!” I shouted. “I wasn’t appointed by just any praetor! I was appointed by Titus Annius Milo! I imagine that name is known to you.” Now their growling died down. They may not have been among Milo’s adherents, but like most of Rome’s street toughs, they feared him.

“No need for a riot,” Gallus said reluctantly. “What do you want here, Senator?”

“I want to speak with Ateius’s Marsian friend, Sextus Silvius.”

The men nearest the door looked at one another. “He’s not here,” one of them said.

“Is that so? Where might he be?”

“We-we don’t know. Some of the tribune’s closest friends have left the City. When a tribune can be murdered, who is safe?” The man looked to the others for agreement and support. I realized that they were at a loss how to act. The leaders of Ateius’s little factio had disappeared.

“They were probably murdered as well!” said another of the door crowd. The grumbling rose.

I turned around. “Tribune Gallus! I wish to speak with you in privacy. Come with me.”

“You have no authority to order me, Senator,” he blustered, for the sake of his audience. “But, unlike the factio of Crassus and Pompey and the rest of the aristocrats, I respect the institutions of Rome.” He addressed the crowd. “My friends, I will return as soon as I have straightened this man out.”

We walked down the street, out of sight and hearing. A few streets away there was a little park surrounding a shrine to the genius loci of the district, here represented in the traditional fashion as a sculpted snake climbing a stubby column. Withered garlands draped its base, and pigeons pecked at the offerings of bread and fruit left by the people of the neighborhood. I took a seat on a stone bench, and Gallus sat beside me.

“Tribune, in the emergency meeting called by Pompey after the departure of Crassus, you said that you had no foreknowledge of the outrageous behavior of Ateius that day.”

“And I spoke nothing but the truth,” he insisted. Here, away from his crowd, he spoke reasonably, as one public servant to another. “After the lustrum I went to the Temple of Vesta with Pompey and my fellow tribunes, and we all swore this before her fire.”

“Very well. I need to know certain things about the tribune Ateius.”

“I knew him only in our shared public functions,” he said, apparently anxious to distance himself from the man.

“That is, principally, what I need to know. On what matters did the two of you cooperate?”

“Why, on denying Crassus the Syrian command, of course. Everyone knows the harm that will be done to Rome if he-”

“What other business?” I pressed.

“There was no other business. Not for Ateius Capito!”

“Do you mean to say that the two of you spent almost an entire year in office doing nothing but opposing Crassus?”

“Nothing of the sort! Why, I worked with Peducaeus on getting the river wharfs rebuilt, and petitioning the pontifex maximus to extend Saturnalia for an extra day and reform the calendar, which has gotten into dreadful shape, and there’s the whole business of the agrarian laws and the land commissioners to be sorted out-”

I held up a hand to stanch the flow of words. Everybody was complaining about overwork these days.

“I can see that you’ve exhausted yourself in service to the People, as every tribune should. Did Ateius Capito concern himself with none of these pressing matters?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no. It was only Crassus, as far as Ateius was concerned.”

“What about all the petitioners who mobbed his home? How did he keep their support?”

“The vast bulk of those people do nothing but take up a tribune’s time. Often as not, they just want an important ear to hear their complaints. If they do have real problems, they are usually so petty that they can be solved by a freedman with a few coins to pass around. Ateius’s staff handled those. The few with substantial grievances to address, Ateius passed on to the other tribunes. He wasn’t very popular among us.”

“Didn’t that strike anyone as odd? The office of tribune is just one step on a man’s political career. Any man of sense uses it to make contacts, do favors that will profit him later on, even, perhaps, enrich himself a bit, within legal limits. How was Ateius supporting his rather expensive office if all he did was alienate the richest man in the world?”

“Ateius came of a substantial equestrian family; you’ve seen his house.”

“Oh, come now, none of that! You know as well as I that if he wasn’t doing profitable political favors for important people, he had to be buying the support he needed. That requires a great deal more than the fortune of a substantial equestrian family. Whose money was he spending, if not his own?”

“He was passing out the silver rather freely,” Gallus said. “But I was not about to ask. The possible sources are rather limited, you know.” The last words were mumbled, as if he was reluctant to say even this much.

I knew exactly what he meant. Crassus certainly wasn’t financing his own opposition. That left the two men with the most to gain from the elimination of Crassus: Pompey and Caesar. The conference at Luca the previous year had supposedly patched up their differences, but nobody mistook it for anything but a temporary political expedient, to keep things at home quiet while two of the Big Three were engaged in foreign service and the third was occupied with the all-important grain supply.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about Capito? Any unusual visitors he may have had, foreigners who may have been seen with him, any other odd behavior?”

“Senator, I rarely saw him except in the Forum when we dealt with that single issue. I was far too busy to socialize with him. His enthusiasm for foreign religions and sorcery was well-known, but public life in Rome is ridden with crackpots.”

“All too true. Well, Tribune, I thank you for your cooperation.” We both stood.

“This is a vicious business,” Gallus said. “I hope you find who murdered him. He was a tribune and shouldn’t have been touched while he was still in office.” He adjusted the drape of his toga. “Aside from that, I’m glad the bastard’s dead.”

I went back to the Forum, stopping on the way to snack at the stands of some street vendors. With commendable moderation, I washed it down with nothing stronger than water.

I hailed a few friends as I crossed the Forum, but I did not stop, instead climbing the lower slope of the Capitol to the Tabularium, the main archive of the Roman State. There I located the freedman in charge of the Censor’s records.

“How may I help you, Senator?” he asked. He was surrounded by slaves who actually looked busy for a change, that year being one in which the Census was taken.

“I need the records pertaining to the late tribune Caius Ateius Capito’s qualifications for office.” The fitness of candidates to stand for office coming under the purview of the Censors, Capito would have deposited a statement of his age, property, and military and political service with them. The man went off, shaking his head at this unreasonable imposition on the time of a busy, busy official. It was getting to be an old story.