Steven Saylor: Roman blood

I glanced at Tiro's face, at his lips parted with spontaneous, unthinking lust, yet twisted at the corners with an equally spontaneous revulsion. I looked up and spotted another opening in the crowd. I stepped towards it, pulling on Tiro's sleeve, but he was rooted to the spot. I pulled harder. There was sure to be real trouble now.

At that instant I heard the unmistakable metallic slither of a dagger pulled from its sheath and glimpsed a flash of steel from the corner of my eye. It was not one of the gladiators who had drawn the weapon — the figure was on the opposite side of the cart, in the midst of the embalmers. A bodyguard? One of the dead girl's relatives? An instant later — so quickly there was no sense of motion at all, only of displacement — both figure and glint of steel were on the nearer side of the cart. There was a strange ripping noise, tiny but somehow final. The gladiator bent double, clutching his belly. He grunted, then moaned, but the noise was submerged in a loud collective shriek.

I never actually saw the assassin or the crime; I was too busy trying to push through the crowd, which scattered like kernels of grain from a ruptured sack the moment the first drop of blood fell to the paving stones.

'Come on!' I shouted, dragging Tiro behind me. He was still staring over his shoulder at the dead girl, unaware, I thought, of what had happened. But when we were safely away, well beyond the scuffling and confusion that continued around the upset cart; he drew up alongside me and said in a low voice, 'But we should stop and go back, sir. We were witnesses.'

"Witnesses to what?'

'To a murder!'

'I saw nothing. And neither did you. You were looking at the dead girl the whole time.'

'No, I saw the whole thing.' He swallowed hard. 'I saw a murder.'

'You don't know that. The gladiator may recover. Besides, he's probably just a slave.' I winced at the flash of pain in Tiro's eyes.

'We should go back, anyway,' Tiro snapped 'The stabbing was just the beginning. It's still going on, see? Half the marketplace has been pulled into it now.' He raised his eyebrows, struck by an idea. 'Lawsuits! Perhaps one of the parties will be needing a good advocate.'

I stared at him, quietly amazed. 'Master Cicero is a lucky man, indeed. How practical you are, Tiro. A brutal stabbing takes place before your very eyes, and what do you see? A business prospect’

Tiro was stung by my laughter. 'But some advocates make a great deal of money that way. Cicero says that Hortensius employs no fewer than three servants whose only job is to roam the streets, keeping an eye out for likely cases.'

I laughed again. 'I doubt that your Cicero would care to take on that gladiator for a client, or the gladiator's owner. More to the point, I doubt that they would care to deal with your master, or with any other advocate. The interested parties will seek justice in the usual way: blood for blood. If they don't care to take on the job themselves — though the stabbed man's friends hardly look cowardly or squeamish to me — they'll do what everyone else does, and hire one of the gangs to do it for them. The gang will find the assailant, or the assailant's brother, and stab him in return; the new victim's family will hire a rival gang to return the violence, and so on. That, Tiro, is Roman justice.'

I managed to smile, giving Tiro permission to take it as a joke. Instead, his face became more clouded. 'Roman justice,' I said more sombrely, 'for those who can't afford an advocate, or perhaps don't even know what an advocate is. Or know, and. don't trust them, believing all courts are a sham. It's just as likely that what we saw was the middle of such a blood feud, not its beginning. The man with the knife may have had nothing to do with the embalmers or the dead girl. Perhaps he was just waiting for the right moment to strike the blow, and who knows why or how far back the quarrel goes? Best to keep your nose out of it. There's no one you can call upon to stop it.'

This last was true, and a constant source of astonishment to visitors from foreign capitals, or to anyone unaccustomed to life in a republic: Rome has no police force. There is no armed municipal body to keep order within the city walls. Occasionally some violence-weary senator will propose that such a force be created. The response on all sides is immediate: 'But who will own these police' And they are right. In a country ruled by a king, the loyalty of the police runs in a clear, straight line to the monarch. Rome, on the other hand, is a republic (ruled at the time of which I write by a dictator, it is true, but a temporary and constitutionally legal dictator). In Rome, whoever plotted and schemed to get himself appointed chief of such a police force would simply use it for his own aggrandizement, while his minions' biggest problem would be deciding from whom to accept the largest bribe, and whether to serve that person or stab him in the back. Police would serve only as a tool for one faction to use against another. Police would merely become one more gang for the public to contend with. Rome chooses to live without police.

We left the square behind, and the Subura Way as well I led Tiro into a narrow street I knew of, a shortcut. Like most streets in Rome, it has no name. I call it the Narrows.

The street was dim and musty, hardly more than a slit between two high walls. The bricks and paving stones were beaded with moisture, spotted with mould. The walls themselves seemed to sweat; the cobblestones exhaled the odour of dampness, an almost animal smell, rank and not entirely unpleasant It was a street never touched by the sun, never dried by its heat, or purified by its light — filled with steam at high summer, coated with ice in winter, eternally damp. There are a thousand such streets in Rome, tiny worlds set apart from the greater world, secluded and self-contained.

The alley was too narrow for us to walk side by side. Tiro followed behind me. From the direction of his voice I could tell that he kept glancing back over his shoulder. From the timbre of his voice I knew he was nervous. 'Are there a lot of stabbings in this neighbourhood?'

'In the Subura? Constandy. In broad daylight. That's the fourth I know of this month, though it's the first I've actually witnessed. The warmer weather brings it on. But it's really no worse in the Subura than anywhere else. You can have your throat slit just as easily on the Palatine, or in the middle of the Forum, for that matter.'

'Cicero says it's Sulla's fault.' The sentence began boldly but ended with an oddly stifled catch. I didn't have to see Tiro's face to know it had reddened. Rash words, for a citizen to criticize our beloved dictator. Rasher still for his slave to repeat it carelessly. I should have let the matter drop, but my curiosity was piqued.

'Your master is no admirer of Sulla, then?' I tried to sound casual, to set Tiro at ease. But Tiro did not answer.

'Cicero is wrong, you know, if that's what he thinks — that all the crime and chaos in Rome is Sulla's fault. Bloodshed in the streets hardly began with Sulla — though Sulla has certainly contributed his share of it.' There, I had put my foot onto thin ice myself. Still Tiro did not respond. Walking behind me, not having to meet my eyes, he could simply pretend not to hear. Slaves learn early to feign convenient deafness and a wandering mind. I could have stopped and turned around to face him, but that would have been making too much of the matter.

Yet I would not let it go. There is something about the mere mention of the name Sulla that fans a fire in every Roman, whether friend or foe, accomplice or victim.

'Most people credit Sulla with having restored order to Rome. At a very high price perhaps, and not without a blood-bath — but order is order, and there's nothing a Roman values more highly. But I take it Cicero has another view?'