Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

'Don't I know you, young man?' he said.

I looked at Meto and felt a pang of dread, remembering his nightmare. An uncertain emotion lit his eyes, but his face remained impassive. 'You knew me once, citizen,' he said. His voice was quiet but steady.

'Did I?' said Crassus, cocking his head and drawing up his shoulders. 'Yes, so I did, however scarcely. So you are a freedman now, Meto?'

'Yes.'

"The adopted son of Gordianus?'

I moved my lips to answer, but Meto answered first. 'I am.'

'How interesting. Yes, only recently a friend of mine happened to inform me of your circumstances.' Did he mean Catilina? Or could it have been his once-protege, Marcus Caelius? Whichever, I did not like the idea of my family being discussed behind my back. 'Odd, how this detail of your manumission and adoption had somehow escaped my attention all these years.'

'It hardly seems a matter worthy of concern to a man as eminent as yourself, citizen,' said Meto, returning Crassus's scrutiny with an unwavering gaze. I looked at Meto, slighdy awed. Not only had he said exactly what I would have said, but he had said it just as I would have tried to, with the very same, deliberately straightforward inflection, neither contemptuous nor servile. Sometimes we open our mouths and hear our parents speak; sometimes our children open their mouths and our own voices come out

'The last I knew of you, Meto, you were in Sicily, where I had arranged for you to be,' said Crassus, delicately avoiding the crass vocabulary of commerce and ownership. 'Just as I had arranged for that one to be off to Egypt,' he added, indicating Apollonius and casting a sharp glance at Mummius. 'What part did Marcus Mummius play in frustrating those delicate arrangements, I wonder? Never mind. Now I meet you in a toga, Meto, on your way up to the Arx to celebrate your citizenship.' His lips compressed into the thinnest of smiles. He narrowed his eyes and shifted them between me and Meto. 'The goddess Fortune has smiled on you, Meto. May she smile on you always,' he said in a hollow voice, and turned away, summoning his retinue after him.

Perhaps he meant it, for above and beyond the triumph of the individual will, a Roman respects and bows to the incomprehensible caprices of Fortune, and to a man like Crassus the salvation of a boy like Meto, in the face of all Crassus's efforts to the contrary, might very well seem a supernatural occurrence, evidence of the intervention of the gods and thus an occasion for respect and the humble expression of goodwill. Who knows, after all, when the goddess Fortune might turn her back even on the richest man in Rome?

The lengthy retinues passed. We pressed onward and upward, only to encounter another retinue. Coming down from the citadel, following Crassus and Caesar, was Cicero himself, together with his fellow consul, the notorious nonentity y Gaius Antonius. At the party, Rufus had said something in passing about Cicero wearing armour — 'that absurd breast-plate’ he had called it, and had then passed on to another subject without explaining. Now I saw what he had meant, for covering Cicero's chest and reflecting the harsh gleam of the afternoon sun was a burnished breastplate such as a general might wear in combat Cicero's consular toga was loosened at the neck and throat so that the boldly shaped pectorals of the hammered and filigreed metal were fully displayed. Around him hovered a bodyguard of armed men, surly-looking fellows who walked with their hands on the hilts of their sheathed daggers. It struck me that such a display was less worthy of a consul of the Republic than of a suspicious autocrat — even the dictator Sulla had gone about the Forum unarmed and unguarded, trusting the gods to protect him.

Before I could ask Rums to explain the breastplate and the heavy bodyguard, Cicero was upon us. In the middle of conversing with Antonius he caught sight of Rufus. His expression passed through rapid changes. He looked at first genuinely pleased, then grave and doubtful, then almost playfully shrewd — the face of a mentor who has lost the allegiance of a once-devoted pupil but does not despair of regaining it. 'Dear Rufus!' he said, smiling broadly.

'Cicero,' said Rufus in return, without emotion.

'And Marcus Mummius, back from serving Pompey in the East.

And Gordianus,' said Cicero, finally seeing me. His voice went

flat for a moment, then took on a politician's affable familiarity. 'Ah, yes, you've come to take the auspices for young Meto's coming of age. We're all getting older, aren't we, Gordianus?'

Some more than others, I thought, though the years had actually done much to soften Cicero's unlovely features. The thin, sharp nose was now rather fleshy; the slender neck with its prominent knob was now padded with rings of fat; the pointed chin had become lost in jowls. The man whose delicate constitution would hardly allow him to eat in the heat of the day had nevertheless managed to grow portly. Cicero had never been handsome, but he had managed to acquire a look of prosperity and self-assurance. His voice, once grating and unpleasant, had been trained and transformed over the years into a melodious instrument. 'How I regret that I was unable to attend your party,' he said. 'The demands of being consul are unending — you understand, I'm sure. But I did send Marcus Caelius to offer my apologies. He did deliver his message, did he not?' The look in his eyes gave a deeper meaning to the question.

'Caelius came,' I said. 'But his message was misdirected. He left dissatisfied.'

'Oh?' Cicero sounded unconcerned, but his eyes flashed. 'Well, my fellow consul and I must hurry on — we have pressing business in the Senate. Good luck in your campaign, Rufus! Good fortune to you, Meto!'

As they passed, I said in a low voice to Rufus, 'Well, augur, what did you make of that flicker of lightning — the one in Cicero's eyes?' 'Is there trouble between you?'

"There's likely to be. But what is this business of his wearing a breastplate? And going about with such a formidable bodyguard?'

'He looks absurd!' bellowed Mummius. 'like a mockery of a military man. Does he dare to mock Pompey?'

'Hardly,' said Rufus. 'He began to wear it the day he postponed the elections, saying that Catilina was plotting to murder him in the confusion of voting day — "To save his own life, the consul of the Roman Republic must resort to wearing armour and surrounding himself with armed men," et cetera. It's a tactic to get the crowd's attention and alarm the voters; it's political theatre, spectacle, nothing more. After what Cicero and his brother did to Catilina's good name in the consular campaign last year, no one would be surprised if Catilina wanted to murder him. Who knows, perhaps there is a plot to assassinate Cicero; but for Cicero it's just more grist for the mill of his shrill rhetoric'

'Politics!' Mummius barked. 'I had enough of it the year I served as praetor. Give me orders to follow and men to order, and I'm happy.'

'Well,' I said, huffing and puffing from the exertion of the steep ascent, 'for the moment, at least, let us put all such unworthy matters behind us.' Quite literally behind us, and beneath us as well, I thought, turning my head to glance down at the teeming Forum far below. ‘We have arrived at the summit. There is nothing but blue sky between us and the eyes of Jupiter. Here in this place, my son becomes a man.'

XX

On battlefields and in the countryside, where there is no permanent place for performing auguries, a sacred tent must be pitched before the augur may begin his work. High up on the Arx in Rome, above a steep semicircular cliff with an expansive view of the whole northern horizon, there is a paved place open to the sky called the Auguraculum, especially consecrated for the taking of the auspices. The only structure is a permanently pitched tent maintained by the college of augurs. Like the special robes they wear, it has a purple border and is shot with stripes of saffron. It is a small tent, so small that one would have to stoop to step inside, though so far as I know no one ever goes inside.