John Roberts - The Sacrilege

"A pertinent point!" said one of the lawyers, unable to help himself. The distinction between honorable and dishonorable weapons was a strict one in Roman law. The glare Octavius gave the lawyer boded ill for the progress of the trial.

"What have you say for yourself, Publius Clodius?" the praetor demanded.

"I am a serving Roman official and cannot be charged with a criminal offense!" he said, gloating.

Octavius gestured with his baton toward a white-gowned figure seated near him. It was one of the Vestals. "You realize," he said, "that had one of you killed the other in this lady's presence, the survivor would have been taken outside the walls to the execution ground and there flogged to death with rods. There are few capital offenses left on the tables, but that is one of them."

"In that case," I said, nodding to the lictors, "I wish to thank these fine citizens for preventing me from killing that loathsome and deranged reptile over there."

"It is lucky for you," Octavius said, "that you intruded upon a court for extortion. Had this been the court for crimes of violence, I might have had you charged, tried and judged on the spot." He exaggerated. Actually, there was a good deal of oath-taking and posting of sureties before a trial could begin. "This is not the first time the two of you have been charged with public riot. You are a menace to the safety of all citizens."

"I protest!" I cried. "I was just minding my own-"

"Silence!" Octavius barked. He raised his eyes and gazed out over the Forum. "Where is the Censor Metellus?" He gestured to a lictor. "There he is, over by Sulla's monument. Fetch him." The man ran off and a few minutes later returned with my father. I could tell by the way he was glaring at me that the lictor had been giving him a colorful account of recent events.

"Noble praetor, what is your wish?" Father said.

"Cut-Nose, I am going to charge your son with public riot and bearing arms within the pomerium. I am also going to check the law books and see if a charge of crime against Maiestas is appropriate. I would like to do the same for Publius Clodius, but there is some question whether his quaestorship protects him. Will you stand surety for Decius the Younger if I release him to you?"

"I will," Father said.

"Then take him away. I will send to Pompey's camp for Clodius's elder brother, Appius. Perhaps if we can keep these two separated, we need not fear for the destruction of Rome and the sanctity of her courts." He truly had a gift for sarcasm.

"I will see to it that my son arrives for trial on the appointed day. No Roman is above the law."

"These two least of all," Octavius said wryly.

The lictors released me and I stooped to pick up my weapons. The charge had been made, so it didn't matter if I had them in my possession now. Clodius and I exchanged a final, mutual glare, and I turned to walk away with my father.

"You have always been an idiot," my father began as we walked across the Forum, "but this surpasses your previous enormities by a wide margin. Whatever possessed you to try to murder Clodius in a Roman court under the nose of the senior praetor?"

"I thought I might never get another chance!" I said.

"You were specifically instructed to keep away from him."

"I've done my best," I protested. "He sought me out. He set a dozen men on me. I had to run and I had to fight."

"Am I to take it, then, that the blood on your dagger is neither yours nor Clodius's? I thought it best not to ask in front of the praetor."

I shrugged, sending a dart of fire through my wounded shoulder. "Oh, there may be a body or two in the streets back there. Nobody who amounts to anything, just Clodius's hired scum."

"Good. I would hate to think I had raised a coward as well as a fool. How bad is that shoulder?"

"Kind of you to ask. It's painful and bleeding freely. I think it will need stitching. I'll go see Asklepiodes in the Trans-Tiber. He's sewed me up before."

"The question is, can I trust you to go there without getting into more trouble?" Of course, it never occurred to him to accompany me there.

"One fight a day is enough even for my glory-lusting spirit, Father." We were out of the Forum by this time, and passersby ogled at my wild appearance.

"I think you should leave the city for a while," Father said.

"But I just got back!"

"Rome can take only so much of your presence. A stint managing the estate at Beneventum might settle you a bit. The realities of farm work could only improve you."

There is a belief among us that the only respectable life is agriculture. Probably because it is the dullest life imaginable. Of course, there is no virtue in working the land. The virtue lies in owning the land. How instructing an overseer to boss a gang of slaves returns a man to the realities of tilling the soil escapes me, but many swear by it.

"I have an investigation to conduct, Father," I said. "I can't just break it off to go watch slaves spread manure under grape vines."

"Your wishes are of no importance," he said.

One of the most infuriating provisions of Roman law is the one conferring lifetime authority upon the paterfamilias. You can be the gray-haired commander of legions and conqueror of provinces, but if your father is still alive, you are still, legally, a child.

"It's a matter of state security," I insisted.

He gave a short, humorless laugh. "That business about the rites of that foreign goddess?"

"There is far more to it that that," I said with some urgency.

"Go on," he said, still walking from long habit at the standard legionary pace.

I gave him a somewhat truncated account of my findings to date, along with some speculations as to their significance. I did not identify Julia. He would assume that any woman who shared my taste for snooping must be unworthy.

"So you suspect Pompey is behind it, eh?" He said this grudgingly, but I could tell that his interest was piqued. Like the rest of the aristocratic party, he hated Pompey and feared that the man would crown himself king of Rome.

"No one else is so bold. He is the one who has a pack of tame Etruscan priests."

"And," Father mused, "he wants to settle his veterans on public lands in Tuscia."

"He does?" I said. This was new to me.

"Yes, as you would know if you ever paid any attention to important public business instead of crawling through every sewer in the city."

"I've only been in the Senate for a few days," I said.

"That does not excuse you. And you realize that your vaporings are built upon the words of some of the most degenerate people in Rome?"

"I always take that into account," I said. A sudden inspiration struck me.

"Tell me, how did Capito stand on the question of settling Pompey's veterans?" At this question Father actually stopped in his tracks and stared at me as if at some wonderful apparition sent by the gods. I wiped blood from my upper lip with the back of my caestus. My nose was bleeding inside and out from Clodius's bite.

"There may be something in your mad sophistry after all. Capito opposed the settlements most violently."

"So does more than half the Senate. What was Capito's particular objection?" We were nearing Father's house by this time. We presented an odd spectacle, I must admit: the dignified Censor in his toga praetexta and I, who looked like the receiver of the second-place award in a munera. And the subject was politics, as always.

"He claimed it would upset the public order and give Pompey a power base near Rome and so forth; everyone says that. But the real reason was that his family leases a huge tract of the ager publicus in Tuscia, an area that will be cut up into farm plots for Pompey's veterans if the legislation goes through."

I grinned, but it made my mouth hurt. "So Capito's family has been farming and grazing that land for several generations, paying the state at a nominal rate set a hundred or more years ago?"