The Sacrilege

"Oh, I made a bit of a scene this morning. A great revelation came to me while we were watching Trojan Women"

"A vision from Apollo!" she cried, clapping her hands. "But of course! Euripides is the most sublime of playwrights, and Trojan Women was the most inspired of his plays. I love Euripides."

"Indeed?" I said. Women are difficult to fathom. "Well, in any case, I was suddenly vouchsafed a glimpse of the meaning of a number of anomalies. It was the sight of all those Greek men in women's clothing, and Pompey sitting there like a puffed-up bullfrog in his triumphator's robe. And do you know what my first thought was? Without even knowing why it came to me, I thought, 'Milo will be pleased.'"

"You make no sense whatever," she said with considerable restraint.

"Made no sense to me at first, either. That's the way it is with divine revelations. You see, my friend Milo wants to marry Fausta. He was very displeased when he heard that you saw her there that night when she had no right to attend the Mysteries but didn't join you unmarried women. He hinted that he might be quite unhappy with me should I implicate her in any wrongdoing, and Milo is not a man I would want to fall afoul of. So imagine my relief when I understood that she was not there that night!"

"But I saw her," Julia said coolly. "Do you think I am a liar, or merely a fool?"

"No, no, nothing of the sort," I said, laughing and shaking my head. I must have looked and sounded truly demented. "You see, that wasn't Fausta you recognized. It was her twin brother, Faustus, dressed as a woman!"

Her jaw dropped gratifyingly. "Dressed as a woman? Like Clodius?"

"Yes, like Clodius. And Pompey, and your uncle, Caius Julius. I suspect that Crassus was there as well. Pompey was wearing the dress of the peasant herb-woman, a purple dress. He does so love to wear purple."

"But Uncle Caius? Can you be sure?"

"He was supposed to spend that night at the house of Metellus Celer, but he went out, ostensibly to look for omens on the Quirinal. I checked at the Temple of Quirinus and found out that he did not go out through the Colline Gate that night. I think he, too, must have do

"Oh, dear," she said weakly. "But why? Why meet together in such a bizarre fashion?"

"That is what I am about to find out," I said. "Come along. Let's have a few words with my slave boy, Hermes."

"Your slave?" she said as she followed me to the rear of my house, Cato close behind us.

"Exactly." I threw open the door to his cubicle, and the boy backed against a wall, white-faced. "Where is it, you thieving little swine?" I shouted.

"What do you mean, master? I don't know what you're talking about!" At least he had the grace to look as guilty as Mars in Vulcan's net.

"I mean the things you stole from the body of Appius Claudius Nero, you disgusting creature!" I slapped his face twice, forehand and backhand.

"Under my bed!" he cried, all but bawling.

I threw back his pallet, revealing a cache of rings, bracelets and coins in a hollow scooped into the dirt floor. Among the glittering loot was a plain bronze cylinder as long as my palm and as big around as my thumb.

"You couldn't resist, could you?" I said. "You went back out there that night and stripped the body. That's pretty low, Hermes, robbing a corpse!"

"Of course it's low!" he yelled. "I'm a slave! What do you expect! You noblemen can murder each other in the streets, and the praetor sends you out of town for a year or two. We get sent to the cross! I couldn't just leave him lying there with all that gold on him. Anyway, I sacrificed to Mercury, and he's the god of thieves."

"Admirable piety. Well, you may have cleared things with the gods, but not with me. You made a mistake, Hermes. You came back here with your ill-gained loot and you had to gloat, didn't you? It was still dark, but you couldn't resist trying the quality of the gold." I held the poison ring before his nose. There were teeth marks on its capsule.

"You didn't know this was a poison ring and you bit into it. You didn't suck out all the poison, but you got enough to give you a bellyache all the next day."

"So poor old Nero had his revenge after all," he said, wincing at the memory.

"He deserves more!" I shouted. "Cato, bring the whip!"

"You don't own a whip, master," Cato said. I turned to face him.

"Yes, I do. A great, nasty-looking flagrum with bronze studs along all the thongs. My father gave it to me when I set up in my own house. Where is it?"

"You lost it in a dice game years ago," Cato said.

His wife, Cassandra, appeared in the doorway. "Will you all stop yelling? The neighbors will think we're disorderly. I'm trying to get di

"Oh, let's go back out to the atrium," I said, disgusted. "It's too crowded in here." I could swear that I saw Julia masking a smile. I examined the bronze tube. The wax seal over its cap was broken. Back in the atrium, Julia and I took chairs while Hermes, temporarily reprieved, stood nervously shifting from one foot to the other.

"You've been into this, I see," I said, holding up the tube.

"I thought there might be something valuable in it," Hermes said. "But it was just a roll of paper."

"That is because this is a message tube. And did you read the message?"

"How could I? I can't read."

"And did it not occur to you that Nero might not have come to kill me, but rather to bring me a message?"

"Did it occur to you?" he said insolently.

I sighed. "I really must purchase another flagrum and a strong, stupid, stony-hearted slave to wield it."

"If I'd know it was for you, I'd have brought it immediately, master," Hermes mumbled.

"What does it say?" Julia urged impatiently.

I slipped the paper from the tube and unrolled it. The letter was written in a fine, aristocratic hand, the sort that our schoolmasters whip into us at an early age, but the formation of some of the letters was a trifle shaky, the sign of a writer in a state of emotional distress. The grammar was impeccable, but the phrasing was a bit awkward. One did not expect literary elegance from a Claudian. I began to read aloud.

[To the Senator Decimus]: a misspelling, but a common one, since my praenomen is extremely rare, while Decimus is not: [Caecilius Metellus the Younger:

[I dare not set my name to this, but you will know who I am. When I came to Rome to live, I sought only the support and patronage of my family to begin and pursue my career. Instead, I have become involved in matters that terrify me; matters involving murder, conspiracy and, I think, treason.

Upon my arrival, my kinsman Publius Clodius made much of me, and much of his own glowing future, persuading me to take service as one of his followers. Greatly flattered, I agreed. He entrusted me with matters of some sensitivity, some of them of questionable legality. He continually assured me that this was the way things were done in modern Roman political life.

For more than a month, Clodius hinted about a crucially important meeting he was arranging. All month, he met many times with Caius Julius Caesar, with Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives, and on several occasions I accompanied him to the camp of Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus to confer with the general.

All this time, Clodius showed the greatest signs of merriment, and behaved as if he were maneuvering these powerful men at his own will, into his own power. "I'll control them all," he told me on more than one occasion. How he was to accomplish this I could not imagine.

After his last meeting with Pompey, Clodius came away greatly agitated. When I asked him why he was so upset, he said that the general had required of him that he kill the son of the Censor Metellus, who had just returned to Rome. I had heard him speak many times, very bitterly, of this man and asked why he was so displeased with the commission. He said it was because it was at Pompey's behest rather than for his own satisfaction, and that Pompey had required that the deed be accomplished with poison so that it might appear that his enemy died of natural causes.]