“You have it already! Go on!”
“Calm yourself, my friend. Unrequitable passion has a deleterious effect on the bodily humors. He must have completed his journey to Baiae because he was on the road south, returning to Croton, when he was fallen upon and slain,” Asklepiodes said.
“ ‘Fallen upon’?”
“Yes, it appeared to be the work of bandits. They’ve become rare in the vicinity of Rome, but southern Italy is infested with them.”
“It always has been. Southern Italy is more like Africa than civilized Latium.” I wasn’t being quite fair to our southern brethren. Southern Italy was full of desperate, dangerous men because the peasants of that region were the most thoroughly ruined in the peninsula. The entirety of the land south of Capua and the whole island of Sicily had been turned into latifundia. Land that had supported thousands of peasant families had been converted into a few vast plantations worked by cheap slaves, leaving the dispossessed farmers to fend for themselves.
“So,” I went on, “how is it that the murder was attributed to bandits? I don’t suppose anyone came forward to confess?”
“Of course not. When does anyone confess to a crime save under torture or when caught in the act? But, according to those who found his body, it bore all the signs of a bandit attack: He was discovered stripped to the skin, even his sandals taken. Also missing was the hired donkey he had been riding.”
“How was he dispatched?”
“Stabbed through the body. That is all I know of his fatal wound. Had I been able to examine the corpse, I might have discovered many revealing details. But he had been cremated more than a month prior to my visit. Apparently, it never occurred to the authorities to inquire into the incident. Bandit attacks are so common in the region that they saw no reason for an investigation.”
“And he was traveling alone? Not even a slave or two?”
“Apparently. As a penurious man of simple habits, he had only a rather elderly housekeeper.”
I mused for a while, studying the weapons on the wall. “Stabbed, eh? And through the body? Bandits usually favor a club to subdue their prey. It gets less blood on the clothes.”
“They might have forced him to strip before giving him his passage on the ferryboat.”
“Then why not cut his throat? It is the swiftest and surest method for dispatching a man with a knife. I’ll tell you why: These people can’t shake off their aristocratic habits. They want to make it look like bandits did it, but they have to stab their victim from in front, like gentlemen.”
“A strange sort of oversight, one would think,” Asklepiodes commented.
“They intend never to be called to account for their crimes,” I said. “It is to maintain their own good opinion of themselves and each other that they commit murder as if they were soldiers striking down an enemy. Doubtless these men tell each other that they are acting out of patriotic motives.”
“ ‘Patriotic’?” Asklepiodes gestured with his beautifully manicured hands like an actor in a comedy who is at his wit’s end. “But this is so puzzling. Not only killing a very obscure Greek philosopher from patriotic motives but constructing so elaborate a conspiracy to prevent one man from attaining the office of praetor. I hope you are not offended that I wonder at this.”
“Oh, I’m under no such delusion. I am just the immediate and rather a minor target, I’m afraid. These men have designs on the whole Republic.”
“Ah,” he said, with satisfaction. “That is on a scale rather more grand. To my poor mind, though, the details remain wreathed in obscurity.”
“They are not very plain to me either, but I think I am beginning to see where this is all headed. Three men named Claudius Marcellus, two brothers and a cousin, are pushing us toward civil war. One of them is this year’s consul, another will be next year’s, the third will very likely be consul the year after. They are doing everything in their power to turn the whole Senate against Caesar. This is a plot made simpler by the fact that Caesar does so little to ingratiate himself with that body.
“Like good generals, these Claudii are making long-range war plans. They’ve assembled their forces, and probably not only in the Senate but all over our Empire. They’ve agitated among the people but without great success. The plebs love Caesar.” I thought about that for a moment. “They’ve probably had more success in the south. Their base is in Baiae, and the southern part of the peninsula is almost solidly for Pompey. His veterans have settled there.
“But their most forward-looking policy has been to arrange for a truly ingenious cipher to keep all their conspiratorial correspondence secret. I know of no other planners, military or civil, who have taken such a precaution.”