“Why?” I asked. “She’s malevolent and she despised her husband; but she had to be married to somebody, and Celer wasn’t as objectionable as most she would have been attached to. He had a fine house, and he left her free to do pretty much as she pleased.” This constituted a happy marriage, among my class.
“Celer got a bit too hostile toward her little brother toward the end,” Milo said.
“That’s right,” Sestius concurred. “Decius, you’ve been away from Rome too much of late. Last year Metellus Celer, as consul, opposed Clodius’s bid to transfer to the plebs. He was certainly not alone in that, but he got downright violent about it. He was losing his sense of moderation in his last months in office.”
“It was a busy year,” I observed. “I heard that Caesar and Pompey and Crassus made up their political differences.”
“Temporarily,” Milo said. “It won’t last. But for now the usual feuds are dormant. Caesar got Clodius transferred to the plebs to clear his path to the tribuneship, got him adopted by a man named Fonteius to do it, and guess who presided as augur at the adoption?”
I ran the list of augurs through my memory, trying to recall which of them were still alive and in Italy. “Not Pompey!”
“Pompeius Magnus himself,” Milo confirmed.
“The world is getting to be a very odd place,” Sestius said. “If you can’t count on people like that to slit one another’s throats, what can you count on?”
“Things will be back to normal soon,” Milo said. “Clodius is going to make such a mess of things next year that people will demand a return of order.”
I had my doubts. “Clodius is ridiculously popular,” I said. “Is it true that he plans to make the free distribution of grain a guaranteed right of the citizens?”
“A radical concept, isn’t it?” Sestius said.
“It won him his tribuneship as nothing else could,” Milo commented, picking up a few nuts. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”
“You’re joking!” Sestius said. “If the grain dole becomes institutionalized; instead of an emergency measure, not only will we lose one of our most powerful political tools, but every freed slave, ruined peasant, and footloose barbarian in Italy will head straight for Rome to sign up!”
“They already do that anyway,” I pointed out.
“It’s no cause for rejoicing,” Sestius grumbled.
“We’ll sort things out,” Milo said confidently.
It may seem odd that men like Clodius and Milo and Sestius could speak with such sanguine assurance, as if they were about to reign as kings rather than serve as elected officials, but the tribuneship had made a great comeback in the last few years. Sulla had all but stripped the Tribunes of the People of all their powers, but one after the other, each year’s tribunes had passed laws in the Popular Assemblies restoring them. Now they were more important than ever, and they had the immeasurable power to introduce new legislation and carry it through the assemblies. This was the power that gave or withheld proconsular appointments, apportioned the state’s treasure, and got people exiled. The consuls themselves were relatively powerless by comparison, and the Senate had become a debating club. Real power lay with the commons and their elected representatives, the tribunes.
I promised to keep Milo apprised of the situation and left his house, wondering whether I should go to Clodia’s house armed. I also regretted that I had not thought to ask Asklepiodes whether there existed a reliable means to avoid being poisoned.
6
THE HOUSE OF THE LATE METELLUS Celer was located low on the slope of the Esquiline, in a district that had somehow escaped the worst of the fires that periodically swept the city. It was a relatively modest structure. It had been in the family for several generations and so was on the scale common to the days before the Punic Wars, when even the greatest families were little more than wealthy farmers.
Hermes accompanied me in a mixed state of alarm and anticipation. Clodia frightened him as she frightened everybody. But she also belonged to that new generation of Romans who affected to love things of beauty for their own sake, rather than for their value as loot. To this end she surrounded herself with beautiful things, including slaves. Clodia was a familiar sight in the slave markets, always shopping for new beauties as she discarded those past their peak of comeliness.
This was another of her many scandalous traits. Most well-bred people, including my own family, pretended that they never bought slaves but used only those born within the household. When they wanted slaves from the market, they discreetly sent stewards to do the buying. Not Clodia. She liked to look over the livestock herself, examining teeth with her own eyes, punching for wind and squeezing for muscle tone with her own hands.