“Patron!” Festus shouted. Then, correcting himself, “I mean, Aedile!” He was an officious little man, son of one of our country stewards, come to the City and prospering as an oil merchant. He was one of the men I had sent to check on the troublesome drains.
“Yes, my friend?” I said, gesturing broadly. One of the rewards of clientage was being recognized publicly by a high official. Festus basked in the attention.
“Aedile, the state freedman Acilius wants you to come at once. He has something he says you must see.”
“He does, does he?” I had been looking forward to an hour or two at the baths, free of official worries. “This freedman summons a high official like a household slave?”
Festus smiled obsequiously. “He says it’s very important, sir.”
“Oh, well. What’s an aedile anyway? Just a glorified errand boy at everyone’s beck and call.” I went on in this fashion for some time. I did a lot of complaining that year. While I lamented the woes of the aedileship, we walked to the Forum access to the Cloaca Maxima, first and biggest of Rome’s sewers.
This access was covered with a shrine in the form of a miniature temple dedicated to Venus Cloacina, she who oversees the purity of Rome’s water. Inside this diminutive sanctuary, a steep staircase led down to the great drain. The distance was not far, for the tunnel lies just beneath the surface of the streets, angling downhill to the river. The stairwell was lined with tiny niches in which burned oil lamps. By the time we reached bottom, my eyes were almost accustomed to the dimness. The air was cold after the unseasonable warmth of the open air.
I was always uneasy intruding in this subterranean realm. There seemed something unnatural about this aqueous city beneath the City. It took an effort to maintain my air of official dignitas as we entered the small landing, its walls painted with ancient murals depicting half-forgotten gods and demons; snake-haired harpies with bulging eyes; long-nosed, donkey-eared, Etruscan death guides; and creatures that had no names in the whole vast nomenclature of Roman religion. Most prominent among them was the ferryman common to most religions, the one who takes the shades of the dead across the river Styx.
His near-double was waiting for us. Tied up to the miniature landing was a barge built like a small riverboat, painted black but decorated with the serpents, ox skulls, and red dogs traditionally associated with underground deities carved in low relief all around the sides, twined with painted myrtle and cornel shoots. Chained in the stern of the barge was an old slave whose white hair reached his elbows, bearded to the waist, clutching a long pole in hands like twisted claws. In the lamplight, his deep-shadowed eyes glittered like obsidian. In the subterranean gloom, he was as sure sighted as an owl, but he would have been struck blind by sunlight.
This ancient apparition was, naturally, known as Charon, and he had been a sewer bargeman since my father was a boy, condemned for some long-forgotten crime to ply the dark waters and never return to the surface.
“Welcome, Aedile,” said Acilius, who stood on the landing with a couple of his assistants. “If you will accompany me in the barge, I will show you a few things that demand your immediate attention.”
“Splendid,” I said, stepping into the craft and seating myself on one of its benches. “There’s nothing to liven up a fine afternoon like a boating expedition in a sewer.”
Actually, that stretch of the Cloaca Maxima was not at all objectionable, Many people never realize that the Forum was once a swamp, and the original cloaca was a simple canal dug to drain it. In time, the channel had been lined with stone to make it permanent; then it was roofed and paved over back when Rome had kings. Those old kings had built well; and after four hundred years, the stonework was as solid as ever, needing no upkeep at all.
“Roman engineering at its best!” I exclaimed, admiring the great, beautifully fitted tufa blocks overhead and to both sides. Here the water was relatively fresh, but that did not last long. Soon we came to the first of the public latrines situated directly over the sewer. Luckily for us, Charon, with his long pole, was adept at avoiding these conveniences, so we were spared being the targets of descending missiles. At intervals we passed lower arches, where smaller sewers contributed their outfiow to the greater stream.
The air began to grow dense as the water grew thicker. Soon we were plowing through a horrid scum through which unpleasant bubbles rose and burst, like the bubbles of fermentation in a wine vat. I withstood the stench manfully. It was little worse than some of the fouler alleys of the Subura where the inhabitants dumped their slop jars and kitchen refuse into the streets and where the muck would suppurate through a hot, rainless summer until just passing by such an alley could be lethal to one not native to the district. The Cloaca Maxima had a long way to go before it would be that bad.