Needless to say, my mind at the time was not upon the forthcoming death of the Republic, nor even upon my debts, which I knew to be inevitable. My thoughts were fully occupied by my multitude of duties, by the incredible burden of office. By the time I was no more than one-quarter of the way through the year of my aedileship, I was certain that things could not get worse. As usual, I was wrong.
It all began when a building collapsed.
“ANOTHER BODY HERE!” THE public slave yelled, already bored with his task. It was perhaps the fiftieth corpse to be discovered in the ruins. The building was, or rather had been, to keep my tenses straight, a five-story insula of a sort becoming distressingly common in Rome at that time—a hulking block of low-grade timber and masonry, jammed with as many impoverished families as could be crammed into its upper stories, with a few decent quality fiats occupied by the well-to-do and modestly wealthy on the two lowest fioors, the ones with running water. Shops were usually at street level, but this one had been strictly residential. Sometimes a single insula covered an entire city block. They were crowded, dark, verminous, and as fiammable as an oil-soaked funeral pyre.
Oh, well, I suppose the poor had to live someplace. The occasional earthquake would bring down scores of them, and no small number collapsed from the ravages of neglect and inferior construction.
What made the one where we were working now so distressing was that it was all but new, its mortar scarcely dry, its wood still smelling sweetly of resin. This was not supposed to happen. Which is not to say that it did not happen anyway and with some frequency. The laws concerning building materials and standards of construction were rigid, specific, and fiouted quite openly. It was much cheaper to bribe an official than to build according to the law.
“Bring out the body,” I ordered the team of slaves who stood by with their tools and stretchers. These slaves were a degraded lot, the ones who tended the Puticuli, the public burial pits outside the City. They had this job because they had no qualms about handling corpses. In a disaster like this one, there was no way to perform the purification rites until the bodies were taken from the wreckage and laid out where the Libitinarii, the undertakers, could attend to them.
By this time, there was a long row of such corpses lying in the little plaza before the collapsed insula, many of them terribly mangled, others scarcely marked and probably victims of suffocation. There were infants and old people, young men and women, slave and free. A great throng of people milled around them, trying to identify relatives and loved ones, sobbing and apprehensive. There was a general, low-level moaning to be heard, interrupted from time to time by a loud, wailing outcry as some woman recognized a husband, father, or child among the dead.
There had been few survivors, and those had been carried off to the Tiber Island, where such aid as could be provided would be given them and their screams and groans would not add to the uproar.
“Way!” came a lictor’s bellow. “Way for the Interrex!“ A double line of lictors pushed their way into the plaza, shoving the mourners and gawkers aside with their fasces. Behind them came the man who had all the power and prestige of a consul but not the title or the proconsular appointment. There had been such scandals and riots and lawsuits over the previous year’s elections that the consuls had not been allowed to take office yet, so an interrex had been appointed to preside in their place. This one happened to be a kinsman of mine, the resoundingly named Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica.
“How many dead?” he asked me.
“About fifty so far,” I told him, “but we’ve only cleared away the upper stories. There’ll be more. Do you think this rates a day of mourning?” Metellus Scipio was a pontifex as well and could declare one.
“If the list of dead is outrageously high, or if someone of note is found in there, I’ll call for one in the Senate. It seems rather pointless, though. This year has been so bloody already that the whole City should be wearing black togas and growing beards.”
“All too true,” I said, “but I’m going to bring charges against whoever built this atrocity. A brand-new insula has no business collapsing without an earthquake. There hasn’t even been time for termites to get at it.”
“At least there wasn’t a fire,” he observed. When such a building collapsed upon cooking and heating fires, the resulting fiames could spread all over the City.
“A little blessing from Jupiter,” I said. “It happened just before dawn. No fires lit yet, and the night-lights all burned out.”
“Tragic,” he mused, “but it could have been worse. Find out who’s responsible, and bring me his name. You’re going to be too busy to prosecute, but we can find one of the rising young family members to hand it to. My younger son can use the experience.” Naturally, he would try to use the catastrophe for family political advantage; we did that sort of thing all the time. It was his next revelation that stunned me.