The River God's Vengeance(30)

I felt the blood mounting to my face. “I gave instructions to exactly that effect, you fool!”

“As I recall your words, Aedile, you said that, should he regain consciousness, I was to assure him that you would give him a decent funeral, that he might be rendered more cooperative. But the occasion never arose.”



This was useless. He had been bribed or intimidated. “Who took the body?”

“It was turned over for interment in the usual place to a teamster driving one of the carrion wagons.”

As I stalked out, he showed not the least distress that he was losing the gratuity I would surely have rewarded him for efficient service. That clinched it. He had been bribed.

“Come along, Hermes,” I said. “He has been taken to ‘the usual place.’ I want a look at him. If we hurry, we can get there before it’s too dark to see anything.”

“Not there!” Hermes said, horrified.

“It’s not so bad,” I assured him. “You can just hold your nose.”

“But it’s such a long walk!”

He was right on that point. From the river to the Esquiline Gate, we had to traverse the whole width of the City. No burials were allowed within the City. The better sort were cremated and had their ashes decently interred within the many tombs lining the highways that led from Rome in all directions. For the rest—the paupers, the least valuable slaves, foreigners who had not made other arrangements, dead animals, and all others who were not considered worth the firewood it would take to incinerate them—we had that fine old Roman institution, the euphoniously named Puticuli or “putrid pits.”

In the pits, the corpses were tossed into excavations and sprinkled with quicklime to hurry the process of dissolution. On a hot summer day, an unfortunate wind blowing across the City from that direction was staggering. This archaic practice was a disgrace to Rome, and every Roman owes a debt of thanks to Maecenas, who a few years later was to buy up that ground, cover the pits under countless tons of soil, and turn the whole area into a beautiful public garden. Every time I walk there, I praise his name, even if he is one of the First Citizen’s closest friends.

The sun was setting as we passed through the Esquiline Gate and turned left. To our right lay the Necropolis, where the modest tombs of the poorer people lay. These humble monuments were mostly erected and maintained by Rome’s many funeral clubs. Most free workmen and many slaves belonged to these societies. They all paid a small annual fee into the general fund, which paid for a monument and the hire of professional mourners. When a member died, they all attended the funeral, so even a poor man could have a decent send-off.

Not everyone was so fortunate, and soon we passed the Necropolis and came to the final resting place of the others, although I, for one, could not find much rest among the corpses of, not only my social inferiors, but animals of nearly every sort. These included dead horses; animals rendered inedible because of disease or because they had been sacrificed and their livers or other organs had carried ill auspices; work oxen too old, tough, and stringy to be used as food; and dogs. We had few cats in Rome in those days.

The slaves who toiled in this place were little better off than old Charon in his sewer barge. It was decidedly unpleasant work; but by way of compensation, they got to keep whatever they could scavenge from the corpses. Usually this consisted of whatever rags of clothing they were wearing, but coins and even jewels were sometimes discovered in various bodily orifices, and there was a thriving if illegal trade in body parts, mostly sold to practitioners of magic.

I accosted one such slave, a dull-eyed lout dressed in a black tunic, his arms and legs smeared with some sort of indescribable filth. I stood well back from him as I asked him where the latest batch of carrion from the City had been deposited. He pointed a blackened claw toward the northeast.

“The new pit’s that way, sir. Been maybe forty wagons unloaded there today. There’ll be a lot of workmen around it. Can’t miss it.”

It was incredibly true that the new pit couldn’t be missed. Apparently the designation “new” meant that it had been collecting corpses only for the past year or so. The excavation was a circular crater that would have done a volcano proud. The slaves around its perimeter were shoveling corrosive lime onto the day’s accumulation of corpses, bipedal and quadrupedal. At our approach, the work crew’s overseer came to us. He was distinguishable from the others by his relative lack of filth. He was no prettier, though, bearing an oddly deformed head and limping on a clubfoot.

“May I help you, sir?”

“I am the Aedile Metellus. I need to see the body of a slave who was brought here probably in the last two hours.”