“This beam,” I said, “until two nights ago, was part of an insula that fell down. All of its materials were condemned by my order.”
He didn’t seem particularly shocked. “Well, it’s perfectly sound wood, I can assure you of that. Certainly, it is too green to use in an insula, but it is perfectly adequate for this purpose.”
“Who owns the salvage yard?” I demanded.
“A man named Justus. He’s a freedman, but I don’t know who his patron might be.”
“Well, get back to your work. I don’t want this theater fioating away.” I went back to the stairs. “Come along, Hermes, we have some people to see.”
We went back through the theater and Hermes’s importunate words interrupted my thoughts.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” he said, “if this whole place”— he rapped his knuckles against the solid-seeming wall of the passage—”was built by whoever built that insula?“
A chill gripped my heart as we walked out into the vast cavea, and I looked up at the seats that ascended, row upon row, incredibly high, like a staircase in a palace of the gods. Above them the sky-piercing spears of the awning masts stood arrayed in their curving rank, gilded tips gleaming in the morning sunlight. The theater could be seen by travelers miles from the City. Now I looked at it with new eyes, picturing those seats filled to capacity with spectators, picturing them all standing and saluting formally as I entered the theater to take my place as giver of the Games. Picturing them—
“All the gods protect me!” I said. “What if this whole, rickety, wooden basket comes crashing down with eighty thousand Roman citizens in the stands? During my Games! The name of Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger will stink worse than a week-old mackerel as long as Rome stands! I’ll be right up there with Tarpeia and Brennus and Hannibal when the people chant execrations upon Rome’s greatest enemies and traitors! If I don’t manage to open my veins quickly enough, I’ll be impaled on a hook and dragged through the streets and be crucified outside the Capena Gate!”
“Senators don’t get crucified,” Hermes protested. “Slaves and foreigners get crucified.”
“They’ll pass a new law just for me! The tribunes of the plebs will demand it!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hermes said uneasily. “It’s stood like this for at least five years. It’ll last another. I wish I hadn’t said anything.”
I wished he hadn’t, too.
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, I recalled, had been an aedile in the mold of Caesar, squandering immense sums on public works, of which the lavish theater was only one, to buy favor with the public. He had also donated a luxurious bathhouse to the City. It was the first of Rome’s really large balnea, and he provided free admission to all citizens for a year, together with bathing oil and towels. He gave numerous public banquets and paid for regular doles of bread and oil for the poorest citizens, although he never went to Caesar’s extreme of paying everyone’s home rent for a year.
It was, needless to say, a wildly popular tenure of office, and he had been given the urban praetorship practically without having to stand for it. After stepping down from his curule chair, he was given Sardinia to govern. Sardinia was a proconsular province, so he held the title of proconsul without having to be consul first.
It was the custom for politicians, having ruined themselves and descended far into debt, in order to pay for their public offices, to squeeze their provinces; and Scaurus duly squeezed Sardinia, so much so that he was prosecuted for corruption and extortion immediately upon his return to Rome. Flush with plundered wealth, he had no difficulty in getting a jury to see things in a sympathetic light, and he had recently been acquitted. It was a fairly typical career of the times. It took a prosecutor like Cicero to get a Roman jury to return a verdict of guilty against a Roman magistrate on behalf of provincials.
We tended to wink at these little escapades on the part of our promagistrates. You had to lose a foreign war to get Roman citizens to take an interest in what you did while away from the City. Unfortunately, this attitude rested upon a wholly erroneous assumption: that a man could go to a foreign land and behave like a rapacious, unregenerate criminal, then come home and act like an honest citizen. It never seemed to work that way.
Luckily for me, the house of Aemilius Scaurus was not far from his theater, next to the old city wall near the Flumentana Gate. It was a fairly imposing building, but built back in the days before there was any such thing as a fashionable neighborhood in Rome. Like most such older mansions, it had shops and slum housing crowded right against it, and behind it was a tiny market specializing in fresh and preserved garlic.