The Sacrilege(23)

For the first time I crossed the splendid new stone bridge that linked the bank with the island. This had been built the year before by the tribune Fabricius. At the temple I inquired after the physician Asklepiodes and found that he was once again in residence at the Statilian School, which had been displaced by the building of Pompey’s new theater. The new school was situated in the Trans-Tiber district. Armed with directions, I crossed to the far bank into the city’s newest district, which, unconstrained by walls, sprawled over a sizable patch of ground without the suffocating closeness of the old city.

The new school was a splendid affair, with none of the prisonlike air that so many such institutions have. The walk leading to the school was paved with stone and lined with statues of champions of years past. An archway tunneled through the building, leading to a wide exercise yard whence came the clatter of weapons as the men went through their arms drill. I paused to admire the spectacle, and possibly calculate odds for the next games. The trainees fought with practice weapons, but the senior veterans actually used sharp weapons. The blade artistry of some of these men was wonderful to see. No soldier ever gains this sort of expertise, because soldiers spend much time practicing formation fighting and even more on labor details, digging and building. Gladiators do nothing but train for single combat.

Most of the men trained with the large shield and the straight gladius or with the small shield and the curved sica, and some practiced with the spear, but there was a new category, one that had appeared during Caesar’s aedileship.

Caesar had borrowed heavily to put on games of unprecedented magnificence, going so far as to give munera in honor of a deceased female relative when he ran out of dead male ancestors. He bought up so many gladiators that his enemies in the Senate panicked, thinking that he was buying a private army. They quickly passed legislation limiting the number of gladiators one citizen could exhibit at any given set of games. Since he could not show as many as he wanted, he began to use bizarre new types: men who fought from elephants, chariot fighters, horsemen and others. Strangest of all were the netmen.

Nobody knew what to make of them when they first marched into the arena. They looked like fishermen from the Styx with their nets and their three-pronged harpoons. Nobody thought they could be fighters because they wore no armor. We thought perhaps we were to see some new dance. Then a group of big-shield fighters came in and paired off with the netmen. At first, we expected to see the netmen slaughtered. But this was not toe-to-toe fighting of the sort we were used to. The netmen darted all over the arena, casting their nets, running away if they missed, only to return to the fight after retrieving the net by its cord. After a lot of laughter and hooting, the audience began to get into the spirit of the thing and cheered on the combatants. To everyone’s surprise, more netmen than swordsmen won their fights. It was all so unexpected that there was no way to decide whether anyone had fought really well or badly, so the crowd withheld the death signal, although a few fighters died later of their wounds.

Caesar had intended this to be a novelty act for that one set of games, but the crowd’s fancy was taken and they began to demand the net fighters. Now I saw that Statilius Taurus had added them to his regular categories of fighters. Traditionalists like my father found them entirely too exotic, and Cato, predictably, said it was a disgrace to the tradition of mortal combat.

A slave guided me to the quarters of the resident physician, and there I found my friend Asklepiodes, the world’s greatest expert on mortal wounds. We spent several minutes exchanging greetings, for which he had a Greek’s fondness. We swiftly brought each other up to date on our doings of the past year or so; then I broached my current business, telling him of the events of the previous night.

“Ah, Decius, how like you!” Asklepiodes said. “Back in Rome only three days and already involved in a murder!”

“One successful,” I said. “The other, fortunately merely attempted.” I handed him the wrapped parcel of pastries. “Is there some way to test these, short of feeding them to a slave?”

“I will try an animal. It is difficult to induce a dog to eat sweet pastries, but perhaps a pig will oblige. These tests are not infallible, I must warn you. There are substances deadly to humans but harmless to animals.”

“If it is a poison,” I asked, “is there any way to determine what sort?”

“That is extremely difficult unless you use a human subject, who can describe his symptoms. I am, of course, forbidden to do any such thing.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said. “Do you think you could get a look at Capito’s body? Unfortunately, I have no official position just now.”