The Sacrilege(63)

There is a belief among us that the only respectable life is agriculture. Probably because it is the dullest life imaginable. Of course, there is no virtue in working the land. The virtue lies in owning the land. How instructing an overseer to boss a gang of slaves returns a man to the realities of tilling the soil escapes me, but many swear by it.

“I have an investigation to conduct, Father,” I said. “I can’t just break it off to go watch slaves spread manure under grape vines.”

“Your wishes are of no importance,” he said.

One of the most infuriating provisions of Roman law is the one conferring lifetime authority upon the paterfamilias. You can be the gray-haired commander of legions and conqueror of provinces, but if your father is still alive, you are still, legally, a child.

“It’s a matter of state security,” I insisted.

He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That business about the rites of that foreign goddess?”

“There is far more to it that that,” I said with some urgency.

“Go on,” he said, still walking from long habit at the standard legionary pace.

I gave him a somewhat truncated account of my findings to date, along with some speculations as to their significance. I did not identify Julia. He would assume that any woman who shared my taste for snooping must be unworthy.

“So you suspect Pompey is behind it, eh?” He said this grudgingly, but I could tell that his interest was piqued. Like the rest of the aristocratic party, he hated Pompey and feared that the man would crown himself king of Rome.

“No one else is so bold. He is the one who has a pack of tame Etruscan priests.”

“And,” Father mused, “he wants to settle his veterans on public lands in Tuscia.”

“He does?” I said. This was news to me.

“Yes, as you would know if you ever paid any attention to important public business instead of crawling through every sewer in the city.”

“I’ve only been in the Senate for a few days,” I said.

“That does not excuse you. And you realize that your vaporings are built upon the words of some of the most degenerate people in Rome?”

“I always take that into account,” I said. A sudden inspiration struck me.

“Tell me, how did Capito stand on the question of settling Pompey’s veterans?” At this question Father actually stopped in his tracks and stared at me as if at some wonderful apparition sent by the gods. I wiped blood from my upper lip with the back of my caestus. My nose was bleeding inside and out from Clodius’s bite.

“There may be something in your mad sophistry after all. Capito opposed the settlements most violently.”

“So does more than half the Senate. What was Capito’s particular objection?” We were nearing Father’s house by this time. We presented an odd spectacle, I must admit: the dignified Censor in his toga praetexta and I, who looked like the receiver of the second-place award in a munera. And the subject was politics, as always.

“He claimed it would upset the public order and give Pompey a power base near Rome and so forth; everyone says that. But the real reason was that his family leases a huge tract of the ager publicus in Tuscia, an area that will be cut up into farm plots for Pompey’s veterans if the legislation goes through.”

I grinned, but it made my mouth hurt. “So Capito’s family has been farming and grazing that land for several generations, paying the state at a nominal rate set a hundred or more years ago?”

“Closer to two hundred.”

“Oh, the elevated and patriotic motives of our Senators,” I said.

“You’ll see worse than that in the Senate, if you live,” Father said. By this time we were at his gate.

“Could you send a slave to my house?” I asked. “My boy, Hermes, should be there by now with my toga. Have him meet me at the surgery of Asklepiodes. He knows where it is and bring me a tunic.”

Father popped his fingers and a slave came to take my instructions. The man ran off and we continued with every Roman’s favorite subject.

“Where does Caesar stand on these questions?” I asked.

“As a popular, he is for giving the land to the veterans, but he favors the ager publicus in Campania. A bit farther from Rome, but the best farmland in Italy.”

“They don’t seem connected, do they? What have those two concocted between them? I think it must be behind all this.”

“They both argue that their settlements will strengthen the state,” Father said while I dripped on the tiles of his atrium. “Be a reservoir from which to draw soldiers for future generations. All that sort of talk.”