“I’m afraid I don’t know, Senator. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s what we educated people call a rhetorical question. It doesn’t call for an answer. Can you write?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Excellent. I want you to copy this list of names for me while I study these other documents.”
The boy took the reed pen, and I gave him the scrap of papyrus with the list of magistrates. Carefully and with great concentration he began copying the names in a blocky, workmanlike hand. Like so many young slaves he had the name of one of the famous pretty boys of antiquity, but he wasn’t an especially attractive youth—not that my tastes run that way. He was snubnosed with protrudingupper teeth, but he seemed to be intelligent. I have always been willing to overlook ugliness in a slave if he has some redeeming quality.
“Be sure to copy the descriptions as well,” I admonished.
“I am doing that, sir,” he said dutifully. Next to each name were a few words describing the putative magician’s speciality: “necromancer,” “spirit medium,” “astrologer,” “summoner of Eastern gods,” and so forth. One was described, alarmingly, as “raiser of corpses.”
Besides these practitioners there were organized cults whose supposed indecent practices were catalogued in some detail. There were the usual ecstatic dancing, public fornication, self-mutilation, drug-induced intoxication, unnatural acts with animals, mass flagellation, and loud music. I have always objected to loud music myself.
I found a certain unworthy pleasure in reading about these supposedly disgraceful practices adjacent to that list of prominent public men. I was familiar with many of those men, and knew some of them to be addicted to things far worse than any attributed to the religious libertines. The difference was, they were senators while these cults attracted slaves, freedmen, the lowest of the proletarii, and the resident foreigners.
This is nothing new, of course. We are always anxious to protect the lower orders from vices that we ourselves practice with great enthusiasm. We know that we have the inner, philosophical strength to resist carrying our pleasures to excess, while the childlike masses are apt to be corrupted by them.
Follow-up reports gave details of suppression and expulsion. Most of the leaders were foreigners and were simply banished from Rome. Some of these were branded so that they would be unwelcome anywhere in Roman territory. The way our Empire was growing, these unfortunates might soon have to take up residence somewhere around the headwaters of the Nile or in the land of the Seres, where silk comes from.
The ones who could claim Roman citizenship were mostly let off with an admonition, any repetition of their scandalous behavior to be dealt with sternly. I had every expectation that these people had also proven able to come across with a few thousand sesterces to make the aedile’s life more comfortable and help defray the onerous burdens of his office. It was an unspoken but well-recognized fact of political life that cult leaders could deliver substantial bloc votes come election time.
When the reading and copying were done, I tipped young Hylas with a sesterce and turned away discreetly while he disposed of it somewhere about his person. Slaves, especially small ones, must resort to certain subterfuges in order to prevent larger slaves from acquiring their wealth, and it is often inadvisable to wonder too much about where our money has been.
With my papyrus tucked into my tunic, I left the temple, thinking about the man now looting Sardinia, and others of his sort. From what I had learned of him so far, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was nothing unusual, just a typical Roman politician of the times. At some time he had been a quaestor, doing scut work for the government, perhaps accompanying some general and profiting from it, making valuable political and commercial contacts in the process. He had then been elected to the aedileship and had not stinted himself on largesse to the populace with his Games and his theater and his baths. Undoubtedly he had gone deeply into debt to do this, besides squandering whatever wealth he had inherited.
Riding on the great popularity of his aedileship, he stood for praetor the very next year and won the office handily. Then he had been given a propraetorian province, Sardinia, which he was now looting so merrily. It had become common practice, and it did much to ruin the Republic. Provinces that had been Roman territory for centuries were treated like newly conquered nations, with extortions and oppressions that would shame an Oriental potentate.
The provincials had recourse in our courts. Cicero had made his legal reputation prosecuting a man named Verres who had given Sicily a sacking that was breathtaking even in that jaded age. The Sicilians had come to Cicero because they had been very pleased with the honesty of his own administration of the western part of the province when he was quaestor there under Peducaeus.