The Tribune's Curse(49)

“March!” Pompey called, and we set off with Pompey in front, Milo behind him, the other praetors there behind Milo. We lesser senators followed in a gaggle. Behind us strolled a fairly substantial force of bodyguards, mostly ludus-trained slaves like Hermes, forbidden to bear arms but handy with fists and clubs. I was all too aware that they would be little protection against attack by a real mob.

However, I also knew that Milo’s crowd would be there in the Forum, and Pompey’s many clients, and the personal followings of the other important men, and these might be able to hold the mob at bay long enough for us to escape, should worse come to worst.

We passed across the bridge and through the gate, where the guard saluted us. Pompey paused there for a moment.

“Can you see anything?” he called up to the men atop one of the gate towers.

“No fires, Consul,” the man answered.

“Good. Things haven’t properly started yet.” He led us off across the Forum Boarium, past the ghostly bulk of the Circus Maximus, and then around the base of the Capitoline Hill. The Tuscan Street would have been more direct, but this brought us out at the Basilica Julia, which had a more commanding view over the Forum and offered a better escape route up to the Temple of Capitoline Jove, should the worst happen. Either way, the walk was all too short.

“When we get to the basilica,” Pompey said, “I want the lictors in a line halfway up the steps. Senators at the top of the steps, serving magistrates nearest me. Milo, I trust your boys will be there?”

“They have their orders for situations like this, Consul,” he said. “Every man will be there, in place, to give us the best protection. The question is: which way will Clodius jump?”

The same question had been running through my own head. “Clodius won’t want a riot unless he controls it, and nobody will control this mob once it loses its head,” I said.

“Metellus is right,” Pompey said. “Milo, I don’t want anything to break out between you.”

“I won’t start anything,” Milo said.

We had been hearing the roar of the crowd ahead from the time we entered the Forum Boarium. The noise abated as we went into the Basilica Julia through a rear door and crossed its cavernous interior, inhabited only by the night cleaning crew of public slaves who huddled in the corners, wide-eyed with fear. Then we walked out onto the colonnaded portico, and the full roar of the mob struck us.

Beside me I heard a senator mutter, “A white boar to Hercules if I get through this night alive.”

For my part, I was ready to pledge a whole herd of bulls to Jupiter. The Forum was a seething, storm-tossed sea of people, alight with waving torches, further illuminated by the bonfires that, for some unknown reason, mobs always feel compelled to ignite. The fires were fed with furniture and building materials plundered from all the nearby buildings. At least they were burning on the pavement and hadn’t yet spread to the houses and public buildings, but that was just a matter of time. A mindless mob is always happy to burn its own homes and shops, only to wake up when the hysteria has passed and look for someone to blame for its own beastly behavior. That part is usually good for another riot, one with more bloodshed than arson.

The lictors took up their station on the steps, standing shoulder to shoulder, their fasces held at a slant across their chests. Some of the mob caught sight of them, and then of the knot of dignitaries on the terrace at the top of the steps. As word spread, an extraordinary motion, something like the way water moves when it is disturbed, swept through the crowd. A bit at a time, starting at the forward fringes and amid little concentrations here and there, the inchoate, antlike swarming began to assume a common direction, and then the whole mass was surging toward the basilica, except for those who had already secured points of vantage on the bases of monuments or who hung, apelike, from the great statues and monumental columns.

In the fore of the crowd, I saw Clodius, dressed in his work-ingman’s tunic. He was a few steps ahead of the mob and running for all he was worth, not escaping them, but leading.

“Let that man through!” Pompey ordered the lictors, “but no other who is not of senatorial rank.”

From behind us, more senators quietly came from the depths of the basilica. They were the braver members of the order, who had been watching from hiding places around the Forum, waiting for a signal to assemble. To my relief I saw Cicero, along with Cato, Balbus, and some others. With so much courage and prestige present, we might just pull it off. I scanned the crowd, and saw that Milo’s thugs had taken up a position well to the fore, ready to turn and hold off the mob on their master’s order. In fact, the whole section of the mob nearest the steps were his adherents and Clodius’s. I felt a sort of perverse pride in the sight. Romans can even organize a bloodthirsty mob. Let the barbarians match that, if they can.