“An excellent report,” I told him. “I am obliged to you.” I turned to go, but he spoke up.
“Senator?”
I turned back. “Yes?”
“You’re up for aedile next year, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“You get elected, the big sewer’s clogged real bad, been needing cleaning for years.”
“I’ll remember,” I said, sighing with resignation. I would be paying for my predecessors’ neglect. Scouring the sewers was one of the very worst jobs on the aedile’s docket. We usually employed condemned criminals to do it.
“Do it as soon as you’re in office,” he admonished me. “Or it’ll be too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“Flood coming next year, a big one. We’ve seen all the signs,” he nodded dolefully.
“I’ll see to it. Thanks for the warning.”
I made my way toward the Campus Martius, brooding over the prospect of the year ahead. I didn’t doubt the man for an instant. This wasn’t an old woman seeing warnings from the gods in every bird that flew past her window. These were people who lived their lives on the river and knew all its moods. If they said a flood was coming, then, barring freakish circumstances, it would come.
I skirted the edge of the Forum Boarium and went out through the Carmentalis Gate and took the long street that led to Pompey’s Theater. The street was lined with some of our smaller but nonetheless most beautiful temples. Pompey had had the street widened and improved to facilitate access to his theater, which was the first permanent theater built in Rome. For centuries, the Censors tried to keep degenerate Greek influences out of the City, regarding them as a danger to public morals.
The great complex of interconnected buildings bulked up from the flat plain of the Campus Martius like a beached whale. At one end was the vast theater with the temple atop it, and from it stretched the extravagant portico and the Senate meetinghouse, all surrounded by splendid gardens. Pompey could do some things right, if he hired someone competent to think it up for him.
I passed into the theater and stood within the great half circle of seats, said to have a seating capacity of forty thousand. On the stage, an acting troupe was rehearsing what appeared to be a tragedy, the actors looking strange without their masks. At the top of the seats, before the temple, I could see a small crowd gathered. I began to climb, feeling like a slave at the Games, relegated to the highest seats with the most distant view of the action.
A pack of thugs stood as a sort of honor guard around the mangled remains of the late, unlamented Ateius Capito. I didn’t bother to look him over, since I had come here to get a professional opinion. Instead, I admired the temple, which I had not seen since it had been completed.
The Temple of Venus Victrix was, of necessity, rather small. You do not build a truly huge temple atop a theater, even if you are inclined by nature to such odd architectural juxtapositions. Its proportions, however, were exquisite. The slender, delicately fluted Corinthian columns, topped with their sprays of acanthus leaves, were especially pleasing.
“No signs of action from the City?” I asked the man in charge of the thugs, one I vaguely remembered seeing with Clodius’s escort.
“No. My guess is, everyone will hold off till the funeral. The other tribunes will give a rousing funeral oration and carry on just like they didn’t hate his guts. Then, if you haven’t found the killer or killers, they’ll start taking the place apart.”
“There’ll be no end of fun if that happens,” agreed another. These men were connoisseurs of mobs and riots.
I wandered over to the edge of the top terrace next to the temple and looked over the waist-high railing. The building with its tiered rows of arches below me looked like a huge marble drum. Statues stood inside every arch, all of them specially commissioned for the theater. We had looted all the Greek cities so thoroughly that there was little original artwork left worth taking, so now we brought in expert sculptors to make copies for us of famous sculptures.
I leaned out for a better look, bracing a hand against one of the masts set in massive, bronze sconces at intervals along the top of the outer wall. On days of theatricals, these masts supported the velarium, a huge awning. Pompey’s velarium was striped with purple, because he was never shy about reminding people of his military glory. Of course, the stripes were not made with the true, Tyrian purple used for the triumphator’s robe. That much Tyrian dye would have cost more than the whole theater complex. Rather, it was made with dye extracted from the common trumpet-shell and mixed with various native dyes. I learned this from an old dye merchant of Ostia. The effect was almost the same as that of the true purple, but unlike Tyrian dye this imitation faded with age and exposure to the sun.