He shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no. It was only Crassus, as far as Ateius was concerned.”
“What about all the petitioners who mobbed his home? How did he keep their support?”
“The vast bulk of those people do nothing but take up a tribune’s time. Often as not, they just want an important ear to hear their complaints. If they do have real problems, they are usually so petty that they can be solved by a freedman with a few coins to pass around. Ateius’s staff handled those. The few with substantial grievances to address, Ateius passed on to the other tribunes. He wasn’t very popular among us.”
“Didn’t that strike anyone as odd? The office of tribune is just one step on a man’s political career. Any man of sense uses it to make contacts, do favors that will profit him later on, even, perhaps, enrich himself a bit, within legal limits. How was Ateius supporting his rather expensive office if all he did was alienate the richest man in the world?”
“Ateius came of a substantial equestrian family; you’ve seen his house.”
“Oh, come now, none of that! You know as well as I that if he wasn’t doing profitable political favors for important people, he had to be buying the support he needed. That requires a great deal more than the fortune of a substantial equestrian family. Whose money was he spending, if not his own?”
“He was passing out the silver rather freely,” Gallus said. “But I was not about to ask. The possible sources are rather limited, you know.” The last words were mumbled, as if he was reluctant to say even this much.
I knew exactly what he meant. Crassus certainly wasn’t financing his own opposition. That left the two men with the most to gain from the elimination of Crassus: Pompey and Caesar. The conference at Luca the previous year had supposedly patched up their differences, but nobody mistook it for anything but a temporary political expedient, to keep things at home quiet while two of the Big Three were engaged in foreign service and the third was occupied with the all-important grain supply.
“Is there anything else you can tell me about Capito? Any unusual visitors he may have had, foreigners who may have been seen with him, any other odd behavior?”
“Senator, I rarely saw him except in the Forum when we dealt with that single issue. I was far too busy to socialize with him. His enthusiasm for foreign religions and sorcery was well-known, but public life in Rome is ridden with crackpots.”
“All too true. Well, Tribune, I thank you for your cooperation.” We both stood.
“This is a vicious business,” Gallus said. “I hope you find who murdered him. He was a tribune and shouldn’t have been touched while he was still in office.” He adjusted the drape of his toga. “Aside from that, I’m glad the bastard’s dead.”
I went back to the Forum, stopping on the way to snack at the stands of some street vendors. With commendable moderation, I washed it down with nothing stronger than water.
I hailed a few friends as I crossed the Forum, but I did not stop, instead climbing the lower slope of the Capitol to the Tabularium, the main archive of the Roman State. There I located the freedman in charge of the Censor’s records.
“How may I help you, Senator?” he asked. He was surrounded by slaves who actually looked busy for a change, that year being one in which the Census was taken.
“I need the records pertaining to the late tribune Caius Ateius Capito’s qualifications for office.” The fitness of candidates to stand for office coming under the purview of the Censors, Capito would have deposited a statement of his age, property, and military and political service with them. The man went off, shaking his head at this unreasonable imposition on the time of a busy, busy official. It was getting to be an old story.
I waited for him amid the rustlings and cracklings of papyrus, the rattlings of wooden binders containing wax tablets, the thumpings of lead seals as the slaves and freedmen went through the motions of the most notoriously tedious job required by the constitution. It was a good thing we only had to do it every five years.
“Here you are, Senator,” the archivist said, handing me a small roll of papyrus. I unrolled it and read.
There was not much to it. Ateius stated that he possessed the minimum property required for equestrian status, that he had been enrolled in the equestrian order by the Censors Cornelius Lentulus and Gellius Publicola, fifteen years before. He had served with the legions for the required number of campaigns, under Lucullus, Metellus Creticus, Pompey, and Philippus, he of the famous fishponds. Most of his service had been in the East, I noticed—Macedonia and the wars with Mithridates and Tigranes and their heirs, for the most part, plus the bandit-chasing that inevitably takes up so much of an army’s time in that part of the world, even when it is nominally at peace. Perhaps, I thought, it was during these years that Ateius acquired his taste for strange, foreign religions and magic. The Eastern world is rank with sorcery.