Roma - Saylor Steven - Страница 53
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“No, Lucius. This task is not for you.”
“But I must see her!”
“No! Verginia is my daughter, not your wife. This duty falls to me, and to me alone.”
Verginius and the nurse stepped inside the building. The meeting room was empty. One of the lictors led them down a long hallway to the chamber of Appius Claudius. The lictor allowed Verginius and the nurse to enter the room alone, but he would not allow them to close the door behind them.
“Then avert your eyes!” demanded Verginius.
The lictor glowered at him, but turned his face away.
The room was small and dark, and far enough from the crowded Forum that no sound from outside could be heard. While Verginius and Lucius had harangued the citizenry all day, this was where Appius Claudius had kept himself shut away, alone with Verginia.
Verginius wrinkled his nose.
The lictor grunted. “Smells like a whorehouse, doesn’t it?”
Verginia was sitting on a couch strewn with rumpled coverlets. She rose and clutched her breasts. Her face was red from weeping. “Papa! Thank the gods, at last!”
Verginius turned his face away. “Nurse, examine her. Lictor, keep your eyes averted!”
The old nurse stepped forward. At the sight of her, Verginia seemed to become a child. She stood passively and made no resistance as the woman lifted her tunica and stooped over to peer between her legs.
Verginius’s voice was a hoarse whisper, barely audible. “What do you see?”
“Master, the child is no longer a virgin.” The old woman shuddered and began to sob. The lictor snickered.
Verginia stepped back from the nurse and pushed down her tunica. Her lips quivered. “Papa?” she said. She looked at the floor, not at her father, and her voice trembled with fear.
Verginius moved quickly toward her. She abruptly threw open her arms in the posture of a woman expecting an embrace or surrendering to a blow.
Verginius reached into his tunic and drew out a dagger. With the last of his voice, he gave a cry of anguish. The sound that emerged was ghastly—a hoarse, stifled croak. It was the last sound Verginia would hear.
Only moments after he had entered the building, Verginius emerged, carrying his daughter in his arms.
The red-faced lictor ran out after him. “Decemvir, it happened before I could stop it! I never thought—”
Appius Claudius rose from his chair of state. He clenched his fists, but his face registered no expression.
Like a warm wind through a wheat field, a murmur passed through the crowd, traveling from those who could see Verginius back to those who could not. The murmur was followed by gasps and stifled cries as men rushed forward to see for themselves. A few, catching only a glimpse of the girl’s body, thought that she was alive and being carried like a child; they cried out in triumph that Verginius had rescued his daughter. Then they saw how the girl’s arm swayed with each step, as limp and lifeless as her hair; they saw the red stain on her breast. Cries of joy turned to cries of anguish.
Marcus Claudius appeared, spreading his arms to block Verginius’s way. He glanced over his shoulder at the Decemvir with a look of panic in his eyes. Appius Claudius barely raised an eyebrow.
“What have you done, you fool?” shouted Marcus Claudius. “The girl—my property—”
“This is your doing,” said Verginius. “Yours, and the Decemvir’s. You gave me no choice. She was my daughter. I did the only thing a father could do. Let the gods judge me. Let them look down and judge you, as well.” He faced the tribunal and raised the body in his arms. “And let the gods judge you, Appius Claudius!”
The Decemvir’s face might have been made of stone. Only his eyes showed a flicker of emotion, which some interpreted as fear, but other as derision.
The crowd was startled by a cry of agony. Lucius appeared, his hands clutching his head, his face contorted almost beyond recognition. He dropped to his knees before Verginius. He seized Verginia’s hand, clutching it desperately. He pressed it to his lips, then let it drop, horrified by the lifeless flesh. He gathered handfuls of her hair, sobbed, and hid his face amid her tresses.
Up on the tribunal, anticipating what was to come, Appius Claudius called for his lictors to gather around him. All Roma seemed to draw a final breath, and then the riot began.
All the violence that had come before was as nothing compared to the fury that swept through the Forum and spilled into the streets beyond. The whole city descended into a kind of madness. The mob’s outrage at the fate of Verginia unleashed vast stores of anger and resentment that had nothing to do with the singular villainies perpetrated on her by Appius Claudius. Amid the uproar, men acted on their most reckless impulses and indulged their darkest cravings for vengeance and retribution. Men were chased through the streets and beaten without mercy. Houses were broken into and vandalized. Old scores were settled with unrestrained violence.
Much blood was spilled in Roma that day—but not the blood of Appius Claudius. Only his death could have satisfied the angry mob; only the sight of his corpse next to that of Verginia could have calmed the riot. The chair of state was smashed and the tribunal was torn down; Appius Claudius was not amid the wreckage. Men pushed past the lictors, broke into the meeting hall and ran through every room; the Decemvir was nowhere to be found. His inexplicable escape was like a spiteful trick played upon the mob, a deliberate insult to their righteous fury.
Almost forgotten amid the chaos, Verginius lowered the body of his daughter to the ground and knelt over her, joined by Lucius. Father and lover wept uncontrollably, adding their tears to the blood that stained Verginia’s breast.
449 B.C.
By the time Icilia’s pregnancy began to show, many things had changed in Roma.
The change that most intimately affected her was the death of her father. Walking through the Forum one day, Icilius had clutched his chest and fallen. By the time he arrived home, carried on a litter, his heart had stopped beating.
Upon their father’s death, Icilia’s brother Lucius became paterfamilias. It was Lucius who would decide Icilia’s fate, and the fate of her unborn child.
Great changes had also taken place in the city.
The tragic end of Verginia had shaken Roma to its foundations. Had Appius Claudius possessed any idea of the forces his mad scheme would unleash? It was hard to imagine how any man, however blinded by lust or arrogance, could have proceeded on such a reckless course. For generations to come, his name would be a synonym for that which the Greeks called hubris—a pride so overbearing that the gods themselves are compelled to annihilate the offender.
Did Appius Claudius anticipate Verginius’s intention to kill his daughter? Did he deliberately allow it to happen, having cold-bloodedly determined that this was his best course of action? In the aftermath of the upheaval, some put forth this opinion. They argued that Appius Claudius had already had his way with the girl, and thus had no further use for her. She had become a liability to him; her death would relieve him of the responsibility to determine her identity, and what better solution than to goad her father into committing the act? Appius Claudius thought he had found a way to take what he wanted without paying a price. If a man had power, and was clever, and was brazen enough to follow through on a ruthless scheme, then even for the most terrible crime he might hope to avoid punishment.
Others said that even Appius Claudius could not be that cold and calculating. Having desired Verginia so desperately that he would carry out such a dangerous plot, surely a single night and day had not exhausted his appetite for her. The fact that his face showed no reaction to her death was because he was utterly stunned by what Verginius had done.
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