Roma - Saylor Steven - Страница 76

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Kaeso became so flustered that he abruptly changed the subject. “You spoke earlier of your own illustrious career, cousin, but you made no mention of an episode that has always intrigued me.”

“Oh, yes?” said Quintus. “What is that?”

“I believe it happened not too long before I was born, when you were just beginning your political career. It had to do with a famous case of poisoning—or rather, many cases of poisoning.”

Quintus nodded grimly. “You refer to the investigation that took place the year I served as curule aedile. A veritable plague of poison!”

“If you had rather not talk about it—”

“I’m quite willing to discuss it. As with the disaster of the Caudine Forks, there is no sense in hiding such an episode, no matter how distasteful. As you say, I was a young man, and quite thrilled to have been elected curule aedile, a magistracy that automatically admitted me to the ranks of the Senate. To me fell the responsibility of keeping law and order in the city.”

“That sounds like a fascinating job.”

“Does it? For the most part, it consists of tedious administrative duties—fining citizens who’ve damaged public property, investigating accusations of overcharging by moneylenders, that sort of thing. Not a happy post for a man who would rather be fighting! But my complaints paled beside the general gloom that reigned over the city that year. People were fearful and uneasy, for it seemed that a terrible plague of a most peculiar nature had descended on us. Its victims were all men—not a woman among them—and the symptoms varied inexplicably. Some died swiftly. Others recovered for a while and then relapsed and expired. Even odder was the fact that a disproportionate number of those who died were men of high standing. Plagues tend to strike the poor and the lowborn in preference to their betters, not the other way around. The peculiar nature and the mounting toll of this plague were only gradually perceived over a course of months, and by that time the priests and magistrates were greatly alarmed. It seemed that the wrath of the gods must be at work. What had the people of Roma, especially their leading men, done to offend them?

“Eventually, the Senate resorted to an ancient recourse in times of epidemic. As you know, there is a wooden tablet inside the Temple of Jupiter, affixed to the doorway that leads into the sanctuary of Minerva on the right. Since the founding of the temple, every year, on the Ides of September, one of the consuls drives a nail into that tablet, to mark the passage of each year; thus the age of the temple and of the Republic can be calculated. The tablet adorns Minerva’s sanctuary because numbers were one of her gifts to mankind. But the tablet has another, rarer function. In times of epidemic, a special dictator may be named—a religious, not military appointment—to carry out a single duty: He must drive an additional nail into the wooden tablet. How this custom came about, no one knows, but its effect is to lessen the ravages of plague. Thus, also, the years of plague can be recalled, and the frequency of such outbreaks reckoned.

“So it was done in this instance. A special dictator was appointed—Gnaeus Quinctilius, as I recall. With the Vestals and the priests and all the magistrates in attendance, Quinctilius drove a nail into the tablet, and then, his duty done, he resigned his office. But the ritual brought no relief. The plague continued and the number of victims increased. The people grew more frightened and their leaders more uneasy. I was as concerned as anyone, of course, but as curule aedile it hardly fell to me to devise a proper means of propitiating the gods and dispelling the plague.

“Then, one day, going about my business in my chambers in the Forum, a young woman came to see me. She refused to tell me her name, but from her dress and manner, I could see she was a freeborn servant from a respectable household. She said she had something terrible to tell me, but only if I would promise to shield her from punishment by the state or retribution by those whose crimes she would reveal. Well, I thought this was going to be nothing more dire than a case of a contractor embezzling bricks from the city, or some pipe-layer charging twice for repairing the public sewer. I gave her my assurances, and she proceeded to tell me that the plague that was afflicting the city was of human origin—and perpetrated not by men, but by women. She accused her own mistress, along with some of the most highborn women in Roma.

“On its face, her story seemed preposterous. For what possible reason would so many women resort to poisoning their husbands and other male relatives? One woman might resort to poison, yes; but scores of women, repeatedly, all in the same year? And yet, by that time, hundreds of men had died, and no cause had yet been discovered. I asked for proof. She offered to take me to a house where the poisons were made. If we were lucky, she said, we might catch some of the women in the act of brewing them.

“I had to act and quickly. In that moment, the job I had considered trifling and humdrum suddenly weighed upon me as the world must weigh upon the shoulders of Atlas.” Quintus sighed, but his eyes glittered; relating the grim story clearly gave him great satisfaction.

“And then what happened, cousin Quintus?”

“Speed was essential, yet proper forms had to be observed, or otherwise any evidence might be compromised. I alerted the consuls at once—how old Gaius Valerius blustered when I woke him from a nap in the middle of the day! With the consuls as witnesses, along with their lictors, I went to the house in question, the home of a patrician named Cornelius, one of the first victims of the plague. His widow’s name was Sergia. Her door slave, seeing such a company, blanched and tried to shut us out. I pushed my way inside.

“At the back of the house, we found a room, which must have been a kitchen at one time, but that had been given over entirely to the brewing of potions. Herbs were hung by bits of string from the rafters. Pots were bubbling and steaming. One pot had been set on a wooden rack to cool; lined up beside it was a row of little clay bottles. Sergia was clearly in charge; the other women were merely servants. When she saw us and realized what had happened, she grabbed one of the bottles and raised it to her lips. I knocked the bottle from her hand. It shattered on the floor and spattered my tunic with a green liquid. The lictors restrained her. There was a rage in her eyes that chilled my blood.

“Sergia refused to answer questions, but, with a little persuasion, her slaves spoke readily enough. They led us to more than twenty houses where the products of Sergia’s kitchen might be found. What a day that was, bursting into house after house, witnessing the outrage of the women, the disbelief of their husbands, the fear and confusion of the children. The implicated women were made to appear before the consuls in the Forum, along with the potions that had been seized.

“Before that day, there had never been a public inquest into charges of poisoning. Such matters were rare enough, and when they did occur, they had always been handled entirely within the affected household, with justice dispensed by the paterfamilias. ‘It began beneath his roof, let it end beneath his roof,’ as the saying goes. If a head of household’s wife or daughter, or his son, for that matter, dared to commit such a crime, it was the prerogative of the paterfamilias to determine guilt and exact punishment.

“But this was clearly beyond the scope of any one paterfamilias. There was simply no precedent for such a thing—a vast web of crimes spun by a conspiracy of women! The consuls were fearful of repercussions from the powerful families involved. They were only too happy to allow me, as curule aedile, to conduct the questioning.

“Sergia at last broke her silence. She claimed that her potions were remedies for various ailments, none of them poisonous. If that were so, I said, then let every woman present swallow the potion that was found in her possession. This caused a great stir among the women. There was much weeping, shrieking, tearing of hair. Gradually, the women quieted one another. At last, they agreed to the test. In unison, following the lead of Sergia, the women swallowed their so-called remedies.

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