Catilina's Riddle (27 page)

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at once. Menenia had put up her long hair in a coil held together with combs inlaid with bits of shell, in very much the same fashion as Bethesda's—though Menenia's combs, I noticed, were not quite so ornate.

I admired her tactfulness more and more.

Clean and refreshed, we arrived back at the house on the Esquiline to find that preparations were almost complete. A sundial down on the Subura Way had shown the time to be almost noon; the first guests would arrive soon. It was time for Meto to put on his toga.

The donning of the toga is no simple matter, even for advocates and politicians like Cicero, who wear them almost every day. What seems so simple in its unfolded state—a very wide piece of thin white wool, cut into a roughly oblong shape—becomes devilishly intractable and takes on a life of its own when one attempts to make it into a respectable-looking toga. That, at least, is my experience. Somehow the thing must be made to cross the chest, drape over the shoulder, and lie across one arm. The precise placement of the numerous folds and the way they hang are of supreme importance, or else a man ends up looking as if he simply left the house wearing a common bed sheet—an absurd appearance sure to elicit the scorn of his neighbors.

Fortunately, as for everything else of importance, Romans have slaves to take care of the problem of donning the toga. (Indeed, there was a joke common when I was a young man in Alexandria that the reason the Romans were bent on conquering the world was to supply themselves with slaves to help them dress.) The same slave who groomed and barbered Eco also served as his dresser. Here, as with the tweezers, was an opportunity for a slave to take petty revenge on his master, arranging for him to leave the house with the hem of his toga dragging or some fold tenuously placed so that it would later lose its shape. But Eco's dresser was quite competent, and more than a little patient as he helped the three of us into our togas, beginning with his master, then myself, and finally Meto.

Eco had purchased Meto's toga from a fine shop at the foot of the Palatine. It took two attempts to get him into it, and quite a bit of fussing with the folds, but at last Meto stood before us perfectly draped in his first manly toga.

"How do I look?" he said.

"Splendid!" said Eco.

"Papa?"

I hesitated to speak, because I felt a catch in my throat. "You look—" I began to say, then had to clear my throat. How fine he looked!

He had been a beautiful boy; he would be a handsome man, and in that moment one could see both together, past and future at once. His hair looked very black and his skin very smooth against the white wool; the color made him appear to be wrapped in purity. At the same time the

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authority and anonymity of the toga itself lent him an air of dignity and manliness beyond his years.
I
had told him last night that he could put his years of slavery behind him forever, that he need never worry about his unseemly origins again. Now
I
believed it myself.

"I
am proud, Meto. Very proud."

He walked toward me and would have hugged me,
I
think, but the drapes of cloth over his left arm constrained him. He looked confounded for a moment, then laughed and turned around, realizing that moving comfortably in a toga was a skill he would have to master. "How on earth do
I
go to the privy with all this on?" he asked, grinning.

"I
shall show you that when the need arises,"
I
said, and sighed in mock weariness. "Ah, the duties of fatherhood!"

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C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

ut in the garden, the guests had begun to arrive. The sun was well up, and the filtered yellow light through the gauzy canopy cast a warm glow over the courtyard and into the hallways and rooms around it. Dishes with all sorts of o delicacies had been placed on the tables, and the couches were disposed in informal arrangements, so that the guests could feed themselves and gather as they wished, rather than reclining and being served a succession of courses. This seemed rather chaotic and perhaps even a bit ungracious to me, but Eco assured me it was the new fashion.

"And like your beard,
I
suspect it shall come and go," I said under my breath.

As always with such gatherings, at first there seemed to be only a handful of guests, and then suddenly the garden was full of them, the men in their togas, the women in multicolored stolas. The soft murmur of their conversation filled the air. Their various perfumes and unguents mingled with the floral scents of the garden and the delectable odors of the roasted figpeckers and stuffed pigeons that kept arriving on trays from the kitchen.

I
made my way through the throng, stopping to speak with neighbors and clients I had not seen in years, and at last found Eco and pulled him aside. "Did you invite all these people?"
I
whispered.

"Of course. They're all friends or acquaintances. Most of them have known Meto since he was a little boy."

"But you can't be intending for all of them to walk through the Forum with us, and then come back here for dinner!"

"Of course not. This is only the general reception. People are invited

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to come and enjoy themselves, to get reacquainted with the family, to see Meto in his toga, to leave when they wish—"

"To eat you out of house and home! Look, over there!" A man with a gray beard who looked vaguely familiar—the association was not pleasant, and I seemed to recall that we had been on opposite sides of some litigation—was hovering stealthily over a little serving table, dropping stuffed grape leaves into some sort of pouch inside his toga.

Eco laughed. "Isn't that old Festus? You remember, he came over once saying he wanted to consult you about a lawsuit pending against him, and we never saw that little Alexandrian vase again."

"No." I frowned, shaking my head. "That is not Festus."

Eco cocked his head. "Ah, I have it. Rutilius—his own brother brought suit against him, accusing him of thieving from him. The scoundrel never denied it; instead, he wanted us to dig up something horrible and scandalous about his brother, so as to even the score."

I shook my head. "No, it's not Rutilius, either, but probably someone just as awful. Surely you wouldn't have invited either of those two to Meto's party! Oh, the indignities I've had to put up with over the years to keep our bellies full! I'm just glad I'm away from it all now. And I'm glad you're young and hard-shelled enough to see your own way through the snares and traps of this city."

"You trained me well, Papa."

"I wish I had trained Meto half so well."

"Meto is different from me," he said. "And different from you."

"I worry about him sometimes, about his future. He's still such a boy—"

"Papa, you must stop saying that. Meto is a man now, not a boy."

"Still—oh, now this is too much! Look, now that wretched man has begun pilfering the honeyed dates! There won't be any for the other guests. You see, you've invited far too many people—neither of us can even remember who that man is, though we're both sure we don't like him. This is why it's a mistake to have people serve themselves. If we were all seated with slaves doing the serving—"

"I suppose I should do something," said Eco. "I'll go ask the fellow if he's murdered any wives or poisoned any business partners lately."

With that he ambled toward the old graybeard, who gave a start and jumped back from the table when Eco touched his shoulder. Eco smiled and said something and led him away from the food. The jump must have dislodged the man's hidden cache, for a string of stuffed grape leaves and honeyed dates began to drop from his toga, leaving a trail behind him on the floor.

A hand touched my shoulder. I turned and saw a shock of red hair, a spangling of freckles across a handsome nose, and a pair of bright brown eyes looking into my own. The next moment I was locked in a mutual

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embrace, then held at arm's length while Marcus Valerius Messalla Rufus looked me up and down.

"Gordianus! The country life most certainly agrees with you—you look very fit indeed!"

"And the life of the city must agree with you, Rufus, for you never seem to age at all from year to year."

"I am thirty-three this year, Gordianus."

"No! Why, when we met—"

"I was about the same age that your son Meto is now. Time flies, Gordianus, and the world changes."

"Though never enough for my taste."

We had first met years ago in the house of Caecilia Metella, when Rufus was assisting Cicero in his defense of Sextus Roscius. He had been only sixteen then, a patrician of ancient lineage, politically precocious and secretly infatuated with his mentor, Cicero. Not surprisingly, the infatuation had come to nothing, but Rufus's more practical ambitions had led to a successful career. He had been one of the youngest men ever elected to the college of augurs, and as such was frequently called upon to read the auspices and pronounce the will of the gods. No public or private transaction of importance takes place in Rome, no army engages in battle, no marriage is consecrated without consulting an augur. I myself have never had much faith in reading messages into the flights of birds and divining the will of Jupiter from a flash of lightning across the sky.

Many (or most) augurs are mere political hacks and charlatans, who use their power to suspend public meetings and block the passage of legislation, but Rufus had always seemed quite sincere in his belief in the science of augury. He, too, had been involved in the scandal of the Vestal Virgins, for it was Rufus, as a religious colleague, whom the Virgo Maxima had first summoned for help when Catilina was discovered in the House of the Vestals. Rufus had called on Cicero, and Cicero had called on me. As I have remarked before, Rome sometimes seems a very small town indeed.

"I'm glad you've come, Rufus. There are very few faces from the Forum that I miss seeing from day to day, and yours is one of them. I mean it," I said, and I did, for Rufus had always been a young man of unusual integrity, soft-spoken but passionate in his beliefs and driven by an intensity that was not immediately apparent from his good-natured manner. His natural sense of justice and moral equanimity often seemed out of place among the self-serving oratory and ceaseless back-stabbing of the Forum. "But what's this?" I said. "You're wearing a candidate's toga." Rufus pretended to dust himself, for the natural woolen color of his toga had been rubbed with chalk to make it a harsh white, as is the

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practice of men running for office. "That's because I'm running for praetor this year."

"Then I hope you win. Rome needs good men to run the city and give out justice."

"We shall see. The voting will take place tomorrow, just after the balloting for the consular election. Normally the election for praetors and the election for consuls take place on different days, of course, but with the postponement of the consular election—well, it will be an insanely busy day. Caesar, too, is running for a praetorship, as is Cicero's brother, Quintus."

"I suppose you're still allied with Cicero," I said, then saw from his face that I was mistaken.

"Cicero . . . " Rufus shrugged. "Well, you know the circus act he performed last summer in order to win the consulship. Blowing smoke from his mouth and jumping through hoops—though it came as no surprise to see him resorting to the most outlandish tricks to get himself elected. Over the years he's reversed his positions on virtually every issue, yet his rhetoric stays the same—as if rhetoric gave a man consistency, rather than principles. I find myself uncomfortable in his presence these days. I read the auspices on the day he took office—not officially, but for my own satisfaction—and they portended a year full of deceit and treachery, perhaps even disaster. Ah, Gordianus, I saw the look that just crossed your face: you have no faith in the auguries. Neither does Cicero, who thinks they're merely tools that men like himself can use to manipulate the masses. And manipulate he does, shamelessly. Hypocritically turning his back on the children of Sulla's victims who seek redress, railing against the Rullan land reform, the way he handled that riot over special seating for equestrians in the theater, and now this postponement of the elections—you haven't been in the city long, have you?"

"I arrived only last night."

"Utter chaos. Voters arriving after hours or days of hard traveling only to find that the election day has been indefinitely postponed—

imagine! Angry farmers from up in Etruria camping out on the Field of Mars, lighting camp fires that could burn down the city—and when the praetors ride out to warn them, the farmers pull out the rusty old swords they used to carry for Sulla! It's enough to make me want to drop out of the praetor's race. And all because of this preposterous notion of Cicero's that Catilina is set to slaughter half the Senate if he doesn't win the consulship. And now, as if to prove he has no sense of shame or decorum left at all, Cicero insists on going about the Forum wearing that absurd breastplate—"

"What's this?"

"Please, I can't even bear to think about it. You'll probably see for

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yourself down in the Forum. Oh, Cicero! These days, I'm aligned with Gaius Julius Caesar." I nodded at the name of the young patrician who earlier in the year, against all expectations, had won the election to take the place of the deceased Pontifex Maximus, head of the state religion.

In recent years Caesar had emerged as a standard-bearer for the party of discontent and reform. His lavish expenditures on public games and banquets had won the hearts of the masses (and driven him deeply into debt, it was rumored, despite his family's great wealth). He was said to be witty, charming, devious, scornful of the Optimates, and possessed of that single-minded nature which in men of politics can lead to greatness, or disaster, or both. There were those who feared—or hoped—

that Caesar would become another Catilina, if indeed Catilina's credibility and hopes for the consulship were about to reach their end.