Free Defender of Rome by Douglas Jackson Page A

some whose deeds were long forgotten, but whose names would live on for ever in this sacred place. A pair of giant triumphal arches commemorated the victories of Augustus and Tiberius. On the Rostra Julia the great orators still made their pronouncements above the beaks of ships captured a century before at Actium, beside the frozen stone figures of Scipio and Sulla and Caesar and Pompey. Here was the little shrine to Venus Cloacina, goddess of the sewers, and, along the Via Sacra, fluted pillars topped by the golden figures of Mars and Jupiter, Venus and Minerva. And, in simple contrast to the man-worked grandeur all around, the little group of olive and fig and grapevine which marked nature’s most precious gifts to Rome.
    Other men would say that the heart of the heart was the Curia, where the Senate sat, but for Valerius it would always be the Basilica Julia. Already, though it was only early afternoon, slaves and servants were making their way to the shops and stalls on the margins of its pillared aisles. He knew the lawyers would be slower to return from the midday meal with their families and took his time. He had three cases outstanding which needed dealing with before he could begin Nero’s mission. They couldn’t be more different: an inheritance dispute he was defending before the Court of the Hundred; a complicated civil case involving the demolition of a semi-derelict apartment block on the other side of the Pons Aemilius that would take some delicate negotiation; and, by far the most pressing, an accusation of water theft which he was due to prosecute for the water commissioner. Fortune favoured him when he noticed Quintus Fuscus, a lawyer he knew, a dozen yards ahead on the Vicus Jugarius. Valerius explained his dilemma, but not the reason for it. ‘I can put off the building case and I owe the water commissioner some kind of explanation, but I need someone to take the inheritance suit off my hands.’
    The case was the most lucrative of the three and Fuscus’s face lit up. ‘I’d be delighted to oversee it; I haven’t tried a case before the centumviri for years. It will be a pleasure.’
    Valerius thanked him and walked on to his next meeting.
    ‘This is most unusual,’ Commissioner Honorius complained. ‘The case is ready to present and all parties are available.’
    ‘If you wish to find another prosecutor I will be happy to withdraw,’ Valerius assured him.
    ‘No, no. It’s just that I believe you underestimate the importance of this case. The theft of water from Rome’s aqueducts has always been a most serious offence and is on the increase. The time is right for an example to be made.’
    Valerius made his apologies and agreed to speak to the representative of the accused, a builder with interests all over the city who was alleged to have tapped into one of the main aqueducts feeding the capital to supply his brickworks.
    By now the Forum hummed with activity. The avenues were thronged with senators, each with his guard of bullies and drifting cloud of clients; with lawyers and their clerks and the crowds of gawpers who had come to see them win or lose; with money changers, soothsayers, shoppers and worshippers, men offering themselves for work, and the beggars, blinded and maimed, who reminded Valerius of the ache in his missing arm. It was as he fought his way east along the Via Nova past the House of the Vestals that he felt someone brush against him. His first thought was that he was being robbed, but then he realized that something had been placed in his left hand.
    He looked down and discovered he was holding a torn piece of scroll.

IX
    POPPAEA AUGUSTA SABINA lay back on the padded couch and took a sip of well-watered wine. From the other side of the wide table in the shaded gardens on the Palatine, Fabia smiled at her old friend; two of Rome’s most striking women comfortable in the knowledge that they would never need to rival each other. The tone of their relationship had been