Free Saturnalia by John Maddox Roberts Page A

grumbled.
    “We’ll sort things out,” Milo said confidently.
    It may seem odd that men like Clodius and Milo and Sestius could speak with such sanguine assurance, as if they were about to reign as kings rather than serve as elected officials, but the tribuneship had made a great comeback in the last few years. Sulla had all but stripped the Tribunes of the People of all their powers, but one after the other, each year’s tribunes had passed laws in the Popular Assemblies restoring them. Now they were more important than ever, and they had the immeasurable power to introduce new legislation and carry it through the assemblies. This was the power that gave or withheld proconsular appointments, apportioned the state’s treasure, and got people exiled. The consuls themselves were relatively powerless by comparison, and the Senate had become a debating club. Real power lay with the commons and their elected representatives, the tribunes.
    I promised to keep Milo apprised of the situation andleft his house, wondering whether I should go to Clodia’s house armed. I also regretted that I had not thought to ask Asklepiodes whether there existed a reliable means to
avoid
being poisoned.

6
    T HE HOUSE OF THE LATE METELLUS Celer was located low on the slope of the Esquiline, in a district that had somehow escaped the worst of the fires that periodically swept the city. It was a relatively modest structure. It had been in the family for several generations and so was on the scale common to the days before the Punic Wars, when even the greatest families were little more than wealthy farmers.
    Hermes accompanied me in a mixed state of alarm and anticipation. Clodia frightened him as she frightened everybody. But she also belonged to that new generation of Romans who affected to love things of beauty for their own sake, rather than for their value as loot. To this end she surrounded herself with beautiful things, including slaves. Clodia was a familiar sight in the slave markets, always shopping for new beauties as she discarded those past their peak of comeliness.
    This was another of her many scandalous traits. Most well-bred people, including my own family, pretended that they never bought slaves but used only those born within the household. When they wanted slaves from the market, they discreetly sent stewards to do the buying. Not Clodia. She liked to look over the livestock herself, examining teeth with her own eyes, punching for wind and squeezing for muscle tone with her own hands.
    “Try not to get caught doing anything improper with the girls,” I cautioned Hermes.
    “Of course not, Master,” he said with patent insincerity. “But you do want me to pump them for information, don’t you?”
    “Quit drooling. Yes, I want to know if they have any knowledge of Celer’s death or if Clodia had any strange visitors. Well, I know she has all sorts of strange visitors, but what we’re looking for are witch women, mountebanks, the sort of people who are likely to be peddling poisons.”
    This was a pretty far-fetched hope. Clodia had traveled widely for a woman, and she might have picked up exotic poisons almost anywhere. It was the sort of thing she would shop for. But there was a chance that she had acquired her poison openly, right here in Rome. Aristocratic felons like Clodia often took few precautions to conceal evidence of their crimes. They considered themselves above suspicion, or at least above prosecution.
    I knew I was in for an interesting evening the moment the door opened. In the past, Clodia had been allowed to exercise her taste only within her own quarters. The rest of the house was a typically drab, stuffy Metellan establishment. That rule had gone up with the smoke of Celer’s funeral pyre.
    The
janitor
who opened the door to us looked like one ofthose Greek statues of ephebic athletes, all flowing muscles and perfect skin, and dense, curly locks. Except for his scalp he had been fully depilated, a common