Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (50 page)

Hortensius would have been a match for him. But Cicero? Erucius was clearly not impressed with his competition. He yelled out loud for one of his slaves; he turned to exchange some joke with Magnus (they both laughed); he stretched and strolled about with his hands on his hips, not even bothering to glance at the bench of the accused. There Sextus Roscius sat hunched over with two guards at his back – the same two who had been posted at Caecilia’s portal. He looked like a man already condemned – pale, silent, as inanimate as stone. Next to him, even Cicero looked robust as he stood and clutched my arm in greeting.

‘Good, good! Tiro said he had spotted you in the crowd. I was afraid you’d be late, or stay away altogether.’ He leaned towards me, smiling, still holding my arm, and spoke in a confidential voice as if I were his closest friend. Such intimacy after his coldness of late unnerved me. ‘Look at the judges up there in the tiers, Gordianus. Half of them are bored to death; the other half are scared to death. To which half should I pitch my arguments?’ He laughed – not in a forced way, but with genuine good humour. The ill-tempered Cicero who had fretted and snapped ever since my return from Ameria seemed to have vanished with the Ides.

Tiro sat on Cicero’s right, next to Sextus Roscius, and carefully laid his crutch out of sight. Rufus sat on Cicero’s left, along with the nobles who had been helping him in the Forum. I recognized Marcus Metellus, another of Caecilia’s young relations, along with the esteemed nonentity and once-magistrate Publius Scipio.

‘Of course you can’t be seated with us at the bench,’ Cicero said, ‘but I want you nearby. Who knows? A name or a date might slip my mind at the last moment. Tiro posted a slave to warm a place for you.’ He gestured to the gallery, where I recognized numerous senators and magistrates, among them the orator Hortensius and various Messalli and Metelli. I also recognized old Capito, looking wizened and small next to the giant Mallius Glaucia, who wore a bandage on his head. Chrysogonus was nowhere to be seen. Sulla was present only by virtue of his gilded statue.

At Cicero’s gesture a slave rose from one of the benches. While I walked towards the gallery to take his place, Mallius Glaucia elbowed Capito and whispered in his ear. Both turned their heads and stared as I took my seat two rows behind them. Glaucia furrowed his brows and curled his upper lip in a snarl, looking remarkably like a wild beast in the midst of so many sedate and well-groomed Romans.

The Forum was bathed in long morning shadows. Just as the sun rose over the Basilica Fulvia, the praetor Marcus Fannius, chairman of the court, mounted the Rostra and cleared his throat. With due gravity he convened the court, invoked the gods, and read the charges.

I settled into that mental stupor that inevitably overtakes any reasonable man in a court of law, awash in an ocean of briny rhetoric pounding against weathered crags of metaphor. While Fannius droned on, I studied their faces – Magnus slowly burning like an ember, Erucius pompous and bored, Tiro struggling to suppress his eagerness, Rufus looking like a child amid so many grey jurists. Cicero, meanwhile, remained serenely and unaccountably calm, while Sextus Roscius himself nervously surveyed the crowd like a cornered, wounded animal too blood-spent to put up a fight.

Fannius finished at last and took his seat among the judges. Gaius Erucius rose from the accuser’s bench and made a laborious show of carrying his portly fame up the steps to the Rostra. He blew through his cheeks and took a deep breath. The judges put aside their paperwork and conversations. The crowd grew quiet.

‘Esteemed Judges, selected members of the Senate, I come here today with a most unpleasant task. For how can it ever be pleasant to accuse a man of murder? Yet this is one of the necessary duties that falls from time to time onto the shoulders of those who pursue the fulfilment of the law.’

Erucius cast his eyes downward to assume a countenance of abject sorrow. ‘But, esteemed Judges, my task is not merely to bring a murderer to justice, but to see that a far older, far deeper principle than the laws of mortal men is upheld in this court today. For the crime of which Sextus Roscius is guilty is not simply murder – and that is surely horrifying enough – but parricide.’

Abject sorrow became abject horror. Erucius furrowed the plump wrinkles of his face and stamped his foot. ‘
Parricide!
’ he cried, so shrilly that even at the far edges of the crowd men gave a start. I imagined Caecilia Metella quivering in her litter and covering her ears.

‘Imagine it, if you will – no, do not back away from the hideousness of this crime, but look straight into the jaws of the ravening beast. We are men, we are Romans, and we must not let our natural revulsion rob us of the strength to face even the foulest crime. We must swallow our gorge and see that justice is done.

‘Look at that man who sits at the bench of the accused, with armed guards at his back. That man is a murderer. That man is a parricide! I call him “that man” because it pains me to speak his name: Sextus Roscius. It pains me because it was the same name that his father bore before him, the father
that man
put into his grave – a once-honourable name that now drips with blood, like the bloody tunic that was found on the old man’s body, shredded to rags by his assassins’ blades.
That man
has turned the fine name his father gave him into a curse!

‘What can I tell you about . . . Sextus Roscius?’ Erucius infused the name with all the considerable loathing his voice and countenance could muster. ‘In Ameria, the town he comes from, they will tell you he is far from a pious man. Go to Ameria, as I have done, and ask the townsfolk when they last saw Sextus Roscius at a religious festival. They will hardly know of whom you speak. But then remind them of Sextus Roscius, the man accused of killing his own father, and they will give you a knowing look and a sigh and avert their eyes for fear of the gods’ wrath.

‘They will tell you that Sextus Roscius is in many ways a mystery – a solitary man, unsociable, irreligious, boorish, and curt in his few dealings with others. In the community of Ameria he is well known – or should I say notorious? – for one thing and one thing only: his lifelong feud with his father.

‘A good man does not argue with his father. A good man honours and obeys his father, not only because it is the law, but because it is the will of heaven. When a bad man ignores that mandate and openly feuds with the man who gave him life, then he steps onto a path that leads to all manner of unspeakable crime – yes, even to the crime that we have assembled here to punish.

‘What caused this feud between father and son? We do not really know, though the man who sits beside me at the accuser’s bench, Titus Roscius Magnus, can attest to having seen many sordid examples of this feud at first hand; as can another witness I may call, after the defence has its say, the venerable Capito. Magnus and Capito are each cousins of the victim, and of
that man
as well. They are respected citizens of Ameria. They watched for years with dread and disgust as Sextus Roscius disobeyed his father and cursed him behind his back. They watched in dismay as the old man, to protect his own dignity, turned his back on the abomination that had sprung to manhood from his own seed.

‘Turned his back, I say. Yes, Sextus Roscius
pater
turned his back on Sextus Roscius
filius
, no doubt to his ultimate regret – for a prudent man does not turn his back on a viper, nor on a man with the soul of an assassin, even his own son, not unless he wishes to receive a knife in the back!’

Erucius pounded his fist against the balcony of the Rostra and stared wide-eyed above the heads of the crowd, held the pose for a moment and then drew back to catch his breath. The square was strangely hushed after the thunder of his voice. He had by this point worked himself into a fine sweat. He clutched at the hem of his toga and dabbed it against his streaming jowls. He raised his eyes and looked to heaven, as if seeking relief from the gruelling ordeal of seeking justice. In a plaintive voice, pitched just loud enough for all to hear, he muttered, ‘Jupiter, give me strength!’ I saw Cicero cross his arms and roll his eyes. Meanwhile Erucius pulled himself together, stepped forward to the Rostra with bowed head and began again.

‘
That man
– why bother to say his befouled name when he dares to show his face in public, where any decent man may see it and recoil in horror? –
that man
was not the only offspring of his father. There was a second son. His name was Gaius. How his father loved him, and why not? From all accounts he was the exemplar of what every young Roman should be: pious towards the gods, obedient to his father, aspiring to every virtue, a young man in all ways agreeable, charming, and refined. How strange that a man could have two sons so different from each other! Ah, but then the sons had different mothers. Perhaps it was not the seed that was polluted, then, but the grounds in which it was planted. Consider: two seeds from the same grape are planted in different soil. One vine grows strong and lovely, bearing sweet fruit that yields a heady wine. The other is stunted and strange from the first, gnarled and pricked with thorns; its fruit is bitter and its wine is poison. I name the first vine Gaius, and the other Sextus!’

Erucius mopped his face, shuddered in revulsion, and went on. ‘Sextus Roscius
pater
loved one son and not the other. Gaius he kept close to him always, proudly displaying him to the finest society, showering him in public with kindness and affection. Sextus
filius
, on the other hand, he kept as far from him as he could, relegating him to the family’s farms in Ameria, keeping him from view as if he were a thing of shame not to be shown among decent folk. So deep did this division of affections run that Roscius
pater
thought long and hard about disinheriting his namesake completely and naming Gaius his sole heir, even though Gaius was the younger of his sons.

‘Unfair, you may say. It is better when a man treats all his sons with equal respect. When he goes about choosing favourites he asks for nothing but trouble in his own generation and the next. True, but in this case I think we must trust the judgment of the elder Sextus Roscius. Why did he despise his firstborn so much? I think it must be that he, better than any other man, could see what wickedness lurked in the breast of young Sextus Roscius, and he recoiled from it. Perhaps he even had a presentiment of the violence that his son might one day wreak on him, and that was why he kept him at such a distance. Alas, the precaution was not enough!

‘The tale of the Roscii ends in manifold tragedy – a series of tragedies that cannot be set right, but only avenged, and only by you, esteemed Judges. First, the untimely death of Gaius Roscius. With him vanished all his father’s hopes for the future. Consider: is it not the greatest joy of existence to give life to a son, and to see in him an image of yourself? To rear and educate him so that you are renewed as he grows? I know, I speak as a father myself. And will it not be a blessing on departing this life to leave behind, as your successor and heir, a being sprung from yourself? To leave him not only your estate, but your accumulated wisdom, and the very flame of life passed from parent to child to pass on to his sons, so that when your mortal body fades away, you will live on in your descendents?

‘With the death of Gaius, this hope for a kind of immortality died in his father, Sextus Roscius. But he had another son still living, you may protest. True, but in that son he saw not his own reflection, true and straight as one sees it in a pool of clear water. Instead he saw an image of himself like that reflected from a crushed silver plate, distorted, twisted, and taunting. Even after the death of Gaius, Roscius
pater
still considered disinheriting his only surviving son. Certainly there were plenty of other, more worthy cousin candidates to be his heir within the family, not least his cousin Magnus – that same Magnus who sits beside me at the accuser’s bench, who loved his cousin enough to see that his murder does not go unpunished.

‘Young Sextus Roscius fiendishly plotted the death of his father. The exact details we do not know and cannot know. Only
that man
could tell us, if he dares to confess. What we know are the naked facts. On a night in September, leaving the home of his patroness, the much-esteemed Caecilia Metella, Sextus Roscius
pater
was accosted in the vicinity of the Baths of Pallacina and stabbed to death. By Sextus Roscius
filius
himself? Of course not! Think back to the turmoil of last year, esteemed Judges of the court. I need not dwell on the causes, for this is not a political court, but I must remind you of the violence that surged through the streets of this city. How very easy it must have been for a schemer like young Sextus Roscius to find the cut-throats to do his dirty work. And how clever, to try to stage the execution at a time of turmoil, hoping that his father’s murder would be overlooked in the midst of so much upheaval.

‘Thank the gods for a man like Magnus, who keeps his eyes and ears open and is not afraid to step forward and accuse the guilty! That very night his trusted freedman, Mallius Glaucia, came to him here in Rome with news of his dear cousin’s murder. Magnus immediately dispatched Glaucia to carry the news to his good cousin Capito back home in Ameria.