Marcus looked at Lucius. ‘Do you deny this claim?’
The man from Rome said nothing, but looked at us with all the condescension of a senator forced to join a children’s game. Marcus asked again. Again there was no answer. Then — as I held my breath — Marcus challenged for the third and final time, and still the senator made no reply at all.
The law was satisfied and it all seemed to happen very quickly after that. Marcus took the rod and touched Junio on the back. ‘Then, by the power invested in me by the Emperor, I rule that all impediments to manumission are in this case void, and before all witnesses I adjudge him free.’ He touched the rod on Junio’s shoulders one by one. ‘You may arise.’
Junio rose slowly to his feet, a free man for the first time in his life. Vindicated, literally — by the staff or vindicta. One of Marcus’s red-haired slaves appeared, bearing a tunic and a pair of shoes, and Junio followed him into a vacant writing room to put them on. There was a little smattering of applause, but not a lot. The crowd had come to see the visitor from Rome and hear Marcus’s farewell speech. This little household drama had bewildered them.
However, it wasn’t over yet. I stepped up once again to the petitioner’s place and presently my ex-slave came to join me there, now dressed like any other freeman in the town.
‘Libertus, you have a further petition to bring before this court?’ Marcus was obliged to ask the question, although the whole form of these proceedings had been his idea.
‘I have, Excellence.’ In fact, the most important part was yet to come. I cleared my throat and started on my plea. I had practised the speech so many times that I could say it in my sleep. I was childless, I argued, and thus legally entitled to abrogate an heir. (I could not acquire the one I wanted by adoptio — buying a child from his father fictitiously three times — since Junio didn’t have a father I could buy him from.)
I advanced the proofs that I met the requirements of the law — one of which, these days, was that he should not be my slave. As a freeman, however, he could give his own consent. ‘I am clearly more than eighteen years his senior,’ I said, not dwelling on the matter, since I had no formal proof of Junio’s age, ‘and I am demonstrably capable of marriage since I have a wife. Furthermore,’ I added wickedly, ‘by permitting me to abrogate the boy, the court would also save itself expense, since it would otherwise have to appoint a legal curator for him until he’s twenty-five.’ Again I did not raise the issue of how one might determine when that age was reached.
It was all an elaborate, but necessary, charade. The laws were fashioned to protect the young (unscrupulous men had adopted wealthy orphans in the past and, having thus legally acquired the estate, promptly disinherited the child) but Junio had no possessions of his own in any case.
My patron listened carefully to what I had to say, though he had coached me in every word of it. ‘Normally such abrogations should be heard in Rome,’ he said ‘but the Emperor has granted a rescript in this case, and has written in answer to my formal preliminary request to say that the petition is approved, provided that the Praetor and magistrates are satisfied?’
It was another fiction, naturally. Once the agreement of the Emperor had been obtained, the opinion of the council hardly mattered. It was unlikely that Commodus had really taken any personal interest in the case, I knew, but Marcus had powerful friends in Rome these days. The consenting seal on the letter had probably been granted at Pertinax’s behest.
It did the trick. A spokesman for the council rose and agreed that they approved. Clearly — given the circumstances — they hadn’t needed to consult.
Marcus turned to Junio. ‘Do you consent to this arrangement?’
Junio could hardly speak for grinning, but he managed, ‘I consent.’
Marcus turned to the assembled company. ‘Then I pronounce that Longinus Flavius Junio should be henceforth the legal son and heir of Libertus the pavement-maker, with full rights as a Roman citizen.’
So it was done. I was a paterfamilias at last. Another little red-haired slave appeared, this time with a toga for my adopted son. It was a present from Marcus, or more probably the lady Julia — she was far more generous than her husband and understood how much this gesture meant to me. Junio was clearly absolutely thrilled. From the moment that he put it on, assisted by the slave, he looked more like a proper citizen than I had ever done and I realised for the first time that he probably did have Roman blood in him. After all, he was born into slavery — no doubt the product of his owner and some female serving girl.
There was only one thing remaining to be done, and Lucius was looking expectantly at me. I reached into my toga folds and produced the purse of money which my fictional opponent would expect for his part in the proceedings. It was a considerable sum — to me in any case — arranged a day or two ago with Lucius’s chief slave: a sandy-headed fellow with calculating eyes, whose expensive olive tunic could not disguise his air of general menace, and whose steely courtesy — combined with the flexing of his enormous hands — had somehow induced me to agree to rather more than I could comfortably afford.
Lucius weighed the purse a moment in his hand, rather disdainfully I thought, before he slipped it into a belt-pouch underneath his robes. Then he turned and with conscious dignity went back to occupy his former seat, while I bowed myself backwards by a pace or two. Junio did the same. Then, having completed the formalities, we made our way out of the basilica into the brightness of the forum, leaving Marcus and his fellow councillors to deal with the other official business of the day.
The forum was full of business, as it always was. Colourful stalls and fortune-tellers huddled round the walls, scribes and money-changers plied their trade in booths, and self-important citizens went striding up the colonnaded path, or stood on the steps of the basilica to be seen.
Gwellia, my wife, was waiting for us there. She had been watching the proceedings inside the hall, though of course, as a woman she’d played no part in them — a female is not legally entitled to adopt, being technically only a child herself in law. She smiled, but gave Junio only a very brief embrace — not because she was not delighted to greet him as her son, but because public displays of emotion are not expected of Roman citizens.
Besides, there was a little sadness in the greeting too. We had hoped — Gwellia and I — to adopt another child, an infant orphan girl, whose remaining family had fled into exile and left her behind. It would have been a much simpler matter than adopting Junio, since she was both female and freeborn — merely a question of fictitiously buying her, just once, from someone representing her missing family.
But events had not transpired as Gwellia had hoped. We had taken the child into the household for a moon or so and she had not thrived. She refused to eat and grew quite pale and sick — used, I suppose, to childish company, though perhaps also partly because she was not fully weaned. She proved to be a constant worry in the house, attempting to climb into the fire and eating Gwellia’s dyes. In the end we were forced to place her with a family in the woods, a woman with several children of her own who had looked after the infant sometimes when her mother was alive. The joyful reunion was almost unbearably touching to see, and the decision was clearly for the best, especially since the few denarii we paid towards Longina’s keep were an enormous bonus for the family. We’d declared ourselves her sponsors (simply a matter of a statement to the court) so she was still officially our ward, but it had been a painful decision for my wife. Gwellia had always longed for children but we two had been wrenched apart when we were young and sold to slavery, and by the time we were reunited we were too old to have any natural offspring of our own.