By the time the slaves finally threw me out the lamps were lit. I was just about gibbering, but I'd filled a good few sheets of my own: paper sheets, not tablets, because I would've needed a mule to carry that weight of wood and wax home. As it was, they filled the good-sized bag which I filched from Rusticus's head clerk when his back was turned. The notes weren't all that detailed, but I had the essentials, and that was enough to get me started. Rusticus surely couldn't object if I came back to check finer points where necessary.
Most of the names mentioned had been just that, names: big ones, sure, because not everyone gets the privilege of a trial by the senate; but they didn't mean a lot at present outside the social register, and anyway I'd tried not to get sidetracked into thinking too much about what I was writing. Nevertheless by the time I'd shoved all the roll-cases back where they belonged, cursed Livia to ten different kinds of hell and staggered out in the direction of the nearest wineshop the hairs on the back of my neck were bristling fit to bust.
Livia had been right: the records had made instructive reading. One word had kept reappearing again and again, so often that it had to be what the empress was pointing me towards.
The word was 'treason'.
4
I wasn't tired when I got back, at least not sleep-tired. I shoved my head round the bedroom door, but Perilla had given up on me hours ago and was flat out, her hair a tawny cloud across the pillow: she never got her maid to bind it up at night, which was okay by me. Bathyllus was still padding around bright eyed and bushy tailed, as I knew he would be: Bathyllus takes his responsibilities seriously, and he can always find a table to straighten or a spoon or two to buff up. I sent him for a jug of Setinian and lugged it and my bag of notes into the study. Then I got down to serious work.
There were too many names. That was the problem. In the ten years I'd been away Rome had seen twenty-three trials before the senate, for everything from treason through adultery to a guy who'd pushed his wife out the window and claimed he'd been sleepwalking at the time. Yeah, well, as a defence I supposed it'd been worth a try, but he must've been desperate, and it didn't say much for his powers of imagination. Some of the names jumped off the page straight at me, as they'd done when I first read them; Suillius Rufus's for one, Perilla's ex who I'd run foul of in Antioch. They'd nailed Rufus seven years back for pocketing bribes as a city judge, and he'd been exiled at the Wart's insistence to a flyspeck off Sicily. Sometimes emperors do get things right, and I raised my cup to the old boil-encrusted bugger's sense of justice. Calpurnius Piso's brother Lucius was there, and Junius Silanus, whose brother Decimus had once thrown me out of his urban villa for accusing him of not screwing Augustus's granddaughter. Old friends all. Others I'd never met but were familiar from the social register: the young Quinctilius Varus's wife Claudia Pulchra (adultery); Gaius Silius and his wife Sosia Galla; Titius Sabinus…
The rest were a blur. This needed method. Order. Good old Roman thoroughness. Setinian. I reached for the jug and filled my wine cup.
Taking up my biggest wax tablet I drew my pen down the middle. Dates to the left, names and charges to the right. I started with the big one, the obvious one. Treason.
When I counted down the list four cups later I had seven names in chronological order. Caesius Cordus, senatorial governor of Crete and Cyrene: treason and extortion. Decimus Silanus's brother Gaius, the Asian governor, ditto. According to the charge sheet he'd also been found guilty of ‘offences against the divinity of Augustus and the majesty of Tiberius’, which reading between the lines meant he'd let his hair down at the wrong party or opened his mouth too wide in the wrong person's hearing. Third, a guy I'd never heard of but who sounded a real pea-brain, Lucius Ennius, accused of melting down a statue of the Wart and using the bullion to make dinner plates. Big league stuff. Tiberius had quashed that one himself.
The fourth name on the list was Gaius Silius. Silius's case had been more serious. Governor of Upper Germany ten years back, he'd been accused of connivance in the Gallic revolt and of profiteering after the event. He'd killed himself before the verdict was given, and his wife Sosia, who was also implicated, had been sent into exile. This one smelled like a month-old anchovy. I'd known Silius vaguely from his visits to Dad about the time he'd got his first Eagle, and although I'd only been a kid at the time frankly I couldn't believe the charge. Sure, he'd had an ego the size of the Capitol — he'd have to, to get where he was — but he hadn't been traitor material. He'd kept his troops loyal to the Wart when the Rhine frontier blew up after old Augustus died, and he was army to the bone. That didn't sit well with the connivance business: for a dyed-in-the-wool army man like Silius, consorting with rebels ranks with screwing goats and taking orders from civilians. The profiteering, sure: Silius was as human as the rest of us, and once the Gauls were beaten they were fair game. But not the treason. That stank.
Fifth was Lucius Piso, 'my' Piso's elder brother and one of the defence lawyers at his trial. Charged with treasonable conversation about the Wart, possessing poison and wearing a sword to meetings of the senate. I discounted the last two items for what they were: malicious ballast, to give the case extra weight. No traitor is that crazy, and whatever else he might be the guy wasn't stupid. The first charge, though, made me think. The case had never come to trial; he'd died a natural death (precise nature unspecified) before the first hearing, which was, if you like, pat. Maybe too pat. Sure, Lucius was no youngster, and he could've eaten a bad oyster or caught something nasty in the woodshed, but I couldn't forget how his brother had gone four years previously. I wondered what the 'treasonable private conversation' was, although I suspected I knew already: 'my' Piso had certainly had secrets to spill that the Wart would give his best boil plaster to keep under wraps. I'd bet good money that Lucius had been another sucker who'd opened his mouth too wide in the wrong company.
Sixth, Votienus Montanus, someone else I didn't know. Not a Roman, with a name like that. Maybe a Gaul, a Spaniard, or a Lusitanian; the records didn't show. In any case Montanus was accused of slandering Tiberius, and condemned to death. That made me pause, too: the Wart may have his faults but he isn't thin-skinned, and simple slander goes straight past him. There'd been instances in the past when he'd been bad-mouthed in private or public, but when a prosecutor tried to get up a case he'd quite rightly laughed it out of court. This time he hadn't laughed. Instead, he'd taken this guy's head. So what made Montanus special? So special that the Wart made sure he was chopped, or at least stood aside and let the senate chop him?
Last and not least came Titius Sabinus, charged with straight treason. Reading between the lines, it was obvious that he'd been set up six ways from nothing by a gaggle of informers and his hide very carefully nailed to the senate house floor. We'd never met, but I knew of him. Although he came from a good family, like me he was a political nobody: no consulship, not even a city judgeship. No military command. A narrow-striper, not a senator. Hardly, in other words, the usual traitor material. He wasn't all that rich, either, by aristocratic standards, which since the successful prosecutor usually gets a large slice of the cake is a common reason for starting up a case. What did make him stand out was that he'd been a close friend of Germanicus's and — gossip said — an even closer one of Agrippina's after the Caesar's death. Scratch the obvious implication: Agrippina wasn't the type for affairs, casual or otherwise. Also, the records showed that when charges were brought the Wart had written personally to the senate demanding a conviction; which, for the Wart, was queer as a five-legged cat. Sabinus had been condemned nem. con. and strangled the same day.