"So I returned home and that was all until this morning, when I found myself under virtual arrest."
I stood. "Very well, I have noted your story."
"Don't you believe me?" I could hear the desperation in her voice.
"I will take your words into consideration." A good scare would do her a world of good.
"Well?" Livia said, when I left Julia's chamber.
"I must consult with some experts. I would like to meet with you and the First Citizen at Tubero's house this evening."
"But are you satisfied that Julia had nothing to do with this sorry business?" She was almost pleading. How I loved that.
"Not yet. Will you meet with me there?"
She fumed for a while. "We will." It was good to have the upper hand with these people for a change.
I left the mansion on the Palatine and went to the houses of two of my fellow pontifexes who were far more learned than I in religious matters.
It was already dark when I reached the house of Gratidius Tubcro once again. Paris carried a torch before me, overjoyed at the prospect of messing about in a murder investigation.
I found a whole crowd of metallic-sounding men in togas before the door of the house, as well as a number of lictors shouldering their fasces,
"You stay out here," I ordered Paris. "This business is entirely too ugly for one as young as you."
"But you've always told me that when you were my age…"
"Enough. Times were different then. Besides, this looks like a dangerous enough crowd to suit even you."
I went inside and found the First Citizen seated by the pool in the courtyard, along with Livia and Octavius's right-hand man, the formidably competent Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, whose future marriage into the house depended upon the result of my investigation. The widow Gratidius stood by, looking suitably awed by the presence of so many mighty persons. A chair was thrust under me and I sank into it gratefully. I was getting rather old for these long, active days.
"I have indulged you because I know you to be efficient at this sort of work," said the First Citizen. "I trust you have reached a satisfactory conclusion."
"By ‘satisfactory' I take it you mean one that clears your family of scandal?" I enjoyed the sight of his reddening face for a while, then added, "If so, be at ease. Julia didn't do it."
"What do you mean?" blurted the widow.
"Silence, woman!" Octavius barked, a little of his real nature showing through. "Explain, Senator." Relief oozed from his p)ores.
"Will you accompany me into the room where the murder occurred?"
He raised a hand piously. "Senator, you know quite well that, as pontifex maximus of Rome I may not look upon human blood. Livia is under the same rule."
"Are we going to maintain that fiction?" I said, mightily vexed. "You attend the munera like everyone else. Gladiators bleed rather profusely."
"Those are funeral games and therefore are religious observances. It is different," he said.
"Oh, very well," I said. "Marcus Agrippa, will you bear witness on behalf of the First Citizen?"
"I will," he said. So the two of us went into the now extremely smelly shrine while the royal couple waited just outside the door. The body was quite stiff now. A number of lamps now illuminated the grotesque scene.
"You have all heard Julia's story and I find it to be true in all relevant details."
"I knew it!" Octavius said.
"Then who killed him?" Livia demanded.
"Bear with me. How did you ever settle on such a man to be Rex Sacrorum?”
"Senator," Octavius said, "have you any idea how difficult it is to get anyone to accept that office?"
"Just so. He must have been drunk when he accepted. It seems he was often in that state. In any case, while his wife was very pleased to be promoted to patrician status, she had no interest in being the wife of the Rex Sacrorum.''
"Then a Roman wife has murdered her husband, with the collusion of the household slaves? Infamous!" A tragedian could not have done it better.
"No!" squawked the widow.
"Much as I hate to clear that woman of anything," I said, "I fear I must tell you that she didn't do it either. In fact, there was no murder."
"This should be a good one," Agrippa said. "What happened?"
"The silly bugger did it himself."
That raised Agrippa's eyebrows. "I've heard of opening your veins, but this…"
"You will notice the toga. It is smeared with half-dried blood. Had the man been wearing it when the wound was inflicted, it would be soaked. The wife and servants found him here, dead and quite naked, and they wrapped him in it to make the scene marginally less bizarre."
"The blood is as described," Agrippa reported to those outside the door.
"This statue," I indicated the crocodile-headed god, "is not the one that stood here last night. Its base is round and the blood was stopped in its sticky progress by a square pedestal."
"I can confirm that," Agrippa reported.
"Now this god has a fearsome aspect with his reptilian head, but he is actually a Nile fertility god and quite benevolent. I suspect he is left over from an earlier enthusiasm of the late Tubero, who had a taste for the exotic, not to mention the unwholesome. He has a coating of dust, whereas the altar is quite clean. If you will institute a search of the house, you should find a statue of Cybele, along with certain paraphernalia associated with the worship of that goddess: cymbals, a scourge studded with knucklebones, a sickle and so forth. You may even discover the… ah… items missing from the gentleman here."
"Find them!" Livia barked. There was a rustling and clinking from without.
"Why Cybele?" the First Citizen asked.
"Allow me to wax pedantic. Almost two hundred years ago, Hannibal was still romping about inItaly. Our ancestors were frightened by a shower of stones that fell from the heavens. The Sybilline Books were consulted and it was revealed that the danger would be averted by this Phrygian goddess. From King Attalus the Senate received certain cult objects and the goddess was installed in the temple built for her on the Palatine. Hannibal was duly driven out and her worship continues to this day, but only in a decorous and lawful form.
"However," I continued, relishing this part, "there is another side to her worship; an alien, oriental and wholly disreputable side. It has long been forbidden in Rome, but it enjoys a certain vogue among those bored by the decorum of the State religion. The Corybantes, the ecstatic followers of the goddess in her more daemonic aspect, are noted for practicing flagellation, hence the studded scourge. In their religious transports, candidates for priesthood castrate themselves and throw their severed members upon the altar."
"Barbarous!" Octavius muttered.
"Last night poor Tubero, spurned by Julia, solaced himself with a good session of holy flagellation. You notice the whip marks? They are almost vertical, quite unlike the horizontal and diagonal stripes one sees when a slave is whipped by a second party. This is because Tubero was lashing himself, slinging the thongs over his left shoulder."
"That's what it looks like," Agrippa affirmed.
"I suspect that Tubero was a man who liked these private games. He allowed fantasy to become reality. In any case, having drunk himself silly and then inflamed his senses with the dubious pleasures of self-flagellation, he performed the final rite. He probably intended merely to mime the actions. After all, the lack of an audience would deprive the ritual of half the fun. But he was not in a steady state of mind and he went too far. The expression on his face when he realized what he was holding must have been worth seeing. This was not a conventional orgy of Cybele, so no one was there to stanch the blood and he perished."