"No, I had a different but connected reason to ask you here."
"This sounds devious. Please continue."
"I believe you should be looking into the activities of the priest Diocles."
My cup hand paused halfway between table and mouth. "Why?" The cup resumed its progress.
She grew oblique. "Tell me, have Norbanus and Silva approached you, urging you to execute Gelon and be done with it?"
I was no slouch at obliquity myself. "And if they have?"
"Ask yourself why."
I had been asking myself exactly that, but I would have been foolish to reveal this to her. "Come to the point, Jocasta. What are the priest and the duumviri up to?"
"By now you've seen that Baiae and much of southern Campania are fat on the luxury trade. Landowners control things up in Rome, but down here the likes of Silva and Norbanus and all the rest are cocks of the dunghill. Silk, perfume, incense, dyestuffs, gems, gold, extraordinary slaves-if it is precious, expensive, rare, those men control it and they make millions from it. Where there is so much wealth, there is corruption. I doubt I am telling you anything terribly surprising."
"I am aware of the connection between money and political influence. I fail to see what this has to do with the case at hand."
"Where there are luxuries, there are sumptuary laws, import duties, trade restrictions, and many other inconveniences to the pursuit of further wealth. Even in a common year there is a great deal of bribery, coercion, and influence buying to be done. In a censorship year like this one, the problem increases tenfold."
"I can see that this might be of concern to men like the duumviri and their colleagues including, I am sorry to say, your husband. How might the priest be involved? He seems an austere man. His house is modest, as are his clothes, his household, and his late daughter."
"That girl was not the modest, blameless idol the old man described in her eulogy." What she felt delivering these words was difficult to read, but I sensed deep emotion there.
"What mortal has ever matched up to his or her eulogy? The form is stylized and consists almost entirely of conventional phrases. I myself have delivered eulogies for utterly wretched human beings and made them sound like fit companions for the gods."
She laughed, and she had a good laugh, one that made all the flesh she was displaying jiggle. "Well, be that as it may, the girl was-I don't want to speak ill of the dead and attract her vengeful spirit-" she spilled a few drops of wine onto the pavement in propitiation "-but that young woman was spreading herself pretty thin."
"And if she was promiscuous, what of it? That's the stuff of family scandal, not the concern of a senior magistrate."
"It is if her activities involve treason."
"Treason?" I said, intrigued. In those days treason was an exceedingly slippery concept. With so many men and factions vying for supreme power, each tended to define the concept his own way. These days, it just means anything the First Citizen doesn't like.
"Treason,'' she reaffirmed. "We don't engage in Roman-style power politics down here, but we aren't entirely unaware of how it's played. Campania and points south are old Pompeian territory, full of his clientela."
"I can hardly be unaware of that."
"Before much longer, it's going to come to a showdown between Caesar and Pompey."
I closed my eyes. Finally, those two names. I had thought I was away from it all, but no chance of that. "The names are not unfamiliar to me. But activity on behalf of one or the other scarcely merits the onus of treason."
"It does when dealings with foreign powers are involved."
Perhaps I should clarify something here. Clientage-that interlocking series of relationships that so closely binds men not necessarily of the same family-has always been a bedrock of Roman society and remains so even now. But in my younger days it carried even greater import. Citizen clients were obliged to vote for you, and noncitizen clients owed you all the accustomed duties. Hence, politically ambitious men took every pain to expand their clientela. Great men had millions of clients, encompassing whole districts. In Italy, this meant a great well of loyal manpower when raising legions. The greatest men, like Caesar and Pompey, had foreign kings and by extension their kingdoms, among their clientela. Needless to say, the First Citizen put an end to that upon assuming dictatorial power.
Once again, my cup paused in its ascent.
"Before we proceed further," I said, "I should very much like to know how it happens that you know what these men have been up to." Men in my experience generally did not make their women a part of their political lives. There were exceptions, of course. Clodia, for instance. Or, for that matter, my wife, Julia.
"My husband's business subjects him to long absences from Italy. During those times, I conduct his affairs here. Whether they like it or not, those men have to deal with me frequently."
This did not satisfy me, but I let her go on.
"I am quite aware when one or more of those men are in financial difficulties, and when one is, they all are. They try to conceal this from me and everybody else. The pattern of their dealings changes and they begin to meet in secret. Their meeting place is always the same: the Temple of Apollo."
"Mere changes in commercial habits should not reveal such a thing to you. How did you come by this knowledge?"
"The usual way. I employ spies in their households."
Immediately, I thought of the unfortunate Charmian, now languishing in the ergastulum with her back cut to pieces. I would have liked to surprise Jocasta with this knowledge, but it's always good to keep something in reserve.
"What did your spies report?"
"That the duumviri and certain others met with the priest and discussed the secession of the former Greek colonies of southern Italy, Baiae, Cumae, Stabiae, Tarentum, and Messana, and several others. Soon after these meetings their pecuniary problems cleared up as if by magic."
"Whose money?" I demanded.
"Who wants to see Rome brought low? There is no shortage of candidates, but the remaining free Greek states seem the likeliest, don't you think? Macedonia is always fretful and in a state of rebellion."
"Macedonia is poor."
"Rhodes is not. Rhodes is rich and powerful and still, just barely, independent. Ptolemy chafes under the Roman heel and might like to be truly independent instead of a Roman puppet. And Alexandria is a Greek city. They might all see a coming civil war as their last chance. If all of them subscribed to a bribe fund, it would scarcely dent their resources to buy powerful sympathizers in all the humiliated towns."
"With the priest as go-between?"
She said nothing, merely selected an especially fat cherry and dipped it in honey. There was a great fad for cherries back then. A few years previously Lucullus had brought the first cherry trees to Italy as part of the loot from his eastern campaign. He had planted a vast orchard and made seedlings and cuttings available to Italian farmers at only a nominal cost-one of those acts of euergesia Julia had spoken of. The new trees were just beginning to bear and everyone was eating cherries.
"What is the girl's part in all this?"
"As I said, she was spreading herself thin among the local male population, and it seems she had a habit of babbling in the throes of passion. I don't think the priest would have killed his own daughter for it, but any of the others would have."
I set down my cup. "These are no longer the days of Sulla. It is not sufficient to bring charges against a prominent citizen to see him executed and claim a part of his wealth."
"You wrong me, Praetor!" she said, smiling. "I am merely zealous in my devotion to the Senate and People of Rome."