The third day before the Nones of Germanicus.
The first hour of the day.
Rome. The great city woke up as early as any country village. The sun was not yet above the house tops and already the streets rang with the chatter of half a dozen languages, the rumble of carts, the cries of hawkers, the shouts of schoolteachers in their curb-side classrooms bawling at sleepy pupils. Why then was Master still in his bed? His dutiful clients already crowded his atrium to wish him a good morning and receive their hand-outs: the obligatory morning salutatio. Elsewhere in the house, slaves sponged glittering mosaic floors with a clatter of buckets, polished red-veined marble walls till they shone like mirrors, and dusted the countless statues that populated the wide corridors of this princely mansion.
But the four bedroom slaves-each ready to perform his assigned part in the morning ritual of getting Master up, shaved, fed, and dressed-stood hesitating before his door. Old Pollux, the night-guardian of the bed chamber, touched the bronze handle, drew back his hand, knocked again, and listened. A doubtful look came over his battered face. “Fetch Master’s son,” he ordered the young slave who carried the razor and mirror. The boy dashed off down the hall and around the corner to young master Lucius’ bedroom.
Presently, Lucius appeared, his eyes swollen with sleep and in no good humor. Shouldering the others aside, he gave the door one smart rap, then pushed it open and stepped inside with Pollux and the others at his heels.
The single narrow window was a rectangle of pearl gray in the dark wall, and one guttering lamp hanging from its stand threw an uncertain circle of light over the bed. There a motionless shape, dark with blood, lay face down in a tangle of sheets.
Lucius sucked in his breath, leaned close over his father’s body, touched it with a finger. Then, in a swift instant, he bolted from the room and down the staircase to the ground floor and through a colonnade to the atrium. “Someone has murdered my father! You,” he shouted at one of the astonished clients, “run to the city prefect’s office. The rest of you, man the doors and windows. Quickly! The killer may still be in the house.”
With expressions of horror, the obsequious clients raised their hands to heaven and demanded angrily of each other who could have committed such an atrocity on this great and good man, their patron?
To the slaves gathered round the corpse upstairs, the sight of their dead master stirred a mixture of emotions. Joy that their tormentor was dead; but then dawning terror. They raced down the stairs after Lucius, shrieking their innocence.
By this time other slaves and freedmen were running from distant parts of the house to see what was the matter. A woman, overcome by shock, backed out of Verpa’s bedroom door screaming, and all of them together set up a wail. The slaves understood what danger they were in. They were as good as dead. ???
In another mansion, across the city, the same obligatory morning ritual was in progress.
Gaius Plinius Secundus, Roman senator, lion of the court of probate, currently acting vice-prefect of the city, arose well-rested from his bed and took his breakfast: the bread dipped, not drowned, in wine, the pear neatly sectioned, a few figs, and all arranged on the tray with his napkin folded just so, the way he liked it.
This small repast over, a slave buckled on his red leather senatorial shoes while another, an elderly man of dignified bearing, commenced to wrap him in a dazzling, purple-striped toga, not releasing him until he was satisfied that every fold was perfect. This was the man’s single job and he performed it with great state. Even on a sweltering September morning like this one, the ridiculous garment was mandatory for Romans at the salutatio. So the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, commanded: those ancient, grim shepherd-warriors who could think of no more fitting badge of citizenship than to wrap themselves in a woolen blanket from neck to ankle and damn the weather. Already, his clients gathered, in the atrium, were itching and sweating in their own togas, and all, patron and clients alike, would have to endure this for an hour.
What an inexpressibly tedious chore, thought Pliny to himself, not for the first time, as one by one the family freedmen together with a clamorous multitude of flatterers, place-seekers, seedy literary gentlemen, and the merely hungry, bustled forward with hearty looks to kiss his hand and receive their food basket and a few coins.
As though from a great distance, Pliny heard himself murmuring inanities: “What a fine young fellow! Do you go to school?” He smiled benignly on a squirming boy thrust at him by an eager father.
A chore, but dignitas demanded it. A man of his position must have clients thronging his atrium, and clients must have patrons to defend them in the courts, whisper in a magistrate’s ear, commission a poem, dower a homely daughter. The morning salutatio was one of the duties pertaining to rank, and Pliny was a man who took his rank and his duty seriously. And every so often, he reminded himself, there came along some promising young man from his native district, just setting his foot on the path to advancement, who deserved the counsel, wealth, and connections that an up-and-coming senator like Pliny could offer.
Though he ached to stand up and massage his neck, Pliny stifled a yawn and kept his stately pose, fondly conscious of the eyes that admired him from behind the door curtain-the dear girl, so curious, so shy. He squared his shoulders and looked magisterial.
At last, the clock slave called the second hour of the day and the crowd began to shuffle out. He watched their backs retreating through the vestibule and out into the street. Fewer clients nowadays, he reflected, sought their patron’s advice or his blessing on their endeavors as they once had done in the old republican days. Now they came mostly for the handout, the money that was just enough to keep food in their bellies for another day. They would all be back again tomorrow, and the whole tedious degrading routine gone through again. At least, with the Senate and courts in recess, he would not need to be accompanied by a horde of them throughout his day. What a relief!
As the door closed behind the last of them, a plump young girl emerged from the side chamber where she had been hiding. She looked up at him with a grave and gentle gaze, full of love and admiration. With her own hands she unwound his sweat-soaked toga and draped a light linen cloak over his shoulders. Pliny held her round chin between his fingers and gave her a tender, almost fatherly, kiss on the forehead.
But this fond moment was interrupted by a female slave bursting into the atrium, baskets of vegetables spilling from her arms. “It’s all over the market, Master,” the woman gasped. “Senator Verpa’s been murdered! Hacked to bloody pieces, they say. Troopers from the City Battalions are there already and have the slaves under guard. Thanks to the son, they say, not a single one got away…” She stopped to catch her breath.
There followed a moment of stunned silence while Pliny’s slaves stood stock still and exchanged fleeting looks. The girl turned wide eyes on Pliny. “Husband, what does it mean? Are we…?”
He checked her with a stern look. “Now Calpurnia, you’re not to think about it at all. There’s simply nothing to be afraid of. Do you hear me, my dear? That’s better. Helen, take your mistress into the garden and fetch her kitten or her sparrow or something, you know what to do. Go along, my darling, and put this completely out of your mind, completely out of your mind. You know you mustn’t excite yourself, not now.”
“Gaius, I’m your wife, I’ve a right…”
But he leveled his gaze at her, and the girl reluctantly allowed herself to be led away by her nurse. Calpurnia Fabata was fourteen years old, less than half her husband’s age. And she was pregnant with their first child. Pliny watched her with anxious concern. A pregnancy could be difficult in one so young. Her morning sickness had now stretched into the sixth month, and her doctor insisted that excitement and mental stress must be avoided. In an age when Romans of his class had to be bribed by the government to procreate, Pliny longed for children.
Swift-footed rumor raced through the city. By mid-morning there was no one in Rome who hadn’t heard of Verpa’s murder. And, as always happens, exaggeration flourished. The isolated murder of one master, and a notoriously cruel one at that-he was once said to have thrown a miscreant slave into a pool of carnivorous eels-had now swelled to the first act in a bloody slave insurrection. Romans, reminding each other that fully one-third of the city’s population was of servile origin, felt stirrings of panic.
By midafternoon the wilder reports had begun to subside. Nonetheless, the killing of even one master by his slaves chilled Roman hearts. Living in a sea of slaves-slaves to dress them, feed them, bathe them, brush their teeth, wake them, put them to bed, carry them, read to them, teach them, amuse them, sleep with them, even remember their friends’ names for them-Romans had a queasy fear of them. A man had no secrets from his slaves. They were everywhere in the house, silent shadows, seeing, hearing things that might interest a tyrannical emperor and cost their master his life.
And whenever a slave, driven beyond endurance, turned on his master, Romans responded with hysterical savagery, for this was every slave owner’s nightmare. The Law was explicit. All the slaves in the house must be punished alike. Could one slave alone plot his master’s death without letting a word slip to the others? Could he procure the weapon, creep unnoticed past the night-guard, open the door to the chamber, carry in a light, do the deed, and make off all in total silence and secrecy? Impossible. Every slave in the house, it must be assumed, knew what was afoot and could have reported it. To put it simply, no slave was innocent of his master’s death, and the whole familia without distinction must be executed. “Are not some punished unjustly?” asked a few. “What of it? Unless we keep them in constant fear, we are at their mercy.”
Even the mild Pliny, who had never raised his hand or spoken a harsh word to a slave in all his decorous life, could not suppress a shudder.