Hortensius would have been a match for him. But Cicero? Erucius was clearly not impressed with his competition. He yelled out loud for one of his slaves; he turned to exchange some joke with Magnus (they both laughed); he stretched and strolled about with his hands on his hips, not even bothering to glance at the bench of the accused. There Sextus Roscius sat hunched over with two guards at his back — the same two who had been posted at Caecilia's portal. He looked like a man already condemned — pale, silent, as inanimate as stone. Next to him, even Cicero looked robust as he stood and clutched my arm in greeting.
'Good, good! Tiro said he had spotted you in the crowd. I was afraid you'd be late, or stay away altogether.' He leaned towards me, smiling, still holding my arm, and spoke in a confidential voice as if I were his closest friend. Such intimacy after his coldness oflate unnerved me. 'Look at the judges up there in the tiers, Gordianus.
Half of them are bored to death; the other half are scared to death. To which half should I pitch my arguments?' He laughed — not in a forced way, but with genuine good humour. The ill-tempered Cicero who had fretted and snapped ever since my return from Ameria seemed to have vanished with the Ides.
Tiro sat on Cicero's right, next to Sextus Roscius, and carefully laid his crutch out of sight. Rufus sat on Cicero's left, along with the nobles who had been helping him in the Forum. I recognized Marcus Metellus, another of Caecilia's young relations, along with the esteemed nonentity and once-magistrate Publius Scipio.
'Of course you can't be seated with us at the bench,' Cicero said, 'but I want you nearby. Who knows? A name or a date might slip my mind at the last moment. Tiro posted a slave to warm a place for you.' He gestured to the gallery, where I recognized numerous senators and magistrates, among them the orator Hortensius and various Messalli and Metelli. I also recognized old Capito, looking wizened and small next to the giant Mallius Glaucia, who wore a bandage on his head. Chrysogonus was nowhere to be seen. Sulla was present only by virtue of his gilded statue.
At Cicero's gesture a slave rose from one of the benches. While I walked towards the gallery to take his place, Mallius Glaucia elbowed Capito and whispered in his ear. Both turned their heads and stared as I took my seat two rows behind them. Glaucia furrowed his brows and curled his upper Hp in a snarl, looking remarkably like a wild beast in the midst of so many sedate and well-groomed Romans.
The Forum was bathed in long morning shadows. Just as the sun rose over the Basilica Fulvia, the praetor Marcus Fannius, chairman of the court, mounted the Rostra and cleared his throat. With due gravity he convened the court, invoked the gods, and read the charges.
I settled into that mental stupor that inevitably overtakes any reasonable man in a court of law, awash in an ocean of briny rhetoric pounding against weathered crags of metaphor. While Fannius droned on, I studied their faces — Magnus slowly burning like an ember, Erucius pompous and bored, Tiro struggling to suppress his eagerness, Rufus looking like a child amid so many grey jurists. Cicero, meanwhile, remained serenely and unaccountably calm, while Sextus Roscius himself nervously surveyed the crowd like a cornered, wounded animal too blood-spent to put up a fight.
Fannius finished at last and took his seat among the judges. Gaius Erucius rose from the accuser's bench and made a laborious show of carrying his portly frame up the steps to the Rostra. He blew through his cheeks and took a deep breath. The judges put aside their paperwork and conversations. The crowd grew quiet.
'Esteemed Judges, selected members of the Senate, I come here today with a most unpleasant task. For how can it ever be pleasant to accuse a man of murder? Yet this is one of the necessary duties that falls from time to time onto the shoulders of those who pursue the fulfilment of the law.'
Erucius cast his eyes downward to assume a countenance of abject sorrow. 'But, esteemed Judges, my task is not merely to bring a murderer to justice, but to see that a far older, far deeper principle than the laws of mortal men is upheld in this court today. For the crime of which Sextus Roscius is guilty is not simply murder — and that is surely horrifying enough — but parricide.'
Abject sorrow became abject horror. Erucius furrowed the plump wrinkles of his face and stamped his foot, 'Parricide!' he cried, so shrilly that even at the far edges of the crowd men gave a start. I imagined Caecilia Metella quivering in her litter and covering her ears.
'Imagine it, if you will — no, do not back away from the hideousness of this crime, but look straight into the jaws of the ravening beast. We are men, we are Romans, and we must not let our natural revulsion rob us of the strength to face even the foulest crime. We must swallow our gorge and see that justice is done.
'Look at that man who sits at the bench of the accused, with armed guards at his back. That man is a murderer. That man is a parricide! I call him "that man" because it pains me to speak his name: Sextus Roscius. It pains me because it was the same name that his father bore before him, the father that man put into his grave — a once-honourable name that now drips with blood, like the bloody tunic that was found on the old man's body, shredded to rags by his assassins' blades. That man has turned the fine name his father gave him into a curse!
'What can I tell you about.. Sextus Roscius?' Erucius infused the name with all the considerable loathing his voice and countenance could muster. 'In Ameria, the town he comes from, they will tell you he is far from a pious man. Go to Ameria, as I have done, and ask the townsfolk when they last saw Sextus Roscius at a religious festival. They will hardly know of whom you speak. But then remind them of Sextus Roscius, the man accused of killing his own father, and they will give you a knowing look and a sigh and avert their eyes for fear of the gods' wrath.
'They will tell you that Sextus Roscius is in many ways a mystery — a solitary man, unsociable, irreligious, boorish, and curt in his few dealings with others. In the community of Ameria he is well known — or should I say notorious? — for one thing and one thing only: his lifelong feud with his father.
'A good man does not argue with his father. A good man honours and obeys his father, not only because it is the law, but because it is the will of heaven. When a bad man ignores that mandate and openly feuds with the man who gave him life, then he steps onto a path that leads to all manner of unspeakable crime — yes, even to the crime that we have assembled here to punish.
‘What caused this feud between father and son? We do not really know, though the man who sits beside me at the accuser's bench, Titus Roscius Magnus, can attest to having seen many sordid examples of this feud at first hand; as can another witness I may call, after the defence has its say, the venerable Capito. Magnus and Capito are each cousins of the victim, and of that man as well. They are respected citizens of Ameria. They watched for years with dread and disgust as Sextus Roscius disobeyed his father and cursed him behind his back. They watched in dismay as the old man, to protect his own dignity, turned his back on the abomination that had sprung to manhood from his own seed.
'Turned his back, I say. Yes, Sextus Roscius pater turned his back on Sextus Roscius filius, no doubt to his ultimate regret — for a prudent man does not turn his back on a viper, nor on a man with the soul of an assassin, even his own son, not unless he wishes to receive a knife in the back!'