Toward noon, there occurred a remarkable exchange. Everyone has heard some version of it, usually distorted beyond recognition by those who were not there or those who were but in later years grew too fearful to tell the truth. I am the only man now alive who was there that day, and this is how it truly happened, not how it ended up in Roman legend.
"Caius Julius," said the Consul Messala Niger, "without your speaking of forbidden things, do you know if any of the ladies who were present last night have any idea of what Clodius was up to when he entered your house dressed as a woman?" Everybody wanted to hear about this.
"My mother, the lady Aurelia, has told me there was talk that Clodius thus gained stealthy entrance to carry on a liaison with Pompeia." He drew himself up so straight and tall that I suspected him of wearing actors' buskins on his feet. "I have therefore resolved to divorce Pompeia forthwith!"
Celer stood. "Don't be hasty, Caius Julius. There is nothing going on between your wife and Clodius. He just wanted to spy on the rites. The fool has talked about nothing else for days."
Then Caesar made history, of a sort. Gazing around him like an eagle, he said, "She may well be innocent, but that is immaterial. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." You could have heard a pin drop in the Curia. The appearance of a god among us could not have been so stunning.
One of the many banes of my existence has been my laugh, which is high-pitched and raucous, and has on more than one occasion been likened to the braying of a wild ass. I could not help myself. I held it in as long as possible, then let it loose when the pain of suppression grew insupportable. It started as a snorting wheeze high up in my aristocratic Metellan nose and, an instant later, emerged like the sound of a legion's pack-train demanding their ration of oats.
In an instant, the Senate was convulsed. Vinegary old politicians who didn't laugh from one year to the next doubled over, laughing until their guts cramped. Solemn pontifexes had tears rolling down their wrinkled cheeks. Just outside the chamber, a whole bench of tribunes rolled about so helpless with laughter that they could not have interposed a veto if we had called for the beheading of every plebeian in Rome. I am sure that I saw even Cato smiling.
Since he is now a god, people think that Caius Julius must have been held in reverent awe since earliest youth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. At this time he was forty years old, completely undistinguished politically and militarily, and highly regarded only in the popular assemblies, where he was good at currying favor with the mob. In the Senate he was a nobody. He had bribed his way to the supreme pontiff's position and he was renowned only for his extravagance and his questionable morals. Of Caius Julius Caesar two things were generally agreed: He had the biggest debts in history and he had almost certainly been buggered by King Nicomedes of Bithynia.
It was hearing that unbelievably sanctimonious pronouncement from such a source that convulsed the Senate. During all this hilarity Caesar stood like a statue of himself, his face devoid of expression. In later years, I lost a great deal of sleep wondering if he remembered that I was the first who laughed that day.
The meeting broke up with nothing decided. In no time at all, the story was all over the city. For months afterward stage comedies and wall scrawlings referred to Caesar's famous dictum. Anytime conversation flagged or a party seemed to be growing dejected, somebody would draw himself up and intone: "But Caesar's wife must be above suspicion," and everybody would laugh like rabid hyenas.
I walked down the steps of the Curia, mopping the tears from my face with a corner of my toga. No one could ask for better entertainment than this. Hermes came running up to me, and of course I had to explain everything to him. The jabber of the multitude in the Forum grew deafening. Between them, Clodius and Caesar had concocted the most memorable event of the year.
I went to the baths and was swamped by men who had not been there, demanding to know what was going on. I held forth for some time, not neglecting to call for the immediate arrest and trial of Publius Clodius. It was all so congenial that I had to remind myself that I was involved in deadly matters as well.
"I hope there's a trial," said a fellow Senator. "I've wondered for years what it is my wife does at that rite." It turned out that he spoke for a great many highly placed husbands. Others were more fearful of divine wrath.
"That woman Clodia must be involved," said a prominent banker. "She's his sister, and everyone knows that woman will do anything." This had occurred to me as well.
From the baths I went to the Statilian ludus, where I had to explain everything all over again to Asklepiodes. He knew little of Caesar and therefore missed the humor of the situation. And he had a Greek's love of mystery cults, so he was mildly scandalized by Clodius's sacrilege.
"Your Italian gods seem to lack the proper subordinates for punishing such transgressors," he said in his superior fashion. "Greek deities would have set the Friendly Ones after him."
I thought of those winged, serpent-haired creatures pursuing Clodius through the alleys of Rome, blood dripping from their eyes and their claws extended to rip flesh.
"It's a great pity," I admitted. "We don't personalize our gods in quite the way you Greeks do, and give them minions and servants. Some of our gods don't even have images."
"That is a very poor sort of religious practice, if you ask me," Asklepiodes maintained. "And the way you elect and appoint your priests, as if they were just ordinary officials. And most disgraceful is the way you appoint your augurs and give them a rule book for taking omens. Where is the art of divination without the divine afflatus?"
"That is because we are a rational and dignified people, and we are not about to conduct public affairs according to the ravings of a demented ecstatic. In times of crisis, I admit, we consult a sibyl, but I never heard that it did any real good."
"Because you Romans lack a true understanding of divine nature," he said stoutly.
"Nor have I ever heard of it doing Greeks any good. Even when their prophesies proved to be correct, the supplicant usually misinterprets it and comes to disaster."
Asklepiodes looked down his nose at me, a considerable feat since he was shorter. "It is always the occasional tale of irony that makes its way into legend. When approached in the proper spirit, sibylline oracles are usually quite reliable."
"I'll take your word for it," I told him.
"Now, on to less exalted matters. I fear I must bill you for one pig. A small one, originally intended for the gladiators' dinner."
My heart sank. "Then it was truly poison?"
"Healthy pigs are seldom struck dead by natural causes or the wrath of the gods. I fed it the pastries you gave me, and it was dead within an hour."
"An hour? That long? It must have been a weak poison."
"Not necessarily. Those instantaneous poisons one always hears about are fictitious. I have never encountered one that took less than an hour to kill a grown man, and most of them take much longer, accompanied by agonizing pains and convulsions. Somebody wanted you dead, my friend."
"Any idea what sort of poison?" I asked.
"I spoke before of the difficulty of this. I dissected the animal afterward and found no signs of hemorrhage. It did not go into violent convulsions. The poison might have been an extract of certain mushrooms, but it might as easily have been a decoction of Egyptian cobra venom which had been reduced and concentrated, then mixed with a stabilizing agent to form a powder."
"Cobra venom? That's a bit exotic. The boy had just visited a peasant herb-woman in the Forum. Do they traffic in such things?"
"They most certainly know mushrooms. Do not be fooled by appearances, Decius. She may never have attended lectures by learned physicians, but a peasant herbalist will have an intimate knowledge of the local plants and their properties. For all I know, there may be an herb or a root native to some local valley that produces a poison deadlier than any known to the school of Hippocrates."