Last seen in Massilia rsr-8 Page 12

  It was Cicero who had prosecuted Gaius Verres a little over twenty years ago. The case had been a major scandal and established Cicero as the preeminent advocate in Rome, even as it destroyed Verres, who fled for Massilia before the court could deliver its damning verdict. The charge against Verres was extortion and criminal oppression of the people of Sicily during his three years as provincial governor of the island. Roman governors have always been notorious for exploiting their provinces and lining their own purses at the expense of the governed, while the Senate, whose members all hope for the opportunity to do the same themselves someday, turns a blind eye. It was indicative of the egregiousness of Verres's conduct that he was actually brought to trial for his offenses.

  According to Cicero, who had also served as an administrator in Sicily, Verres had not only extorted the populace and plundered their civic treasuries, but had virtually stripped the island bare of every beautiful man-made object. Verres's appetite for fine works of art amounted to a mania. He especially loved paintings of the sort done in encaustic wax on wood, not least because they could easily be carried off, and he assiduously built himself a collection of the best pictures to be gleaned from every public space and private gallery in Sicily. But his greatest passion was for statues. Before Verres, every town square in Sicily, even the humblest, was decorated with the statue of a local hero or some particularly venerated deity; after Verres, the pedestals stood empty-except in those instances where the scoundrel, to squeeze even more money from the locals, had forced them to erect statues of himself, charging them outrageous sums for the privilege. Anyone who dared to oppose him, whether Sicilian or Roman, was ruthlessly disposed of. His behavior while he controlled the island was more that of a pirate than a provincial governor.

  As soon as Verres's tenure was up and he returned to Rome, the Sicilians sought restitution from the Roman Senate and looked for a way to prosecute the man who had robbed them. Cicero took up their cause and, despite all Verres's legal finagling and the Senate's reluctance to prosecute one of its own, Cicero and the Sicilians eventually prevailed. The evidence assembled against Verres was so damning that even the Senate had to act; and as the trial progressed, Verres chose to flee Rome rather than face the verdict. The connoisseur of fine art set another fashion in his choice of destination; Verres fled for Massilia, and in the twenty years of political chaos that ensued, wave upon wave of Roman political exiles would follow him.

  I knew who Gaius Verres was, of course-what Roman didn't? — but I had I never laid eyes on him. I knew that he was here in Massilia, but I had never expected our paths to cross. But then, nothing predictable or expected had occurred since the moment we emerged from the flooded tunnel into the city. More and more it seemed to me that Massilia was an unfamiliar world with its own peculiar rules of logic to which I must bend, willingly or not.

  Verres's house was not far from the scapegoat's, somewhere along the way to Milo's house. Within her encircling walls, Massilia was a small city, and her fashionable district was very compact.

  The house itself surprised me by its opulence. One thinks of exiles living in ruin and misery, or at least in reduced circumstances. But the house of Verres was even more ostentatious than that of the scapegoat, with a brightly colored facade in shades of pink and yellow, and elaborate columns flanking the entrance. A slave admitted us at once; the Catilinarians were obviously familiar visitors. The foyer was floored with yellow marble with swirling red veins, and, like a Roman house, had niches on either side housing the busts of Verres's ancestors. Or so I thought upon first glance. When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the busts were not of ancestors after all, unless Verres claimed descent from the likes of Pericles, Aeschylus, and Homer. He had used the niches reserved for sacred display to show off specimens from his sculpture collection!

  A slave led us deeper into the house. Statues and paintings were everywhere. Many of the paintings were installed on the walls, jammed close together, but others were stacked in narrow spaces between pedestals and walls, and some were even piled atop each other in corners. But the paintings, as vivid as many of them were-portraits, pastoral scenes, episodes from The Iliad and The Odyssey, erotic tableaux-faded into the background. It was the statues that dominated the house, and not just in the niches and the usual spots in front of columns or under archways. There were scores of statues, perhaps hundreds, so crowded together in some rooms that only a narrow pathway had been left clear. Their arrangement made no sense; Diana with her bow and arrow thrust her elbow into the nose of some obscure Sicilian statesman and appeared to take aim directly at the head of a seated Jupiter only a few feet way, whose stern gaze was directed at a pair of rearing life-size stags done in marble and flawlessly painted, even to the white spots on their flanks. The house was large and the rooms spacious, but it was not a palace, and a palace would have been required to properly contain so much art. As it was, I had the peculiar feeling of having stumbled into a very crowded but ominously silent house party, where the strange mix of guests were all made of bronze and marble-gods and animals, dying Gauls and cavorting satyrs, nude athletes and long-dead playwrights.

  It was a kind of blasphemy to treat works of art, especially images of the gods, in such a fashion, with no respect for their unique power and singularity. I shuddered.

  "Why in Hades have you brought me here?" I asked Publicius. "You'll see," he said in hushed voice. "You'll see!"

  We were led at last to the garden at the house's center, where an immensely fat man in a red tunic rose from a bench to greet us. A fringe of white hair circled his perfectly round head. A strand of tiny pearls and lapis beads peeked out from between the folds of fat that circled his neck. Rings of silver and gold glittered on his fingers. Among them I saw what looked like an iron citizen's ring. Verres had no right to wear it. The court's verdict had stripped him of his citizenship.

  "Publicius! Minucius! How good to see you again. Welcome to my house."

  "I swear to Artemis, he gets bigger each time we see him," said Publicius under his breath in a tone more full of wonder than disdain, and then, louder, "Gaius Verres! How kind of you to welcome us. We bring two guests, newly arrived from Rome."

  "Ah! Rome…" Verres's beady eyes glimmered. "So near, yet still so far away. Some day…"

  "Yes, some day," Publicius agreed wistfully. "And perhaps not so long from now, from the look of things. The world has turned upside-down."

  "And shaken out these two," said Verres, regarding Davus and myself.

  "Ah, yes, let me introduce you. Gaius Verres, this is Gordianus, called the Finder. The father of Meto," he added in a hushed voice.

  If Publicius expected our host to be impressed, the fat man disappointed him. Verres looked me up and down as if appraising an object newly offered for acquisition. His rudeness was almost refreshing after the obsequious fawning of the Catilinarians. "When I was last in Rome, you were known as Cicero's hunting dog," he said gruffly. He spat the name Cicero as if it were an epithet.

  "Perhaps," I said, staring at him coldly. "But you haven't been in Rome for a very long time, Gaius Verres." The Catilinarians winced. "At any rate, I had nothing to do with your trial."

  Verres grunted. He turned his attention to Davus and raised an eyebrow. "And this big fellow?"

  "Davus is my son-in-law."

  Verres crossed his arms and pulled at his several chins. "A model worthy of the great Myron himself. I should like to see him naked. But with what sort of props? He's too' grown-up for Mercury. His features are not intelligent enough to pass for Apollo. Not coarse enough for Vulcan, or old and worn enough to be Hercules, though perhaps some day… No, I have it! Give him a helmet and a sword and he could be Mars. Yes, especially scowling like that…

  Misreading Davus's frown of consternation as anger, Publicius hurriedly spoke up. "Gordianus and Davus arrived in the city only a few days ago. It was the day of the battering-ram-"

  "Yes, yes, I know," said Verres. "Everyone in Massilia
has heard the story by now. Two Romans swam in through a flooded rat hole and were scooped up by the scapegoat, who's now fattening them up-though why, no one can imagine, since it's the scapegoat who'll wind up as the main course one of these days."

  This casual impiety induced an uncomfortable silence in the two Catilinarians. Publicius bit his lip. Minucius lowered his eyes. Clearly, of the three, Verres had by far the strongest personality. A tyrant he had been, and a tyrant he remained, even if his shrunken kingdom extended only as far as the walls of his own house.

  "Well, then," Verres went on, "I suppose I can guess why you've come. Not to see my ivory Jupiter from Cyzicus, or the Apollo I brought back from Syracuse; nor to savor the beauty of my Ephesian Alexander, or experience the very rare sight of my miniature Medusa, which was executed by a student of Praxiteles. Did you know that the snakes on her head were carved from solid carnelian? Incredibly delicate! The largest is no thicker than my little finger. The Syracusans said the snakes were sure to break if I dared to move her, but not one of them suffered even a chip when I shipped her to Rome… and then here to Massilia."

  "Fascinating, Gaius Verres," said Publicius, in a tone that indicated he had heard the tale more than once. "But what we actually came to see-that is, what we came here to show Gordianus, so that he might behold it once again with his own eyes-"

  "Yes, yes, I know why you've come. It's why you always come."

  Verres called for a slave, spoke to him in a whisper, and sent him from the room. The slave returned with a bronze key, a big,

  bulky thing with numerous notches, and a flickering lamp. Why a lamp, when the sun was still up? Verres took the key and the lamp and dismissed the slave. "Follow me," he said.

  We left the garden. A long hallway led to the back of the house, where a flight of stairs descended steeply to a subterranean level.

  The underground passage was so narrow that we had to proceed in single file. Verres and the Catilinarians went ahead of me, with Davus in the rear. The floor was treacherous and uneven. The wavering flame from Verres's lamp was too weak to light our feet, but it did illuminate the masses of spider webs above our heads. In places the ceiling sagged; Publicius and Davus, the tallest among us, had to stoop.

  At last the winding subterranean passage terminated in a bronze door. There was a scraping noise as Verres pushed the key into a keyhole and worked it back and forth. The walk had required no special exertion, yet Publicius and Minucius both took labored breaths. By the flickering lamplight I saw that they trembled.

  Davus took my arm and whispered in my ear. "Father-in-law, I don't like this. Who knows what's in that room? It might be a prison. Or a torture chamber. Or…"

  Or a hiding place, I thought. The Catilinarians had spoken of Meto. He had come to them, they said, sought them out. They told me they had something to show me, something I could see only at the house of Verres. I felt a sudden rush of irrational excitement and found myself breathing as heavily as the others.

  The door swung inward on creaking hinges. Verres stepped inside, leaving the rest of us in darkness. "Well, then, come on," he said. Publicius and Minucius stepped forward, visibly shaking. Davus insisted on stepping in front of me so as to enter ahead of me. I was the last to step inside the long, narrow room.

  XIII

  It was neither a prison nor a torture chamber, but the most obvious and logical thing to be found behind a bronze door beneath a rich man's house: a treasure room. The chamber was crowded with ornately decorated jewelry boxes and urns heaped with coins, small silver statuettes and talismans carved from precious stones. On the walls were mounted antique weapons and military regalia of the sort collectors fancy. Amid this clutter, my eyes were drawn to something at the far end of the room. It stood apart, with space cleared around it so that it could be seen clearly.

  I recognized it at once and felt a sudden, painful stab of nostalgia. I had first seen it in a setting in some ways similar to this, illuminated by lamplight in a place of darkness. It had been in a mine north of Rome where Catilina and his inner circle were hiding. The thing was made of silver, perched atop a tall pole festooned with a red and gold pennant. Through the gloom, I peered up at the eagle with its beak held high and its wings spread. But for the glimmer of silver it might have been a real bird, frozen in glory.

  "The eagle standard of Catilina," I whispered. "You remember!" said Publicius.

  Of course I did. How could I forget? I had last seen it tumbling to earth at Pistoria, lost in the chaos of the battle, marking the spot where Catilina fell.

  Publicius touched my arm and whispered in my ear, "This was what your son came here to find. That was his true mission to Massilia!"

  I gazed up at the eagle, fascinated by the play of light and shadow across its spread wings. "What are you saying? I don't understand."

  "Before Catilina, it was Marius who carried the eagle standard-Marius the mentor and hero of Caesar-in his campaign against the Teutones and the Cimbri, here in Gaul."

  "That was a long time ago," I said.

  "Yes, even before Caesar was born. Marius defeated the Teutones and the Cimbri. He returned to Rome in triumph with the eagle standard. Years later he prepared to carry it into war once again, against Mithridates in the East. But then Sulla, who had been his lieutenant, turned against him and waged civil war. Sulla marched on Rome itself! In the end, Marius was killed, and the eagle standard fell into Sulla's bloodstained hands. He made himself dictator-but only for a while, because Sulla soon died, consumed by worms that grew out of his own flesh. A horrible death, but no more than he deserved; the gods dealt with him justly. And then-no one quite knows how-the eagle standard came into the possession of Catilina."

  "The Deliverer!" cried Minucius, clutching his breast.

  "For many years Catilina hoarded it in secret, biding his time," Publicius continued.

  I nodded. "Cicero claimed that Catilina kept the eagle of Marius in a hidden room and bowed down to worship it before plotting his crimes."

  "The criminal was Cicero!" said Publicius vehemently. "Such a man could never understand the true power of the eagle standard. Catilina kept it safely hidden until the time came to carry it into battle again, against the same forces that Marius had fought, the oppressors of the weak, the defilers of the pure, the false pretenders who fill the Senate and mock the virtues that once made Rome great."

  Minucius, in a breathless, impatient voice, took up the story. "But the time was not yet right-Catilina was premature; his cause was doomed. Only we few who fled to Massilia were left to preserve his memory, and for a while longer the gods allowed the serpents who ruled the Senate to hold sway. The murderers of Catilina cut off the Deliverer's head and showed it off as a trophy… but they never found the eagle standard! If they had, they would have destroyed it, melted it down, reduced it to a shapeless lump, and cast it into the sea. But the eagle eluded them."

  "For years we searched for it," said Publicius, pressing his colleague aside, clutching at me and pushing his face close to mine. "We hired agents, offered rewards, followed false leads-"

  "Those who tried to dupe us and cheat us lived to regret it!" cried Minucius.

  "But the eagle had vanished. We despaired-"

  "Some of us lost hope-"

  "We feared that our enemies had found it after all, and destroyed it." Publicius sucked in a breath and turned his head to gaze up at the silver eagle. "Yet all along, here it was! Here in Massilia, safe and sound in this vault! Hidden underground, in darkness, behind a bronze door. As if the eagle had known where to rendezvous with its next owner."

  I looked up at the eagle, then past Publicius and Minucius to Verres, who pursed his lips but said nothing.

  "Then Gaius Verres is now your leader?" I asked.

  "Not at all!" said Publicius. "Verres is merely the keeper of the standard, holding it in trust for its next, true owner. What better place for it to reside, temporarily at least, than here, forgotten by the world at large and safe from
its enemies?"

  I nodded. "And who is this next, true owner?"

  "But surely that's obvious! Caesar, of course. Caesar will complete what Marius and Catilina began. Caesar will abolish the Senate; he's already driven them into exile. Caesar will remake the Roman state-"

  "Remake the world!" cried Minucius.

  "That is his destiny. And he'll do it under this standard. When the walls of Massilia fall and the city opens her gates to Caesar, and the imperator himself strides in, resplendent in glory, the eagle shall be here, waiting for him. Do you think it was merely coincidence that Massilia was Caesar's first destination after taking Rome? Oh, no! Rumors had already reached him that the eagle standard of Marius was here in Massilia. He came here to find it. But the Timouchoi sided with Pompey and closed their gates to Caesar. The fools! To obtain what is rightfully his, Caesar was forced to lay siege. But a man like Caesar has recourse to more subtle tools than catapults and siege towers. He also sent your son here-Meto, who once fought beside Catilina-to confound Caesar's enemies and search for the missing eagle standard."

  "And now you've come," whispered Minucius. "The father of Meto! You, too, fought beside the Deliverer. When Caesar returns to claim Massilia, you shall be here to witness the moment he takes possession of the eagle standard. Do you see how the gods bring all things to a head? The strands they weave out of our mortal lives are like a pattern visible only from the heavens; we here on earth can only guess at their designs." He shook his head and smiled, bemused by the wonder of it all.

  The narrow vault suddenly seemed airless and cramped, and the treasures strewn about the room as tawdry as the masses of crowded statues in the rooms above our heads. The eagle standard itself, briefly invested with magic by the sheer enthusiasm of the acolytes, was merely another object after all, beautiful and precious but made by human hands for an all-too-human purpose, now reduced to one of a thousand items in the inventory of a shamelessly greedy miser.