The Venus Throw by Steven Saylor Page A

to a feverish pitch, Caelius pointed his finger at Bestia and shouted, ‘Judges, I do not point the finger of guilt—I point
at the guilty finger!
’ ”
    I choked on a mouthful of porridge. “Outrageous! Just when I was beginning to think that Roman orators had degraded their craft to the lowest level of indecency and bad taste, along comes a new generation to push the limit even further. Oh Minerva,” I added under my breath, glancing out the window at the statue in the garden, “preserve me from a day in court! ‘I point at the guilty finger.’ Ha!”
    Bethesda sipped from her cup of honeyed wine. “Anyway, Bestia was acquitted, finger and all.”
    “I suppose Cicero made a stirring speech for his defense.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t recall.”
    Cicero’s speech would probably have made a greater impression on her, I thought, had the man delivering it been as young and good-looking as Marcus Caelius. “Fortune smiled on Lucius Calpumius Bestia, then.”
    “Though not on his wives,” said Bethesda dryly. There was a flash of something like anger in her eyes, but then a smile crept across her lips. “Speaking of young Caelius reminds me of another bit of gossip from the Forum,” she said.
    “Also involving Caelius?”
    “No, involving his landlord.”
    “I see. And what fresh outrage has Publius Clodius perpetrated now?” Clodius owned the apartment building down the street, the one in which Caelius had his lodgings. In his mid-thirties and a patrician of impeccable lineage, Clodius had made himself much feared in recent years as a rabblerouser and exploiter of populist resentments. It was Clodius, as tribune, who had masterminded the Roman takeover of Cyprus in order to finance his scheme to pass out free grain to the people of Rome. Once friendly to Cicero, he had almost single-handedly engineered Cicero’s exile and was now his archenemy. His political tactics were crude, relentless and often violent. Just as men like Caelius were pushing the boundaries of oratory in the courts, men like Clodius were pushing the boundaries of political intimidation. Not surprisingly, the relationship of the two men went beyond that of landlord and tenant. They had become frequent political allies, and they shared a personal bond as well. It was well known that Caelius was the lover, or at least one of the lovers, of the rabble-rouser’s widowed older sister, Clodia.
    “Well, I didn’t witness the incident myself, but I heard about it at the fish market,” said Bethesda, practically purring. “It seems that Pompey was down in the Forum, arriving with his retinue at some trial or other that was about to begin.”
    “Could this have been the trial of Pompey’s confederate Milo, for breach of the peace?”
    Bethesda shrugged.
    “With Clodius acting as prosecutor?” I added.
    “Yes, that was it, because Clodius was there with a large retinue of his own, made up of some very rough types, apparently.”
    To describe Clodius’s notorious gang of troublemakers as “rough” was to understate the case. These were strongarmers of the lowest order, some hired, some obligated toClodius for other reasons, some voluntarily in his service to sate their appetites for violence.
    For a man like Clodius to be prosecuting anyone for breach of the peace seemed ironic, but in this case the charge was probably justified. The accused, Milo, had his own rival gang of ruffians ready to rampage through the streets supporting whatever political cause their master happened to favor at the moment. Where great men like Pompey, Caesar and Crassus contested one another in exalted spheres of financial and military prowess, vying for mastery of the world, Clodius and Milo struggled with one another for immediate control of the streets of Rome. The greater powers allied themselves with these lesser powers for their own purposes, and vice versa. At the moment, Milo was Pompey’s enforcer in Rome, so Pompey was obligated to speak in Milo’s