and make fun of the humble house on the Quirinal Hill from which he had fled, and to which he had now unwillingly returned in his distress. There were more sincere ways to show respect to one's father, Atratinus insisted, pausing with a meaningful smile so that no one would miss the example he himself presented.
Nor would it be wise for any woman to turn her back on Caelius, he said, for the fellow was capable of far worse than mockery and slander- as we would see when the charge of the attempted poisoning of Clodia was dealt with by another speaker.
Atratinus played on these themes of dissipation and disreputable conduct, turning them over and over as a man turns a jewel in his hand, to see the various ways it catches the light. By turns he sought to outrage the judges, to appeal to sentiment, to make them laugh.
Politically, he said, Caelius had flirted with the cause of the depraved revolutionary Catilina. Sexually, he had assaulted the wives of Roman citizens; witnesses would be called to verify these charges. Witnesses would also be called to attest to Caelius's violent nature; there was the case of a senator named Fufius whom Caelius had beaten up at the pontifical elections in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. And if these indications of Caelius's character were not damning enough, con-sider the way he swaggered and strutted and spat out his speeches when playing the prosecutor at other men's trials, or debating in the Senate. And the appalling color of the stripe on his senatorial toga! Where everyone else's was traditionally somber, almost black, his was a garishly bright, bold purple. At the reminder of this impropriety, I saw quite a few judges nod their gray heads.
Worst of all-because it was this vice which most seriously threat-ened to destroy the republic-was Caelius's extravagance with money. In this Caelius represented the very worst aspect of his generation, which was set so firmly apart from wiser, more senior men such as the judges, as well as from less experienced but more virtuous young men of Atratinus's age, who looked on the spendthrift habits of men like Caelius with dread and dismay. What would become of the Republic if such men were not stopped? They squandered fortunes on licentious behavior and spent huge sums on electoral bribery, corrupting everyone and everything they touched. Then, finding themselves bankrupt, as they inevitably must, and stripped by their own debauchery of all moral sense, such men resorted without hesitation to the most fiendish crimes to replenish their coffers. To get his hands on Egyptian gold, Caelius had covered his hands with Egyptian blood. In so doing he had cast a bloody stain on the dignity and honor of the Roman state.
"If ever there was a case which proved the sad necessity for courts such as this one, this is that case. If ever there was a man who full deserved the condemnation of this court, Marcus Caelius is that man." So Atratinus concluded.
I turned to Bethesda and asked what she thought. "Rather too young for my taste," she said. "But a pleasant voice."
The freedman Publius Clodius spoke next. His speech dealt with the first three charges against Caelius. Where Atratinus had shown a kind of prim distaste at having to pollute himself with cataloguing Cae-lius's crimes, Clodius attacked with the relish of a man wielding a red-hot poker. He did not hesitate to make crude jabs and thrusts, but he also pulled back from time to time, confident in his weapon's power to inflict damage even from a distance. Paroxysms of disgust were punctuated with abrupt full stops, during which, standing stock-still and emotionless, Clodius would deliver some of his most acid comments, eliciting gasps and laughter from the crowd. It was a technically dazzling speech.
The virtues or vices of Caelius's character might ultimately be matters of opinion, he conceded, especially in a time when so many Romans had become sadly confused about such things, but the outrages committed against the Alexandrian envoys were simple matters of fact. A hundred of the most respected men in Egypt had come to Rome to petition the Senate. As ambassadors, they carried the protection of the gods and the state. Yet they had been met with unremitting violence, intimidation, fire and ultimately murder. Word of this scandal had spread from the Pillars of Hercules to the borders of Parthia, undermining Rome's prestige with her subjects and allies and inflaming her already precarious relations with the volatile kingdom of Egypt.
The places and dates of these attacks were well documented. The prosecution would produce witnesses who would swear that in each in-stance – at Neapolis, at Puteoli, and at Palla's estate-Marcus Caelius had been seen in the vicinity shortly before the attack, in the company of known assassins. Further, as other witnesses would attest, Caelius had been heard shamelessly bragging in public about his part in the massacres. What sort of man was so imprudent as to boast of engineering such atrocities? Clearly,a man with the depraved character of Marcus Caelius.
Clodius proceeded to give a vivid account of each attack, piling on gory details, painting tableaus of pity and terror, invoking the shades of the unavenged dead.
Why, he asked, had Marcus Caelius perpetrated such violence? The reason was obvious: for financial gain. A man like Marcus Caelius, from a humble but respectable family, could hardly engage in the high living he was famous for without incurring massive debts. Witnesses would be called to document his reckless spending habits. If Caelius wished to dispute these witnesses, and if he had nothing to hide, let him open his private account books for the court. Was he willing to do that? If not, why not? Because, Clodius alleged, those account books would reveal the payments Caelius had received to mount his campaign of terror against the Alexandrian envoys. To finance his own disgusting pleasures, Caelius had sold out the good name of the whole Roman people. Clodius's indignation came to an appropriately thunderous climax that had the crowd stamping their feet with appreciation. He returned to the bench mopping sweat from his forehead like a boxer.
I turned to Bethesda and raised an eyebrow. "Well?"
"Everybody knows that freedmen try harder," she said. "But all that blustering and waving of arms only makes me nervous."
"I noticed you fidgeting. Afraid for your precious Marcus Caelius?"
" 'Oratory is all very well when there are no facts to go on,' " she said. I looked at her amazed, as I always am when she unexpectedly quotes some old Roman proverb. It's natural of course that she should pick up such things from me and from going to trials, but there's some-thing jarring about hearing them repeated with an Egyptian accent. "And so far," she said, "they've said nothing about the death of Dio, nor about any attempt to poison Clodia."
"I suspect that will come next."
Lucius Herennius Balbus mounted the Rostra to conclude for the prosecution. If Atratinus had played outraged youth, Herennius was the stern, admonishing uncle, castigating Caelius's character from an older, wiser, but no less scandalized perspective. He began and ended his speech by reciting the litany of Caelius's vices. In between, he dealt with the death of Dio and the "bare escape" of a certain Roman lady who had the misfortune to know more about Caelius's crimes than was healthy for her.
That lady, he said, would testify about a loan which she had made to Caelius, ostensibly to put on games in his hometown for the sake of his political career-when in fact no such games had taken place. The money she lent him had been used to bribe slaves in the house of Lucius Lucceius, in an attempt to murder Dio by poison, and thus put an end once and for all to the decimated Alexandrian delegation by destroying its leader. That particular plot had failed, but Dio, alerted to the danger, had fled to another house, and it was there that he eventually met his end. By whose hand, everyone in the court must know: the assassin Publius Asicius. Never mind that Asicius had been acquitted at his own trial; it was common knowledge that the prosecution and defense had conspired together to throw the case in Asicius's favor. Caelius and Asicius, partners in so many other vices, had been partners in this outrage as well-witnesses would be called who would place the two very close to the house where Dio was staying on the night of his murder. Like a tree with many branches, the Alexandrian delegation had been ruthlessly hacked away, limb by limb, until only the trunk remained. Caelius had not been satisfied until that, too, was destroyed.