"No, no, no!" Cleio clutched her cheeks, tore at her hair, and wailed. Eco, whom I had told to be prepared for such an outburst, started back nonetheless. Sosistrides looked at me aghast. I averted my eyes. How could I have simply told him the truth, and made him believe it? He had to be shown. Cleio had to show him.
"He did leave a farewell," Cleio cried. "It was the most beautiful poem he ever wrote!"
"But his slave found nothing. Mulciber's poems to Cleon had vanished, and there was nothing new-"
"Because I took them!"
"Where are they, then?"
She reached into the bosom of her black gown and pulled out two handfuls of crumpled papyrus. "These were his poems to Cleon! You never saw such beautiful poems, such pure, sweet love put down in words! Cleon made fun of them, but they broke my heart! And here is his farewell poem, the one he left lying on his threshold so that Cleon would be sure to see it, when we went to his house yes-terday and found him hanging in the foyer, his neck broken, his body soiled… dead… gone from me forever!"
She pressed a scrap of papyrus into my hands. It was in Greek, the letters rendered in a florid, desperate hand. A phrase near the middle caught my eye:
One day, even your beauty will fade;
One day, even you may love unrequited!
Take pity, then, and favor my corpse
With a first, final, farewell kiss…
She snatched back the papyrus and clutched it to her bosom. My voice was hollow in my ears. "When you went to Mulciber's house yesterday, you and Cleon found him already dead."
"Yes!"
"And you wept."
"Because I loved him!"
"Even though he didn't love you?"
"Mulciber loved Cleon. He couldn't help himself."
"Did Cleon weep?"
Her face became so contorted with hatred that I heard Sosistrides gasp in horror. "Oh, no," she said, "he didn't weep. Cleon laughed! He laughed! He shook his head and said, 'What a fool,' and walked out the door. I screamed at him to come back, to help me cut Mul-ciber down, and he only said, 'I'll be late for the games!'" Cleio col-lapsed to the floor, weeping, the poems scattering around her. " 'Late for the games!'" she repeated, as if it were her brother's epitaph.
On the long ride back to Rome through the Campanian countryside, Eco's hands grew weary and I grew hoarse debating whether I had done the right thing. Eco argued that I should have kept my sus-picions of Cleio to myself. I argued that Sosistrides deserved to know what his daughter had done, and how and why his son had died- and needed to be shown, as well, how deeply and callously his beau-tiful, beloved Cleon had inflicted misery on others.
"Besides," I said, "when we returned to Sosistrides's house, I wasn't certain myself that Cleio had murdered Cleon. Accusing the dead tutor was a way of flushing her out. Her possession of Mulciber's missing poems were the only tangible evidence that events had un-folded as I suspected. I tried in vain to think of some way, short of housebreaking, to search her room without either Cleio or her father knowing-but as it turned out, such a search would have found nothing. I should have known that she would keep the poems on her person, next to her heart! She was as madly, hopelessly in love with Mulciber as he was in love with Cleon. Eros can be terribly careless when he scatters his arrows!"
We also debated the degree and nature of Cleon's perfidy. When he saw Mulciber's dead body, was Cleon so stunned by the enormity of what he had done-driven a lovesick man to suicide-that he went about his business in a sort of stupor, attending the games and performing his athletic feats like an automaton? Or was he so cold that he felt nothing? Or, as Eco argued in an extremely convoluted series of gestures, did Mulciber's fatal demonstration of lovesick de-votion actually stimulate Cleon in some perverse way, inflating his ego and inspiring him to excel as never before at the games?
Whatever his private thoughts, instead of grieving, Cleon blithely went off and won his laurel crown, leaving Mulciber to spin in midair and Cleio to plot her vengeance. In a fit of grief she cut off her hair. The sight of her reflection in Mulciber's atrium pool gave her the idea to pass as a boy; an ill-fitting tunic from the tutor's wardrobe completed her disguise. She carried a knife with her to the gymnasium, the same one she had used to cut her hair, and was prepared to stab her brother in front of his friends. But it turned out that she didn't need the knife. By chance-or guided by Eros-she found her way into the courtyard, where the statue presented itself as the perfect murder weapon.
As far as Cleio was concerned, the statue's role in the crime constituted proof that she acted not only with the god's approval but as an instrument of his will. This pious argument had so far, at least as of our leaving Neapolis, stayed Sosistrides from punishing her. I did not envy the poor merchant. With his wife and son dead, could he bear to snuff out the life of only remaining offspring, even for so great a crime? And yet, how could he bear to let her live, knowing she had murdered his beloved son? Such a conundrum would test the wisdom of Athena!
Eco and I debated, too, the merits of Mulciber's poetry. I had begged of Sosistrides a copy of the tutor's farewell, so that I could ponder it at my leisure:
Savage, sullen boy, whelp of a lioness,
Stone-hearted and scornful of love,
I give you a lover's ring-my noose!
No longer be sickened by the sight of me; I go to the only place that offers solace To the broken-hearted: oblivion! But will you not stop and weep for me, If only for one moment…
The poem continued for many more lines, veering between re-crimination, self-pity, and surrender to the annihilating power of love.
Hopelessly sentimental! More cloying than honey! The very worst sort of dreck, pronounced Eco, with a series of gestures so sweeping that he nearly fell from his horse. I merely nodded, and wondered if my son would feel the same in another year or so, after Eros had wounded him with a stray arrow or two and given him a clearer notion, from personal experience, of just how deeply the god of love can pierce the hearts of helpless mortals.
A GLADIATOR DIES
"A beautiful day for it," I said begrudgingly. Cicero nodded and squinted up at the filtered red sunlight that penetrated the awning above our seats. Below, in the arena, the first pair of gladiators strode across the sand to meet each other in combat.
The month was Junius, at the beginning of what promised to be a long, hot summer. The blue sky and undulating green hills were es-pecially beautiful here in the Etrurian countryside outside the town of Saturnia, where Cicero and I, traveling separately from Rome, had arrived the day before to attend the funeral of a local magistrate. Sextus Thorius had been struck down in the prime of life, thrown from his horse while riding down the Clodian Way to check on the progress of a slave gang doing repair work on the road. The next day, word of his demise reached Rome, where quite a few important persons had felt obligated to attend the funeral.
Earlier that morning, not a few of the senators and bankers who gathered to watch the funeral procession had raised an eyebrow at the sight of Gordianus the Finder among them; feeling the beady gaze of a prune-faced matron on me, I distinctly overheard her whis-per to her husband, "What's he doing here? Does someone suspect foul play at work in the death of Sextus Thorius?" But Cicero, when he caught sight of me, smiled grimly and moved to join me, and asked no questions. He knew why I had come. A few years ago, facing the prospect of a ruinous business scandal, Thorius had consulted Cicero for legal advice, and Cicero had sent Thorius to me to get to the bottom of the affair. In the end, both scandal and litiga-tion were averted. Thorius had rewarded me generously, and had subsequently sent quite a bit of business my way. The least I could do on the occasion of his death was to pack my best toga, spend the night at a seedy inn in Saturnia, and show up at his funeral.