The Pillars of Rome by Jack Ludlow Page B

events of the previous two days; Tiberius Livonius cut down along with four companions garbed in his robes as a priest of the Cult of Lupercalia . This had led to serious rioting, as the people he represented, the poor and needy, poured out of their slums screaming for retribution, thus giving the patrician party an excuse to respond with their armed retainers, which in turn led to the massacre of Livonius’s adherents. Over three hundred had died as the patricians egged on their supporters to kill their political enemies.
    Yet their deaths paled beside the effect of the initial assassination. The murder of a plebeian tribune, a hero to the dispossessed, whose personwas held to be inviolate, was a heinous crime. All Rome was agog to know the names of the assailants, though few seemed to doubt that the author of the attack was the owner of this house. An angry crowd, defying the danger of another massacre, as well as the orders of the lictors to disperse, had gathered outside to yell obscenities. Those lictors, whose task it was to maintain civil order, were forced to mount guard at the gate. The noise swelled as the outer door swung open to admit another caller, and the room fell silent as Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus entered. A collective sigh rose from the throats of those with a slim chance of an interview with Lucius, for their prospects were so diminished as to have almost disappeared. Everyone else knew that the mere presence of this man would considerably extend the time they had to wait; Aulus would be admitted to the great man’s study just as soon as the host was appraised of his arrival.
    Properly clad in his senatorial toga, with one fold acting as a cowl to cover his head, Aulus took up position on his own, at a point far away from the entrance to the study. Several men bowed in his direction, indicating that many a conversation was open to him. While courteously returning the bows, Aulus held himself aloof. Likewise those clients of Lucius, who would also wish to avail themselves of Aulus’s largesse, he being one of the richest men inRome, were kept at bay by the look in his eye, which was not one to invite an approach. Lucius’s steward, ushering an elderly knight out of the study, failed to see Aulus and was just about to indicate that another man should proceed through the door when a hurried whisper made him spin round. It was like a scene from a comedy by Plautus. The steward’s hand shot to his mouth in a most unprofessional manner and he rushed into the study to tell his master. Seconds lengthened into a full minute before he returned, which had already heightened the tension, but when the fellow ignored Aulus, and indicated that the original supplicant should go through, the air became charged. For quite some time no one could speak; they just stared at Aulus to see what he would do.
    The object of their curiosity did not even flick a black eyebrow; there was no reaction at all to this obvious slight, even though, inwardly, he was troubled. Aulus had come with three objects in mind; to celebrate a birth, to mourn a death and to expunge the dread that what the mob protested outside, that Lucius had been responsible for the assassination of Tiberius Livonius, was true. Ruminating in turn on all three, he stared back at his inquisitive audience as if daring one of them to mention what had just taken place; to state the level of the insult that had just been very publicly delivered. No one did and soon the conversationresumed, if anything louder than before, as the gathering tried to make sense of this unexpected shift in the political wind.
    In the jumble of thoughts that coursed through Aulus’s mind the sight of the child he had exposed kept cropping up, unbidden, a bundle of white placed on the cold earth. He had avoided looking at it too closely, staying mounted on a horse suddenly skittish, not wishing to be haunted by the physical image, but all that meant was that he transposed, instead, the