Dictator

I got down from my horse. I had no idea what would happen next. I walked towards Milo. Just then there was a shout, or rather a scream from the tavern, and Clodius was carried out by four gladiators, each holding an arm or a leg. Milo had a calculation to make: would he let Clodius live and take the consequences, or kill him and have done with it? They laid him on the road at his feet. Milo took a javelin from the man standing next to him, checked the tip with his thumb, placed it in the centre of Clodius’s chest, grasped the shaft and plunged it in with all his force. Clodius’s mouth fountained blood. After that, they all took turns in slashing at the corpse, but I could not bring myself to watch.

I was no horseman, yet I believe I galloped back to Rome at a speed a cavalryman would have been proud of. I urged my exhausted mount up to the Palatine, and for the second time in half a year I found myself blurting out to Cicero the news that one of his enemies – the greatest of them all – was dead.

He gave no sign of pleasure. He was ice-cold, calculating. He drummed his fingers and then said, ‘Where is Milo now?’

‘I believe he carried on to Lanuvium for the ceremony as planned.’

‘And Clodius’s body?’

‘The last time I saw it, it was still by the roadside.’

‘Milo made no attempt to conceal it?’

‘No, he said there was no point – there were too many witnesses.’

‘That’s probably true – it’s a busy spot. Were you seen by many people?’

‘I don’t think so. Clodius recognised me, but not the others.’

He gave a hard smile. ‘Clodius at least we no longer have to worry about.’ He thought it over and nodded. ‘That’s good – good that you weren’t seen. I think it would be better if we agree you were here with me all afternoon.’

‘Why?’

‘It wouldn’t be wise for me to be implicated in this business, even indirectly.’

‘You anticipate this will cause you trouble?’

‘Oh, I am quite certain of it. The question is: how much?’

We settled down to wait for word of what had happened to reach Rome. In the fading light of the afternoon I found it difficult to banish from my mind the image of Clodius dying like a stuck pig. I had witnessed death before, but that was the first time I had seen a man killed in front of me.

About an hour before darkness, a woman’s piercing shriek arose from some place nearby. It went on and on – a frightening, other-worldly ululation.

Cicero walked over and opened the door to his terrace and listened. ‘The Lady Fulvia,’ he said judiciously, ‘if I am not mistaken, has just learned she is a widow.’

He sent a servant up the hill to find out what was happening. The man came back and reported that Clodius’s body had arrived in Rome on a litter belonging to the senator Sextus Tedius, who had discovered it beside the Via Appia. The corpse had been conveyed to Clodius’s house and received by Fulvia. In her grief and fury she had stripped it naked, apart from its sandals, propped it up, and was now sitting beside it in the street beneath flaming torches, crying out that everyone should come and see what had been done to her husband.

Cicero said, ‘She means to whip up the mob.’ He ordered the guard on the house to be doubled overnight.

The following morning it was judged far too dangerous for Cicero or any other prominent senator to venture out. We watched from the terrace as a huge crowd led by Fulvia escorted the body on its bier down to the Forum and placed it on the rostra, and then we listened as Clodius’s lieutenants worked the plebs up to a fury. At the end of the bitter eulogies the mourners broke into the Senate house and carried Clodius’s corpse inside, then went back across the Forum to the Argiletum and started dragging out benches and tables and chests full of volumes from the booksellers’ shops. To our horror we realised they were constructing a funeral pyre.

Around midday, smoke began to issue from the small windows set high up in the walls of the Senate chamber. Sheets of orange flame and scraps of burning books whirled against the sky, while from inside came a terrifying and uninterrupted roar, as if a vent had been opened to the underworld. An hour later the roof split from end to end; thousands of tiles and spars of fiery timber plunged soundlessly from view; there was a strange interval of silence; and then the noise of the crash passed over us like a hot wind.

The fountain of smoke and dust and ashes lingered above the centre of Rome in a pall for several days, until the rain washed it away; and in this manner the last mortal vestiges of Publius Clodius Pulcher and the ancient assembly building he had reviled all his life vanished together from the face of the earth.

VIII