“Thank you, my friend, your expertise in these matters is well known.”
Suetonius bowed his head modestly. Marinus snorted in his beard.
“And,” added Pliny, “I have a job for Zosimus here, too. I want you to go out into the streets, my boy. Oh, not to the brothels and gambling dens, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with Ione! But hang about in the agora, in the palaestra, the baths, the cook shops, and talk to people. I want to know what’s being said out there, not just about Balbus but all of us. You’re the only Greek I absolutely trust. Will you do this?”
The young man’s eyes lit up. “I will start this morning, Patrone!”
***
“Good riddance to ’im, say I. They should set up a statue to the ’orse that broke ’is fucking neck for ’im. One less Roman leech sucking our blood, ain’t I right, sir? You’re not from here are you? So maybe you ’aven’t ’eard.”
The fact of the procurator’s death and the alleged cause of it had, with almost magical rapidity, made its way to the farthest corners of the city.
The blowzy proprietress rested a fat elbow on the bar and refilled Zosimus’ cup with a thin and vinegary red. The secretary had no head for wine and was beginning to feel the worse for it. Soon, he promised himself, he would return to the palace and have Ione put a cold cloth on his forehead. It had been a long, and not very fruitful, day. The things he had heard, he could hardly bring himself to repeat to his patrone. He had set out that morning full of enthusiasm to carry out his commission to “catch tongues,” proud to be called the one Greek that a Roman could trust. And the young man had no difficulty striking up conversations with strangers. It was his face, he supposed. A broad, open face with a nose like a dumpling and innocent brown eyes; the face of one who was, perhaps, just a little simple. No one suspected that such a face concealed the well-stocked mind of one who had been trained from boyhood to recite all the comedies of Menander and Terrence from memory. His parents had been slaves of the old master, Pliny’s learned uncle, who had noticed the child’s quickness and cultivated it. When the uncle died in the smoke of Vesuvius, Zosimus had passed to the nephew. And the younger Pliny had treated him with the greatest affection and intimacy, even sending him for a rest cure once when he was sick, then manumitting him without requiring him to buy his freedom, and finally marrying him to his darling Ione. Zosimus would gladly give his life for Gaius Plinius.
He had begun the day at the palaestra among idlers watching the wrestlers and runners at their sweaty practice. As the sun rose higher, he had drifted with the crowd to the agora, to the welcome coolness of the portico that ran along one side, stopping along the way to buy a piece of grilled squid from a street vendor. The courts had been in session all morning and now the jurors spilled out of the courthouse, buzzing like Aristophanes’ wasps. Everywhere, knots of men stood nose to nose, gesticulating and shouting, the way Greeks always did. Zosimus pretended to read the public inscriptions on their marble slabs, and listened. Not all the conversation was about the Roman procurator’s unexpected demise, but much of it was, and none of it was complimentary. His fine estate, his handsome horse, his entourage of lackeys worthy of some Persian king—and all of it paid for by their taxes. And he would be replaced by another barbarian from that race of plunderers, equally brutal and grasping. Would there ever come an end to their slavery?
With his ears ringing, Zosimus sought solace in the baths. But Nicomedia’s bathhouse was shockingly dilapidated and dirty, the water coated with a greasy scum. He didn’t stay long.
He browsed for a while along the street of the potters, the street of the carpenters, and the street of the bronzesmiths, lined with cramped workshops where men bent over bowls and lamps, tapping with little hammers. He strolled along narrow, zigzagging lanes where old women sat in their doorways, shelling peas and cackling to each other, and sturdy, straight-backed young women trudged from the public well, balancing water jugs on their shoulders; where school children chanted their lessons in a sidewalk classroom and