Part 16 (1/2)
”I need not describe to you the feelings of my colleagues, nor my own. To hint them is perhaps too much; to particularize them would be unseemly. I may say, however, that just as street-boys acclaim you by shouting:
”'That's the girl that saved the dog;' just as all over the Empire you are talked of as the lady who rescued the retiarius; so at any festival or ceremonial in which the Vestals take part, many a dignitary is likely to nudge his neighbor, indicate you and whisper:
”'That's the priestess who walloped Bambilio!' You are not infamous, you are famous.
”As for myself I am the more inclined to feel indulgent towards you because I understand how you felt. You were boiling with rage at being struck by any one, as any n.o.ble girl would be. Yet you would have controlled your fury but for the fact that you knew that you yourself had done nothing to deserve chastis.e.m.e.nt, that you were suffering for another's fault.”
”What!” cried Brinnaria.
”Oh, yes,” Aurelius continued, easily. ”Causidiena and I are quite agreed on that point. Neither she nor I have questioned Meffia, and we do not mean to; partly because we are sure enough, without any admission from her; partly because the matter is best left as it is, without any further notice. But, with the exception of Meffia, it is quite certain that, from the Vestals themselves down to the last slave-girl, every resident of the Atrium believes that not you but Meffia let the fire go out, and that you took the blame due her. And we can all conjecture your motives, as we all applaud them.
”Meffia might never have survived a scourging, might have been ailing for months. Rome wants no sick Vestals nor dead Vestals. Causidiena is grateful to you, all the Atrium is grateful, I am grateful.”
”But,” said Brinnaria, wide-eyed, ”I had supposed that, if Meffia was suspected, there would be an inquisition and testimony under oath and that it would be obligatory that the Vestal actually at fault must be scourged.”
”For once,” the Emperor smiled, ”you have failed to read accurately the statutes of the order. It is positively refres.h.i.+ng. I was beginning to feel that you were altogether too accurate. In fact the scourging of a delinquent Vestal is a mere disciplinary regulation, designed to a.s.sure the maintenance of the fire. It is not in the nature of a mandatory atonement. It has nothing in common with an act of expiation. It has nothing to do with placating or propitiating the G.o.ddess. It has no likeness whatever to the punishment of a guilty Vestal.”
”That reminds me,” said Brinnaria, ”of what I came for. I'm as grateful as possible for what you have said to me, surprised that Causidiena and you so easily saw through my deception, delighted that you take it as you have, more than delighted to find you so kindly disposed towards me.
I need all the kindness you can feel towards me. I want to come to the point, to the reason why I am here. I want you to answer me this question:'Suppose I were accused of the worst possible misconduct, formally accused before you, what then?”
”Then,” said Aurelius, ”you would have a fair trial.”
”I believe I should,” said Brinnaria. ”You would be perfectly fair and entirely just. And a fair trial would be a novelty. Almost never has an accused Vestal had a fair trial.”
”Not even if acquitted?” the Emperor suggested slyly.
”No,” Brinnaria retorted vigorously. ”Even most of those absolved were not tried fairly. Postumia was, if the records from so long ago are to be trusted. The first trial of the third Licinia was perfectly fair, the minutes are very full and there is no shade of bias in the discussion of her many interviews with Cra.s.sus, while the court was plainly genuinely amused at his greed for desirable real-estate and at his artifices to induce her to sell cheap. Fabia, in the same year, was justly treated.
But most of the other acquittals were quite as bad as most of the convictions to my mind. I can discover almost no trial where both sides had a full hearing, where the judges tried to get at the facts and kept their attention on the evidence, where the finding as the expression of the opinions rather than of the partiality of the Pontiffs. Almost every verdict on record, it seems to me, was dictated by favoritism or influence or prejudice or wrath.”
”You seem to think you know a great deal about the subject of trials of Vestals,” Aurelius remarked.
”I feel justified in thinking so,” Brinnaria maintained. ”Where the minutes of the court have perished, as, of course, in the case of all the trials before the capture and burning of the city by the Gauls, I have read what records remain. Where the court records are extant I have pored over every word of the minutes of the proceedings and of every doc.u.ment attached.”
”That is more than ever I found time to do,” Aurelius meditated. ”Your conclusions ought to be of interest. What are they?”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath and went on. ”I am convinced,” she said, ”that sometimes the accused received what she deserved, but generally by accident. The judges were swayed by politics or expediency or clan-feeling or popular clamor or self-interest, not by reason.
”n.o.body could form any judgment, at this distance of time, about the guilt or innocence of Oppia or Opimia or Popilia or Porphilia or Orbilia or Orbinia or whatever her real name was, it all happened so long ago.
But Minucia and s.e.xtilia and Floronia and the rest were just victims of judicial ferocity, as far as I can make out.”
”You are then of the opinion,” the Emperor asked, ”that there never was a guilty Vestal?”
”No,” Brinnaria replied judicially, ”I don't go as far as that.
Varonilla was probably depraved and with her the two Oculatas. I don't think their suicides prove anything against them, for a woman is just as likely to hang herself because she despairs of a fair hearing as because she is conscious of guilt. What weighs with me is that they were brought up in the dissolute times of Messalina and Nero and that their relatives were leaders of the most profligate set in Rome, cronies of Vitellius and his coterie. But although Cornelia was bred and raised in the same social atmosphere, I am quite as sure of her innocence as all the world was the day she was buried and as everybody has been ever since.
Domitian just murdered her without a trial, for political reasons and for moral effect. So likewise Marcia and the second Licinia were judicially murdered by that fierce old Ca.s.sius Longinus Ravilla. He was elected to convict them, not to try them, and he conducted the trial not to arrive at a fair verdict, but to force a conviction. He had some excuse, for their acquittal on their former trial had been brought about by idiotic bribing and family influence. On the face of the evidence at both trials they were clearly blameless. What ruined them was their trying to s.h.i.+eld Aurelia, surely the worst Vestal on record, for she had everything in her favor, ancestry, upbringing and surroundings; she was beyond doubt innately vicious. She was the only Vestal ever justly convicted and justly punished, in my opinion. All the others were irreproachable women, doomed to a frightful fate by prejudiced judges.
In general, an accused Vestal is as good as condemned, the whole population so dreads the results of acquitting an unclean priestess. And it is the easiest thing in the world for a Vestal to be accused. Refuse to sell a farm for half its value, snub a bore, order a slave flogged for some unbearable blunder, and the result is the same; false accusation with perjured witnesses and a quick conviction most likely to follow.”
”The subject seems to have occupied your mind a great deal,” Aurelius ruminated.