第10章 A Woman's Testimony

In the morning she wrapped the codex in cloth, tied it against her body, and went to the forum. The tribunal of the praetor stood at one end of the open square, a raised platform of stone with a wooden rail and a chair that looked, at a distance, like the chair of a teacher waiting for his pupils. In front of it, on the paving, stood the parties of the day: a creditor and a debtor over a loan; two neighbors over a wall; a freedman over an inheritance he swore was his. Everyone who came to the tribunal came with someone who could speak for them. Faustilla looked at the crowd and understood that she had come with no one at all. She got as far as the clerk who kept the order of cases, a thin man with a stack of tablets and the patience of a man who has heard every complaint and believes none of them. "What is your matter?" he asked. "Fraud in the weighing of the grain that feeds the dole," Faustilla said. "I have the reckoning, and tokens, and the name of a clerk who will speak to the false weight and is even now in a cell on a charge that was made up to silence him." The clerk looked up. "You are a citizen?" "I am a freedwoman." "Of what household?" "Of the gens Otacilia. The patron is Otacilius Blandus." "Then it is not your matter," the clerk said, and returned to his tablets. "A freedwoman who brings an action against a freeborn man brings it in the name of her patron, and her patron signs the formula, and her patron stands as her representative, and if the patron will not, then the matter is not before the court at all. Bring your patron's sign, or bring your patron." "My patron will not sign." "Then you have no matter." He said it without unkindness, which somehow made it worse. "The law is not deaf. It is only particular about who is allowed to be heard." She stood there while the cases moved through and the sun climbed the columns, and she watched how a complaint turned into a formula, how a formula turned into a trial, how a trial turned into a judgment that was worth as much as the man who stood behind it. A senator's widow could get a hearing. A freedman with a rich patron could get a hearing. A woman with no patron and no family and a note sewn into her cloak could not get a hearing, not because she was wrong, but because the whole machine was built to weigh the speaker and not the speech. She stayed to watch one case to its end, so that she would know the shape of the thing from the inside. A freedman whose patron had lately died was claiming a sum left to him by will. He had the will, and a witness, and the patron's heir sat against him with his cloak arranged just so. The magistrate heard the freedman, and heard the heir, and gave the sum to the heir, because the heir was a citizen and the witness was only a freedman, and two freedmen's words weigh less in that court than one citizen's. The freedman went away with the will still folded in his hand, which was all the court had allowed him to keep. Could I not speak for myself, she thought. I have a mouth, and I have the papers, and I have counted more grain than the magistrate has seen in his life. Then she understood that a mouth is not the same thing as standing, and that the court did not measure what a person knew, only what a person was. She was turning to go when a man fell into step beside her, plainly dressed, with a tablet under his arm, and he said, quietly, "You are the Otacilian freedwoman. The clerk of the court sent me. I take small cases, and I take them for small fees, and I am telling you now that yours is the sort of case that ruins an advocate. But I have heard what you did at the dole, and I have a daughter who eats that bread, so I will tell you what I know, and then you can decide whether you want to spend your life on it." He walked her to the shade of a colonnade and spoke for a while, and what he told her was this. A complaint about the grain supply was not a private matter; it belonged to the office of the grain prefect, and the office belonged to the Emperor, and the Emperor's men did not wish to hear that the bread of the city was short. If she brought it to the magistrate, and the magistrate referred it to the office, then the office would investigate itself. If she brought it to the people, she would be a woman making a noise in the street, and a woman making a noise in the street could be arrested for it, as a disturber of the peace, whatever the truth of her cause. The only road that had ever worked, he said, was the road of a great name: someone whose dignity was itself a kind of evidence. And she had just been dismissed by the only great name she had. "Then I have nothing," Faustilla said. "You have the thing itself," the advocate said. "You told the clerk you have tokens and a reckoning. A thing can be carried into a crowded place at the wrong moment for the men who own it. I am only telling you that if you do that, they will come for you with the law, and the law will be on their side, and there will be nobody to speak for you." As if to prove it, there was a man waiting for her at the corner of the colonnade. He had a waxed diptych in his hand, and he read from it in a loud, level voice so that everyone in the street could hear: that Faustilla, freedwoman of the Otacilian house, stood accused of the theft of a clay token and a quantity of grain from the Ash Wharf; that she should appear before the magistrate on the next lawful day; and that whoever harbored her should know that she was a thief. He read it twice, and then he gave her the diptych and went away. Faustilla stood in the colonnade with the summons in her hands, and the crowd flowed around her, and she understood that they had begun, at last, to take her seriously. ---