Read The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits for Free Online

of Macedon, last and strongest of Rome’s substantial enemies, and the only hopeof the Greek world against the shadow rising in the West. He was so pleased at the way I’d contrived to discredit such a key player as Caius Laelius, framing him for something he hadn’t even done, that I was promoted to controller in chief of Macedonian intelligence operations in the Roman empire. I’m proud that I’ve been able to do something for the Greek cause, and I’ll never forget Acer and his killer, who made it all possible.
    Ah yes, Acer’s killer.
    Vitellius Acer was, of course, killed by the captured elephant penned up in the stockyard adjoining the plunder store. As everybody knows, elephants have a prodigious memory for past injuries, and an uncanny ability to tell humans apart. As soon as it saw the man who’d wounded it during the battle by sticking a spear through its lip, it pulled up the tethering-pins that were holding it down, rushed across the enclosure, grabbed a stone in its trunk (lucky for it that there was a pile of stones just handy, in the form of the catapult balls) and smashed Acer’s head in for him. Acer did his bit by falling on one of the tethering pegs and smearing blood on it (I wiped chicken’s blood on the other side before I showed it to Scipio); and by knocking over the pile of catapult balls. Some tidy-minded squaddie replaced them at some point before I got there, thereby conveniently smuggling the real murder weapon away from the scene – it was taken along with the rest of the pile to the range and used for target practice. It also helped that Licinius, worried about being accused because his hatred of Acer was so well known, exaggerated how long he’d been with Laelius so as to provide himself with an alibi, though it’s just the sort of thing a clown like that might be expected to do. As for the blacksmith’s hammer, that was pure serendipity, or, as I prefer to believe, the gods helping out a righteous cause.
    I was proud of how few outright lies I had to tell Scipio, and how well I blended them in. I am, after all, a trained lawyer.
    Elephants are a bit like Greeks, I guess. They never forget who their enemies are.

A Gladiator Dies Only Once
Steven Saylor
    As Steven Saylor states in his introduction, the following story is something of a homage to the film
Gladiator.
It’s the latest in Saylor’s popular Roma Sub Rosa series featuring Gordianus the Finder, which began with
Roman Blood
(1991). This story, set just before the famous revolt of the slaves led by Spartacus, takes place before the events in the novel
Arms of Nemesis
(1992). Gordianus finds himself trying to solve, not a murder but, a resurrection!
    “A beautiful day for it,” I said begrudgingly. Cicero nodded and squinted up at the filtered red sunlight that penetrated the awning above our seats. Below, in the arena, the first pair of gladiators strode across the sand to meet each other in combat.
    The month was Junius, at the beginning of what promised to be a long, hot summer. The blue sky and undulating green hills were especially beautiful here in the Etrurian countryside outside the town of Saturnia, where Cicero and I, travelling separately from Rome, had arrived the day before to attend the funeral of a local magistrate. Sextus Thorius had been struck down in the prime of life, thrown from hishorse while riding down the Clodian Way to check on the progress of a slave gang doing repair work on the road. The next day, word of his demise reached Rome, where quite a few important persons had felt obligated to attend the funeral.
    Earlier that morning, not a few of the senators and bankers who gathered to watch the funeral procession had raised an eyebrow at the sight of Gordianus the Finder among them; feeling the beady gaze of a prune-faced matron on me, I distinctly overheard her whisper to her husband, “What’s
he
doing here? Does someone suspect foul play at work in the death of Sextus Thorius?” But