Detectives in Togas

Detectives in Togas

Book cover (2003)
Author	Henry Winterfeld
Original title	Caius ist ein Dummkopf
Translator	Richard and Clara Winston
Illustrator	Charlotte Kleinert
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Children's literature
Publisher	Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published	1956
Media type	Print
OCLC	48846777
Followed by	Mystery of the Roman Ransom Caius in der Klemme

Detectives in Togas (original title: Caius ist ein Dummkopf; "Caius is an Idiot") is a children's book written by Henry Winterfeld, and translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. Set in ancient Rome, the story follows a group of schoolboys who try to solve several crimes: the attack on their teacher and the desecration of a temple wall.

Detectives in Togas was published in 1956, and reissued in 1984, 1990, and 2003. It was marketed for children ages 9–12. It was followed by two sequels: Caius geht ein Licht auf ("Caius has a Revelation"; English title: Mystery of the Roman Ransom) and Caius in der Klemme ("Caius is in Trouble").

Synopsis

Detectives in Togas

The story opens in the midst of a Greek vocabulary class in the Xanthos School. A prank played by Rufus on Caius, which involves a wax tablet with the inscription "Caius is an idiot", severely backfires when Caius takes offense and triggers a fight with Rufus. Enraged at Rufus' act of subterfuge, Xantippus permanently dismisses him from his school, and Rufus leaves in deep dejection. When the rest of the pupils (sans Caius, who is skipping the day) arrive at the school the next morning, they find the classroom and adjacent living quarters ravaged and Xantippus, bound and gagged, locked inside his closet. After being rescued, Xantippus tells them that he was knocked out by a burglar the night before, and with his leg injured during the attack, he is forced to suspend school until healed. He also admits that Rufus' dismissal was only meant to be a wholesome lesson and that he is welcome to return to the school.

The boys head back to their homes on the Esquilinus to inform Rufus about the good news when they are shocked to discover the words "Caius is an idiot" painted on the wall of the local Minerva temple. Before they can attempt to remove the writing, Caius' sister Claudia, whose home is adjacent to the temple, warns them that her father has seen the graffiti and that Caius has implicated Rufus. Alarmed, the boys rush to Rufus to warn him, finding him uncharacteristically downcast and secretive. Rufus swears that he didn't commit the desecration and surmises that someone else must have forged his handwriting. The boys return to the Xanthos School to get the wax tablet, but find it missing. Instead, they discover a gold chain (a cloak clasp) which Xantippus recognizes as the property of the burglar.

As the boys return to the Vinicius villa to plead with the senator, they pass a billboard featuring the daily public news, including an anonymous writ describing the desecration and blaming Rufus by name. Retreating quickly, the boys meet Vinicius, but their attempts to placate him are futile, and the angered senator insists on seeing Rufus. But as the boys go to inform him, Rufus' mother Livia tells them to their horror that Rufus has already been denounced and arrested. As the search Rufus' room, they find his clothes thoroughly soaked; and just then Rompus, a slave of the household, returns with important news: Rufus' father, General Marcus Praetonius, recently thought to have lost an important battle in Germania, has turned his supposed defeat into an overwhelming victory. When Rompus learns that Rufus has been arrested, he breaks down and confesses that he witnessed Rufus acting strangely upon his return from school the previous evening, later ran away from the villa and did not return before the following morning, with his clothes soaked. When Rompus threatened to tell Livia about this, Rufus suddenly implored him to keep silent for his father's sake, without elaborating on the reason why. This leads to the boys and Livia to suspect that Rufus was being blackmailed into scrawling on the temple wall, and proving his innocence would thus result in his release.

The boys decide to consult Lukos, a famed foreign seer and reputed sorcerer whose abode lies right across the Xanthos School. They enter his home and present the gold chain so he can find out the burglar's identity, but they are inexplicably chased out of his house, leaving the chain behind. Mucius, who has in the meantime found Rufus' cloak inside the house, is accidentally locked in, but finds an alterantive escape via a ladder to the roof. Blinded by a storm, Mucius ends up falling through an opening in the roof of a neighboring bathhouse and lands in a pool that is being drained for the night, which saves his life. Locked inside the building, he is found by a bath keeper the next morning and learns from him that Rufus had also landed in the same bath last night.

After convening in their headquarters, a hidden cave in the cliffside of the Esquilinus, the boys, rejoined by Caius, try to formulate a plea to the Emperor himself to pardon Rufus when Xantippus, who was informed by Livia, tracks them down. After finding their accumulated "evidence" useless for the task, he collects the details the boys have found out and comes to the realization that the writ on the billboard was handed in for publication before the temple wall was desecrated. After some investigation at the Censor's office, they learn to their surprise that the writ was handed in by Tellus, a famous ex-consul known for his lavish parties. Xantippus suspects that one of Tellus' guests must have committed the sacrilege, and Antonius is sent to Tellus under a pretense to study the guest list of that particular day. Arriving in the midst of a feast, Antonius is plied with alcohol by Tellus; but while giving his host the slip, he finds the gold chain and its accompanying cloak inside Tellus' bedroom, indicating a relationship between Tellus and Lukos. As Xantippus and his students ponder this, they are visited by a former jail prisoner who was in the same cell as Rufus; Rufus sent him to tell his friends to "rip the sheep's pelt off the wolf".

While Xantippus and the boys try in vain to decipher the scant clues they have, Antonius suddenly spots Tellus sneaking into a bakery next to Lukos' house. Xantippus sends the boys after him, who discover that the bakery's backyard offers an alternate entryway to Lukos' abode. They sneak inside, but are trapped by Lukos, who confesses that he, not Tellus, is responsible for the burglary in the school, the smearing of the temple wall, and Rufus' arrest because the boy had found out his most important secret. As he prepares to lock them up, the boys attack him and knock him out, and discover to their bafflement that Lukos is Tellus in disguise (with the name Lukos being derived from the Greek word "ho lukos" = "the wolf").

When Tellus recovers his consciousness, he confesses that he posed as a clairvoyant to pay off the massive debts he had accumulated due to his costly lifestyle, abusing his friendships and trust in Rome's high society, even with the Emperor himself. Rufus had sought Lukos out to charm Xanthos into forgetting about his dismissal, but thereby discovered his true identity. Tellus managed to coerce him into silence by threatening to have his father executed for his defeat in Germania, whereupon Rufus fled up the ladder and subsequently landed in the bathhouse. But right afterwards, Lukos received a final visitor who informed him of Praetonius' actual victory, long before the news was made public. Knowing that his stranglehold on Rufus was gone, Tellus decided to implicate him by stealing the wax tablet and using it as a stencil. In his impatient haste to see Rufus silenced, he also sent the writ to the Censor's office and, when things weren't working out quickly enough, he reported him to the urban prefect; he had also arranged for Rufus to be secretly taken away to end his life as a galley slave.

Tellus implores the boys to leave and fetch help, to buy himself time to destroy all evidence of his double life. The boys force him to write a confession, but then Lukos tries to trick them. Foiled, he flees up the ladder to the roof just as Vinicius, Xantippus and a group of praetorians arrive to rescue them. The party tracks Tellus to the bathhouse, where they find him dead after a fatal plunge into an already drained pool. Rufus is freed just in time, and after Xantippus' recovery all the boys return to school, where Caius humorously ends up proving his slow-wittedness to be true, causing Xantippus, for the first time before his students, to break out in hilarious laughter.

Mystery of the Roman Ransom

One year after the events of the first book, Xantippus' students try to do their teacher a birthday favor by gifting him a deaf-mute Gallic slave named Udo, although Antonius has come up with the alternative idea of giving him a tame lion to guard the school. Xantippus refuses both offers, since a slave's upkeep would be too expensive and the lion would keep him out of the classroom, and asks the boys to return Udo to his former owner, the slave trader Callon. However, when they arrive, only an old slave answers the door, telling them that Callon fled after he was threatened by a huge, one-eyed ex-gladiator named Gorgon who was asking for Udo. While wandering around, wondering what to do about their charge, the boys run into Gorgon, who immediately tries to abduct Udo. Caius incapacitates the ex-gladiator by putting a pot of honey over his head, and the boys retreat with Udo to their secret cave. As they decide to deliver Udo to the police, Udo suddenly speaks up and confesses that he only pretended to be deaf and dumb to protect his life.

Udo explains that he is the personal slave of Marcius Patricius Pollino, a former military commander and now governor of a Gallic province at the Rhine. He explains that his master sent him to Rome with an important message, but once he arrived in the dead of night, he found the meeting point to be a graveyard. Unsettled, Udo decided to hide, and thus ended up listening in on the recipients of the message: A short, fat man, and ex-gladiator Gorgon. From their conversation, Udo learned that the letter contains instructions for Gorgon to murder an important Roman senator, alarming the boys since the list of possible victims includes their fathers. Udo also discovered that he was to be murdered ass soon as he had delivered the letter. As he subsequently fled the graveyard, he hid in a cellar to sleep, but was chased out by a woman and ran until he ran into a band of gladiators, who sold him to Callon. Gorgon later evidently heard about Udo's whereabouts from his comrades and went to fetch him, only to be thwarted by the boys.

Just at that moment, Xantippus arrives to rebuke the boys for their fight against Gorgon. The boys inform him about the conspiracy, and when Xantippus questions Udo, he divulges that before he was sent to Rome, Pollino has had frequent visits by a stranger, with whom he had discussed the planned assassination, a brown bear which is to be sent to a zoo in Rome, and the Teutoburg Forest. After deducing from Udo's descriptions where to find the lost letter, the boys retrieve it, but they and Xantippus only find a list of unrelated names. As they ponder over their significance, Caius suddenly discovers that these names must be read in a certain way, thus revealing the name of the senator to be murdered: Vinicius, his own father. Impatient, Caius runs off to fetch Tiro, his fahter's private secretary, and alert the city prefect, Lucius Terrentius Manilius, to protect his father. As Udo hears the name, he belatedly remembers that this is the name of his master's visitor, and Xantippus immediately sends the boys after Caius.

When the boys arrive at the Villa Vinicius, they are too late, and soon afterwards Tiro returns and reports that Caius was kidnapped by Gorgon, but the letter is still safe. The boys tell Caius' sister Claudia and Tiro about the conspiracy, and deduce that Gorgon will likely meet with the fat man in the graveyard the following night to inform him about the loss of the letter. After spending the early night in the villa, the boys rush to the graveyard and indeed encounter the conspirators. After they end their discussion, the two men split up; Mucius pursues the fat man, while Antonius goes after the ex-gladiator, and the remaining boys return to their school to inform Xantippus about Caius' abduction. Just then, Antonius returns, clad in gladiator garb, to tell them an incredible tale: He had followed Gorgon to the Colosseum, and infiltrating its dungeons, he found Caius in one of the cells. However, he was captured by the gladiators, locked in a vault, and had a lion released on him. Luckily, however, the lion turned out to be Ramses, the very lion Antonius wanted to gift to Xantippus. After escaping the Colosseum together, Antonius brought Ramses to the school, where he is sheltered in Xantippus' backyard.

As Xantippus and his pupils wait for Mucius, they become troubled, especially after they find that Udo has inexplicably run away. After Rufus has left to keep a lookout for Mucius, the school is suddenly raided by Gorgon and Minimos, a dwarf gladiator, who demand Udo from them. Then Gorgon discovers that Xantippus and the boys know about the letter and finds Vinicius' name conveniently written down by Caius; but before he can act on this information, Rufus returns, frees Ramses and sneaks him into the back of the two gladiators. Gorgon is overpowered and captured, while Minimos flees.

In the meantime, Mucius has been following the fat man, to discover to his surprise that the conspirator is none other than city prefect Manilius. After a messenger arrives and delivers some news to Manilius, the prefect swiftly descends to the river docks, where he informs a barque's captain, who is also in on the conspiracy, that Pollino, who has been on its way to Rome to see the assassination succeed, has been arrested by Vinicius. The two men decide to immediately flee to Ethiopia after throwing a certain "Cerberus" overboard. Just then, Mucius is discovered and chased by the barque's crew, but escapes and rejoins his friends at the school.

Just before Xantippus and the boys can take action, Caius suddenly appears, having been freed by Udo after he had heard Antonius' tale. Caius informs them that he had returned to his home and informed his father about the plot against his life. He also learned that the conspiracy revolves around the aftermath of the battle in the Teutoburg Forest; a handful of legionnaires had escaped the massacre and buried the annihilated legions' warchest, which contained over ten million sestertii in gold. Only one of the legionnaires, Manilius, has survived, and he recovered the gold with the help of his brother-in-law, Pollino. The Emperor, however, learned of this and tasked Vinicius to recover the gold, but Pollino, who has hidden the gold, has committed suicide shortly after his capture, taking his secret to the grave. For this failure, the Emperor has sentenced the entire Vinicius family to slavery in the marble quarries on Paros.

The boys immediately rush to the villa to save the Vinicius family, only to find that the Emperor has already sent several agents to arrest Vinicius. However, just then Xantippus arrives with Udo, who has returned after freeing the other captives at the Colosseum. From Udo's story, Xantippus has deduced that the gold is hidden in the cage of the brown bear Pollino had shipped to Rome, with the bear serving as its guardian. This comment makes Mucius realize that the cage with the bear has been loaded onto the barque, with Pollino having intended to cheat his partners out of their share. Vinicius and the Imperial agents immediately set out to chase down the barque. After settling his debts with the boys, Xantippus calls Udo in and declares that he will secure his release so he can return home to Gaul, and Caius thanks Udo wholeheartedly for saving his life.

Caius Is In Trouble

One year after their last adventure, Caius does not appear in school. On Xantippus' questioning, the other boys report that most of them last saw him two nights ago, when they all went to fetch tickets at the Circus Maximus for a highly anticipated chariot race featuring celebrated racer Ben Gor, which is to take place within the next few days. However, the tickets were all sold out. Caius then declared that he would be able to get tickets; when his friends laughed at him, Caius stormed off in a rage, promising to prove them wrong. Only Mucius saw hm again on the day after, on a hoiiday, with a mule and rope ladder in tow, though Caius did not elaborate on their purpose.

Given a break by Xantippus, the boys head for Villa Vinicius to look after Caius, but the villa's doorkeeper startles them with the news that Caius is dead and being buried. The boys immediately return to the school to tell Xantippus, but just then Quintus, a retired centurion who had served under Vinicius, arrives with a package from Caius' sister Claudia, one day late because the school had been closed on the holiday. Xantippus discovers a secret message imploring him to seek out Ben Gor, the only person who could save Caius, who was sentenced to death by the Emperor and about to be executed. However, with the delayed delivery of the message, any help for Caius is now too late to do any good. Shaken by the news, Xantippus closes the school for the next day to give the boys and himself time to process the loss.

The next day, the boys return to Villa Vinicius, where they meet Claudia. She tells them that she has no idea why Caius was executed, and she can tell the boys that Ben Gor is a friend of the Vinicius family; he was a Galilean who rebelled against Rome, was imprisoned and sentenced to death; but Vinicius pardoned him, took him to Rome as a personal slave, and later liberated him, earning Ben Gor's eternal gratitude. Ben Gor is considered a national hero in Rome, with even the Emperor being one of his most ardent fans, leading the boys to believe that Caius must have somehow offended the Emperor while attempting to gets spare tickets from Ben Gor. But just after Claudia has finished detailing Caius' execution, she and the boys are in for a shock when they see Mopsa, Claudia's pet cat, alive after she had been used as a guinea pig for the poison which was then administered to Caius. The boys quickly realize that if the poison did not work on Mopsa, Caius might still be alive, and they rush for the Vinicius mausoleum, where Caius's coffin has been stored. Inside the coffin, which is strangely riddled with air holes, they find their friend, alive but unable to stand up. Thus, they boys decide to carry the coffing through the city in order to reach their secret cave, but their strength fails them, and so they ferry it to the Xanthos School, which is much closer.

After overcoming the shock to see Caius alive, Xantippus begins questioning him. To his friends' horror, Caius reveals that he was accused of intending to assassinate the Emperor. After he had separated from the other boys that night, he went straight to Ben Gor to ask him for spare tickets. Ben didn't have any, but suggested that Caius should go to the Emperor to ask him for some; however, he could not accompany him. With the imperial palace closed for the holiday, Caius, obsessed with getting the tickets, rented a mule from a public stable and procured a rope ladder to climb over the palace walls. He succeeded, but was arrested and knocked out by two Praetorian guards before he could explain himself, and subsequently found himself sentenced to death. As a consequence, helping Caius in evading the Emperor's "justice" is tantamount to high treason. While Ben Gor could appeal to the Emperor, the day of the race is today, and Ben Gor is already at the guarded stables at the Circus, looking after his horses, and to get past the guards a password is needed. To make matters worse, the Emperor intends to move to his retreat on Capri right after the race, making the time window for a successful appeal very slim. When asked about the password, Caius can only remember that it is the name of either "a man who nearly drowned" or "a woman who won a horrible battle".

While Xantippus prepares a secret chamber in his house for Caius, the latter remembers that he recently visited Ben Gor in Claudia's company, so she might know the password as well. Before the boys can set out for the Villa Vinicius, a thunderstorm strikes, forcing them to stay. Right afterwards, a group of Praetorians and an officer of the Emperor's secret police arrive and arrest the boys after it was discovered that Caius' coffin had been taken away; while the agents attempted to arrest Caius' family too, they have somehow escaped. The boys are locked in a dungeon cell, but to their surprise they are unexpectedly visited by Ben Gor, who was alerted by Xantippus. Ben Gor tells the boys that he had explained everything to the Emperor, but the Emperor would only pardon Caius and his friends if he wins the race, since he has secretly bet a large sum of money on Ben. Encouraging the boys, Ben Gor prepares for the race against his rival, the Spaniard Icarus. Even though Icarus plays unfairly, Ben Gor prevails and scores a triumphant victory.

Three days later, the boys and Xantippus assemble at the school; all but Caius, who has returned home for a forgotten cloak. As they summarize the aftermath of their adventure, Xantippus tells his pupils that it was the thunderstorm that revealed the password to him; Caius had simply mixed up the two persons in his descriptions, making it a woman who nearly drowned (Pyrrha) and a man who won a horrible battle (Pyrrhus), with Pyrrhus representing the sad fate awaiting many gladiators despite the chance for glory and thus making up the password. In turn, the boys relate that Senator Vinicius never intended to execute his son. Instead of giving him deadly poison, he used a sleeping potion, and he had intended to recover his son from the mausoleum and hide his family in Africa. After Caius disappeared from the mausoleum, Quintus was warned by a friend in the secret police, and he brought Vinicius and Claudia to safety. Despite all the mishaps, however, this adventures ended happily with Caius' official pardon after Ben Gor's victory.

As the boys and Xantippus grow troubled, Caius suddenly arrives without his cloak. As he tells his friends, he was intercepted by Vincelli, the owner of the stables he had rented the mule from. The mule had returned very late after Caius had abandoned it, and Vincelli demanded the outstanding fees from him. With no money on him, Caius was forced to promise him tickets for Ben Gor's next race and leave his cloak as a collateral. After hearing this, the other boys break out in laughter at this irony; and although first offended, Caius eventually joins in.

Characters

Caius

The son of Vinicius, a very influential senator. Despite being the featured character in the German titulations, he habitually plays a more secondary role in the stories. He is somewhat slow-witted, stubborn and has a very short temper, and tends to inadvertently plunge his friends into deep trouble (thereby forming the base of their adventures).

Xanthos/"Xantippus"

A Greek scholar who has opened a private school for the sons of wealthy patricians in the heart of Rome. Because of his stern and critical manner, his pupils have given him the nickname "Xantippus", based on Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates. However, whenever the boys get involved in dangerous adventures, he is a ready and very valuable source of knowledge and experience.

Mucius

The oldest of Xanthos' pupils, and as the most level-headed, also the leader of their band. His father is a famous tribune named Marius Domitius.

Rufus

The son of Marcus Praetonius, a famous general of modest wealth. He has an open crush on Caius' sister Claudia.

Antonius

The son of a senator. He is the most adventurous and imaginative of the boys, eager to dream up fanciful confrontations with all sorts of villains, monsters and other dangerous enemies.

Flavius

A senator's son. He is the most cowardly of the boys, but also extremely faithful to his friends and always tags along on their exploits.

Julius

The son of a senator and judge, and therefore quite knowledgable about Roman law. As the most frugal of the boys, he is also their treasurer.

Publius

Son of a senator, and the group's most vociferous complainer who regularly tangles with Caius.

Claudia

Caius' younger sister. Despite her tender years (11-13, as the series progresses), she has assumed the role of the Vinicius household's matron upon her mother's death.

Senator Vinicius

Caius and Claudia's father, and a high-ranking member of the Roman Senate. He is occasionally entrusted with confidential missions by the Emperor.

Reception

In the journal Elementary English, the reviewer calls it a "rousing detective story" and notes that Winterfeld was inspired by actual graffiti found during the excavation of Pompeii. The journal The Classical World says Detectives in Togas is a "simple and lively story". A reviewer in the library journal Collection Management says it "adds life to the study of ancient civilizations".

The Christian Science Monitor says Detective in Togas "neatly succeeds in constructing a lesson in ancient history around the plot of a whodunit and spinning the whole thing into a great tale for middle school readers". A reviewer in Huntingdon Daily News says the book has a "fascinating setting", and is "full of suspense and excitement".

Kirkus Reviews describes it as "A good story and with its careful attention to Roman ways, this has its sparkle too" and Publishers Weekly calls it "delightful and witty". For the 2003 reissue, reviewer Terri Schmitz says it is "action-packed and filled with details about what daily life was like for patrician Roman boys, providing painless history lessons along with the rousing story lines." The Guardian says readers "end up learning loads of interesting information about Ancient Rome as you go along - and even a bit of Latin!"