Imperium

spot—fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle and myrtle, and silent save for the twittering of the birds—was redolent of good taste and old money. Even the steward looked like an aristocrat, and when I said I had a personal message for his master from Senator Cicero, you might have thought I had farted, such an exquisite expression of distaste spread across his bony face at the mention of the name. He wanted to take the cylinder from me, but I refused, so he bade me wait in the atrium, where the masks of all Hortensius’s consular ancestors stared down at me with their blank, dead eyes. Displayed on a three-legged table in the corner was a sphinx, wonderfully carved from a single huge piece of ivory, and I realized that this must be the very sphinx which Verres had given to his advocate all those years ago, and which Cicero had made his joke about. I was just stooping to examine it when Hortensius came into the room behind me.
    “Well,” he said, as I stood up, feeling guilty, “I never thought to see a representative of Marcus Cicero under the roof of my ancestors. What is all this about?”
    He was wearing his full senatorial rig, but with slippers on his feet instead of shoes, and was obviously still getting ready to depart for the morning’s debate. It seemed strange to me, too, to see the old enemy unarmored, as it were, outside the arena. I gave him Cicero’s letter, which he broke open and read in front of me. When he saw the names it mentioned, he gave me a sharp glance, and I could tell that he was hooked, although he was too well bred to show it.
    “Tell him I shall inspect it at my leisure,” he said, taking the document from me, and strolled back the way he had come, as if nothing less interesting had ever been placed in his manicured hands—although I am sure that the moment he was out of sight he must have run to his library and broken open the seal. For myself, I went back out into the fresh air and descended to the city by the Caci Steps, partly because I had time to kill before the Senate convened and could afford to take a long way around, and partly because the other route took me nearer to the house of Crassus than I cared to go. I came out into that district on the Etruscan road where all the perfume and incense shops are located, and the scented air and the weight of my tiredness combined to make me feel almost drugged. My mood was oddly separated from the real world and its concerns. By this time tomorrow, I remember thinking, the voting on the Field of Mars would be well under way, and we would probably know whether Cicero was to be consul or not, and in either event the sun would shine and in the autumn it would rain. I lingered in the Forum Boarium and watched the people buying their flowers and their fruit and all the rest of it, and wondered what it would be like not to have any interest in politics but simply to live, as the poet has it, vita umbratilis, “a life in the shade.” That was what I planned to do when Cicero gave me my freedom and my farm. I would eat the fruit I grew and drink the milk of the goats I reared; I would shut my gate at night and never give a fig for another election. It was the closest to wisdom I have ever come.
    By the time I eventually reached the Forum, two hundred or more senators had assembled in the senaculum and were being watched by a crowd of curious gawkers—out-of-towners, to judge by their rustic dress, who had come to Rome for the elections. Figulus was sitting on his consular chair in the doorway of the Senate House, the augurs beside him, waiting for a quorum, and every so often there was a minor commotion as a candidate erupted into the Forum with his corona of supporters. I saw Catilina arrive, with his curious mixture of young aristocrats and the dregs of the streets, and then Hybrida, whose rackety assemblage of debtors and gamblers, such as Sabidius and Panthera, seemed quite respectable by comparison. The senators began to file into the chamber and I was just beginning to wonder if some mishap had befallen Cicero when, from the direction of the Argiletum, came the noise of drums and flutes, and then two columns of young men rounded the corner into the Forum, carrying freshly cut boughs above their heads, with children scampering excitedly all around them. These were followed by a mass of respectable Roman knights led by Atticus, and then came Quintus with a dozen or so backbench senators. Some maids were scattering rose