Lustrum

much time. I want you to arrange to have all the contents of the house packed up and removed. Some we can store in our old home – there is plenty of room as Quintus is away – and the rest Lucullus is willing to look after for us. This place is being watched, so it needs tobe done piece by piece, to avoid arousing suspicion, the most valuable items first.'
    And that was what we did, beginning that very evening, and continuing over the days and nights that followed. It was a relief to have something to do, while Cicero stayed in his room and refused to see anyone. We hid jewellery and coins in amphorae of wine and olive oil and carted them across the city. We concealed gold and silver dishes beneath our clothes and walked as normally as we could to the house on the Esquiline, where we divested ourselves with a clatter. Antique busts were swaddled in shawls and carried out cradled in the arms of slave girls as if they were babies. Some of the larger pieces of furniture were dismantled and wheeled away like firewood. Rugs and tapestries were wrapped in sheets and trundled off in the direction of the laundry, and then secretly diverted to their hiding place in Lucullus's mansion, which was beyond the Fontinalian Gate, just north of the city.
    I took sole charge of emptying Cicero's library, filling sacks with his most private documents and carrying them myself to the cellar of our old house. On these journeys I always took care to skirt Clodius's headquarters in the Temple of Castor, where gangs of his men loitered ready to chase down Cicero if he dared to show his face. Once I stood at the back of a crowd and listened to Clodius himself denounce Cicero from the tribunes' platform. His domination of the city was absolute. Caesar was with his army on the Field of Mars, preparing to march to Gaul. Pompey had withdrawn from the city and was living in connubial bliss with Julia in his mansion in the Alban Hills. The consuls were beholden to Clodius for their provinces. Clodius had learned how to stimulate the mob as a gigolo might caress his lover. He had them chanting in ecstasy. I could not bear to watch for long.
    We saved the transfer of the most valuable of Cicero's possessions until almost the very end. This was a citrus-wood table he had been given by a client, and which was said to be worth half a million sesterces. We could not dismantle it, so we decided to take it under cover of darkness to Lucullus's house, where it would easily fit in with all the other opulent furniture. We put it on the back of an ox cart, covered it in bales of straw, and set off on the journey of two miles or so. Lucullus's overseer met us at the door carrying a short whip, and told us that a slave girl would show us where to put it. It took four of us to lift that table down, and then the slave led us through the huge, echoing rooms of the house until she pointed to a spot and told us to set it there. My heart was beating fast, and not just from the weight of our burden, but because I had recognised her by then. How could I not? Most nights I had gone to sleep with her face in my mind. Of course I wanted to ask her a hundred questions, but I feared drawing attention to her in front of the overseer. We followed her back the way we had come, retracing our steps to the grand entrance hall, and I could not help noticing how underfed she seemed, the exhausted stoop of her shoulders, and the grey hairs that had appeared among the dark. She was clearly enduring a harsher existence than she had been used to in Misenum – a capricious life, the life of a slave, determined not so much by the status itself as the character of the master: Lucullus would not even have noticed she existed. The front door was open. The others passed through it. Just before I followed, I whispered, 'Agathe!' and she turned round wearily and peered at me in surprise that anyone knew her name, but there was no trace of recognition in those lifeless eyes.

XIX
    The following morning I was talking to Cicero's steward when I glimpsed Cicero cautiously coming downstairs for the first time in two weeks. I caught my breath. It was like seeing a spectre. He had dispensed with his customary toga and was wearing an old black tunic to show he was in mourning. His cheeks were gaunt, his hair straggling, his growth of white beard made him look like an old tramp. When he reached the ground floor he stopped. By this time the house had been almost entirely emptied of its contents. He