Lustrum

enemy coming,' he hissed, 'there's an enemy coming, understand? And do you know how I know there's an enemy coming, even though you can't see anything?' He gave the man's hair avicious tug, which made him grunt. 'Because I'm a fucking
augur
, that's why. Now take down that flag, and sound the alarm.'
    Nobody argued after that. One of the sentries unfastened the rope and hauled down the flag, while another picked up his trumpet and blew several piercing blasts. I looked across the river to the Field of Mars and the thousands all standing around there, but the distance was too great to judge immediately what was happening. Only gradually did it become apparent that the crowd was draining away, and that the clouds of dust rising at the edge of the field were being raised by people fleeing to their homes. Cicero described to me afterwards the effect of the trumpet and the realisation that the flag was coming down. Labienus had tried to calm the crowd and assure them it was a trick, but people in a mass are as stupid and easily frightened as a school of fish or a herd of beasts. In no time word spread that the city was about to be attacked. Despite the pleas of Labienus and his fellow tribunes, voting had to be abandoned. Many of the fences of the sheep pens were smashed by the stampeding citizens. The stand where Lucullus and Metellus had been sitting was knocked over and trampled to pieces. There was a fight. A pickpocket was stabbed to death. The pontifex maximus, Metellus Pius, suffered some kind of seizure and had to be rushed back to the city, unconscious. According to Cicero, only one man remained calm, and that was Gaius Rabirius, rocking back and forth on his bench, alone on the deserted platform amid the chaos, his eyes closed, humming to himself some strange and discordant tune.
    For a few weeks after the uproar on the Field of Mars it seemed that Cicero had won. Caesar in particular went very quiet, and made no attempt to renew the case against Rabirius. On thecontrary: the old man retired to his house in Rome, where he lived on, in a world of his own, entirely unmolested, until a year or so later, when he died. It was the same story with the populists' bill. Cicero's coup in buying off Hybrida had the effect of encouraging other defections, including one of the tribunes, who was bribed by the patricians to switch sides. Blocked in the senate by Cicero's coalition, and threatened with a veto in the popular assembly, Rullus's immense bill, the product of so much labour, was never heard of again.
    Quintus was in a great good humour. 'If this were a wrestling match between you and Caesar,' he declared, 'it would all be over. Two falls decide the winner, and you have now laid him out flat twice.'
    'Unfortunately,' replied Cicero, 'politics is neither as clean as a wrestling match, nor played according to fixed rules.'
    He was absolutely certain that Caesar was up to something, otherwise his inactivity made no sense. But what was it? That was the mystery.
    At the end of January, Cicero's first month as president of the senate was completed. Hybrida took over the curule chair and Cicero busied himself with his legal work. His lictors gone, he went down to the forum escorted by a couple of stout fellows from the Order of Knights. Atticus was as good as his word: they stayed close, but not so conspicuously that anyone suspected they were other than the consul's friends. Catilina made no move. Whenever he and Cicero encountered one another, which was inevitable in the cramped conditions of the senate house, he would ostentatiously turn his back. Once I thought I saw him draw his finger across his throat as Cicero passed by, but nobody else seemed to notice. Caesar, needless to say, was all affability, and indeed congratulated Cicero on the power of his speechesand the skill of his tactics. That was a lesson to me. The really successful politician detaches his private self from the insults and reverses of public life, so that it is almost as if they happen to someone else; Caesar had that quality more than any man I ever met.
    Then one day came the news that Metellus Pius, the pontifex maximus, had died. It was not entirely a surprise. The old soldier was nearer seventy than sixty and had been ailing for several years. He never regained consciousness after the stroke he suffered on the Field of Mars. His body lay in state in his official residence, the old palace of the kings, and Cicero, as a senior magistrate, took