Lustrum

then a shrewder instinct checked me. There was a row of shops opposite the great mansion, and I pretended to browse forjewellery, all the time keeping an eye on Caesar's door. I saw his mother arrive in a litter, and then his wife leave by the same means, looking very young and beautiful. Various people went in and out, but no one I recognised. After about an hour the impatient shopkeeper announced that he wished to close, and he ushered me out on to the street just as the unmistakable bald head of Crassus emerged from a small carriage and darted through the doorway into Caesar's home. I lingered for a while but no one else appeared, and not wishing to push my luck any further, I slipped away to give Cicero the news.
    He had left the senate house by this time, and I found him at home, working on his correspondence. 'Well, at least that clears up one mystery,' he said, when I described what I had seen. 'We now know where Caesar got the twenty million to buy his office. It didn't all come from Crassus. A lot of it must have come from the Warden of Land and Sea.' He tilted back in his chair and became very pensive, for, as he later observed, 'When the chief general in the state, the chief moneylender and the chief priest all start meeting together, the time has come for everyone else to be on their guard.'
    It was around this time that Terentia began to play an important role in Cicero's consulship. People often wondered why Cicero was still married to her after fifteen years, for she was excessively pious and had little beauty and even less charm. But she had something rarer. She had character. She commanded respect, and increasingly as the years went on he sought her advice. She had no interest in philosophy or literature, no knowledge of history; not much learning of any sort, in fact. However, unburdened by education or natural delicacy, she did possess arare gift for seeing straight through to the heart of a thing, be it a problem or a person, and saying exactly what she thought.
    To begin with, not wishing to alarm her, Cicero did not mention Catilina's oath to murder him. But it was typical of Terentia's shrewdness that she soon discovered it for herself. As a consul's wife she had supervision of the cult of the Good Goddess. I cannot tell you what this entailed, as everything to do with the goddess and her serpent-infested temple on the Aventine is closed to men. All I know is that one of Terentia's fellow priestesses, a patriotic woman of noble family, came to her one day in a tearful state and warned her that Cicero's life was in danger, and that he should be on his guard. She refused to say more. But naturally Terentia would not leave it at that, and by a combination of flattery, cajolery and threats which must have been worthy of her husband, she slowly extracted the truth. Having done so, she then forced the unfortunate woman to come back to the house and repeat her story to the consul.
    I was working with Cicero in his study when Terentia threw open the door. She did not knock; she never did. Being both richer than Cicero and more nobly born, she tended not to show the customary deference of wife to husband. Instead, she simply announced: 'There is someone here you must see.'
    'Not now,' he said, without looking up. 'Tell them to go away.'
    But Terentia stood her ground. 'It's ——,' she said, and here she named the lady, whose identity I shall conceal, not for her sake (she is long dead) but for the honour of her descendants.
    'And why should I see
her
?' grumbled Cicero, and for the first time he glanced up irritably at his wife. But then he noticed the grimness of her expression and his tone changed. 'What is it, woman? What's wrong?'
    'You need to listen for yourself.' She stood aside to reveal amatron of rare if fading beauty whose eyes were red and puffy from weeping. I made as if to leave, but Terentia ordered me very firmly to stay where I was. 'The slave is a highly skilled note-taker,' she explained to the visitor, 'and entirely discreet. If he so much as breathes a word to anyone, I can assure you I shall have him skinned alive.' And she gave me a look that left me in no doubt that she would do precisely that.
    The subsequent meeting was almost as embarrassing for Cicero, who had a prudish streak, as it was for the lady, who was obliged, under prompting from Terentia, to confess that for several years she had been the mistress of Quintus Curius. He was a dissolute senator and friend of