Old Stagers

M. Didius Falco/Dillius Braco a well-known Roman

Helena Justina a heroine (a loyal reader)

Ma (Junilla Tacita) a canny depositor

Pa (Geminus) a chipped old block

Maia Favonia (a sister) a late-developing job-seeker

Junia (another sister) a skilled staff manager

Rutilius Gallicus a high profile spare time scribbler

Anacrites a low lyer with variable interests

A. Camillus Aelianus an ill-equipped aristocratic trainee

Gloccus and Cotta invisible bathhouse contractors

Numerous children, dogs, pregnancies and pups

The Vigiles

Petronius Longus a stand-in looking for a fair cop

Fusculus an old hand with attitude

Passus a new boy with a taste for adventure

Sergius an official bruiser

The World of the Arts

Aurelius Chrysippus a patron of literature (a swine)

Euschemon a scroll-seller (a good critic) (a what?)

Avienus a historian with writer's block

Turius a utopian with allergies (to work)

Urbanus Trypho the Shakespeare (Bacon?) of his day

Anna, Trypho's wife who may have a way with her

Pacuvius (Scrutator) a bad-mouthing satirist (extinct species)

Constrictus a love poet who needs to be dumped,

Blitis from a writers' group (not writing at present)

From Commerce

Nothokleptes a thieving bastard (a banker)

Aurelius Chrysippus (him again) a secretive businessman

Lucrio a personal banking executive (unsafe deposits)

Bos a big man who explains bank charges

Diomedes a very religious son with artistic hobbies

Lysa (first wife of Chrysippus) a maker of men and their businesses (hard feelings)

Vibia (second wife of ditto) a keen home-maker (soft furnishings)

Pisarchus a shipping magnate who may be sunk

Philomelus his son, a drudge with a dream

Stock Characters

Domitian a Young Prince (a hater)

Aristagoras an Old Man (a lover?)

An old woman a Witness

Perella a Dancer

POETRY SHOULD have been safe.

`Take your writing tablets up to our new house,' suggested Helena Justina, my elegant partner in life. I was struggling against shock and physical exhaustion, acquired during a dramatic underground rescue. Publicly, the vigiles took the credit, but I was the mad volunteer who had been lowered head first down a shaft on ropes. It had made me a hero for about a day, and I was mentioned by name (misspelled) in the Daily Gazette. `Just sit and relax in the garden,' soothed Helena, after I had rampaged about our tiny Roman apartment for several weeks. `You can supervise the bathhouse contractors.'

`I can supervise them if they bother to turn up.'

`Take the baby. I may come too – we have so many friends abroad nowadays, I ought to work on The Collected Letters of Helena Justina.'

`Authorship?'

What – by a senator's daughter? Most are too stupid and too busy counting their jewellery. None are ever encouraged to reveal their literary skills, assuming they have them. But then, they are not supposed to live with informers either.

`Badly needed,' she said briskly. `Most published letters are by smug men with nothing to say.'

Was she serious? Was she privately romancing? Or was she just twisting the rope on my pulley to see when I snapped? 'Ah well,' I said mildly. `You sit in the shade of a pine tree with your stylus and your great thoughts, fruit. I can easily run around after our darling daughter at the same time as I'm keeping a check on a bunch of slippery builders who want to destroy our new steam room. Then I can dash off my own little odes whenever there's a pause in the screaming and stonecutting.'

Every would-be author needs solitude and tranquillity.

It would have been a wonderful way to pass the summer, escaping from the city heat to our intended new home on the Janiculan Hill – except for this: the new home was a dump; the baby had embarked on a tantrum phase; and poetry led me into a public recital, which was foolish enough. That brought me into contact with the Chrysippus organisation. Anything in commerce that looks like a safe proposition may be a step on the route to grief.

I MUST HAVE been crazy. Drunk too, maybe.

Why had I received no protection from the Capitoline gods? All right, I admit Jupiter and Minerva might feel I was their most insignificant acolyte, merely slave to a sinecure, a placeman, a careerist, and a half-hearted one at that. But Juno could have helped me out. Juno really should have bestirred herself from leaning on one elbow, playing Olympian board games of hero-baiting and husbandtracking; the Queen of Heaven could have stilled the dice just long enough to notice that the new Procurator of her Sacred Geese had an unworkable glitch in his otherwise smooth-running social life. In short: I had stupidly agreed to be the warm-up act at someone else's poetry show.

My fellow author was a senator of consular rank. Disastrous. He would expect his friends and relatives to be seated on the comfortable benches while mine squashed into a few inches of standing room. He would grab most of the reading time. He would go first, while the audience was still awake. What's more, he was bound to be a bloody awful poet.

I am talking about Rutilius Gallicus. That's right. The same Rutilius Gallicus who would one day be the Urban Prefect – the Emperor's law and order chief, Domitian's strong-arm boy, that great man who is nowadays so greatly loved by the populace (as we are told by those who tell us what to think). Twenty years ago, at the time of our reading together, he was just any old ex-consul. Then, we still had Vespasian on the throne. As his legate in Tripolitania, Rutilius had recently solved a boundary dispute, for what that was worth (not much, unless you had the misfortune to live in Lepcis Magna or Oea). He had not yet become eligible to govern a province, was not yet famous for his German exploit, and nobody would ever have expected him to be the subject of heroic poetry himself. A celebrity in waiting. I thought him a pleasant mediocrity, a provincial just about holding up to wearing his senatorial purple.