Inside the main entrance, beneath a shaded portico, the men and women parted ways. Diana was peeved at the separation and pouted, then was quickly distracted when Menenia leaned down and said that they would take turns brushing one another's hair. Diana abandoned me at once, and I watched her skip away towards the women's baths, flanked by Menenia and Bethesda holding her hands, and the two slave women following behind with their burden of unguents and brushes and combs.

'She has quite a way with children,' I said, looking after Menenia and her long black hair.

'Yes,' said Eco, nodding and smiling. 'I don't suppose—' 'Not yet, Papa.'

He led us into the recently rebuilt and enlarged men's baths. The size was impressive, sprawling, almost Egyptian in scale. Even so, Eco complained about the crush. 'Normally you'd have room to swing your elbows,' he sighed, 'but with so many men in the city for the election — well, you see how full it is.'

We made our way to the central courtyard, where two naked wresders were grappling on the lawn. Their companions stood by, either cheering them on or stretching their own muscles. Beneath the shaded portico a group of Stoics, fully dressed, sat in a circle. As we passed them, I overheard two of them arguing the merits of

Cicero's rhetorical style versus that of Hortensius, but it seemed to me that most of the philosophers were more interested in watching the naked young athletes.

Within the walls I was struck at once by the smell of the place (water on stone, bodies filthy and bodies clean) and the vague booming echoes that bounced from the domes in the ceiling (men laughing, boys whispering, water sloshing and dripping and splashing, the rhythmic slapping of wet feet against paving stones). We stripped out of our tunics and piled them onto the waiting, outstretched arms of Meto's barber. The slave folded them neatly and stored them in a niche in the wall, then returned with towels and strigils for our use.

We bathed first in the warm pool, which was gently scented with hyacinth, then in the hot pool, which made Meto yelp and lift his bottom from the water — and inspired the men already immersed to their necks to croak with laughter that echoed about the high-ceilinged room. Meto took no offence and merely laughed with them, suppressing another yelp as he lowered himself delicately but resolutely into the steaming, swirling water.

Scraped clean by the strigils, our faces flushed and our beards softened by the hot water, we removed ourselves from the pool and took turns submitting ourselves to the barber's blade. Meto went first, for this was his special day and the first time a razor would touch his face. The slave got into the spirit of things and made quite a production out of what could have been accomplished with three or four simple passes of the blade. There was, to be sure, a fair amount of downy growth on Meto's cheeks, almost invisible except when seen at certain angles in the light, while on his upper lip and his chin there was hardly any hair at all. Nevertheless, the barber approached the job as if he were faced with a grizzled veteran who had not shaved in months. He whetted the long, slender blade against a leather strop, rapidly, passing it back and forth until Meto, watching the guttering metal, became fascinated. The barber applied a hot, steaming towel to Meto's face and cooed to him like a charioteer calming a steed. He circled about him and delicately applied the edge of the blade to Meto's cheeks, jaw, neck, and chin, and, saving the most vulnerable and difficult spot for last, to his upper lip. Meto flinched more than once — being shaved is, after all, the most intimate duty a man can entrust to a slave, and real trust is built only with time. But the man did a splendid job. When it was over there was not a single drop of blood to be seen anywhere, neither on the towel nor the blade nor on Meto's freshly shaved face. Meto seemed almost disappointed not to have been wounded, but he was fascinated by the novel sensation of touching his own denuded flesh.

The barber men produced his scissors — a very fine pair which Lucius Claudius had given to me as a gift and which I had passed on to Eco when I left for the countryside. The barber laid a rough cloth over Meto's shoulders and set about shearing him until he looked quite respectable and remarkably grown-up, with his ears and the back of his neck showing. The barber then treated his hair with a scented oil and was done with him.

I allowed the man to trim my hair and beard a bit, but refused to let him touch me with his razor. Then it was Eco's turn.

"This is your chance,' I said, 'to get rid of that absurd haircut and that eccentric beard.'

Eco laughed. 'Absurd and eccentric? Papa, look around you.'

I did — and saw more than a few young men of Eco's age affecting the same style that he had adopted along with Marcus Caelius — their hair shorn short on the sides but left long on top, their beards trimmed and blocked into a thin strap across the jaw.

'You know where the fashion originated?'

'Yes, with Catilina. Or so you told me, and I've heard others say the same. Catilina and his circle set all the trends.'

'Well, did you know that Catilina has abandoned that particular fashion?'

'Really?'

'It happened under my very roof One night he had the thin beard, and the next morning—' I drew my finger across my jaw. 'All gone.'

'Cleanshaven?'

'As smooth as Meto's cheeks. Isn't that so, Meto?' Meto, still stroking his face to experience the novelty of it, nodded in confirmation.

'You see,' I said, 'it's Meto who has the fashionable look now. Perhaps you should do the same.'

'But everyone else is still wearing a chin-strap beard…' 'For a while.' I shrugged.

Eco reached out and the barber handed him a mirror. He studied his face and ran his forefinger and thumb over the thin black line of his beard. 'Do you really think I should get rid of it?'

'Catilina did,' I said, and shrugged as if I really had no opinion at all.

'Menenia never really cared for the beard anyway,' Eco said afterwards, stroking his jaw and studying himself in the polished copper mirror held up by his barber. He tapped at his chin and winced a bit; where the hair grew thickest the barber had resorted to tweezers to pluck him smooth. Eco had borne the ordeal without flinching. The barber, I suspect, had rather enjoyed it. By inflicting such tiny discomforts, slaves are occasionally able to vent their frustration against their masters.

‘I thought you said Menenia liked the beard,' I said, to needle Eco a bit.

'Shell like me even more without it, I'm sure.'

And she did. To judge from the look in her eyes and in Eco's when we rejoined the women in the vestibule, one might have thought they had been parted for months, not moments. But such is the first blush of passion. As for Meto, Bethesda touched his cheek and sighed, as if she could really tell a difference where the razor had passed. Diana, with the brutal frankness of a child, insisted that she could see no change at all. Menenia again took charge of the situation by proposing that Diana ride home in the Utter with her, a suggestion to which Diana assented at once. Menenia had put up her long hair in a coil held together with combs inlaid with bits of shell, in very much the same fashion as Bethesda's — though Menenia's combs, I noticed, were not quite so ornate. I admired her tactfulness more and more.

Clean and refreshed, we arrived back at the house on the Esquiline to find that preparations were almost complete. A sundial down on the Subura Way had shown the time to be almost noon; the first guests would arrive soon. It was time for Meto to put on his toga.

The donning of the toga is no simple matter, even for advocates and politicians like Cicero, who wear them almost every day. What seems so simple in its unfolded state — a very wide piece of thin white wool, cut into a roughly oblong shape — becomes devilishly intractable and takes on a life of its own when one attempts to make it into a respectable-looking toga. That, at least, is my experience. Somehow the thing must be made to cross the chest, drape over the shoulder, and lie across one arm. The precise placement of the numerous folds and the way they hang are of supreme importance, or else a man ends up looking as if he simply left the house wearing a common bed sheet — an absurd appearance sure to elicit the scorn of his neighbours.