Fortunately, as for everything else of importance, Romans have slaves to take care of the problem of donning the toga. (Indeed, there was a joke common when I was a young man in Alexandria that the reason the Romans were bent on conquering the world was to supply themselves with slaves to help them dress.) The same slave who groomed and barbered Eco also served as his dresser. Here, as with the tweezers, was an opportunity for a slave to take petty revenge on his master, arranging for him to leave the house with the hem of his toga dragging or some fold tenuously placed so that it would later lose its shape. But Eco's dresser was quite competent, and more than a little patient as he helped the three of us into our togas, beginning with his master, then myself) and finally Meto.

Eco had purchased Meto's toga from a fine shop at the foot of the Palatine. It took two attempts to get him into it, and quite a bit of fussing with the folds, but at last Meto stood before us perfectly draped in his first manly toga.

'How do I look?' he said.

'Splendid!' said Eco.

'Papa?'

I hesitated to speak, because I felt a catch in my throat. 'You look—' I began to say, then had to clear my throat. How fine he looked! He had been a beautiful boy; he would be a handsome man, and in that moment one could see both together, past and future at once. His hair looked very black and his skin very smooth against the white wool; the colour made him appear to be wrapped in purity. At the same time the authority and anonymity of the toga itself lent him an air of dignity and manliness beyond his years. I had told him last night that he could put his years of slavery behind him forever, that he need never worry about his unseemly origins again. Now I believed it myself.

'I am proud, Meto. Very proud.'

He walked towards me and would have hugged me, I think, but the drapes of cloth over his left arm constrained him. He looked confounded for a moment, then laughed and turned around, realizing that moving comfortably in a toga was a skill he would have to master. 'How on earth do I go to the privy with all this on?' he asked, grinning.

'I shall show you that when the need arises,' I said, and sighed in mock weariness. 'Ah, the duties of fatherhood!'

XVII

Out in the garden, the guests had begun to arrive. The sun was well up, and the filtered yellow light through the gauzy canopy cast a warm glow over the courtyard and into the hallways and rooms around it. Dishes with all sorts of delicacies had been placed on the tables, and the couches were disposed in informal arrangements, so that the guests could feed themselves and gather as they wished, rather than reclining and being served a succession of courses. This seemed rather chaotic and perhaps even a bit ungracious to me, but Eco assured me it was the new fashion.

'And like your beard, I suspect it shall come and go,' I said under my breath.

As always with such gatherings, at first there seemed to be only a handful of guests, and then suddenly the garden was full of them, the men in their togas, the women in multicoloured stolas. The soft murmur of their conversation filled the air. Their various perfumes and unguents mingled with the floral scents of the garden and the delectable odours of the roasted figpeckers and stuffed pigeons that kept arriving on trays from the kitchen.

I made my way through the throng, stopping to speak with neighbours and clients I had not seen in years, and at last found Eco and pulled him aside. 'Did you invite all these people?' I whispered.

'Of course. They're all friends or acquaintances. Most of them have known Meto since he was a little boy.'

'But you can't be intending for all of them to walk through the Forum with us, and then come back here for dinner!'

'Of course not. This is only the general reception. People are invited to come and enjoy themselves, to get reacquainted with the family, to see Meto in his toga, to leave when they wish—'

To eat you out of house and home! Look, over there!' A man with a grey beard who looked vaguely familiar — the association was not pleasant, and I seemed to recall that we had been on opposite sides of some litigation — was hovering stealthily over a little serving table, dropping stuffed grape leaves into some sort of pouch inside his toga.

Eco laughed. 'Isn't that old Festus? You remember, he came over once saying he wanted to consult you about a lawsuit pending against him, and we never saw that little Alexandrian vase again.'

'No.' I frowned, shaking my head. 'That is not Festus.'

Eco cocked his head. 'Ah, I have it. Rutilius — his own brother brought suit against him, accusing him of thieving from him. The scoundrel never denied it; instead, he wanted us to dig up something horrible and scandalous about his brother, so as to even the score.'

I shook my head. 'No, it's not Rutilius, either, but probably someone just as awful. Surely you wouldn't have invited either of those two to Meto's party! Oh, the indignities I've had to put up with over the years to keep our bellies full! I'm just glad I'm away from it all now. And I'm glad you're young and hard-shelled enough to see your own way through the snares and traps of this city.'

‘You trained me well, Papa.'

'I wish I had trained Meto half so well.'

'Meto is different from me,' he said. 'And different from you.'

'I worry about him sometimes, about his future. He's still such a boy—'

'Papa, you must stop saying that. Meto is a man now, not a boy.'

'Still — oh, now this is too much! Look, now that wretched man has begun pilfering the honeyed dates! There won't be any for the other guests. You see, you've invited far too many people — neither of us can even remember who that man is, though we're both sure we don't like him. This is why it's a mistake to have people serve themselves. If we were all seated with slaves doing the serving—'

'I suppose I should do something, 'said Eco. 'I'll go and ask the fellow if he's murdered any wives or poisoned any business partners lately.'

With that he ambled towards the old greybeard, who gave a start and jumped back from the table when Eco touched his shoulder. Eco smiled and said something and led him away from the food. The jump must have dislodged the man's hidden cache, for a string of stuffed grape leaves and honeyed dates began to drop from his toga, leaving a trail behind him on the floor.

A hand touched my shoulder. I turned and saw a shock of red hair, a spangling of freckles across a handsome nose, and a pair of bright brown eyes looking into my own. The next moment I was locked in a mutual embrace, then held at arm's length while Marcus Valerius Messalla Rufus looked me up and down.

'Gordianus! The country life most certainly agrees with you — you look very fit indeed!'

'And the life of the city must agree with you, Rufus, for you never seem to age at all from year to year.'

'I am thirty-three this year, Gordianus.'

'No! Why, when we met—'

‘I was about the same age that your son Meto is now. Time flies, Gordianus, and the world changes.' Though never enough for my taste.'

We had first met years ago in the house of Caecilia Metella, when Rufus was assisting Cicero in his defence ofSextusRoscius. He had been only sixteen then, a patrician of ancient lineage, politically precocious and secretly infatuated with his mentor, Cicero. Not surprisingly, the infatuation had come to nothing, but Rufus's more practical ambitions had led to a successful career. He had been one of the youngest men ever elected to the college of augurs, and as such was frequently called upon to read the auspices and pronounce the will of the gods. No public or private transaction of importance takes place in Rome, no army engages in battle, no marriage is consecrated without consulting an augur. I myself have never had much faith in reading messages into the flights of birds and divining the will of Jupiter from a flash of lightning across the sky. Many (or most) augurs are mere political hacks and charlatans, who use their power to suspend public meetings and block the passage of legislation, but Rufus had always seemed quite sincere in his belief in the science of augury. He, too, had been involved in the scandal of the Vestal Virgins, for it was Rufus, as a religious colleague, whom the Virgo Maxima had first summoned for help when Catilina was discovered in the House of the Vestals. Rufus had called on Cicero, and Cicero had called on me. As I have remarked before, Rome sometimes seems a very small town indeed.