My feet began to ache from so much standing. I ate far too much for the middle of a hot summer day, and I drank too much wine (because my throat was dry from so much talking — at least that was my excuse). And yet, altogether, I was elated. I felt light as a feather. I was at the party, and yet I also observed the party, detached and amused, like a visitor from Olympus. It was the wine, I told myself or the succession of flattering accolades bestowed on myself and on Meto, or the lingering glow of Manius Claudius's humiliation — it was these things, I told myself, that accounted for my mood, which became happier and happier as the day progressed. It had nothing to do with the simple fact of being back in Rome, of feeling myself at the very centre of the greatest concentration of humanity in the world, of sensing all around me the power and passion of those who live, love, connive, suffer, triumph, and the every day in such a mad place. I no longer loved Rome, I told myself; we had been lovers once, but that was over now, once and for all. I might return to her from time to time, but merely as a visitor, free of the torrid, squalid, jubilant memory of our tumultuous marriage. I loved Rome no longer, I told myself, and almost believed it.

No moment of all the moments in that day was more purely joyous than the one in which a certain booming laugh struck my ears and stirred my memory to instant recognition. I looked up from whatever superficial conversation I was engaged in and searched for the source of the laughter, but in the crowd I could not discern the face I looked for. Then I heard the same laugh close at hand and turned to see Meto being squeezed in the bearish grip of a broadly smiling, stoutly muscled man with a thick beard all black and white like variegated marble. Behind the bearish man stood another figure in a toga, a strikingly handsome younger man with an enigmatic smile on his lips, like a Greek statue in Roman dress.

At last the man released Meto, who caught his breath and dazedly tried to straighten the folds of his toga. Meto felt my gaze and returned it with a strange expression on his face. 'Papa,' he called, with an odd quaver in his voice, 'look who's here!'

'As usual, I heard you before I saw you!' I said, laughing and striding towards the newcomer. I braced myself for the ironlike hug of my old friend Marcus Mummius.

It was Mummius who had defied the will of Marcus Crassus, sought out Meto in Sicily and saved him from a life of slavery chasing after crows in a dusty field. Mummius had delivered Meto to this house on the very day that Diana was born. In my heart he would always have a special place.

Meto had not been the only one of Crassus's slaves whom Mummius had made a special endeavour to save. Behind him now stood Apollonius, whom Crassus had sold to a cruel Egyptian master. Mummius had sailed across the inland sea to rescue the slave, had brought him back to Rome and had ultimately set him free. Apollonius remained in Mummius's household as his freedman and constant companion. How Crassus had despised the passion that had driven his lieutenant to care so deeply for the fate of a mere slave! That discord had been the wedge that drove Crassus and Mummius further and further apart until Mummius at last switched his allegiance to Pompey — which was just as well, for only in the service of Pompey, scourge of the sea pirates and conqueror of the East, could a military man like Mummius exercise his true genius.

'Marcus!' I cried. 'And Apollonius! How good to see you both, especially on this of all days. But what a surprise! I should have thought you were still in the East with Pompey.'

'What, with no more fighting to be done?' said Mummius. 'Mithridates is finished, the lesser kingdoms have been brought under Roman control — there's nothing left to do but make political settlements. Playing Jupiter, I call it, moving petty princes about like knucklebones on a playing board. Pompey loves that sort of work, but you know I haven't the patience for it. It's taking an army into battle that I'm good at, though I think I must be getting too old and slow to be a soldier much longer, unless that's how I want to die. Here, just look at this!'

Without hesitation he hoisted up his purple-bordered senator's toga to show his burly thighs. Since the wearing of a toga entails the absence of any sort of underclothes that might constrict the private parts — a man could hardly tend to the call of nature with his left arm draped, all the folds of a toga to contend with, and a loincloth as well — Mummius was dangerously near to exposing himself. As I recalled, there was quite a bit of him to be exposed. I looked about a little nervously and gestured with my hands as if I were putting out a fire, but one might as well try to stop a bear from scratching its stomach as try to stop Marcus Mummius from showing off a war wound. Fortunately the only woman who happened to be passing by was Bethesda, heading towards the kitchen with an officious air. At the spectacle of Mummius showing off his burly legs, she paused, cocked her head, and cast a cool, calculating stare as if she were passing judgment on a purchase at the butcher's market.

'Here, see this one!' Mummius pointed to a long, thin scar that ran from the pale flesh of his upper thigh down to the region of his knee, where the skin was tanned as dark as an Egyptian's. Amid the furlike covering of hair, the pink, denuded strip of flesh stood out vividly. Mummius flexed the muscles beneath and made the long scar writhe like a snake. He seemed to find this uproariously amusing, to judge by his raucous laughter. I glanced over his shoulder at Apollonius, who rolled his eyes but smiled indulgently. No doubt he had witnessed the scene many times before.

'Battle of the Abas River!' Muroinius declared, dropping the hem of his toga. 'And I was a fool to let it happen. I was on horseback and the Albanian was on foot, wearing nothing but a bearskin and rushing at me with his sword drawn, screaming at the top of his lungs. I saw him coming — had plenty of time to knock him flat with the blunt end of my spear, or else impale him on the point, or draw my sword and parry his blows, r osimply give my horse a good kick to get out of his way. The problem was, I had too much time to think — couldn't settle on one choice or the other. Should have been pure reflex, but on that day I found out that my reflexes are as dead as Carthage. Found out the hard way. Oh, the burning when that blade broke the flesh and then tore straight down! I was the one screaming then.'

'What did you do?' said Meto, who had always loved soldiers' tales.

'Where before I had done nothing, now I did everything at once! Banged the fellow's helmet with the blunt end of my spear, whipped it around and stabbed him in the chest with the point, unsheathed my sword with my other hand and slashed his throat, then gave my horse a hard kick and headed straight into the enemy ranks! It all happened in the blink of an eye.'

'You went towards the enemy, not away? Even wounded as you were?' said Meto.

'I had no choice. Something I've learned in battles before — if you take a bad wound, the worst thing to do is stop. That's the one thing you mustn't do, because then the pain'll come crashing down on you all at once and that's the end of you. I've seen many a man die from a wound that shouldn't have killed him, just because he stopped what he was doing and gave in to the thing. No, you open your mouth in a scream to let the Furies come inside you, and you plunge into the thick of it. That way you never even feel the wound at all, and you don't bleed to death either, because all the blood rushes into your head and your sword arm, instead of pouring out of the cut'

Meto stared at him, awed.

'You know, they say there were Amazons fighting with the Albanians in that battle, though I didn't see any, and there were no women found among the dead. I'm no t sure I'd care to go up against a woman in combat… But here I am talking about myself, as usual, when this day belongs to young Meto! What a sight you make in your manly toga! Why, I remember when you were a small thing, running about the villa at Baiae, carrying messages and pestering the other — the others…'