"Searching for Milo, are you?" said Eco. He was looking at the fistful of stolen jewellery; the sarcasm in his voice made me cringe.

The thief held up his hand and shook it. "What, these? Who ever said that justice should be free, eh? We deserve our payment, don't we? As much as these rich folk deserve their pretty things." He made such an ugly face that I thought he was about to come after us with his dagger. Instead he threw the handful of jewellery at our feet. The silver clinked against the paving stones and the strand of pearls burst. Pink and white baubles bounced everywhere like bits of hail. The men behind him yelled and cursed.

"Who cares?" he shouted. "There'll be plenty more where that came from." He turned and led his raiding party down the street away from us, towards the next house.

My heart began to pound in my chest. If they were headed in the opposite direction, that meant they had already been to my house…

My head felt light. I blinked at oily spots before my eyes. Confronted with the possibility of my own death, a part of me always reacted with sceptical resignation. Facing the possibility of something terrible happening to Bethesda and Diana, I felt an overwhelming dread.

Eco understood. He clutched my hand and squeezed it. As we approached the house I looked for signs of fire or smoke and saw none. Then I saw the double doors of the entrance. They were standing wide open. The lock had been broken. So had the bar, which lay across the threshold broken in two pieces.

I stepped into the foyer, which seemed very dark after the daylight outside. Rushing forwards, I tripped over something large and solid. Eco and Davus helped me up. "Papa -" said Eco.

I hurried on. "Bethesda! Diana!"

No one answered. I ran from room to room, only vaguely aware that Eco and his men followed after me. Couches and chairs had been knocked over. Cabinets lay on their sides with their doors open.

In my bedroom, the sleeping couch had been senselessly ripped open and the sniffing pulled out in handfuls. A pool of something dark and slick shimmered on the floor in front of Bethesda's dressing table. Blood? I shuddered, close to tears, then realized that it was only unguent from a broken jar which had fallen to the floor.

There was no one in the kitchens, no one in the sleeping quarters. "Where were the slaves?

I hurried on to Diana's room. The door of her wardrobe stood open and her clothes were scattered all over the floor. The little silver box where she kept her few pieces of jewellery was gone. I called her name. There was no answer.

I came to my study. The scroll cases were empty. They had plucked every scroll from its pigeonhole, probably looking for hidden valuables. Having found none, they had at least left my scrolls and writing instruments intact. Of what use were such things to thieves? Everything lay in piles on the floor, scattered but undamaged, the scrolls still tightly rolled and tied with ribbons.

Then I caught a whiff of something foul. I wrinkled my nose and followed the smell to the corner of the room. Someone had defecated on the floor and then used a torn piece of parchment to wipe himself. I carefully picked up the scrap by a corner to see what it was and read a few lines:

Father, what wretchedness is on us now! I mourn for you still more than for the dead.

Poor Antigone! Poor Euripides!

I stepped from my study into the garden at the centre of the house. The bronze statue of Minerva, which I had inherited from my dear friend Lucius Claudius along with the house, which had been his pride and joy and mine, which had elicited the envy of Cicero himself) had been pulled from its pedestal. Did they think to find some secret treasure chamber beneath it, or did they act out of sheer, wanton destructiveness? The bronze should have survived the fell, but there must have been some hidden flaw in its casting. The virgin goddess of wisdom lay broken in two pieces.

"Papa!"

"What, Eco? Have you found them?"

"No, Papa. Not Bethesda or Diana. But in the foyer – you should come and see for yourself…" "See what?"

Before he could answer, a voice from the sky called both our names. I looked up and saw Diana peering over the edge of the roof. My throat constricted and I almost sobbed with relief.

"Diana! Oh, Diana! But what – how did you get up there?"

"The ladder, of course. Then we pulled it up after us. And then we kept out of sight and stayed quiet. The thieves never even knew we were here."

"Your mother as well?"

"Yes. She wasn't afraid to climb the ladder at all! And the slaves, too. It was my idea."

"And a brilliant idea it was." Tears welled in my eyes until Diana became a blur.

"And look, Papa! I even thought to save my jewellery box." She held it proudly before her.

"Yes, very good. Go get your mother now," I said, impatient to see with my own eyes that Bethesda was safe. "Tell Belbo to come, too."

Eco spoke softly in my ear. "Papa, come to the foyer." "What?"

"Come." He took my arm and led me there.

When I first rushed into the house, I had tripped over something large and heavy. The thing I had tripped over was a body. Eco's men had rolled him onto his back and pulled him into the light.

Belbo's face, normally so bovine and amenable, was frozen in a grimace of fierce determination. In his right hand he clenched a dagger with blood on it. The front of his pale tunic was spotted with great blossoms of red.

He had died just inside the broken door, defending the breach, striving to keep them out. His dagger testified that he had inflicted at least one wound, but he had taken many more.

The tears which I had been holding back, which I had begrudgingly released in my relief at seeing Diana, now came in a blinding flood. The simple, cheerful man who had been my loyal companion for twenty-five years and the protector of my loved ones, who had saved my life more than once, who had always seemed lit from within by a steady flame which nothing could extinguish, lay lifeless at my feet. Belbo was dead.

The looting and burning went on for days.

Rome was utterly without order. Fires broke out or were deliberately started all over the city. A haze of smoke settled into the valleys between the seven hills. Teams of slaves and hired freedmen, their clothes and faces smeared with soot, rushed from crisis to crisis.

I heard women screaming in the night, hoarse cries for help, the clash of steel against steel. There were wild rumours of every sort of outrage – rapes, murders, kidnappings, children trapped in houses and burned alive, men hung upside down by their feet at street corners, beaten to death with clubs and left hanging like trophies.

The day after Belbo was killed, Eco and I braved the streets to deliver his body to the necropolis outside the city walls. Two of my household slaves pulled the cart bearing his corpse. Eco's bodyguards flanked our procession. Though we passed several gangs of looters, no one disturbed us. They were too busy plundering the living to bother with the dead.

At the grove of Libitina we entered Belbo into the registry of the dead. The cremators were very busy that day. Belbo was burned along with several others on a flaming pyre, and then his ashes were taken to a common grave. It seemed too small an end to such a robust life.

Eco and I debated whether my family should go to his house, or his family should come to my house, so as to join our defences. In the end, we decided to leave his household slaves at the house on the Esquiline, so as to guard the place, but to move Menenia and the twins into my house, which, once the door was repaired and strengthened, was arguably more defensible. The Palatine was dangerous, but there had been numerous fires and reports of atrocities on the Esquiline as well, and down in the Subura there was no semblance of order at all. Besides, my house had already been ransacked. There was no reason for the same looters to come back a second time.