On the fourth and final day of Milo's trial I awoke to birdsong in the garden. New flowers had bloomed overnight. Bees and butterflies were already at work, doting on the blossoms. I was tempted to forget the trial and stay home. Why not spend the day enjoying the warm sunshine of Aprilis in my garden? But the plaintive eyes of the staring, broken Minerva would not let me forget what was about to transpire in the Forum.

Davus and a fellow bodyguard had risen long before cockcrow to go down with folding chairs to save places for us. It was a good thing, for I had never seen the Forum so thronged with spectators. By order of Pompey, all taverns were closed for the day. Pompey no doubt intended to head off the threat of drunken rioters, but the radical tribunes must have been pleased for their own reasons; with the taverns closed, even their least civic-minded supporters had nowhere better to be than in the Forum attending the trial. Despite the crush, Davus had doggedly held on to our seats near the front of the crowd.

Dominating everything were Pompey's troops. Wherever there was an elevated place – temple steps or a bit of wall or ramp or pedestal – the soldiers had already occupied it the night before. A ring of troops completely encircled the Forum At the various points of entry they pulled aside perfectly peaceable citizens to search for concealed weapons. Pompey himself was said to be in his stronghold in the treasury building, from which he would not stir until a verdict was announced. I felt as if I had awakened in some other city that morning, a place ruled by a military autocrat – except that autocrats do not allow public trials. There was a sense of confusion and uncertainty in the air, almost of unreality.

And yet, everything proceeded smoothly. Milo and Cicero had shown up before most of the crowd, travelling in a plain, closed litter so that their arrival went unnoticed, which was no doubt as they wished it They stayed out of sight in the litter, ringed by bodyguards, until it was almost time for the trial to begin. The three prosecutors arrived on foot to a great deal of cheering, surrounded by an entourage of secretaries and bodyguards. The officials of the court brought out three large urns; these contained the wooden balls on which each potential juror had written his name. Balls were chosen by lot until eighty-one jurors had been selected, among them Marcus Cato, I noticed. After the speeches by the prosecution and the defence, each side would be allowed to remove fifteen more jurors, leaving fifty-one men to decide the verdict.

Domitius called the court to order. The prosecutors commenced with their arguments at once.

As Cicero had predicted, their three orations seemed unduly short, more like synopses than full-blown speeches. They were potent, nonetheless. In typical fashion, the prosecutors divided various aspects of the case between them, according to their skills and dispositions.

I knew little about Valerius Nepos, but I had heard that his forte was narrative, and so was not surprised that he gave the opening argument. He described the actual incident with dramatic flourish, using the full range of his ringing voice and dwelling on gruesome details to elicit groans and cries of outrage from the spectators. His final lament was so full of grief that it seemed all he could do to keep from tearing out his hair. Nepos would have made quite a performer on the stage, I thought, bringing blind Oedipus or the tormented Ajax to life.

Marc Antony, the tactician, delivered the middle speech. He made the case that Milo had deliberately plotted to murder Clodius, citing evidence that Milo had spies among Clodius's slaves and going over and over the complicated chronology of Milo's and Clodius's movements on the day of the murder. Antony was the right man for a speech that dwelled, by necessity, on such a concentration of details. A more emotional speaker like Nepos, wailing over timetables, would have risked looking absurd. A staid orator like Pompey would have put his listeners to sleep. Antony's blend of soldierly gruffness with an innate sincerity of purpose, kept the jurors' full attention.

Appius Claudius, the dead man's nephew, delivered the emotional finale, a eulogy full of pathos. Seemingly overcome by grieЈ he was often choked with tears and had to struggle to regain his composure. In a ringing summation, he made proud references to the greatness of Clodius's forebears and to the poignant irony that he should have met such a brutal death on the famous road which Appius Claudius Caecus had built and along which stood the tombs and shrines of so many members of his noble family.

During these speeches, I looked to see the reactions of Milo and Cicero. Most defendants bring a horde of family members to cluster around them during the trial, but Milo sat alone, his arms tightly crossed. Granted, his parents were dead, but where was his wife? It would count against him that Fausta Cornelia was nowhere to be seen during her husband's ordeal. Given her reputation, I could imagine the sort of jokes the Clodians would come up with to explain her absence.

And what was Milo thinking, to show up at his own trial in a snow-white toga without even a loose stitch, much less a tear in it? His hair looked freshly dipped and combed, and his jaw was so clean-shaven that he must have seen his barber that very morning before he left his house. I had to shake my head at such audacity. Even the always sardonic Caelius, at his trial, had had the sense (drummed into him by Cicero) to wear an old, threadbare toga and to look at least a bit dishevelled, and Caelius's parents had shown up in torn clothes with their eyes red from crying and baggy from lack of sleep. A Roman defendant is expected to look as wretched as he possibly can, in order to play upon the sympathy of the jurors. This is often merely a formality, but everyone goes along with it out of respect for legal tradition. By showing up looking as if he were paying court to a widow or posing for his portrait, Milo was deliberately thumbing his nose not only at the jury but at the whole judicial process.

Perhaps this was one of the things on his advocate's mind that day. Cicero looked uncommonly distracted, and completely transformed from the previous night. Where was his excitement, his ebullience? His eyes were shifty, his jaw tight, and he gave a start at every unexpected noise from the crowd. He fiddled with scraps of parchment, scribbled notes on a wax tablet, kept whispering to Tiro, and seemed hardly to listen to the prosecutors. Only once did he seem to come to life, during Antony's speech. Antony was trying to imply that Milo paused to water his horses in Bovillae to kill time while he waited for a report that Clodius had left his villa and was on his way, so that Milo could be sure to pass Clodius on the road in order to stage a deliberate attack on him. To frame his accusation, Antony needed to establish the exact hour at which the incident took place, and stressed the point by repeatedly asking, "When was Clodius killed? When, I ask you – when was Clodius killed?"

Cicero, in a loud voice, quipped, "Not nearly soon enough!"

In the immediate silence that followed there was some scattered laughter, but also expressions of shock among the jurors, and then a sudden welling of outrage among the spectators. Cicero's icy grin vanished. Milo stiffened. Even Antony, who had faced barbarians in battle and had no cause to feel threatened by the crowd, backed away from the Rostra and turned pale. I looked behind me to see what they saw: a sea of upraised fists and angry, shouting faces. The fury on those faces was not of the opportunistic sort one sees on looters or soldiers; it had a kind of fiery purity, like the madness of religious ecstatics. It was a fearsome thing; even some of Pompey's soldiers visibly flinched to see it. These were Clodius's people, the angry and dispossessed, the degraded, the hopeless. They were a force to be reckoned with.