The Archive was Catulus’s domain, a temple to him and his clan. Above the vaults was his inscription-Q. Lutatius Catulus, son of Quintus, grandson of Quintus, consul, by a decree of the Senate, commissioned the erection of this National Archive, and approved it satisfactory -and beside the entrance stood his life-size statue, looking somewhat more youthful and heroic than he had appeared in the Senate that afternoon. Most of the attendants were either his slaves or his freedmen and wore his emblem, a little dog, sewn onto their tunics. I shall tell you the kind of man Catulus was. He blamed the suicide of his father on the populist praetor Gratidianus-a distant relative of Cicero -and after the victory of the aristocrats in the civil war between Marius and Sulla, he took the opportunity for revenge. His young protégé, Sergius Catilina, at his behest, seized Gratidianus and whipped him through the streets to the Catulus family tomb. There his arms and legs were broken, his ears and nose cut off, his tongue pulled out of his mouth and severed, and his eyes gouged out. In this ghastly condition his head was then lopped off, and Catilina bore it in triumph to Catulus, who was waiting in the Forum. Do you wonder now why I was nervous as I waited for the vaults to be opened?

The senatorial records were kept in fireproof strongrooms, built to withstand a lightning strike, tunneled into the rock of the Capitol, and when the slaves swung back the big bronze door I had a glimpse of thousands upon thousands of rolled papyri, receding into the shadows of the sacred hill. Five hundred years of history were encompassed in that one small space: half a millennium of magistracies and governorships, proconsular decrees and judicial rulings, from Lusitania to Macedonia, from Africa to Gaul, and most of them made in the names of the same few families: the Aemilii, the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Lutatii, the Metelii, the Servilii. This was what gave Catulus and his kind the confidence to look down upon such provincial equestrians as Cicero.

They kept me waiting in an antechamber while they searched for Verres’s records, and eventually they brought out to me a single document case containing perhaps a dozen rolls. From the labels on the ends I saw that these were all, with one exception, accounts from his time as urban praetor. The exception was a flimsy piece of papyrus, barely worth the trouble of unrolling, covering his work as a junior magistrate twelve years previously, at the time of the war between Marius and Sulla, and on which was written just three sentences: “I received 2,235,417 sesterces. I expended on wages, grain, payments to legates, the proquaestor, the praetorian cohort 1,635,417 sesterces. I left 600,000 at Ariminum.” Remembering the scores of rolls of meticulous accounts which Cicero ’s term as a junior magistrate in Sicily had generated, all of which I had written out for him, I could barely refrain from laughing.

“Is this all there is?”

The attendant assured me it was.

“But where are the accounts from his time in Sicily?”

“They have not yet been submitted to the Treasury.”

“Not yet submitted? He has been governor for almost two years!”

The fellow looked at me blankly, and I could see that there was no point in wasting any more time with him. I copied out the three lines relating to Verres’s junior magistracy and went out into the evening.

While I had been in the National Archive, darkness had fallen over Rome. In Cicero ’s house the family had already gone in to dinner. But the master had left instructions with the steward, Eros, that I was to be shown straight into the dining room the moment I returned. I found him lying on a couch beside Terentia. His brother, Quintus, was also there, with his wife, Pomponia. The third couch was occupied by Cicero ’s cousin Lucius and the hapless Sthenius, still clad in his dirty mourning clothes and squirming with unease. I could sense the strained atmosphere as soon as I entered, although Cicero was in good spirits. He always liked a dinner party. It was not the quality of the food and drink which mattered to him, but the company and the conversation. Quintus and Lucius, along with Atticus, were the three men he loved most.

“Well?” he said to me. I told him what had happened and showed him my copy of Verres’s quaestorian accounts. He scanned it, grunted, and tossed the wax tablet across the table. “Look at that, Quintus. The villain is too lazy even to lie adequately. Six hundred thousand-what a nice round sum, not a penny either side of it-and where does he leave it? Why, in a town which is then conveniently occupied by the opposition’s army, so the loss can be blamed on them! And no accounts submitted from Sicily for two years ? I am obliged to you, Sthenius, for bringing this rogue to my attention.”

“Oh, yes, so obliged,” said Terentia, with savage sweetness. “So obliged-for setting us at war with half the decent families in Rome. But presumably we can socialize with Sicilians from now on, so that will be all right. Where did you say you came from again?”

“Thermae, your ladyship.”

“Thermae. I have never heard of it, but I am sure it is delightful. You can make speeches to the town council, Cicero. Perhaps you will even get elected there, now that Rome is forever closed to you. You can be the consul of Thermae and I can be the first lady.”

“A role I am sure you will perform with your customary charm, my darling,” said Cicero, patting her arm.

They could needle away at one another like this for hours. Sometimes I believe they rather enjoyed it.

“I still fail to see what you can do about it,” said Quintus. He was fresh from military service: four years younger than his brother, and possessed of about half the brains. “If you raise Verres’s conduct in the Senate, they will talk it out. If you try to take him to court, they will make sure he is acquitted. Just keep your nose out of it, is my advice.”

“And what do you say, cousin?”

“I say no man of honor in the Roman Senate can stand by and see this sort of corruption going on unchecked,” replied Lucius. “Now that you know the facts, you have a duty to make them public.”

“Bravo!” said Terentia. “Spoken like a true philosopher, who has never stood for office in his life.”

Pomponia yawned noisily. “Can we talk about something else? Politics is so dull.”

She was a tiresome woman whose only obvious attraction, apart from her prominent bust, was that she was Atticus’s sister. I saw the eyes of the two Cicero brothers meet, and my master give a barely perceptible shake of his head: ignore her, his expression said, it is not worth arguing over. “All right,” he conceded, “enough of politics. But I propose a toast.” He raised his cup and the others did the same. “To our old friend Sthenius. If nothing else, may this day have seen the beginning of the restoration of his fortunes. Sthenius!”

The Sicilian’s eyes were wet with tears of gratitude.

“Sthenius!”

“And Thermae, Cicero,” added Terentia, her small dark eyes, her shrew’s eyes, bright with malice over the rim of her drink. “Do not let us forget Thermae.”

I TOOK MY MEAL ALONE in the kitchen and went exhausted to bed with my lamp and a book of philosophy which I was too tired to read. (I was free to borrow whatever I liked from the household’s small library.) Later I heard the guests all leave and the bolts slam shut on the front door. I heard Cicero and Terentia mount the stairs in silence and go their separate ways, for she had long since taken to sleeping in another part of the house to avoid being woken by him before dawn. I heard Cicero ’s footsteps on the boards above my head, and then I blew out my lamp, and that was the last sound I heard as I surrendered myself to sleep-his footsteps pacing, up and down, up and down.

It was six weeks later that we heard the news from Sicily. Verres had ignored the entreaties of his father. On the first day of December, in Syracuse, exactly as he had threatened, he had judged Sthenius in his absence, found him guilty of espionage, sentenced him to be crucified, and dispatched his officials to Rome to arrest him and return him for execution.