Dio lowered his eyes and sighed. "Come, gallus, it's time to go. We've wasted our time here."

"Hardly wasted, if that smell is what I think it is," said Trygonion cheerfully, as if oblivious to what had just passed between Dio and myself. A moment later a serving girl passed in the hallway carrying a tray of food, followed by two others who carried little folding tables.

We retired to the adjoining dining room, where we each reclined upon a couch. The folding tables were placed before us. Bethesda appeared, with Diana following after her, but they did not join us. The two of them made a point of carrying in the first course and serving it themselves, ladling the first portions of the lentils with sausage onto the plates of my guests, then onto mine, and then watching while we each took a bite. Under their scrutiny, the philosopher, the gallus and I nodded and made noises of approval. Satisfied, Bethesda and Diana retired, leaving the service to the slave girls.

Miserable and desperate as he might be, Dio was also a very hungry man. He swallowed great spoonfuls of food and called to the serving girl for more. Beside him Trygonion ate with even greater relish and an appalling lack of manners, using his thumb to push food onto his spoon and popping his fingers into his mouth. Barred from the ecstasies of sex, the galli are said to be notorious gluttons.

Midwinter night descended on Rome, cold, clear and still.

Once my guests had eaten, they quickly departed. Telling his tale had exhausted Dio. Stuffing his yawning belly had made him sleepy. He was ready for an early bed. Smarting from a twinge of guilt, I almost relented from my earlier refusal to put him up and was ready to offer him a bed, if only for the night; but Dio with a

few curt words made it quite clear that he was set on making his way back to the house of Titus Coponius. If he was sharp with me, how could I blame him? He had come to seek the help of an old acquaintance and was leaving empty-handed. Desperate men – even philosophers-do not accept rejection graciously.

I insisted that Dio take Belbo along to see him safely home. This seemed the least I could do. Trygonion hid his long hair in his hat and adjusted his toga, Dio covered his head with the mantle; again they became impostors at Roman manhood and womanhood. Under cover of darkness they departed as they had come.

Having dispatched my guests, I was faced with the chore of finishing my packing for the trip to Illyria to see Meto. Bethesda had done much, but certain preparations can be made only by the traveler. With the short winter days allowing less daylight for travel, I planned an early start and so had hoped to be abed early, but the preparations kept me up until midnight. It was just as well; once I finally did crawl into bed I couldn't sleep, thinking about Dio and his plight. I reached out to touch Bethesda's shoulder, but she turned away from me, peeved about something.

As I pondered the strange visit, it occurred to me that there were some things I had neglected to find out. Someone had recommended that Dio come to see me. Who? And what was he doing in the company of the little gallus? The two of them seemed like oil and water, and yet Dio obviously trusted Trygonion enough to go out with him in disguise.

Ah well, I thought drowsily, these questions could wait until I returned from Illyria and saw Dio again. But as soon as this thought crossed my mind, I remembered the look I had seen in the philosopher's eyes-the look of a man already dead. I gave a start and was suddenly wide awake.

I turned on my side and reached for Bethesda. She exhaled noisily and pulled away. I called her name softly, but she pretended to be asleep. What had I done wrong? At what had she taken offense? A bit of moonlight strayed onto the bed, illuminating her hair. She had rinsed it with henna that morning, to give it luster and to cover the gray. The smell was familiar, comforting, erotic. She could have helped me to fall asleep, I thought, but she seemed no more willing to comfort me than I had been willing to help Dio. I stared into the tangle of her hair, an impenetrable forest, pathless and dark.

I tossed and turned and at last rolled out of the bed and onto my feet. I was already wearing a long tunic to keep warm. I stepped into my shoes and reached for a woolen cloak.

Out in the atrium, beneath the shadowed gaze of Minerva, I looked up at the firmament of bright twinkling stars. The air was cold and clear. I studied the constellations, and to tire my mind I tried to remember all their names, both Latin and Greek, which I had learned when I was young in Alexandria: the Great Bear, which Homer called the Wagon and others call the Seven Ploughing Oxen; the Little Bear, which some call the Dog's Tail; the Goat, which some say has the tail of a fish…

Still I couldn't sleep. I needed to walk. A few circuits around the fountain in the atrium was hardly enough to drain my restlessness. I walked to the front door and unbolted it. I stepped over the threshold and onto the smoothly paved street.

At night, the Palatine is probably the safest neighborhood in Rome. When I was a boy, it was as mixed as any other neighborhood in the city, with rich and poor, patricians and plebeians all crowded together. Then Rome's empire began its great expansion, and some families became not merely wealthy but phenomenally so, and it was the Palatine, with its proximity to the Forum and its elevation above the less wholesome airs of the Tiber and the cramped valleys, which became their neighborhood of choice. Over the years tall tenements and cramped family dwellings were torn down block by block, and in their places were built great houses separated here and there by strips of green and little gardens. There are still humble dwellings among the mansions on the Palatine, and occupants who are far from wealthy (I'm proof of that), but by and large it has become an enclave of the rich and the powerful. I live on the southern side, just up the hill from the House of the Vestals down in the Forum. In a circle of no great circumference around my house- hardly further than an arrow's flight-I count among my neighbors Crassus, Rome's wealthiest man, and my old patron Cicero, who the previous September had made a triumphant return from political exile and was busy rebuilding the house which an angry mob had destroyed two years before.

Such men own bodyguards-plenty of them, and not merely brutes but well-trained gladiators-and such men demand order, at least in their immediate vicinity. The roving, drunken gangs of troublemakers who terrorize the Subura at night know better than to bring their rowdiness to the Palatine. Rapists and petty thieves practice their crimes in other places on more vulnerable prey. And so, after dark, the streets of the Palatine are quiet and mostly deserted. A man can take a brisk stroll up the street on a chilly winter's night beneath a waxing moon, alone with his thoughts, and not fear for his life.

Even so, when I heard the sound of drunken voices approaching, I felt it prudent to conceal myself until they passed. I stepped back against a wall, beneath the deep shadow cast by the branch of a yew tree. I was just across the street from a venerable old three-story tenement at the end of my block. The place was exceptionally well built and well maintained, the property of the Clodii, an ancient and distinguished patrician family. It had withstood the changes on the Palatine, and was still divided between shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The whole of the middle floor was rented to Marcus Caelius, the young man who had embroiled me a few years before in Cicero's battle of wits with Catilina. It was his voice, together with another, that I now heard approaching from the eastern end of the street.