The Course of Honour by Lindsey Davis Page B

was warm. Opposite the door there now reposed a respectable table on marble feet, empty except for a bronze candelabrum in the form of a slim nymph with a look of dishevelled surprise.
    There were two places on one side of the room; at each sat a smart young female scribe. Their training must be tiptop and their supervisor obviously kept a strong grip even when she was out. These girls were polite, wary, helpful, nicely spoken little things. They asked his name, though he did not tell them, then they repeated the question, though he still pretended to be deaf. Caenis would be furious with them for letting him get away with it.
    He had only just missed her. Her girls, who were called Phania and Melpomene, thought she was dropping in at the Library of Octavia on her way home for lunch with Antonia; afterwards her nap, ofcourse (
Oh of course!
), then probably to the baths to meet her friend. Phania and Melpomene related all this, without giggling, even though they realised that this must be the man who wrote to Caenis from Crete. Hoping to discover secrets, they offered to take a message; they offered to let him leave a note. He thanked them, but declined both offers, and he was still frowning as he collected his escort and left.
    Â 
    Rome had its quiet places.
    He stepped from the pushing turmoil of the street into one of the dusty gardens that were open to the public, where the street-traders’ cries immediately dropped to a distant background hum as if a giant door curtain had just swung closed across the garden gate. Even in Rome a man could stand and think.
    Then, forcing a path along the Via Triumphalis—the same way he had once strolled to the Theatre of Balbus with Caenis at his heels—he came to the great open spaces of the Ninth District where no one was allowed to live except the caretakers of the public buildings and the priests at the temples and monuments. Plenty of people came this way, but once past the elegant Theatre of Marcellus this was another area where the noise dimmed and the pace of daily life pleasantly slowed. On the Field of Mars returning armies traditionally rested and polished up their trophies before their triumphal entry into Rome. The princes of the Empire and their chief men had established their memorial buildings here: the Theatre of Pompey, the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon, and the Mausoleum of Augustus.
    Here too, in a muted corner of the city between that curve in the river and the dominating double heights of Capitol Hill, stood a series of monumental enclosures, the Porticos. Cool marble colonnades surrounded squares containing temples or planted groves, their internal walls adorned with magnificent frescos and their quiet cloisters filled with two centuries of booty from Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece. First on the right was the Portico of Octavia, produced by Augustus in honour of his sister; within its Corinthian columns he had deposited half the workshop of the sculptors Pasiteles and Dionysius, plus some of the finest antiques a civilised collector evermanaged to loot, including a Venus and a Cupid of Praxiteles. It contained temples to Jupiter and Juno, and schools. This Portico also boasted a superbly endowed public library.
    The searcher rested, his feet upon crisply frosted grass, his face upturned to the open sky, creamy as papyrus with the faint threat of rain. He gazed absently at Lysippus’ slender group of Alexander and his generals conferring before the Battle of Granicus. Then once again he left his slaves outside, some squatting on their haunches and others lounging out of the wind beside the mighty columns, staring at passers-by.
    The reading room was huge: thousands of manuscript rolls set into the walls like doves in a columbarium, guarded by humourless busts of safely dead historians and poets. He noticed a roped-off area where a major reorganisation was in hand. Caenis could well be involved with this; she was the sort of girl anybody would ask to