Two For The Lions by Lindsey Davis

about Cato the Elder and the late hour I had slunk home).
    "I want her to grow up knowing who her father is," said Helena.
    "Is that to ensure she will be rude and defiant to the right person?"
    "Yes. And so you will know it is all your own fault. I don't want you ever to say Her mother brought her up and ruined her'!"
    "She's a bright child. She should manage to ruin herself."
    It took me at least twice as long to clean up the baby as it took Helena to rinse out her little tunics in another cauldron. Helena disappeared, perhaps to console Lenia, though I hoped she had gone to prepare my dinner back at home. I was left to make my usual failed attempt to interest Julia in the floating ship I had whittled for her, while she played instead with her favourite toy, the cheesegrater. We had to bring it or there was screaming. She had perfected how to smack it down on the water apparently aimlessly, though with a true knack of soaking her papa.
    The cheesegrater had a curious history. I had swiped it at Pa's warehouse, thinking it looked like an ordinary product of a house clearance. When Pa noticed it at our apartment one day, he told me it had in fact come from an Etruscan tomb. Whether he was himself the tomb robber remained vague, as usual. He reckoned it might be five hundred years old. Still, it worked all right.
    By the time I had dried Julia and dressed her, then dried myself I felt exhausted but there was to be no peaceful relaxation because when I clutched the wriggling baby under my cloak and gathered up all her accessories I found Helena Justina, my supposedly refined girlfriend, leaning on one of the crooked pillars in the outside portico, rewinding her stole around her shoulders and risking serious assault by actually talking to Rodan and Asiacus.
    The ugly pair shined nervously. They were ill-fed, unhealthy specimens, kept on short rations by Smaractus' meanness. He had owned them for years. They were slaves, of course, pallid bruisers in leather skirts and with their arms wrapped in grimy bandages to make them look tough. Smaractus still made a pretence of exercising them at his seedy training barracks, but the place was just a cover and he could never dare risk them in the arena; for one thing, they fought even more dirtily than the Roman crowd liked.
    There were no graffiti from lovelorn manicure girls scrawled on the walls of that particular gladiators' barracks, and no gold-laden ladies stopped their litters surreptitiously around the comer while they slipped inside with presents for the hulk of the month. So Rodan and Asiacus must have been startled when they found themselves accosted by Helena Justina, who was well-known in these parts as Didius Falco's snooty piece, the girl who had stepped down two ranks to live with me. Most people on the rough side of the Aventine were still trying to fathom where I could have bought the powerful love potion to bewitch her. Sometimes at the dead of night, I woke up in a sweat and wondered that myself
    "So how is the world of gladiating?" she had just asked, quite as calmly as if she were enquiring of a Praetorian friend of her father's how his latest court case was progressing at the Basilica Julia.
    It took the clapped-out wrecks a few minutes to interpret her cultured vowels, though not long to compose replies. "It stinks."
    "It bloody stinks." From them that was sophisticated repartee.
    "Ah!" Helena responded wisely. The fact that she seemed unafraid of them was giving them the jitters. It was not doing much for me. "You both work for Smaractus, don't you?"
    She could not yet have seen me lurking in the shadows, anguishing how I could possibly protect her if the rancid pair heaved themselves upright and got lively. They were trouble. They always had been. They had beaten me up several times in the past, trying to make me pay my rent; I had been younger then, and not normally impeded by carrying a baby as I was now.
    "He treats us worse than dogs," grumbled Rodan. He was