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ROME: DECEMBER AD76

I

If there was one thing you could say for my father, he never beat his wife.

'He hit her!' Pa was spluttering; he was so eager to tell my wife Helena that her brother was guilty of domestic violence. 'He came right out and admitted it: Camillus Justinus struck Claudia Rufina!'

'I bet he told you that in confidence too,' I snapped. 'So you come bursting in here only five minutes later and tell us!' Justinus must have gone for a bribe to reinstate himself Once Pa had sold the culprit an exorbitant 'forgive me darling' gift, my parent had rushed straight from his fine art warehouse at the Saepta Julia to our house, eager to snitch. 'You' d never catch me behaving like that,' he boasted self-righteously. 'Agreed. Your faults are more insidious. ' There were plenty of drunken male bullies in Rome, and plenty of downtrodden wives who refused to leave them, but as I licked the breakfast honey from my fingers and wished he would go away, I was glaring at a much more subtle character. Marcus Didius Favonius, who had renamed himself Geminus for reasons of his own, was about as complicated as they come. Most people called my father a lovable rogue. Most people, therefore, were bemused that I loathed him. 'I never hit your mother in my life!' I may have sounded weary.

'I sent her money. ' My father's contributions were a fraction of the fortune he amassed in the course of his dealings as an auctioneer, antique dealer, and reproduction marble salesman.

'If Ma had been given a denarius for every foolish buyer of flaky Greek "original statues" you conned, we would all have dined on peacocks and my sisters would have had dowries to buy tribunes as husbands. '

All right, I admit it: Pa was right when he muttered: 'Giving money to any of your sisters would have been a bad idea. ' The point about Pa is that he could, if it was absolutely unavoidable, put up a fight. It would be a fight worth watching, if you had half an hour before your next appointment and a piece of Lucanian sausage to chew on while you stood there. Yet to him, the concept of any husband daring to hit a feisty wife (the only kind my father knew about, since he came from the Aventine where women give no quarter) was about as likely as getting a Vestal Virgin to buy him a drink. He also knew that Quintus Camillus Justinus was the son of a respectable, thoroughly amiable senator; he was my wife's younger brother, in general her favourite; everyone spoke highly of Quintus. Come to that, he had always been my favourite. If you overlooked a few failings – little quirks, like stealing his own brother's bride and backing out of a respectable career so he could run off to North Africa to grow silphium (which is extinct, but that didn't stop him) – he was a nice lad. Helena and I were both very fond of him.