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only occasionally discussed politics. He was often at the military training grounds at the Field of Mars or the Forum with his friends. I kept to my womanly sphere, learning to oversee the house and supervise our servants, which presented little difficulty but was a new role for me. In the evenings, Tiberius Nero’s friends and their wives sometimes invited us to dinner parties, but these were not places for much serious talk. I had heard my husband speak knowledgeably of military matters and had seen other men bow to his expertise, and I had imagined he was politically knowledgeable, too.
    “The last thing Father would want, or Brutus would want either,” I said, “is for Antony and young Caesar to be united. Cicero himself has said that the more Caesar’s adherents flock to this boy, instead of rallying to Antony, the better it is for us all.” Cicero, the Senate’s great elder statesman, had not been asked to participate in Caesar’s assassination, because he was physically timorous. After the fact, though, he offered fervent support to the killers.
    My husband chuckled. “You mean to say you’ve been seeing Cicero behind my back? And he’s been confiding in you?” Tiberius Nero considered my interest in politics a great joke. He reached over, twined his hand in my hair, and kissed me. “Do you want to come tomorrow to watch the gladiators?” he asked. “Young Caesar Octavianus is putting on a grand show.”
    I shook my head.
    “You don’t want to go at all? It will be five days running.”
    “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. It’s not as if we could sit together anyway.”
    “That’s true. Well, I understand if you can’t stand to see blood.”
    “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that women have to sit so far back, it’s impossible to see a thing.” Tiberius Nero already had taken me to one gladiator exhibition. I had been terribly bored, sitting back among the women as custom demanded, looking down over rows of men’s heads at the small, distant figures hacking at each other. Men said it was unseemly for women to sit up close to watch such bloody spectacles. But then why allow us in at all? The truth was, when it came to this one form of entertainment they loved the most, they had grasped at an excuse to hog the good seats.

    Two years before, in memory of his one legitimate child, a daughter who had died in childbirth, Julius Caesar had presented not only the usual fights between pairs of gladiators but battles between whole detachments of infantry and between squadrons of cavalry, some mounted on horses, others on elephants. His great-nephew wished to outdo him—and he did, pouring out vast sums of money for wolves, bears, and lions for the gladiators to battle, hundreds of horses and elephants, and cohorts of fighting men.
    While avoiding the gladiator shows, I did attend a lesser event, also part of Caesar’s funeral games—chariot races at the Circus Maximus. Tiberius Nero and I had excellent seats near the finish line, in the front tier reserved for senators and their wives. Even my father had spoken with grudging respect of how Julius Caesar had expanded seating at the racecourse, building tiers of seats along the track’s whole perimeter so there was room for a hundred and fifty thousand spectators. Glancing around, I saw tiers packed with people, the well-dressed in good seats, ragged denizens of the city slums high up in the bleachers. The smell of horse manure mingled with that of close-packed human bodies and of sausages sold by vendors who walked along the tiers.
    My husband and I had a wager on the first race, he on the Greens, I on the Reds. I watched the drivers leaning forward tautly, clutching the reins with both hands, each controlling four horses with practiced ease. They circled the long track seven times. When the charioteer dressed in red crossed the finish line first, cheers came from thousands of throats. Tiberius Nero paid his bet good-naturedly.
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