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people outside want to see him."
    "And they will."
    "But not like this!"
    "Exactly like this. You wanted your friends to see his wounds.
    Well, so do I. Everyone in Rome is going to see them."
    "But all this blood, and his clothes hanging from him like rags -" "We'll take off his clothes, then. Let the people see him exactly
    as he is."
    Clodia continued to comb, keeping her eyes on her work. Fulvia stepped towards her. She seized Clodia's wrist, snatched the comb and threw it on the floor. The gesture was sudden and violent, but her voice remained as impassive as her face. "Mother is right. This isn't your household, Clodia. And he wasn't your husband."
    Eco tugged at my sleeve. I nodded. It was time to take our leave. I bowed my head in deference to the corpse, but the gesture went unnoticed; Clodia and Fulvia stared at one another like tigresses with flattened ears. The slave girls scattered nervously as we made our way to the door. Before I left the room I turned and. took a last look at the women, and was struck by the tableau of Clodius dead upon the table, surrounded by the five females who had been closest to him in life, their ages spread over the range of a lifetime - his little daughter, his niece Metella, his wife Fulvia, his sister Clodia, his mother-in-law Sempronia. I thought of the Trojan women mourning Hector, with the attendant slave girls for a chorus.
    The brightly lit outer room seemed like another world, with its fretfully pacing men in togas and hushed masculine voices. The atmosphere was just as tense, but of a different nature — not of mourning but of crisis and confusion, like a military camp under siege or a desperate gathering of conspirators. The room was more crowded than before. Important newcomers had arrived, and with them their retinues of freedmen and slaves. I recognized several well-known senators and magistrates of the populist stripe. Some stood in pairs, quietly conversing. Others were gathered in a circle, listening to a wild-eyed man with unkempt hair who kept striking his palm with his fist.
    "I say we mount an assault on Milo's house tonight," he was saying. "Why wait? It's just a stone's throw away. We'll drag him into the street, set the place on fire and tear him limb from limb."
    I whispered into Eco's ear, "Sextus Cloelius?"
    Eco nodded and whispered back, "Clodius's right-hand man. Organizes mobs, stages riots, breaks arms, slits noses. Not afraid to get his hands dirty."
    Some of the politicians nodded at Cloelius's suggestion. Others scoffed. "What makes you think that Milo would dare to come back to the city, after what he's done?" said one. "He's probably halfway to Massilia by now."
    "Not Milo," said Cloelius. "He's boasted for years that he'd kill Publius Clodius one day. Mark my words, he'll be down in the Forum tomorrow to brag about it. And when he shows his face, we'll slaughter him on the spot!"
    "There's no point in a slaughter," said the handsome, elegantly dressed young man I had noticed on the way in, Clodius's nephew Appius. "We'll press for a trial instead."
    "A trial!" cried Cloelius, exasperated. There was a collective groan.
    "Yes, a trial," insisted Appius. "It's the only way to expose the bastard and his friends along with him. Do you think Milo alone was behind this? He hasn't the wits to stage an ambush. I smell Cicero's bloody maw! Uncle Publius's enemies didn't kill him on a whim. It was cold, calculated murder! I don't want just revenge; a knife in the back could accomplish that I want to see these men discredited, humiliated, jeered out of Rome! I want the whole city to repudiate them, and their families with them. That means a trial."
    "I hardly think it's a matter of choosing whether to stage or not stage a slaughter," said a calm, shrewd-looking young man at the edge of the crowd.
    "Gaius Sallust," Eco whispered in my ear. "One of the radical tribunes elected last year."
    Heads turned. Having gained the group's undivided attention, Sallust