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to sing, declaim and dance. They indulge in Greek athletics, stripping naked, putting on boxing-gloves and sparring, rather than toughening themselves by serving in the army.'
    The truth is that Tacitus, priding himself on his old-fashioned ways and, taking Cato as his hero, has always had a vulgar taste for blood and slaughter. He relishes cruelly, even though it may also repel him. Complicated fellow. I was too well-mannered to say so, and used to content myself with teasing him.
    'I don't suppose,' I would say, 'that you have often been invited to strip and display your charms.'
    There would be trouble for anyone who made such a suggestion to me.'
    Oh dear, I never could resist teasing him. I can't even now. It really surprises me that my old friend has become so great a man, if, that is, a mere historian can be thought great. He talks of greatness, writes longingly of greatness. But what has he ever done that was great?
    Nothing disgusted him more than the story of Nero and his catamite, Sporus; and yet he could never leave it alone, but reverted to it frequently in conversation.
    Sporus, a Greek boy, had been a slave in the household of my mother's sister when Nero first saw him. The boy was only twelve, but, according to my mother, already very pretty, with soft dark curls, silky skin, high cheek-bones, strangely narrow eyes. The young Emperor at once lusted after him and commanded him as a gift. What could my aunt do but part with the child? Nero had him castrated, on account, he said, of the purity of the boy's voice which he pretended was what had first enchanted him. A couple of years later he went through a form of marriage with him, the boy being dressed as a bride, and wearing a garland of red roses. After the ceremony, a parody of the real thing, he retired with him to a bridal chamber, and poor Sporus had to scream as if he was a virgin being ravished. I believe Nero even wounded him so that the sheets would be bloody. All this was perfectly disgusting, but it was rather harsh and quite unreasonable of Tacitus to speak with such contempt of the boy. What choice had he? My mother, having a better understanding than the future historian, always spoke sympathetically, even tenderly, of poor Sporus. I mention these circumstances now because of the part the boy subsequently found himself playing.
    Nero's excesses are not my subject. Tacitus will revel in describing them. Let him do so. My memories of the last year of Nero's life are very different, and delightful. What did I care if he, in his mad extravagance, was taking advantage of the destruction wrought by the
    Great Fire four years previously to create his new palace and rural landscape, with its groves, pastures, herds of cattle, wild animals and grottoes where the mean houses of citizens had once crowded about each other? What did I care if men said in bitterness that all Rome was being transformed into Nero's villa, and if satirists advised the citizens to flee to Veii, assuming, that was, the villa did not get there first? What did I care, even, if every week brought news of some plot against the tyrant, followed by the melancholy report of yet another suicide of some exposed and terrified conspirator?
    For me that year was dominated by love. For me now, in cold and wretched exile, it is a time of sunlit afternoon. Summer afternoon, but summer afternoon with the freshness of spring.
    Domatilla ... I have only to form her name to find myself near to weeping.
    There was the moment that summer when she was transformed from a girl I had always known and liked and been happy to amuse, to . . . how shall I put it? Not a goddess; I leave that nonsense to poets. No, but just as the Emperor's Golden House spread itself in unimaginable delights over the dull city, so my life too was made golden by this hitherto scarcely imagined girl. Perhaps intense love is never anything but a projection of the imagination on the other.
    It was one afternoon at the seaside, and if