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looking toward the doorway, staring at the spot where his grandfather had stepped through the curtain. He looked back at me and his face rearranged itself. It took me a moment to realize that he was smiling. "Besides," he said, "better to wait until my grandfather dies. Otherwise there'll be two freedmen named Marcus Tullius Tiro, and how would men tell us apart?"
    " H o w do they tell you apart n o w ? "
    "Tiro and Old Tiro, naturally." He smiled a more genuine smile.
    "Grandfather won't answer to the name Marcus. He thinks it's bad luck somehow if you call him that. Tempting the gods. Besides, he's too old to get used to a new name, even if he is proud of it. And it's no use calling him, anyway. These days he'll answer the door and that's about it. He can take a very long time. I think my master likes it that way. Cicero thinks it's good manners to keep guests waiting at the door, and even better manners to keep them pacing here in the anteroom, at least on a first visit, while Old Tiro announces them."
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    " I s that what we're doing now? Waiting to be announced?"
    Tiro crossed his arms and nodded. I looked around the room. There was not even a bench to sit upon. Very Roman, I thought.
    At length Old Tiro returned, lifting the curtain for his master. How shall I describe Marcus Tullius Cicero? The beautiful all look alike, but a plain man is plain according to his own peculiarity. Cicero had a large forehead, a fleshy nose, and thinning hair. He was of medium height, with a thin chest, narrow shoulders, and a long neck with a prominent knob protruding from the gullet. He looked considerably older than his twenty-six years.
    "Gordianus," Tiro said, introducing me. " T h e one they call the Finder."
    I nodded. Cicero smiled warmly. There was a restless, inquisitive sparkle in his eyes. I was immediately impressed, without quite knowing why.
    And in the next instant dismayed when Cicero opened his mouth to speak. He said only two words, but that was enough. The voice that came from his throat was high and grating. Tiro, with his sweet modulations, should have been the orator. Cicero had a voice fit for an auctioneer or a comic actor, a voice as peculiar as his name. "This way," he said, indicating that we should follow him through the red curtain.
    The hallway was quite short, hardly a hallway at all. We walked between unadorned walls for only a few paces, and then both walls ended. To the right was a broad curtain of pale yellow gauze, so fine I could see straight through it into the small but immaculately kept atrium beyond. Open to the sun and sky, the atrium was like a well carved out of the house, a reservoir spilling over with heat and light. At its center a tiny fountain splashed. The gauzy curtain rippled and billowed gently, like a mist disturbed by a puff of air, like a living membrane sighing at the slightest breeze.
    Facing the atrium was a large, airy room lit by narrow windows set high in the ceiling. The walls were of white plaster. The furniture was all of dark polished wood in rustic designs, embellished by subtle flourishes of woodwork, silver clasps, and inlays of mother-of-pearl, carnelian, and lapis.
    The room was filled with an astonishing number of scrolls. This was Cicero's library and his study. Such rooms are often the most intimate in the homes of wealthy men, revealing more about their owners than do 30

    bedchambers or dining rooms, which are the domain of women and slaves. It was a private room, indelibly marked by its owner, but a public room as well—testifying to this were the number of chairs scattered about, some of them pulled close together, as if they had just been vacated by a huddled group of visitors. Cicero gestured to a group of three chairs, seated himself, and indicated that we should do likewise.
    What kind of man greets guests in his library rather than in his dining room or veranda? A man with Greek pretensions, I thought. A scholar.
    A lover of knowledge and wisdom. A man who