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all the same.’ Juvens looked like Julius Caesar’s more cheerful younger brother, which he claimed was all good breeding and it might have been true. Certainly, he was from ancient patrician stock so refined that he could quote his ancestry for the past eighteen generations without pausing for breath.
    Unfortunately for all concerned, his grandfather had lost the family fortune, and although his father had made half of it back, he had been careless enough to become entangled in Piso’s conspiracy against Nero and so, along with fifty others, including Lacan, Seneca, and Piso himself, had been forced to suicide. Juvens senior’s estate, such as was left of it, went to the crown.
    He hadtwo sons, of whom the elder, now penniless, subsequently tried to have himself elected consul and was so soundly beaten in the ballot that he retreated into self-imposed exile in Iberia. Our Juvens had survived by virtue of being the second son, too insignificant to be noticed. Scraping together loans at extortionate interest, he bought his commission and bribed his way to one of the furthest legions from Rome: the IVth Macedonica, stationed on the Rhine.
    It was a risky strategy; at least half of those who buy their way to a junior commission find themselves dead with a blade in the back at their first skirmish, but Juvens was bright enough, wild enough, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-whoring, hard-fighting enough to be loved by the men before we ever went into battle together.
    They owed him money, too; Juvens’ luck at dice was legendary. He paid off his debts in full within his first year. By the time we came back to Rome, rumour said he was almost as rich as his grandfather had been in his pomp.
    None of that mattered, at least not as far as I was concerned, because Juvens had proved himself in war. In the past six months he had more than earned the spear Caecina had just given him for personal valour. He was an exceptional commander with an outstanding eye for a battlefield. I had fought twice at his side and would have been happy to do so for the rest of my life, although at that moment, standing like a fool in the widows’ street with my blade half drawn, I wasn’t sure the sentiment was returned: Juvens seemed to like everyone equally, which couldn’t be true.
    In blithe disregard of our orders, he asked, ‘Who did you draw in the lottery?’
    ‘I don’t know. I haven’t opened the tab yet.’
    The first part of that was a lie, as you’ll learn, and I’m sorry for it, but the truth was that we shouldn’t have been discussing it at all: an open street is the very opposite of ‘private’.
    I said, ‘You?’, whichmade me equally guilty. It was a day when convention didn’t count as much as it had done, when the rules had become suddenly flexible.
    I live by rules, I’m not used to bending them. But I wanted to find out if Juvens would be happy to have me at his side in the coming days; I thought I was going to need some friends I could count on and I didn’t have many. Allies? Yes. Drinking partners? Plenty. Men I could go whoring with? More than I could count. But friends? I had none I could name. Except perhaps Juvens, who studied me a moment, grinning, and said, ‘Trabo.’
    ‘Fuck, no!’ I whistled. ‘He’ll kill you.’
    ‘Probably.’ Juvens looked ridiculously cheerful; he’d always had a wild side. ‘I have to find him first, but if it’s true he took an oath to see Vitellius dead, he’ll have to come to Rome to do it. I’ll know him when I see him.’
    ‘And then you’ll kill him. If you can.’
    Because this was what the morning’s lottery in the temple had been for: to convey the orders for the execution of a hundred and sixty ‘enemies of the state’.
    Arriving in his predecessor’s palace, Vitellius had found a document in the archives, signed by a hundred and twenty officers and men of the old Praetorian Guard, asking to be recognized by Otho for their part in the murder of his