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Still not well enough to travel."
    "I see. I had no idea. This is bad news."
    "For Tiro? I don't know about that. I figure he's in a good place about now. Lots of peace and quiet in Patrae, I should think. Nice place to convalesce. Wouldn't want to be in Rome these days if I didn't have two strong legs and felt up to running."
    "I see your point."
    "Was there somebody else in the household you wanted to see?"
    " Want to see? No. Nonetheless, tell your master that Gordianus the Finder requests a visit."
    •        •        •

    Whatever recriminations had passed between us in former days seemed to have been forgotten by Cicero. I waited in the foyer for only a moment before he came to greet me. I received his embrace stiffly, startled by his warmth. I wondered if he had been drinking, but I smelled no wine on his breath. When he drew back I took a hard look at him.
    I had braced myself to encounter Cicero in one of his less pleasant moods— the self-righteous, self-made man, smug friend of the powerful, peevish settler of old scores, priggish arbiter of virtue. I saw instead a man with jowls and receding hair and watery eyes, who looked as if he had just received the worst news of his life.
    He gestured for me to follow him. The mood in his house matched the mood of the city— a panic barely contained by purposeful activity, as slaves hurried back and forth and spoke in hushed voices. Cicero led me first to his study, but the room was like a beehive, with slaves packing scrolls into boxes.
    "This won't do," he said apologetically. "Come, there's a little room off the garden where we can talk quietly."
    The little room was an exquisitely appointed chamber with a sumptuous Greek rug underfoot. A brazier on a tripod in the middle of the room illuminated walls painted with pastoral landscapes. Herdsmen dozed amid sheep, and satyrs peeked from behind little roadside temples.
    "I've never seen this room before," I said.
    "No? It was one of the first rooms Terentia decorated when we came back and rebuilt, after Clodius and his gang burned down the house and sent me into exile." He smiled ruefully. "Now Clodius is dust, but I'm still here— and so are you, Gordianus. But for what? To see it all come to this ..."
    Cicero paced nervously in a circle around the brazier, casting deep shadows across the walls. Abruptly he stopped his pacing and shot me a quizzical look. "Can it really have been thirty years since we first met, Gordianus?"
    "Thirty-one, actually."
    "The trial of Sextus Roscius." He shook his head. "We were all so young then! And brave, the way young men are, because they don't know any better. I, Marcus Tullius Cicero, took on the dictator Sulla in the courts— and bested him! I think back now and wonder how I could ever have been so mad. But it wasn't madness. It was bravery. I saw a terrible wrong and a way to redress it. I knew the danger and went ahead anyway, because I was young and thought I could change the world. Now ... now I wonder if I can be that brave again. I fear I'm too old, Gordianus. I've seen too much ... suffered too much ..."
    In my own recollections, Cicero's motives had never been quite as pure as he was painting them, colored as they were by shrewd ambition. Was he brave? Certainly he had taken risks— and been rewarded with fame, honor, and wealth. True, Fortune had not always smiled on him; he had suffered defeats and humiliations, especially in recent years. But he had caused others to suffer much worse. Men had been put to death without trial when he was consul, in the name of preserving the state.
    Could any man advance as far in politics as Cicero had, and keep his hands entirely clean? Perhaps not. What rankled me was his insistence in presenting himself as the untarnished champion of virtue and reason. It was not a pose; it was the picture he had of himself. His unflagging self-justification had often exasperated, even infuriated, me. But now, in the darkness that