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when it comes to murder.”
    “A veritable Medea. Suspected of incest with her brother, too, I hear. And a great beauty to cap it all. A fit subject for poets and tragedians.” He had a Greek’s appreciation of such things.
    “Catullus used to think so. I heard he finally got over his infatuation and found some other vicious slut to follow around like a puppy.”
    “He has become much more of a sophisticate,” Asklepiodes said. “You remember him as a wide-eyed boy, just come to Rome and smitten by Clodia’s wiles. You were not immune to them yourself, if I recall correctly.”
    The memory pained me. “And now I’m supposed to find evidence against her that probably doesn’t exist. She will laugh at me.”
    “Many men have endured worse from her. You may come to me for treatment.”
    “You have a medicine for humiliation? You should be rich as Crassus.”
    “I have some excellent Cyprian wine. It produces the mildest of hangovers.”
    I stood. “I may take you up on it.” I scanned the walls of the surgery. Asklepiodes had samples of nearly every weapon in the world. Each had attached a scroll describing the wounds it produced. “I wish everyone would use honest weapons like these,” I lamented.
    “What a simple place the world would be,” Asklepiodes sighed. “We should then live in a golden age. As it is, the choice of weapons is broad. Even the subtlest poisons are crude compared to the weapon of choice favored in Rome today.”
    “Which is?”
    “The spoken word. I try to stay aloof from Roman politics, but you are a noisy lot.”
    “We learned it from you Greeks,” I pointed out. “Pericles and Demosthenes and all that wordy pack.”
    “You should have chosen the Spartans to emulate rather than the Athenians. They were stupid louts, but they had a soldierly appreciation of brevity in oratory. Anyway, I do not refer to your distinguished rhetoricians like Cicero and Hortensius Hortalus. Rather, I speak of the rabble-rousers.”
    “Caesar and Clodius?”
    “There are many others. I will not presume to address your own realm of expertise, but you would do well to inform yourself of their activities. I fear civil war is in the offing.”
    “That’s a bit extreme. We haven’t had one in more than twenty years. A little rioting now and then does no great harm. It clears the air and drains off excess resentments.”
    “A most Roman attitude. But this time it will not be aggrieved allies and
municipia.
It will be class against class.”
    “Nothing new about that either. It’s been going on since the Gracchi. Probably earlier. It’s in our nature.”
    “I wish you joy of it, then. Please feel free to consult me at any time.”
    I thanked him and left. Actually, I was not as sanguine as I pretended with Asklepiodes, but I was reluctant to bare my fears about the Roman social ills with a foreigner, even if he was a friend. And if war between the classes was coming, the rabble-rousers among the commons were by no means solely to blame. My own family shared a good deal of the responsibility.
    I was born an aristocrat, but I had few illusions about my peers. We had brought endless ills upon ourselves andupon Rome and its empire through our own stupid intransigence. The extreme end of the aristocratic party resisted any improvement in the lot of the common Roman with the thoughtless, reflexive hostility of a dog guarding its dinner.
    I pondered upon these things as I made my way back into the City proper. Rome had long since expanded beyond the walls marked out by Romulus with his plow. The Port of Rome, an extramural riverside district, had leapt the river to form the new suburb of the Transtiber. Huge building projects were in progress out on the Field of Mars, where once the citizens had formed up every year to enroll in their legions and vote upon important matters. They still went there to vote, although few bothered to serve with the legions anymore.
    Before long, I thought, there would be more