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judging the local assizes, so therefore only the three of us gathered to eat. (Milo’s gladiator, a murmillo named Birria, took his meal in the kitchen; even a man as easy-going as Cicero, who had been known occasionally to tolerate the presence of an actor at his dinner table, drew the line at a gladiator.) We lay in the garden in a kind of fine-mesh tent designed to keep out the mosquitoes, and over the next few hours we learned something of Milo, and why he had made such an arduous journey of seven hundred miles. He came, he said, of a noble but hard-up family. He had been adopted by his maternal grandfather. Even so, there was little money and he had been obliged to earn a living as the owner of a gladiator school in Campania, supplying fighters for funeral games in Rome. (“No wonder we’ve never heard of him,” Cicero remarked to me afterwards.) His work brought him often to the city. He had been appalled, he claimed, by the violence and intimidation unleashed by Clodius. He had wept to see Cicero harried and pilloried and eventually driven from Rome. Given his occupation, he fancied himself to be in a unique position to help restore order, and through intermediaries he had approached Pompey with an offer.
    “What I am about to disclose is in the strictest confidence,” he said, with a sideways glance at me. “No word of it must go beyond us three.”

    “Who am I to tell?” retorted Cicero. “The slave who empties my chamber pot? The cook who brings my meals? I assure you I see no one else.”
    “Very well,” said Milo, and then he told us what he had offered Pompey: to place at his disposal one hundred pairs of highly trained fighting men to recapture the centre of Rome and end Clodius’s control of the legislative assembly. In return he had asked for a certain sum to cover expenses, and also Pompey’s support in the elections for tribune: “I couldn’t just do this as a private citizen, you understand—I’d be prosecuted. I told him I needed the inviolability of the office.”
    Cicero was studying him closely. He had barely touched his food. “And what did Pompey say to that?”
    “At first he brushed me off. He said he’d think about it. But then came the business with the Prince of Armenia, when Papirius was killed by Clodius’s men. Did you hear about that?”
    “We heard something of it.”
    “Well, the killing of his friend seemed to make Pompey do that bit of extra thinking, because the day after Papirius was put on the pyre, he called me to his house. ‘That idea of your becoming tribune—you’ve got yourself a deal.’ ”
    “And how has Clodius reacted to your election? He must know what you have in mind.”
    “Well, that’s why I’m here. And this you won’t have heard about, because I left Rome straight after it happened, and no messenger could have got here quicker than I.” He stopped and held out his cup for more wine. He had come a long way to tell his story; he was obviously a raconteur; he meant to do it in his own time. “It was about two weeks ago, not long after the elections. Pompey was doing a little business in the Forum when he ran into a gang of Clodius’s men. There was some pushing and shoving, and one of them dropped a dagger. A lot of people saw it, and a great shout went up that they were going to murder Pompey. His attendants hustled him out of there fast, and back to his house, and barricaded him in—and that’s where he is still, as far as I know, with only the Lady Julia for company.”

    Cicero said in astonishment, “Pompey the Great is barricaded in his own house?”
    “I don’t blame you if you find it funny. Who wouldn’t? There’s rough justice in it, and Pompey knows it. In fact he said to me that the greatest mistake of his life was letting Clodius drive you out of the city.”
    “Pompey said that?”
    “That’s why I’ve raced across three countries, barely stopping to eat or sleep—to give you the news that he’s going to do