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should be, that a man who cannot stop talking may eventually say something useful.
    When he tried to dismiss Arpocras with a wave of his hand, the Greek stood firm, and so did I, and Licinius Aper, realizing his blunder, graciously invited the three of us to bathe and dine with him.
    He gave us a tour of the house, making sure that we noticed the images of all the deified emperors among his household gods, and that his statues of the gods and goddesses were of the conventional sort. No thousand-breasted Venuses here.
    “I hear they have something like that down in Ephesus,” said Servilius Pudens, “Only they call it Diana.”
    “That is exactly my point, my dear fellow,” said Licinius Aper, placing his had on Pudens’s shoulder with an audible thump and perhaps too much familiarity, though, to be fair, he was actually walking then and may have needed to lean on Pudens for support.
    “It is?”
    “Yes. The natives apply the names of our divinities to theirs, absurd as they might be, and that raises the question of whether they can really be considered divine at all, or just the fevered imaginings of barbarians.”
    Arpocras coughed, as if to say he did not like where this conversation was going, but Pudens merely said, “Oh really? My friend and I were discussing something very similar this afternoon.”
    “Indeed?” said Licinius Aper. “Tell me about it.”
    Tell him he did, and the loquacious Aper dragged on this discussion for hours, through our bath, well into the dinner that followed, only interrupted by vulgar displays of lewd dancers and mimes and acrobats. There was no doubt that our host was going all out to impress, though I couldn’t help but think of the ridiculous freedman in the Satyricon of Petronius, written in the time of Nero yet as applicable to the present circumstances. But Licinius Aper was a Roman, a true son of the Tiber and the Seven Hills, as he had not failed to impress upon us, as he continued to impress … and if I may add a further new proverb to my short collection, let me say that the man who strives so hard to impress may ultimately give an impression other than the one he intended.
    More than once Pudens shot me a glance as if to say how he suffered for the good of Rome, doing his duty, putting up with all this. Arpocras gazed into space, stonily, but remained, I am sure, completely alert. The oddest thing about the whole evening was that at times you might think that Pudens was the object of our host’s hospitality, and I, the legatus propraetore consulari poteste was almost forgotten. But I bided my time, as did Arpocras, waiting for Licinius Aper to get to the point.
    He finally did.
    The dancers and mimes were long gone. The dinner had proceeded, literally from eggs to apples, and as we lingered into the late hours over dessert, our host said suddenly, “The men of Juliopolis are my enemies.”
    I already knew of the rivalry between the two cities, a common enough phenomenon between Greek cities in the East. With the might of Rome to prevent them from actually going to war, they often expressed their enmity in sporting competitions, street riots, and more often than not in ridiculous vanities, each striving to build the grander theatre or aqueduct or temple, which were often unsound, over-budget, and the cause of the very evils which I had come into the province to correct.
    I sighed, and thought, At last.
    I will not repeat everything he said, for, even when he was getting to the point Licinius Aper could be long-winded. The gist of it was—as I understood the undertext of his discourse—that certain wealthy men like himself, Romans, as he made sure we were all quite clear about, some of whose families had dwelt in the East since the affairs of the region were settled by Pompey over a hundred and fifty years ago, controlled the local economy, the grain markets, the small manufactures, even the religious pilgrimage trade. He being, of course, a gentleman, a member of