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man with a long white beard and a pointed Phrygian cap. I felt my eyes brim with tears. It was Phocion. He was sitting at the center of a spoked circle, clearly a horoscope. He looked at me with his last, loving gaze but he spoke with Agrippina's voice. "One final, fateful act,” he said.
    A persistent knocking woke me. The door was opened by a ten-year-old boy with blue eyes and reddish blond hair. It was Agrippina's son Lucius, I recognized him instantly from the statue his mother had caressed when she'd talked about Fate.
    "Good morning," he said very brightly. "Mother tells me that when I grow up and go to war you're going to carry my shield and defend me. Is that true?"
     

 
    A Stellar Trap
    October 16, 48 A.D. – February 49 A.D.
     
     
    Messalina was Agrippina’s niece by marriage and her son Lucius’s first cousin by blood, so it was proper for both of them to withdraw for a period of mourning. Of course Agrippina didn’t mourn, she exulted, but she did so in the privacy of her study, poring over horoscopes of Rome’s power brokers, calculating what they were destined to do next.
    My next two nights were plagued with horrible nightmares that I would like to have had interpreted. But I didn’t know who to go to and had nothing to pay him with if I did. The palace swarmed with courtiers, capped freedmen, thousands of slaves in livery that identified their line of work. They greeted me politely, exchanged pleasantries willingly enough, but avoided conversation. It seemed that everyone knew I had something to do with Messalina’s death. Shunning me was the safest thing to do. Although they kept their distance, they watched me. But then I was used to that.
    I explored the vast palace complex on my own, admiring its population of statues, the astonishingly lifelike paintings that hung on the walls mostly depicting Tiberius’s victories as the emperor Augustus’s greatest general. My favorite was at least twelve feet tall. It depicted twenty-two-year-old Tiberius, bloody from battle and his face flushed with victory, holding aloft the standards of long lost Roman legions he’d just recovered from the Parthians. The glorious moment made my heart leap with the pride. I had an imperial destiny, my stars foretold that, and I was already at the center of the dizzying grandeur of the empire. It was possible that I too, even though I was still a slave, was fated to be a hero.
    More often I was assailed by doubt. I was afraid of Tigellinus and the hold he had over me. I didn’t want to lose my hand like the Copy Mater had. I was also deeply unsettled by Agrippina’s hubris. How long would Isis tolerate her arrogance? My gut churned as the tall marble walls seemed to rush inwards upon me. At moments like these Rome’s grandeur threatened to crush me like a fly.
    I fought for equanimity by focussing my eyes on the future. I needed to find out as much as I could about the woman who had gone to such lengths to find me because that might help me unveil the mystery of that “final, fateful act” she believed I was destined to perform.
     
    Young Lucius helped me. On the morning of the third day after Messalina’s death he woke me. “Good morning, Epaphroditus, do you always sleep so late? It must be a lazy Egyptian habit. Everybody gets up at the crack of dawn around here.”
    “Dominus,” I said, wiping a nightmare out of my eyes, “I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
    His bright face darkened. “I don’t suppose I can blame you. You were there when they…” He wasn’t able to go on. “Did she die bravely?
    “Yes dominus, very bravely.”
    “Well, that’s the main thing, I suppose. Look, mother gave me permission to take you on a visit, to show you who I am. Do you want to come?”
    I was already pulling on my tunic. “Where are we going?”
    “You’ll see.”
    A bodyguard of ten gorgeously uniformed Praetorians surrounded us as we heading north down the slope of the Palatine. It was already after