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to arrange your theatricals than Syrus. The plays he put on for me went over wonderfully. My election to the praetorship is assured.”
    “I have two new dramas in the works,” Syrus told me. “And six short comedies.”
    “Nothing about Troy, I hope. That war’s been done to death.”Even worse, Caesar had been secretly hiring poets and playwrights to write about Aeneas, on the pretext that Caesar’s family, the
gens
Julia, were descended from Julus, son of Aeneas. And the grandmother of Julus was none other than the goddess Venus herself. We had all been blissfully unaware of the divine ancestry of Caesar until he decided to tell us about it.
    “One of the dramas concerns the death of Hannibal, the other the deeds of Mucius Scaevola.”
    “Those sound like safe, patriotic themes,” I said. “Right now, anything about a foreign war looks like a reference to Caesar or Gabinius or Crassus. What about the comedies? I don’t suppose you have anything that would poke fun at Clodius, do you?”
    His smile was a bit strained. “I have to live in this city too, you know.”
    “Oh, well, forget it. I suppose the usual satyrs, nymphs, cowardly soldiers, conniving slaves, and cuckolded husbands will do well enough.”
    “I have a good one about King Ptolemy of Egypt,” he said. “You know he came here last year, begging for money and support?”
    “So I heard. I’ll never understand how the king of the world’s richest nation is always a pauper. But Gabinius put him back on his throne. It’s not about him, is it?” The last thing I wanted to do was spend my money to help out someone else’s reputation. Or even worse, risk making an enemy of a powerful man.
    “No, this is about his coming here to beg before the Senate. Only I have him going about from door to door in the poorest parts of town, dressed in rags with a bowl in his hand, followed by a troop of slaves to carry his wine sacks. I’ve contrived a device that lets him drain the wine sacks one after another, right on stage.”
    I laughed heartily at the thought. I knew Ptolemy and his feats of wine-drinking were little short of what the actor described. “That sounds good. Go ahead with it. Egyptians are always goodfor laughs.” Of course, we thought all foreigners were funny, but I didn’t say that to Publilius, who, as his name attests, came from Syria.
    “I recommend the new Aemilian Theater,” Syrus said. “Have you seen it?”
    “Not yet,” I admitted. This was built the year before by the same Aemilius Scaurus whose baths I had enjoyed that afternoon. “Is it on the same scale as his new baths?”
    “It’s larger than Pompey’s Theater,” Syrus said. “Made of wood, but the decoration is unbelievably lavish, and it hasn’t had time to deteriorate. Besides, Pompey’s was damaged during his triumphal Games. The elephants stampeded and broke a lot of the stonework, and when he had a town burned on stage, the proscenium caught fire. The damage is still visible.”
    “Besides,” Messius said, “Pompey’s Theater will remind everyone of Pompey, and it’s topped by a temple to Venus
Genetrix
, and that’ll remind people of Caesar. Go with the Aemilian, and then all you’ll have to worry about is a fire breaking out and cooking half the voters. It’ll hold eighty thousand people.”
    “Plus,” Syrus added, “most people won’t have to walk as far. Pompey’s is out on the Campus Martius, while the Aemilian’s right on the river by the Sublician Bridge.”
    “I’m sold,” I said. “The Aemilian it is.” About that time the first course arrived, and we applied ourselves to it, and to those that followed. I was forced to admit that perfectly fresh sea fish was a rare treat in Rome, where the catch was usually at least a day old by the time it reached the City. These fish and eels were practically still gasping.
    We were tearing into the dessert when there was a commotion in the atrium. A moment later a small knot of men came