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that he made on the prostibulae in the bathhouse, and he had his admirers among the girls of his own neighbourhood. But he knew there could be no hope with Julia. As a servant boy, little better than a slave, he would be whipped out of the house if they were found out, or worse. And, above all, he had known that Scipio was in love with Julia, a love that had blossomed secretly in the months that followed after Julia had become aware of his feelings, despite her own betrothal since childhood to Scipio’s distant cousin Metellus. If Fabius lost the patronage of Scipio he would never rise above the streets again. But it was Scipio’s friendship that mattered most: a friendship that had enriched his life, that had introduced him to Polybius and a world of books and knowledge that had lit his imagination and made his dream the same dream as Scipio’s, to see a world his father had seen as a soldier that he yearned to explore himself.
    The procession passed, and Fabius hurried over the road towards the Gladiator School, making his way through the warren of alleyways and wooden houses until he came to the two-storey building that surrounded the practice arena. He pushed past the crippled old soldiers begging at the entranceway, past the mound of sand that was used to mop up the blood, and then the stable where they kept Hannibal, the gnarled old war elephant who was the last survivor of his namesake’s march over the Alps almost fifty years before – the final Carthaginian prisoner left alive in Rome. Fabius ran along a dark passageway and up the stairway to the closed door, careful not to brush against the sputtering tallow candles that lined the walls. Officially, the academy was a private school for the instruction of sons of senators in philosophy and history, staffed by professors recruited from the hundreds of Greek captives taken to Rome since the war with Macedonia had begun. Unofficially, it was a training school established by the elder Scipio before he died to ensure that the next generation of Roman war leaders were more skilled than the last, and better able to hold their own against the agitations of the Senate. It was this last fact that made the elder Scipio keep the academy as private as possible, away from the eyes of those who were suspicious of anything he did. In theory, the old centurion Petraeus was there only to instruct the boys in swordplay, but for two mornings of the week behind closed doors they were allowed to simulate the great battles of the past, battles that the centurion or other veterans brought in for the purpose would mastermind for them based on their own experience of tactics and combat.
    He pushed the door open and crept inside, shutting it quietly behind him. The room was large, windowless where it faced the street outside but with an open gallery on the other side overlooking the arena in the courtyard below. Two slaves stood in attendance against the back wall, holding trays with fruit and water pitchers, beside an open passageway coming up from the courtyard where the old centurion would make his entrance. In the centre of the room was a large table, some three arms’ breadths in length, covered with the diorama of a battlefield; the terrain was represented by sand and stones and tufts of grass, and the opposing armies by coloured wooden blocks arranged in rows. Fabius knew exactly which battle was being represented. When Polybius had taught him Greek he had read him a passage on the battle from the history of the war against Hannibal that Polybius had been writing ever since he had arrived from Greece as a willing captive who had always been a great admirer of Rome. And the old centurion had told Fabius about it, an eyewitness who had fought there beside the elder Scipio himself. Fabius had gone to the tavern one evening with him and had spent hours drinking wine and listening to the stories. It was the Battle of Zama, the final confrontation with the Carthaginians