The Ides of April

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The death squads were out that evening.

When I first came to Rome it was the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, tough but decent. My parents knew him. They knew his elder son Titus as well, but Titus only survived his father by a couple of years, years that were dominated by the disastrous volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Even in that dark moment, Rome was well-run and thriving. But when Titus died unexpectedly, rumours that he had been poisoned by his jealous brother Domitian indicated just what kind of rule would follow. Eight years later, we were used to suspicion and fear. Praetorian Guards were regularly sent out to search for those whose low opinion of their emperor had aroused his loathing for them.

Failure to flatter that podgy despot Domitian was a deadly mistake. Many people inadvertently made the error; the slightest thing could offend him. So, as I returned wearily to the city from the necropolis, I was not surprised to glimpse a small group of soldiers passing the end of a dark street; there was no doubt of their sinister intent. As they tramped into the neighbourhood, everyone disappeared from the streets. Even a cat fled, yowling. It realised the soldiers were pitiless men who, if it strayed within their reach, would grab its tail and dash its brains out.

The night was dark by then, moonless and starless, though almost too early for the imperial guards to arrive. Normally, they liked to surprise victims with sudden and thunderous knocking at the door while everyone was sleeping. Just before dawn, a bleary porter would find set-faced men with drawn swords, bringing punishment, often for a crime the victim had not even known he had committed. If the soldiers turned up during hours of darkness, there was less chance of resistance; less chance, too, of angry neighbours raising a public outcry. Tyrants are petrified of riots. Come the pale light of morning, word of a new death in the upper classes would infiltrate basilicas and emporia, though such brutal deletions of humanity were never formally listed in the Daily Gazette.

That night the first warning of their presence was their torches. Guards always carried rather good torches, and plenty of them. Trained killers need big, long-lasting flames; only the very best tar for Domitian's punishers. These heavyweights are crack troops; they don't want to march out on a mission to murder some measly senator only to be jumped by one of the petty muggers who hang about at night. It would be just too, too shameful to creep back to the Praetorian Camp and have to admit that they had been held up and had their medals and fancy daggers stolen by one of the moth-eaten larcenists on Chickenbone Alley.

We were used to the execution squads. That was the worst part; we now accepted it. Children were growing up in Rome who had never known an ordinary, safe existence. Even adults who remembered better times rarely questioned the way things were.

For someone like me, who worked among deceivers and double-crossers, the new atmosphere of dread was an appropriate backdrop. We had reached a grim period when Domitian was clearly becoming more cruel. He believed his wife had betrayed him with an actor; his foreign wars were derided; he had just survived a rebellion in Germany headed by a man he trusted; and his beloved niece Julia had died. He took it out on us, his helpless subjects. Probably he had realised that, much as he wanted to be adored, nobody liked him. The more he executed people who showed their hostility, and the feebler his excuses, the less our charmless tyrant would be loved… Neither he nor we could escape the cycle of misery.

Constant executions had affected the public. Political uncertainty led to desperation. People lost their morality-where they had had any in the first place. A cynic would say it gave more work for informers-the emperor, for one, certainly used spies, spies at all levels of society, spies who were good, bad or absolutely indifferent these days to the faint concept of honesty that had once existed in some of us. As well as the emperor himself wanting to destroy the personal enemies he saw behind every palace pillar, informers could find plenty of ordinary people who were ready to betray others. Picking a fight with your neighbour over a boundary dispute or insulting a shopkeeper who served rotten leeks were now dangerous exploits. You could end up in court, with some unscrupulous informant-turned-prosecutor accusing you of treason or that wonderfully nebulous concept, "atheism"-all with sworn statements to "prove" the crime that had in fact never happened.

I never worked for the state. I had relatives who had done so in the past, but it was now too dangerous. No dubious practices, bedroom or religious, would be exposed by me to further the emperor's morality campaign and make him look good to the gods. No bearded philosopher who foolishly lectured on historic tyrants would spot me sitting in the back row, scribbling notes that would earn him exile to a very uncomfortable island. No silly woman casting horoscopes need fear me reporting her for prophesying Domitian's death.

Any clairvoyant who was any good at foreseeing knives and poisonings was safe from me. Like everyone else, I would be too interested in knowing exactly when we could hope for a decent coup with a well-organised assassination. I knew what I thought about Domitian, but I hid my opinions.

I had nothing to fear from the Guards in theory, yet, like anyone, when I heard them coming I kept out of their way. I did not want a bad-tempered officer to decide any lone woman on the streets after dark must be a whore. I would be at his mercy. Pleading that you have just "come from a funeral" sounds a lame excuse. So I stood carefully in a dark shop doorway while they marched by.

Once again, as I waited, I became depressed. I had been unsettled by Nepos admitting he had discussed me and my work with the aedile. That could lead to bother. And the issue of Salvidia's death gnawed disturbingly. You could say that compared with the problems some brave opponent of the emperor was about to have this night when the Guards arrived at his home, the unexplained death of a middle-aged woman who probably suffered from a bad heart hardly mattered. But that magistrate Manlius Faustus, the supposedly intelligent man Metellus Nepos had taken a shine to, had obviously instructed Nepos to stop talking to me-Nepos, with whom I had previously enjoyed a frank professional relationship. I hated that: the impression that my client and an official had entered some male compact, from which they were high-handedly excluding me.

In these dark streets, full of the menace that trailed behind the Praetorians, I started to think all sorts of things. After they had gone, people kept in their homes, with shutters drawn. I heard neither music nor laughter nearby. Stillness descended. In this unusual, uneasy quietness, an insidious cover-up of strange crimes began to seem almost plausible.

I cursed Nepos again-but this time my irritation was practical. I remembered that I had forgotten to ask him to pay my fees as he had promised.