“This experience, gentlemen, I am inclined to think was more valuable to me than if I had been hailed with salvos of applause. I ceased henceforth from considering what the world was likely to hear about me: from that day I took care that I should be seen personally every day. I lived in the public eye. I frequented the Forum. Neither my doorkeeper nor sleep prevented anyone from getting in to see me. Not even when I had nothing to do did I do nothing, and consequently absolute leisure was a thing I never knew.”

I came across that passage in one of his speeches not long ago and I can vouch for the truth of it. He walked away from the harbor like a man in a dream, up through Puteoli, and out onto the main highway without once looking back. I struggled along behind him carrying as much luggage as I could manage. To begin with, his steps were slow and thoughtful, but gradually they picked up speed, until at last he was striding so rapidly in the direction of Rome I had difficulty keeping up.

And with this both ends my first roll of paper, and begins the real story of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Roll II

THE DAY WHICH WAS to prove the turning point began like any other, an hour before dawn, with Cicero, as always, the first in the household to rise. I lay for a little while in the darkness and listened to the thump of the floorboards above my head as he went through the exercises he had learned on Rhodes-a visit now six years in the past-then I rolled off my straw mattress and rinsed my face. It was the first of November; cold.

Cicero had a modest, two-story dwelling on the ridge of the Esquiline Hill, hemmed in by a temple on one side and a block of apartments on the other, although if you could be bothered to scramble up onto the roof you would be rewarded with a decent view across the smoky valley to the great temples on Capitol Hill about half a mile to the west.