Outside in the chilly street, the usual crowd of the miserable and the desperate was already waiting, and I made a note of each man as he crossed the threshold. Most I recognized; those I did not, I asked for their names; the familiar no-hopers, I turned away. But the standing instruction was, “If he has a vote, let him in,” so the tablinum was soon well filled with anxious clients, each seeking a piece of the senator’s time. I had reckoned the queue had all filed in and I was just stepping back when a figure with the dusty clothes, straggly hair, and uncut beard of a man in mourning loomed in the doorway. He gave me a fright, I do not mind admitting.

“Tiro!” he said. “Thank the gods!” And he sank against the doorjamb, exhausted, peering out at me with pale, dead eyes. I guess he must have been about fifty. At first I could not place him, but it is one of the jobs of a political secretary to put names to faces, and gradually, despite his condition, a picture began to assemble in my mind: a large house overlooking the sea, an ornamental garden, a collection of bronze statues, a town somewhere in Sicily, in the north-Thermae, that was it.

“Sthenius of Thermae,” I said and held out my hand. “Welcome.”

It was not my place to comment on his appearance, nor to ask what he was doing hundreds of miles from home, and in such obvious distress. I left him in the tablinum and went through to Cicero ’s study. The senator, who was due in court that morning to defend a youth charged with parricide, and who would also be expected to attend the afternoon session of the Senate, was squeezing a small leather ball to strengthen his fingers, while being robed in his toga by his valet. He was listening to one letter being read out by young Sositheus, and at the same time dictating a message to Laurea, to whom I had taught the rudiments of my shorthand system.