He nodded to me, and I stepped forward, putting a hand on Sthenius’s arm to guide him out. The Sicilian shook it off. “But I need you,” he persisted.

“Why?”

“Because my only hope of justice lies here, not in Sicily, where Verres controls the courts. And everyone here tells me Marcus Cicero is the second-best lawyer in Rome.”

“Do they indeed?” Cicero ’s tone took on an edge of sarcasm: he hated that epithet. “Well then, why settle for second best? Why not go straight to Hortensius?”

“I thought of that,” said his visitor, artlessly, “but he turned me down. He is representing Verres.”

I SHOWED THE SICILIAN out and returned to find Cicero alone in his study, tilted back in his chair, tossing the leather ball from one hand to the other. Legal textbooks cluttered his desk. Precedents in Pleading by Hostilius was one which he had open; Manilius’s Conditions of Sale was another.

“Do you remember that red-haired drunk on the quayside at Puteoli, the day we came back from Sicily? ‘Ooooh! My good fellow! He’s returning from his province…’”

I nodded.

“That was Verres.” The ball went back and forth, back and forth. “The fellow gives corruption a bad name.”

“I am surprised at Hortensius for getting involved with him.”

“Are you? I am not.” He stopped tossing the ball and contemplated it on his outstretched palm. “The Dancing Master and the Boar…” He brooded for a while. “A man in my position would have to be mad to tangle with Hortensius and Verres combined, and all for the sake of some Sicilian who is not even a Roman citizen.”

“True.”

“True,” he repeated, although there was an odd hesitancy in the way he said it which sometimes makes me wonder if he had not just then glimpsed the whole thing-the whole extraordinary set of possibilities and consequences, laid out like a mosaic in his mind. But if he had, I never knew, for at that moment his daughter, Tullia, ran in, still wearing her nightdress, with some childish drawing to show him, and suddenly his attention switched entirely onto her-scooping her up and settling her on his knee. “Did you do this? Did you really do this all by yourself…?”