The old Senate House was a cool, gloomy, cavernous temple of government, split by a wide central aisle of black and white tile. Facing across it on either side were long rows of wooden benches, six deep, on which the senators sat, with a dais at the far end for the chairs of the consuls. The light on that November afternoon was pale and bluish, dropping in shafts from the unglazed windows just beneath the raftered roof. Pigeons cooed on the sills and flapped across the chamber, sending small feathers and even occasionally hot squirts of excrement down onto the senators below. Some held that it was lucky to be shat on while speaking, others that it was an ill omen, a few that it depended on the color of the deposit. The superstitions were as numerous as their interpretations. Cicero took no notice of them, just as he took no notice of the arrangement of sheep’s guts, or whether a peal of thunder was on the left or the right, or the particular flight path of a flock of birds-idiocy all of it, as far as he was concerned, even though he later campaigned enthusiastically for election to the College of Augurs.

By ancient tradition, then still observed, the doors of the Senate House remained open so that the people could hear the debates. The crowd, Sthenius and I among them, surged across the Forum to the threshold of the chamber, where we were held back by a simple rope. Gellius was already speaking, relating the dispatches of the army commanders in the field. On all three fronts, the news was good. In southern Italy, the vastly rich Marcus Crassus-he who once boasted that no man could call himself wealthy unless he could keep a legion of five thousand solely out of his income-was putting down Spartacus’s slave revolt with great severity.