'It may be Cicero's house,' I protested, 'but he is not receiving visitors.'

'He will receive us!' came a familiar voice from inside the first litter, and a bony hand clawed back the curtain to reveal the leader of the patrician faction in the senate, Q. Lutatius Catulus. He was wrapped in animal skins right up to his pointed chin, giving him the appearance of a large and malevolent weasel.

'Senator,' I said, bowing, 'I shall tell him you're here.'

'And not just I,' said Catulus.

I looked along the street. Clambering stiffly out of the next litter, and cursing his old soldier's bones, was the conqueror of Olympus and father of the senate, Vatia Isauricus, while nearby stood Cicero's great rival in the law courts, the patricians' favourite advocate, Q. Hortensius. He in turn was holding out his hand to a fourth senator, whose shrivelled, nut-brown, toothless face I could not place. He looked very decrepit. I guessed he must have stopped attending debates a long while ago.

'Distinguished gentlemen,' I said, in my most unctuous manner, 'please follow me and I shall inform the consul-elect.'

I whispered to the porter to show them into the tablinum and hurried towards Cicero's study. As I drew close, I could hear his voice in full declamatory flow – 'To the Roman people I say, enough!' – and when I opened the door I found him standing with his back to me, addressing my two junior secretaries, Sositheus and Laurea, his hand outstretched, his thumb and middle finger formed into a circle. 'And to you, Tiro,' he continued, without turning round, 'I say: not another damned interruption! What sign have the gods sent us now? A shower of frogs?'

The secretaries sniggered. On the brink of achieving his life's ambition, he had put the perturbations of the previous day out of his mind and was in a great good humour.