My mother bore her far greater ill-fortune stoically. She spent long days polishing her jewellery and her memories. In time, to pay for my education, she sold her jewels, piece by piece. She lived, I see now, only for me, and denied herself luxuries, even on occasion necessities, in order that I might make a show in the world. At the time I understood nothing of her self-denial, and resented the demands she made on me, and her refusal to allow me to play with the ragged and often criminal boys of our wretched quarter.

So we had few friends. That is how I came to pass so much of my childhood with Domitian. His circumstances resembled mine. He was boarded with an aunt – a sister of his father – in the Street of the Pomegranates in the sixth region, a neighbourhood little more salubrious or respectable than ours. You may think the distance between our homes makes our companionship surprising, since half the city lay between us. But the explanation is simple. His aunt revered my mother, who had been kind to her (she frequently said) in her days of prosperity. This aunt had buck teeth, stammered, and was nervous of strangers. So she would lead the young Domitian all the way over to Trastevere to pay her respects to my mother. For her part, my mother found the aunt useful. She had few domestic skills herself (how should she have had?), was reluctant to leave our apartment, despised our neighbours, or at least kept her distance from them, which incidentally increased the respect they held her in. Two lonely women, resenting the world, fearing it in the aunt's case, despising it in my mother's, they formed an alliance of convenience.

The child, they say, is father of the man. True, I suppose, though I have known those, myself among them indeed, who react so fiercely against the constraints of their childhood that, in retrospect, it is hard to believe that the adult man grew out of the child.