Standing on the spot, Aquila could almost hear Fulmina’s voice, often berating her husband Clodius. It was she who had prophesied greatness for him, with a faith he had never been able to share; how could he, the child of peasants, do what she foretold? Only on the day she died did he hear the truth; he had been brought here as a newborn child, exposed in the nearby woods to die on the feast day of the Goddess Lupercalia.

Clodius, occasionally drunk, always on the sharp end of his wife’s tongue, had been sleeping off a drinking bout. Woken by a baby crying for food, he had fetched him back to his wife, knowing it would assuage her anger. On his ankle had been the charm he now wore round his neck, an indication that at least one of his true parents wanted him to live. Had they sold it they could have lived in some comfort and Clodius would have been spared the need for service, and ultimately death, in the legions; then they did not speak of the power Fulmina felt, and the dreams that merely touching the charm had brought on.

A wander round the district brought back other memories, like the day he had met Gadoric, a slave disguised as an addle-brained shepherd; of the dog Minca, huge and fierce to a stranger, as gentle as a lamb to a friend, long dead now. The shepherd hut was still there, occupied by another, sitting at the edge of the field where the Celt had taught him how to fight with a wooden sword, how to fire an untipped arrow and most of all how to use the spear he still carried, which Gadoric had stolen from the guards of his owner, the fat senator, Cassius Barbinus.

The land he walked on belonged to Cassius Barbinus; Sosia, the slave girl, with whom he had enjoyed a tender childhood romance, had belonged to Barbinus. Didius Flaccus, the ex-centurion who had taken him to Sicily, had worked for Barbinus.