‘Rome first and always, Marcellus! Swear to me that you will always put Rome before everything.’

‘Yes, Father,’ he said out loud, hoping that the parental spirit would hear him.

He picked up the piece of papyrus on which he had drawn an image from the walls of that villa in Beneventum, gifted to the four leaders of the Sicilian slave revolt, men Lucius had suborned and bribed to betray their people with the prospect of a life of ease and comfort. They had not lived to enjoy their deceit; someone had taken revenge and killed them all in the most bloodthirsty fashion, and had left on the walls of each room this outline, a drawing of an eagle in flight, only the red on the original had been blood, not ink.

Why had the mere sight of that image so terrified his father? On sight of it he had called for his litter in an obvious panic, and made an effort to get back to Rome, perhaps to seek the intercession of Jupiter Maximus. It had been in vain; Lucius Falerius, Rome’s senior senator, died like a nobody on the Via Appia, several leagues away from the city he revered, ignored, as was his tear-stained son, by those passing by, the citizens for whom he had laboured so long and so hard.

There was a powerful legacy. Not great wealth; Lucius had put too much time into the care of Rome and its empire to amass much money, though the boy was comfortably off and had the prospect of a marriage that would bring a massive dowry. The real inheritance was political; as the son of a man so influential — with a list of clients almost too long to recount — he could expect to inherit some of that authority. Not all, he was too young for that, but enough to make his mark in the world. It was now time to find out just how potent that was.

Before they left for that fateful journey to Sicily, Lucius had sealed many of his most secret scrolls in chests, to be placed in the cellar.