Throughout this charade, Aulus had paced the barren atrium, cursing himself for the events of the past two years. His mind went further back to the triumph, celebrated at the successful conclusion of his wars on the Greek mainland, where, in a part fulfilment of the prophecy, ‘he had tamed a mighty foe’, having brought Perseus, King of Macedon, to Rome in chains, to be hauled along behind his chariot. Others carried the male children of that same king’s court, who would be educated as Romans and held as a blood bond for the behaviour of their fathers. The city had never witnessed such a triumph; not even the defeat of Carthage had introduced such wealth to the Republic. The slave beside him in his four-horsed war chariot might caution that all glory was fleeting, but the cheers of the crowds added to the unstinting praise of the Senate made it both hard to hear and impossible to comprehend. There was not a soldier in the legions that marched behind him on that day that did not feel immortal.

Aulus had brought back more than Alexander’s heir. The wealth that Perseus’s great ancestor had plundered from Greece and the Persian Empire came too, in a train of carts that took two whole days to wend its way from the city gates to the Capitol. Hundreds of finely wrought and valuable urns, full to the lip with gold coins, were carried in procession behind him. Still others followed, brimming with jewels and precious objects, all borne on the shoulders of men who had once been Macedonian soldiers, the most feared army in the world. Now they would be sold in the market-place and in such quantities that the price of male slaves had plummeted.

Alexander the Great’s armour came too, in his own war chariot; breastplate, helm and shield, which held an almost mythical significance for the whole civilised world.