‘The task outlined by the Senate,’ Lucius continued, ‘demands no conquest, only that the Celtic-Iberian tribes should be defeated, dispersed and sent back into the mountains from which they came. There is therefore little glory to be garnered on this campaign, only hard fighting and the risk of death. Given that, I demand to know who else would volunteer?’

He was answered only by silence; that he expected from those who supported him. It was his enemies and the uncommitted he was challenging, the latter the key to a majority. Lucius stopped short of calling them cowards, though not very far short. He clinched their support by reminding them that he, in his second term as a reigning consul, had the right to command the army, but, just as he had for the war in Macedonia, he was willing to put aside his claim, as was his junior colleague, to secure a quick victory as well as a return to normality by sending to Spain, as proconsul, the man he trusted most with a military command. Lucius took Aulus’s hand and raised him so that he could consent to the agreement of his peers, knowing his friend would, in humility, stammer his acceptance. The Senate was not the natural arena for Aulus: he liked simple chains of command, orders given and obeyed. Not for him, thought Lucius, the balancing of political weight, or the need to persuade or terrorise a reluctant senator so that he could see where his best interests lay.

Aulus did surprise Lucius by adding one stipulation; that, as he was going to a Roman province with proconsular powers to contain a rebellion, his family, including his young wife, should accompany him. Everyone now looked to the man who had moved the motion to give him the command to see if he would demur. Privately, Lucius had made quite a few salacious jokes about the way that his old friend was smitten, had even secretly admired the pornographic graffiti with which the slum dwellers of Rome were wont to tell their betters what they thought of their actions. Personally he found Claudia gauche and the sight of Aulus drooling over her embarrassing, but he saw no harm in the notion and nodded his assent. After the drubbing the doubters had just received none in the Senate had dared protest at a general taking his family on campaign. In reality forbidden, it seemed a small price to pay to secure his services.