This would strike at the wealth and political authority of the same class by allowing inter-marriage, as well as extending to such people the kind of trade concessions that buttressed senatorial wealth. With a keen sense of history, Lucius Falerius knew that empires were unstable constructs, with no gods-given right to continued existence. What was being proposed would weaken the Roman state, and once the spirit of the Goddess Discordia was let loose, there was no telling where matters would end. Tiberius Livonius had to be stopped, and the best way to kill off the body of such ideas was to chop off the head.

He cared nothing for himself in this; the power and majesty of Rome was everything to Lucius Falerius. He had given his every waking moment for a full thirty years to increasing that Imperium so would gladly give his last breath to maintain it. To his mind only the optimates could be entrusted with such a task; they were the men who had supervised the creation of the empire; they must combine to fight off the populares who, by appealing to the base greed of the lower orders, would drag Rome down, as other empires had been, by a fatal weakening of the structure of authority that had brought about success. Nothing counted against that single object, certainly not the life of one senator. Without doubt they would point to him, but who would believe that a man just delivered of a son, with his wife newly dead because of it, would choose that moment to murder his greatest political rival?

For the first time in two decades that Sibylline prophecy surfaced, and he recalled that night in the cave, as well as the terrors and reflections that had followed; Aulus so fearful, he determined to be rational. His childhood friend had certainly tamed his mighty foe; was this the moment he would strike to save Rome’s fame? Was there some truth in that Sibylline nonsense after all? The image of the eagle he had never forgotten, but surely it did not apply to a man like Livonius, unless the gods saw him as a bird of prey bringing down the Roman state. No! His enemy was no taloned eagle, more a twittering sparrow needing to be silenced.