Calpurnia could not suppress a smile of victory.

"But I'll take no payment from you, Calpurnia. And I'll take no directions from your haruspex. Whatever I discover, I may share with you-or I may not. I work for myself, not for you. I do this for Hieronymus, not for Caesar."

Her smile faded. Her eyes narrowed. She considered for a moment, then nodded her assent.

On my way out, I passed her uncle, who still sat in the garden. Gnaeus Calpurnius clutched his priestly robes and glared at me.

There was not a cloud in the sky and the sun was at its zenith as I left the house of Calpurnia and crossed the Palatine Hill. I moved through a bright, glaring world without shadows. The thick, hot air seemed to eddy sluggishly around me. The windowless walls of the houses of the rich, colored in shades of saffron and rust, looked hot enough to scorch my fingertips.

The month was September, but the weather was hardly autumnal. When I was a boy, September was a month for playing amid fallen leaves and donning cloaks to ward off the chill. No more; September had become the middle of the summer. Those who knew about such things said the Roman calendar was flawed and had gradually fallen out of step with the seasons. The problem was worse now than ever before; the calendar was a full two months behind the place where it should be. Autumn festivals, spring festivals, and summer feast days were still celebrated according to the calendar but made no sense. There was something absurd about making sacrifices to the gods of the harvest when the harvest was another sixty days in the future, or celebrating the parole of Proserpine from Hades when there was still frost on the ground.

Was it only old-timers like me who felt acutely the absurdity of our disjointed calendar? Perhaps the young simply took it for granted that September had become a month of long sweltering days and short nights too hot for sleeping; but to me, the broken calendar represented a broken world. The civil war, which had spread to every corner of the Mediterranean from Egypt to Spain, was over at last, but amid the wreckage lay the centuries-old republic of Rome. We had a calendar that could no longer reckon the days and a Senate that could no longer govern.