He was clutching a black book under his left arm. The way he held it drew my attention to a hole in the elbow of his jacket. He addressed me by name, according me, in the Italian fashion, a doctorate to which I am not entitled, owing (if I may digress) to a difference of opinion with the authorities of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1960.

Then he introduced himself to me as Count Alessandro di Caltagirone, a name the significance of which I did not immediately grasp. He told me he had been greatly impressed by my translation of the memoirs of Augustus, though he understood, of course, that they were not authentic. "Why should you think that?" I said.

"That is no question to put to me," he replied, and called for a brandy and soda at my expense. "Unlike what I can offer you," he continued. "And what is that?" "The authentic memoirs of the Emperor Tiberius," he replied. "Come," I said, "this is too much of a coincidence…" "On the contrary, it is only so much of a coincidence because it was written that it should so be…" "Written?" I said.

"In your horoscope, which I cast myself, more than two hundred years ago."

By now, as you may imagine, I concluded that I was dealing with a madman, and tried to remove myself as inconspicuously as possible. But he would not be shaken off. He positively attached himself to my person, and, to cut a long story short, we eventually came to an agreement, the exact terms of which I am not at liberty to divulge. The long and short of it was that I came into possession of the Latin manuscript which I have now translated and present to you here.

I am not going to pronounce on its authenticity: that is for the reader to determine. If it convinces him or her, that is a testimony such as no scholar can gainsay. (And my own faith in scholarship has, I confess, been shaken in recent years. Scholars are like other people: they believe what it suits them to believe and then find reasons for doing so.)