All the same, now that I bring myself to write this account of my own life, for you – for your instruction and, I hope, pleasure – I confess that the pompous tone is hard to avoid. Autobiography sets out to recapture experience, but the business of writing it requires the author to abstract himself from the self that lived these experiences, and to construct a figure that can hardly fail to be, as it were, theatrical. To put it another way: the self you write is never quite the self that lived. (I hope you don't find that concept too difficult. It's a modern idea of course which you certainly won't find in the authors you have studied and I am only too sadly aware of the inadequacy of my attempts at philosophical exposition.) I was anyway struck with this when I wrote a first sketch of my life about twenty years ago when I was stuck in a small town in the Pyrenees recovering from an illness. I found it heavy going, I assure you. It began, if I recall, with a genealogical chapter. Everyone is interested in his ancestry of course, but I could not bring mine to life. It was profoundly unsatisfactory.

So, engaging on this book for you, my boys, I propose to imitate Homer or follow his advice at least. He recommends you start in the middle of action.

Therefore: here we are: Greece, late March, blustery and cold, snow on the mountains, in my nineteenth year.

As we lay in the rest-room after our baths Maecenas ran his hand over my thigh.

'You see, my dear, I was quite right. Red-hot walnut shells are absolutely it. You have such pretty legs, ducky, it's a shame to spoil them with fuzz.' And then, with his hand still stroking me just above the knee, and Agrippa snorting something about bloody effeminate dirt from the next couch – then – it is a scene I hold clear as a vase-painting – the curtain was thrown aside, and a slave burst in, with no ceremony at all. 'Which of you is Gaius Octavius Thurinus?' he cried.