“Thirty-two!” exclaimed Epaphroditus. “Where do the years go? Well, it seems you have reached an age at which you might consider following in the footsteps of your father and grandfather.”

“Become an augur, you mean?”

“For a start. Nowadays the augurate is usually a reward from the emperor to men who have given long years of service to the state, but there are always exceptions, especially for those with hereditary ties to the priesthood. I know that you never established any relationship with the late Vespasian, but now that his son Titus has succeeded him, it’s a new day in Roma. The men around Titus are closer to your own age. If you were to seek the emperor’s favour-”

Lucius shook his head. “I used to watch my father perform auguries. I never felt drawn to the art.”

This was not the first time they had discussed augury. Why did Epaphroditus keep bringing up the subject? Probably because Lucius would not speak his true thoughts aloud.

Lucius’s feeling about his father were very mixed. The more Lucius learned about Nero, the more he wondered at his father’s unshakable loyalty to the man. As a freedman, Epaphroditus’s service had been compulsory, but what had drawn Titus Pinarius to Nero? Was it merely the opportunity for advancement and wealth? Had he not been appalled when his own brother was put to death by Nero?

Kaeso, the uncle Lucius had never known, was another source of consternation. How had a Pinarius, a relative of Augustus and the descendant of one of the city’s most ancient families, become a Christian? Lucius wished he had been given the chance to talk to his uncle Kaeso, instead of being kept away from him. Had his father made a genuine effort to understand Kaeso, or to bring him back to the worship of the gods? Since both men were dead, Lucius would never know the truth of their relationship.

Lucius took pride in his family’s ancient heritage but felt deeply puzzled by the preceding generation. He would never say a word against his father, especially to Epaphroditus, but the idea of following in his father’s footsteps did not appeal to Lucius.

“Granted, Lucius, you may feel no particular affinity for augury, but consider the benefits. The priesthood would give you a vocation, a focus for your talents, a connection with others of your class-”

“Fortunately, I need none of those things.” Lucius flashed a wry smile. “The last time I sat here in your garden, Epaphroditus, you put forth very similar arguments, only then the subject was family and marriage. You said I should finally take a wife and make some sons – to enjoy the tax exemptions, if for no other reason. But I have no worries about money; my father left me a very wealthy man. Yes, I could fritter away my time in the so-called service of the state, either as a priest or a magistrate – but why should I bother? And I could marry a fine patrician girl and produce some fine patrician sons – but again, why bother? The state is the emperor; the emperor is the state. The rest of us are like grains of sand on a beach: interchangeable, indistinguishable, inconsequential. A Roman citizen has no importance whatsoever, no matter how much some of us would like to pretend otherwise.”

Epaphroditus drew a sharp breath. He looked around the garden to make sure there were no slaves to overhear. “Lucius, you must be more careful about what you say, even to me. That kind of talk is not only defeatist, but dangerously close to sedition.”

Lucius shrugged. “You prove my point. If a citizen has no more freedom of speech than a slave, why serve the state?”

“How old did you say you were, Lucius? Thirty-two?” Epaphroditus shook his head. “A dangerous age for a man – old enough to feel that he should be in charge of his destiny and to chafe against the constraints of living under an absolute ruler, but perhaps not yet old enough to discern the fine line that a man must tread if he’s to survive the whims of Fortune.”

“By which you mean the whims of the imperial family?”

“Roma could have fallen into worse hands than those of the Flavians.”

Epaphroditus expressed the prevailing consensus. Vespasian had been a competent and level-headed ruler, his reign made smoother by a vast infusion of wealth provided by the sack of Jerusalem, which had filled the Roman treasury with gold; the enslavement of the Jewish insurgents had provided thousands of slaves to build Roma’s roads and grand new monuments. Nero and his immediate successors had failed largely because they ran out of money. Vespasian had never had to worry about that.

Increasingly confident as his reign progressed, Vespasian gradually abandoned the fiction, steadfastly maintained by the dynasty of Augustus, that the emperor and Senate were equal partners, with the emperor merely the first among citizens. By the time of his death from natural causes, there was no doubt that Vespasian was absolute ruler of the state. He became so confident of his popularity that he put a stop to the practice, begun by Claudius, of searching every person admitted to the imperial presence for weapons. He also abandoned Claudius’s practice of staffing the bureaucracy with imperial freedman, making state service a professional career open to citizens of merit, or at least ambition.

In the last ten years there had been a radical shift in the way people thought about the “good old days” of the long-ago Republic. Where once people sentimentalized the Republic and senators spoke wistfully of its return, it was more common now for people to refer to the era of Caesar and Pompeius as the “bad old days,” when unbridled competition between ruthless warlords resulted in bloody civil war. The Year of Four Emperors that followed Nero had been a throwback to the end of the Republic, a reminder of the chaos that could reign when there was no clear successor to command the legions and run the empire. How much better it was to bow to an emperor whose legitimacy was beyond question and to enjoy the stability of a ruling dynasty.

If Vespasian had a vice, it was greed. The emperor and his favourites had shamelessly exploited their positions to accrue enormous wealth, treating the Roman state as a moneymaking scheme for insiders. Vespasian famously put a tax on the city’s latrinae, claiming a share of the money made by the sale of urine to fullers, who used it to clean wool. Thus the saying, “Even when you piss, the emperor takes a percentage.”

A year after Vespasian’s death, people still wondered at his dying words: “Oh, damn! I think I’m becoming a god.” The Senate duly voted to honour him in death as the Divine Vespasian.

His elder son, Titus, succeeded him. He had served under Vespasian in Judaea, taking part in the plunder of Jerusalem and the enslavement of the Jews. Titus had been an active partner in his father’s reign – his father’s henchman, some called him, since as prefect of the Praetorian Guards he ruthlessly protected his father’s interests. But as emperor, Titus had so far displayed an even milder temperament than his father’s. With the transition of power, the new dynasty was firmly established, making it clear that Roma was destined to be ruled by hereditary kings, even if no one called them that.

Epaphroditus returned to the subject of Lucius’s future. “If you have no inclination for augury or state service, perhaps it’s not too late for you to consider a military career. I don’t know anyone more skillful with a bow and arrow. Last year at your Etrurian estate I saw you bring down a charging boar with a spear. Not every man can do such a thing; that took nerves as well as skill. I suspect you could handle yourself quite well on a battlefield.”

Lucius shook his head. “I learned to use weapons because I own land in the countryside, and hunting amuses me. It also puts meat on my table. But why should I wish to kill my fellow mortals?”

“To defend Roma.”