Free The Venus Throw by Steven Saylor Page B

bodyguard. Besides, I welcomed the excuse to spend more time with Meto.
    On the way back, we happened to cross the Adriatic usingthe same intrepid boatman and in the same boat as before. I had no trouble getting Eco to pause for a few moments in the temple of Fortune before we set sail. Happily for our crossing, the sky was clear and the waters were calm.
    Back in Rome, Bethesda seemed to be in considerably better spirits than when I had left. Indeed, her attentions to me on the night of my return could have stopped the heart of a weaker man. Once there had been a time when a month’s separation was enough to build our appetites for each other to a ravenous pitch; I had thought those days were long gone, but on that night Bethesda managed to make me feel more like a youth of twenty-four than a bearded grandfather of fifty-four. Despite the aches and pains of the previous days’ long hours on horseback, I arose the next morning in excellent spirits.
    As we ate our breakfast of Egyptian flatbread and millet porridge with raisins, Bethesda caught me up on the latest gossip. I sipped at a cup of heated honeyed wine and listened with only half an ear as she explained that the miserly senator across the way was finally putting a new roof on his house, and that a group of Ethiopian prostitutes appeared to have taken up residence at the home of a rich widower who keeps an apartment up the street. When she turned to affairs down in the Forum, I paid closer attention.
    Bethesda had a soft spot for our handsome young neighbor Marcus Caelius, the one whom I had run into on the night before my departure. According to Bethesda, Caelius had just finished prosecuting a case which had set the city abuzz.
    “I went down to watch,” she said.
    “Really? The trial, or the prosecutor?”
    “Both, of course. And why not?” She became defensive. “I know quite a lot about trials and the law, having lived with you so long.”
    “Yes, and Marcus Caelius is exceptionally good-looking when he gets himself all wound up with an exciting oration—eyesflashing, veins bulging on his forehead and neck . . .”
    Bethesda seemed about to respond, but thought better of it and stared at me straight-faced.
    “A prosecution,” I finally said. “Against whom?”
    “Someone called Bestia.”
    “Lucius Calpurnius Bestia?”
    She nodded.
    “You must be mistaken,” I said, with a mouth full of millet.
    “I think not.” Her expression became aloof.
    “But Caelius supported old Bestia for the praetorship last fall. They’re political allies.”
    “Not any longer.”
    This was entirely credible, given Caelius’s reputation for fickleness, both in love and polities. Even when he was publicly allied with a candidate or cause, one could never be quite sure of his real intentions. “On what charge did he prosecute Bestia?”
    “Electoral bribery.”
    “Ha! In the fall he campaigns for Bestia, and in the spring he tries the man for illegal campaigning. Roman polities!” I shook my head. “Who defended?”
    “Your old friend Cicero.”
    “Oh, really?”
    This added a new wrinkle to the matter. Marcus Caelius had made his entry into public life as Cicero’s pupil and protégé. Then, during the turmoil of Catilina’s revolt, he parted ways with his mentor—or perhaps he only pretended to do so, in order to spy for Cicero. Throughout that tumultuous episode, Caelius’s real allegiance remained a mystery, at least to me. Afterward, Caelius left Rome for a year of government service in Africa. On his return he seemed to have left the camp of his old mentor for good, going up against Cicero in court and actually getting the better of the master orator. Later, when the Senate exiled Cicero and hisenemies went on a rampage and destroyed Cicero’s beautiful house on the Palatine, it was my neighbor Marcus Caelius who came knocking at my door with the news—complaining that the windows of his apartment afforded no view and asking if he could watch the