“How do you know what interests me?” said Sabina. “You may have been showering me with flowers and dead deer for a few weeks now, but we’ve never had a single interesting conversation.”

“Naturally a girl does not study the precepts of sculpture or—”

“You’re much more interesting when you aren’t patronizing me,” Sabina said frankly. “You should try talking like a human being more often. So, what’s so special about the Polykleitos Doryphorus?”

Hadrian looked down at her. For a moment Sabina thought he’d go back to boring pleasantries, but his hand reached out almost involuntarily and touched the little Atlas. “See the shift in the weight between the feet? Perfectly poised between motion and repose. The Greek sculptor Polykleitos found it was the finest way to express the beauty of the athletic form. His Doryphorus is the best example, but he had a very fine Hera in a temple in Argos, and a bronze Amazon in Ephesus—”

“Surely you’re not a sculptor too?” Sabina looked at Hadrian’s large hands. Unscarred and soft, the nails smooth and uniform, not much like Uncle Paris’s chisel-roughened palms.

“No, merely a dabbler in the arts,” Hadrian said with a modesty Sabina found suspect. “I make sketches, and architectural drawings—you can see the same principle in Greek architecture, you know. The Erechtheion caryatids, they don’t just serve as pillars! You can see a knee raised, as if they’re ready to step down off the plinth—”

He was waving his arms now.

“I’m going to build my own villa someday,” he told Sabina. “The perfect blend of Greek and Roman architectural principles. The grace and beauty of Greece—Corinthian columns, we’ve got nothing to match them—but backed up by the solidity of our Roman domes. I’ve made preliminary designs, but I need more study. A tour in Greece; I want to see the Acropolis, the temples. The Greeks have the finest temples in the world.”

“According to you, the Greeks have the finest everything,” Sabina teased, but he was too absorbed to mind her joking now.

“Not everything.” Decisive. “Rome has the finest government, the best engineering, the most perfect system of organization. But culture, that goes to Greece. Architecture, philosophy, dramatics—all we have to offer for dramatists are those dreary pantomime farces, nothing to stand against Sophocles and Euripides. And as for literature—”

“Cicero,” said Sabina promptly. “Martial, Virgil—”

Hadrian snorted. “Overrated.”

“Surely not Virgil,” Sabina protested. “‘I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood—’”

“Orotund and overpolished,” Hadrian snapped. “You want an accounting of Aeneas, you’d do better to study Ennius’s Annals. Good straightforward Roman prose—”

“You will never win me away from Virgil. What about Cato?”

“Cato I will grant you. He has a textbook on public speaking, sound basis in Greek rhetorical theory—”

“Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Have you? Extraordinary. What about his Origines…”