“But he does his job so well. What’s a smile now and then if it keeps him working hard?”

So Quintus Pollio went on bowing and smirking. He would have sold thirty years of his life for the honor of carrying the family name of the Julii, the Gracchi, or the Sulpicii. So would my mistress, for that matter.

I amused myself by peering into the vendors’ stalls that crowded the streets. Souvenirs of dead gladiators, the blood of this or that great fighter preserved in sand, little wooden medallions painted with the face of the famous Belleraphon. These last weren’t selling very well, since not even the artists could give Belleraphon a pretty face. Portraits of a handsome Thracian trident fighter did much better.

“He’s so beautiful!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cluster of girls mooning over a medallion. “I sleep with his picture under my pillow every night—”

I smiled. We Jewish girls, we liked our men to be fighters too—but we liked them real and we liked them long-lived. The kind who take the head off a legionnaire in the morning and come home at night to preside over the Sabbath table. Only Roman girls mooned over crude garish portraits of men they’d never met, men who would probably be dead before the year was out. On the other hand, perhaps a short-lived man was better for daydreaming about. He’d never be old, he’d never lose his looks, and if you tired of him he’d soon be gone.

The crowds grew thicker around the Colosseum. I’d walked often enough in its vast marble shadow as I ran errands for my mistress, but this was my first time inside and I struggled not to gape. So huge, so many marble arches, so many statues staring arrogantly from their plinths, so many seats. Fifty thousand eager spectators could cram inside, so they said. An arena fit for the gods, begun by the late Emperor Vespasian, finished by his son the late Emperor Titus, opened today in celebration for Titus’s younger brother who had just donned the Imperial purple as Emperor Domitian.

So much marble for a charnel house. I’d have preferred a theatre, but then I would rather hear music than watch men die. I imagined singing for a crowd as large as this one, a real audience, instead of the frogs in the conservatorium when I scrubbed the tiles…

“Keep that fan moving, Thea.” Lepida settled into her velvet cushions, waving like an Empress at the crowds who had a small cheer for her father. Men and women usually sat separately to watch the games, but Quintus Pollio as organizer of the games could sit with his daughter if he liked. “Faster than that, Thea. It’s going to be gruesomely hot. Really, why won’t it cool down? It’s supposed to be fall.”