‘Your life is in your own hands, just as it always was. You won’t change,’ Helena said. ‘You need to work. It is what you enjoy: grappling with puzzles that no one else will undertake and righting society’s wrongs. Don’t become a man of leisure; you’ll go mad—and you’ll drive the rest of us crazy.’

I pretended to think she just wanted reasons to pack me out of the house every morning as before. But she knew that I accepted she was right.

During the nine days of mourning, Helena and I told everyone that ‘in the style of the divine Emperor Augustus and his unparalleled wife Livia’, we would not be seen in public. Platitudes always work. Nobody considered that we regarded Augustus and Livia as two-faced, double-dealing, power-mad manipulators.

After the nine days, we could both just about face people again. Helena Justina was beside me at the feast, when I returned to the Janiculan.

I knew what the funeral feast would be like. I thought the day would hold no surprises. Even more hangers-on managed to bring themselves up the hill than had struggled there for the cremation. Free food, free drink, and the chance to hear or pass on gossip, brought fools out in flocks. Relatives we had forgotten were ours somehow turned up. Mother’s brothers, Fabius and Junius, who were rarely seen together because they feuded so tenaciously, both came all the way from the Campagna; at least they brought root vegetables as presents, unlike the other shiftless guests. If they had ulterior motives they were too dumb to say. I thought Fabius and Junius were simply acknowledging the end of an era that only they and Ma now remembered.

I had primed my more reliable nephews—restless Gaius, overweight Cornelius, sensible Marius—to pass among the throng, muttering that there were far more debts than anticipated and that I might refuse to be the heir . . . It held off some of the graspers from overt begging.