A man and his wife conjured up basic meals for travellers. If there were places to stay, we preferred not to investigate. We ate, drank, told stories, then camped out. Next day, the man had gone to check his fig tree, but his wife made us a simple breakfast. Then we pressed on.

At Antium our qualms proved groundless. The magistrate was not going to be the least bit unhelpful; we were not even able to meet the man. His house was locked up and he was away.

‘So . . .’ Petronius Longus mused thoughtfully. ‘If you live in a scenic old town on the coast, when summer comes you still have to go off on holiday?’

‘That lummock with the fig tree nipped down here and warned him you were coming,’ gloated his brother. This was pretty well the first opinion he had volunteered on anything. The rest of us gazed at Petronius Rectus and carefully kept quiet, as we belatedly assessed him as a crackpot fantasist.

We asked around. That was a lark. Half the people refused to speak to us, the rest said they knew nothing.

After these fruitless forays, we did move on to Satricum. It was another very ancient township, on low-lying ground, right at the edge of the Pontine Marshes. Around this remote crossroads, cultures had clashed for aeons. The warlike Volscians had fought over the archaic place; they probably still lived here. Not only did it feel as if we might bump into a bunch of slant-eyed, smiling Etruscan ancestors, there was an end-of-civilisation atmosphere, brought about by the little town’s proximity to the dreaded wetlands.

A tightly built settlement was going about its business. Up on a hill stood a temple to Mater Matuta: the mother of the morning, Eos, Aurora—the rosy-fingered harbinger who unlocks the gates of heaven so the sun can roll out each day. We climbed the acropolis like good tourists and saw the ancient goddess, chiselled in pitted stone, enthroned and mourning her son Memnon, killed at Troy by Achilles, whose corpse lay across her lap.

She was a goddess of provender as well, and a game girl who had been cursed by the jealous Venus into a habit of taking many lovers (the kind of curse most young girls fervently pray for). The Mater Matuta at Satricum looked a bit weathered for lovers, but had done her job with opening the gates for Helios today. The sky was clear blue and the sun shone brilliantly.

‘That’s the Pontine deception,’ Petronius Rectus informed us gloomily. ‘Gorgeous weather, vegetation blooming—death behind every bush.’ As a travel companion, the man was a laugh a minute.

We went back to our lodging house, in need of a drink.