The Praetorian Camp was on the far side of the city. I walked slowly. I was expecting when I got there to be crushed like an eggshell beneath a Guard’s heavy boot…

I recognized Frontinus at once. He wore an enamelled breastplate and a great silver buckle on his belt, but he had once learned his alphabet sharing a stool under the primary school awning at the corner of our street, side by side with a curly-haired rogue called Didius Festus. To Julius Frontinus, therefore, I was a national hero’s baby brother and since he could no longer take Festus to a tavern and get him joyously drunk—because Festus was dead in the desert in Judaea—he took me.

It was a discreet, well-run winery, way out in the northeast corner of Rome, near the Viminal Gate, full of soldiers from the city regiments and very businesslike. There was no food. There were no women. There was every kind of liquor, warm and cold, spiced or straight, charged well over the odds, though I was not allowed to pay. On my own I would never have got a foot indoors. With Frontinus, no one gave me a second glance.

We sat among a group of tall, well-padded men who openly overheard but never spoke. Frontinus must have known them; they seemed to know whatever he was going to say. Getting him to say it took a while. When a man like that invites you out drinking it is understood that prior to business there must be ceremonial. Ours, in honour of me and as a pleasure for him, was to discuss heroes and their heroism until we were both maudlin drunk.

After we talked about Festus and before I passed out, I managed to ask some questions. Before Frontinus sent me home in a builder’s waggon with a load of ridging tiles, he managed to answer them.

“Why ever did he do it?” Frontinus was still musing. “First up the town wall at Bethel, so first dead. Nothing to do for the rest of eternity but let his gravestone whiten in the desert sun. Lunatic!”

“Wanted to cash his deposit with the burial club. Couldn’t bear losing all those stoppages from his pay. So, patriotic brother, Hail and Farewell.”

It was two years since Festus died, towards the end of Vespasian’s Galilean campaign, though so much had happened in the city since then that it seemed much longer. Yet I could not believe he had gone. In some ways I never will. I am still waiting for a message to say Festus has landed back at Ostia so will I please bring him a waggon and some wineskins because he’s run out of cash but has met some lads on the boat that he’d like to entertain…I shall probably be waiting for that message all my life.