"Feel happy," Cicero advised. "The law is a chancy business. I was exiled for the finest legal judgment I ever delivered." He shook his head. "This district is so pleasant it's hard to believe it's such a sink of corruption."
"I like it anyway," I assured them. "They know how to have a good time, and you can't get fish stew like this just anyplace."
We were lounging in a dining room of the Villa Hortensia while my household packed up for the trip to Bruttium. We were dipping crusts of bread into the last of the stew, having put away a prodigious amount of it.
"Did you hear?" Hermes inquired. "Diocles opened his veins last night."
"With all his guilt," I said, "what he couldn't stand was for people to know he'd been the slaver's partner. This is one funeral I'll pass up."
"So ends the line of priests of Campanian Apollo," Julia said sadly.
"They'll find another one," I assured her. "Bloodlines aren't everything."
"But such an ancient lineage!" she said. "It seems a shame."
"This was just a little change in a little town," Cicero said. "I fear that far greater things are about to change very soon." And so they did.
These things happened in Southern Campania in the year 704 of the City of Rome, the consulship of Lucius Aemilius Lepidus Paullus and Caius Claudius Marcellus.