Mummius nodded dumbly. Behind him, Apollonius smiled. Little Meto looked up at Bethesda's looming belly with parted lips, clearly in awe of his new mistress.

'I can't stay long in the garden,' Bethesda said. 'It's much too hot. I was on my way to he down for a while, but I thought I heard voices here in the peristyle. So you are Marcus Mummius. Gordianus has spoken of you often. Welcome to our home.'

Mummius only swallowed and nodded. Bethesda smiled and withdrew. 'Oh, Eco,' she called over her shoulder, 'come along and help me for a moment.'

Eco nodded to our guests and followed after her.

Mummius cocked an eyebrow. 'But I thought…'

'Yes, Bethesda was my slave. And for years I was very careful to avoid producing another slave by her. I wanted no children of my own blood, certainly not slave children.'

'But your son…'

'Eco came into my life unannounced. I thank the gods every day that I had the wisdom to adopt him. But I saw no reason to bring a new life into such a world.' I shrugged. 'After Baiae something stirred in me. Bethesda is now a freedwoman, and my wife.'

Mummius grinned. 'And now I see what you were busy doing nine months ago, last December, instead of going out to watch Crassus's ovation!'

I laughed and leaned toward him. 'Do you know, Mummius, I believe it did occur on that very night!'

Eco suddenly appeared at the far end of the peristyle. The two slave girls flanked him. All three wore expressions of shock, dismay, confusion, and joy.

Eco opened his mouth. For a long moment he seemed to be mute again. Then the words tumbled out. 'Bethesda says she's ready – she says it's beginning!'

Mummius turned pale. Apollonius smiled serenely. Meto whirled and clapped his hands. I rolled my eyes heavenwards.

'Another crisis arrives,' I whispered, feeling suddenly fearful, and then impossibly elated. 'Another story begins.'

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although he attained fabulous wealth and shared in the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, Marcus Licinius Crassus is universally regarded as one of history's biggest losers. His crucial mistake was getting killed in his ill-conceived campaign against the Parthians in 53 BC, at the height of his power and prestige. Decapitation has a way of making even the richest man in the world irrelevant.

There are two biographies of Crassus in English. Allen Mason Ward's invaluable Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic (University of Missouri Press, 1977) is meticulously researched and argued; F.E. Adcock's Marcus Crassus, Millionaire (W. Heffer amp; Sons, Ltd., Cambridge, 1966)-is essentially a long, elegant essay. Ward is sometimes forgiving to a fault, as when he writes of Crassus's decimation of his own soldiers: 'Times were desperate, and desperate measures were needed… it would not be fair to criticize Crassus's behavior as unnaturally vicious.' Adcock, on the other hand, may be too glib when he writes of the young Crassus: 'He did not wear his heart upon his sleeve, and it might be doubted whether he had a heart to wear.'

Our chief sources for the Spartacan revolt are Appian's History and Plutarch's Life of Crassus. Original source material on other slave uprisings, and on Roman slavery in general, can be found in Thomas Wiedemann's Greek and Roman Slavery (Roudedge, London, 1988).

The most comprehensive guide to Roman painting, potions, and poisons is Pliny's Natural History, which also supplies our scant knowledge of Iaia and Olympias. Those interested in the mythic properties of the Sibyl of Cumae may consult Virgil's Aeneid. References to food are scattered through many sources (the Pythagorean comment on beans in chapter 7, for example, comes from Cicero's On Divination), but the richest larder of information is Apicius; adventurous cooks and armchair gourmets may consult The Roman Cookery of Apicius (Hartley amp; Marks, Inc., 1984), translated by John Edwards with recipes adapted for the modern kitchen.

Every now and then a researcher discovers a previously unknown volume that fits his needs with uncanny precision. So it was when I discovered Romans on the Bay of Naples: A Social and Cultural History of the Villas and Their Owners from 150 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Harvard University Press, 1970), by John H. D' Arms. It was a book I longed to read even before I knew it existed.

For small details and matters of nomenclature, I consulted on an almost daily basis a massive, musty, 1300-page edition of William Smith's unsurpassed Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (James Walton, London; second edition, 1869), and to a lesser extent Everyday Life of the Greeks and Romans by Guhl and Koner, another nineteenth-century reference work (Crescent Books, reprinted 1989).

My adaptation of Lucretius's 'Why Fear Death?' (following Dryden's translation) for the funeral in chapter 16 is arguably anachronistic, given that Lucretius's On the Nature of the Universe was not published until around 55 BC. However, I like to imagine (and it is possible) that in 72 BC Lucretius, still in his twenties, might already have been working on early drafts of his great poem, bits of which might have circulated among the philosophers, poets, and performers who lived on the Cup.

I want to say thank you to some people whose personal interest in my work and professional support of my career have been unflagging: to my editor Michael Denneny and his assistant, Keith Kahla; to Terri Odom and the Odom clan; to John W. Rowberry and John Preston; to my sister Gwyn, Keeper of the Disks; and of course to Rick Solomon.

A library figures prominently in this novel – the library of Lucius Licinius is the scene of the murder. In the here and now, it is libraries which are being killed – cut back, shut down, dismantled and dispersed, book by book and dollar by dollar. Yet without them, I could hardly have done my research. I especially appreciate the San Francisco Public Library, severely shaken but not shut down by the earthquake of 1989; the Interlibrary Loan system, which allows access to volumes from collections all over the country; the Perry-Castaneda Library on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, where I've spent whole days among the stacks in a kind of information ecstasy, uncovering material for both Arms of Nemesis and its sequel, Catalina's Riddle; and the Jennie Trent Dew Memorial Library in Goldthwaite, Texas, where in a sense all my historical research began some thirty years ago.