This prompted a roar of approval from the crowd. Some resumed the chant of "Trebonius, open your eyes!" The mood seemed more boisterous than angry. Merely by voicing such a radical proposal, no matter how unlikely the chance that it would become a reality, Caelius had given them hope and raised their spirits.

Suddenly the mood changed. The roar died down. The chanting stopped. There were cries of outrage, hisses, and catcalls from the outskirts of the crowd. I rose on tiptoes, trying to see over the heads that blocked my view. Suddenly I was lifted aloft; Davus had clutched me from behind and raised me up as if I weighed no more than a child. Such are the advantages of having a son-in-law with the strength of an ox.

I saw a cordon of bodyguards flanking some important personage-one of the chief magistrates, apparently, because the retinue was headed by lictors, the ceremonial escorts of the superior magistrates. Each lictor bore over his shoulder a bundle of birch rods called fasces, which served as a sheath for an ornately decorated ax. The use of lictors and their ceremonial weapons supposedly dated back to the time when Rome was ruled by kings. Normally, within the city bounds, the lictors would have borne their fasces without axes-but these were not normal times, and I clearly saw the flash of highly polished iron ax heads above the bundled rods.

I also caught a glimpse of the man whom the lictors surrounded and saw that his toga had a broad purple stripe. I counted twelve lictors, and knew that the newcomer could only be Caesar's fellow consul, Publius Servilius Isauricus. In Caesar's absence, Isauricus was the sole head of the state. Thus had Caesar observed the ancient tradition of electing two consuls, one to govern Rome while the other conducted military operations in the field, even though everyone knew that it was Caesar alone who determined the policies of the state. Isauricus was nothing more than a figurehead, a caretaker charged with enacting Caesar's will while Caesar was absent. He and Caesar were very old friends, and it was a sign of Caesar's complete faith in Isauricus that he had contrived to have him elected to serve alongside him as consul for the year.

I remembered seeing Trebonius, before Caelius began his harangue, dispatch one of his clerks with a message; evidently Isauricus had come in response to Trebonius's alarm. Once again Caelius was threatening to spur the mob to a riot, and something would have to be done.

The lictors pushed and shoved their way toward Caelius's tribunal. The churning, raucous crowd might have overwhelmed them by sheer numbers, but in the face of the disciplined lictors the crowd became confused and disorganized. The lictors had another advantage, for the first impulse of a Roman citizen, no matter how riled, is to show respect to anyone bearing fasces and to defer to any magistrate accompanied by lictors. Even in that disaffected crowd, a patriotic respect for Roman authority ran deep.

The lictors reached the tribunal, where Caelius awaited them with hands on his hips. Isauricus emerged from the cordon of armed men and mounted the tribunal to stand before Caelius. His face was very nearly the same color as the purple stripe on his toga. Next to Caelius-a handsome man in his thirties, worked up by his speech to his highest pitch of charismatic radiance-Isauricus looked like a sputtering, hopelessly out-of-touch old grandfather in a comedy by Plautus. The weird theatricality of the moment was reinforced by the fact that the two of them stood on a platform not unlike a portable stage. All they needed were grotesque masks and a bit of back ground music to turn them into comic actors.

Isauricus shook his finger at Caelius and spoke in an angry voice, keeping his pitch too low for the crowd to hear. Apparently I was not alone in imagining the two as actors, because a wiseacre in the crowd began to shout, "Speak up! We can't hear you! You're swallowing your lines!" Laughter rippled through the crowd, and someone started a new chant: "Isauricus, speak up! Isauricus, speak up!"

The consul abruptly looked out at the crowd, furious to hear his name shouted at him so rudely. Caelius, who had so far kept a sardonic smirk on his face, appeared to lose his temper in the same instant. The two commenced shouting at each other. Whatever they said was drowned out by the swelling roar of mingled yells and laughter from the crowd, but it was easy enough to imagine. Isauricus was telling Caelius that he had no legal authority to set up a tribunal in the first place, and that by interfering with a fellow magistrate in the commission of his duties he was coming very close to treason. Caelius was probably resorting to more personal insults; I could easily imagine him calling Isauricus a finger puppet with the hand of Caesar up his back side.

Whatever Caelius said to Isauricus, it must have cut to the quick. The consul, overcome by a burst of fury, abruptly picked up Caelius's chair of state and lifted it over his head. It looked as if he intended to strike Caelius with it, and even headstrong Caelius quailed a bit, stepping back and raising his arms to protect himself. Instead, Isauricus slammed the chair down in front of him and seized the fasces from the nearest lictor. He extracted the ax from the bundled rods and raised it above his head.

The crowd let out a collective gasp. Davus, unable to see because he still held me aloft, cried, "What is it, Father-in-Law? What's going on?"

"By Hercules," I said, "I think we're about to see a murder!"

Sunlight glinted on the upraised ax. The crowd fell silent except for a few scattered screams. My blood ran cold. The mob had rioted for days and had burned down the Senate House after Clodius was killed on the Appian Way. Now Caelius had taken up Clodius's mantle as champion of the downtrodden. What would they do if they saw him murdered in cold blood by the consul of Rome right before their eyes?

Caelius staggered back, his mouth open in shock, his face as white as a Vestal's stola.

Isauricus brought down the ax-not on Caelius, but on Caelius's chair of state. With a great crash, the seat was shattered. Isauricus raised the ax and brought it down again. There was another crash, and bits of wood went flying in all directions.

For a brief instant a look of relief crossed Caelius's face. Only a moment before he had been staring into the mouth of Hades. Just as quickly, relief was replaced by utter outrage. In a heartbeat his face turned from bloodless white to deepest red. He cried out and rushed toward Isauricus, oblivious of the ax the consul wielded.

At once, lictors swarmed onto the tribunal, unsheathing their axes and interposing themselves between the two magistrates. A moment later, to defend Caelius, men from the crowd jumped onto the tribunal. Isauricus and Caelius were separated, and Caelius was pulled from the tribunal into the crowd. His supporters wanted to protect him, but it seemed to me they were subjecting him to the risk of being trampled to death.

"Enough, Davus!" I said. "I've seen enough. Set me down! We almost got caught in the last riot, and I don't want to make that mistake again."

But it was too late. A vortex of humanity swirled all around us. Men screamed, shouted, laughed. Faces flashed before me: some jubilant, some angry, some terrified. The crowd spun me about until I grew dizzy. I looked for Davus but saw him nowhere. Hieronymus, too, had vanished, along with all the familiar chin-waggers. I gazed about, disoriented and confused, unable to spot a familiar landmark. I saw only a blur of strange faces and, beyond them, a confusion of walls and buildings. The crush of bodies squeezed the breath out of me, lifted me off my feet, carried me along against my will. I saw spots before my eyes-

And then, out of nowhere, incongruous amid so much ugly chaos, I saw the face of the woman called Cassandra. In her eyes I saw no panic, but quite the opposite-a deep serenity, oblivious of the madness around us. Was that a sign of madness, to appear so calm amid such insanity?