Servilia showed off a new piece of jewelry, a necklace of pearls linked by a finely wrought gold chain, and boasted of the bargain she had negotiated; the cost was roughly the value of my house on the Esquiline Hill. This prompted a discussion about money and investments, which led to a general consensus, myself abstaining, that land around Rome had become more expensive than it was worth, but a country house in Etruria or Umbria, complete with slaves to run it, could still be obtained at a bargain.

Marcus Licinius asked Cicero if the rumor he had heard was true, that Cicero's chief rival in the coming race for consul was likely to be the radical patrician, Catilina. Cicero replied by quoting a Greek epigram; the point was obscure to me, but the others were moved to laughter. There was more talk of politics. Cato complained about a fellow senator who had employed an obscure but ancient point of procedure to outmaneuver his opponents; declining to name the man, Cato instead referred to him using a vaguely indecent nick-name-presumably a pun, but it meant nothing to me. I think he was talking about Julius Caesar.

It seemed that Archias was in the midst of composing an epic poem about Lucullus's campaigns in the East, hoping to complete it in time for his patron's eventual triumph. At the urging of Cicero, Archias quoted a new passage. The scene was one the poet had witnessed himself: the sinking of the fleet of the one-eyed Roman rebel Marcus Varius off the island of Lemnos. His words were spellbind-ing, conjuring images full of terror, gore, and glory. At one point, he quoted Lucullus's order to his men regarding the fate of the Roman rebel:

Take Varius alive, not dead;

Put no one-eyed man to the sword.

Disobey, and I'll pluck the eyes from your head

And throw you overboard!

It seemed to me that a shadow crossed Lucullus's face as he listened to these words, but afterwards he applauded as heartily as the rest of us, and promised Archias a place of honor at his triumph.

Over pheasant with pinenut sauce, the conversation took a philosophical turn. Antiochus was a proponent of the so-called New Academy, a school of thought which argues that mankind possesses an innate faculty for distinguishing truth from falsehood and reality from fantasy. "The existence of such a faculty may be inferred if we consider the opposite case, that no such faculty exists," said the corpulent philosopher, dabbing a bit of sauce from his chin. "Perception comes from sensation, not from reason. I see the cup before me; I reach for it and I pick it up. I know the cup exists because my eyes and my hand tell me so. Ah, but how do I know I can trust my eyes and my hand in this instance? Sometimes, after all, we see a thing that turns out not to be there after all, or at least not what we thought it was; or we touch a thing in the dark and think we know what it is, then discover it to be otherwise when we see it in the light. Thus, sensation alone is not entirely reliable; indeed, it can be quite the opposite. So how do I know, in this instance, that this is a cup I hold before me, and not some other thing, or an illusion of a cup?"

"Because the rest of us can see it, too!" said Marcus, laughing. "Reality is a matter of consensus."

"Nonsense! Reality is reality," said Cato. "The cup would exist whether Antiochus or the rest of us saw it or not."

"I agree with you there, Cato," said the philosopher. "But the point remains: how do I know the cup exists? Or rather, let me change the emphasis of that question: How do I know the cup exists? Not by my eyes and hand alone, for those two are not always trustworthy, and not because we all agree it exists, despite what Marcus may say."

"By logic and reason," offered Cicero, "and the accumulated lessons of experience. True, our senses sometimes deceive us; but when they do, we take note of it, and learn to recognize that particular experience, and to differentiate it from instances where we can trust our senses, based also on past experience."

Antiochus shook his head. "No, Cicero. Quite apart from logic and reason and the lessons of experience, there exists in every man an innate faculty, for which we as yet have no name and governed by we know not which organ; yet that faculty determines, for each man, what is real and what is not. If we could but explore and cultivate that faculty, who knows to what greater degree of awareness we could elevate mankind?"

"What do you mean by a 'greater degree of awareness'?" said Marcus.

"A realm of perception beyond that which we presently possess."

Marcus scoffed. "Why do you assume such a state exists, if no mortal has yet attained it? It's a presumption with no basis in experience or logic; it's an idea plucked out of thin air."

"I agree," said Cato. "Antiochus is espousing mysticism, not philosophy, or at least not any brand of philosophy suitable for a hard-headed Roman. It's all very well for Greeks to spend their time pondering imponderables, but we Romans have a world to run."

Antiochus smiled, to show that he took no offense at Cato's words. He opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by our host, who abruptly turned his gaze to me.

"What do you think, Gordianus?" said Lucullus.

I felt the eyes of the others converge on me. "I think…"

I looked to Cicero, who smiled, amused at my hesitation. I felt slightly flushed, and cleared my throat. "I think that most men are like myself, and don't give much thought to such questions. If I see a cup, and if I want what's in the cup, I pick it up and drink it, and that's the end of that. Now, if I were to reach for the cup and pick up a hedgehog instead, that would give me pause. But as long as a cup is a cup-and up is up, and down is down, and the sun comes up in the morning-I don't think most people ever think about epistemology."

Antiochus raised a condescending eyebrow. It was one thing for the others to challenge his ideas with other ideas, but quite another to dismiss the importance of the topic he had raised. In his eyes, I had shown myself to be hardly better than a barbarian.

My host was more indulgent. "Your point is well taken, Gordianus, but I think you're being just a bit disingenuous, aren't you?" said Lucullus.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Well, in your line of work-insofar as Cicero has explained it to me-I should think you rely a great deal on reason or instinct, or some faculty such as that which Antiochus speaks of, in order to determine the truth. A murder is committed; a relative comes to you, asking you to discover the killer. If a man's stopped breathing, it doesn't take an Aristotle to determine that he's dead; but how do you go about the rest of it-finding out who did it, and how, and when, and why? I suppose some evidence is concrete and indisputable, of the sort you can hold in the palm of your hand-a bloody dagger, say, or an earring separated from its match. But there must be a vast gray area where the indicators are not so certain. Witnesses to a crime sometimes tell different versions of events-"

"They inevitably do!" asserted Cicero with a laugh.

"Or a clue may point in the wrong direction," continued Lucullus, "or an innocent man may deliberately incriminate himself, so as to protect another. Lies must be sorted from truth, important facts must be placed above trivialities. The warp and woof of reality must be minutely examined for meaningful patterns and inconsistencies that might elude the scrutiny of a less conscientious… 'finder,' as I believe Cicero calls you. Indeed, Gordianus, I should think that you must have frequent occasion to apply the tenets of epistemology more rigorously than anyone else in this room. I suspect it's become second nature to you; you swim in a sea of practical philosophy and never think about it, as the dolphin never thinks of being wet."