Titus threw a few coins to the sedan bearers, who disappeared at once. “Wait for me here, at this spot,” he told his bodyguards, feeling an unaccustomed uneasiness. Usually he allowed his bodyguards to loiter around the Forum while he was in the Senate House, rather like dogs let off a leash, but on this day he wanted to know that they would be exactly where he had left them when he came out.

Halfway up the steps he ran into a fellow senator, Gaius Cassius Longinus. Under Claudius, as governor of Syria, Cassius had amassed a great fortune. His learned commentaries on the law had established him as the Senate’s leading expert on all matters judicial. Still, Titus could never forget that Cassius’s ancestor and namesake had been one of the assassins of the Divine Julius. Cassius’s eyesight had begun to fail; he was often in a foul mood, and today was no exception. Titus, who was much junior to Cassius in the Senate, usually would have given the older man a nod and no more, but he could not resist asking Cassius if he knew anything about the crowd before the Senate House.

Cassius squinted at the throng and scowled. “They’re here to plead for mercy for those slaves,” he said.

“Really? There are so many of them.”

“Are there? Then it’s a blessing that I can barely see them. I’m told they’ve been arriving all morning, and more are arriving every moment. You know, our ancestors saw this sort of thing all the time – mobs gathering to demonstrate in the Forum whenever there was a debate in the Senate. Sometimes the mobs would riot. Sometimes it was like this every day in the Republic, especially towards the end. Can you imagine the chaos?”

Titus gazed out at the crowd. So this was an old-fashioned Roman mob! “They look unhappy, but they’re not that badly behaved.”

“Not yet!” Cassius shuddered. “What I find so appalling is the reason they’re here. When their ancestors broke a few patrician heads for plebeian rights, or rioted at the behest of the Gracchi brothers to help the small landowners, or even when they burned down the Senate House after the rabble-rouser Clodius was killed, at least they were fighting for their own self-interest as citizens. But this shameless assembly of freedmen and citizens are here to argue for the benefit of slaves. It’s disgusting! Imagine, during the Spartacus revolt, if the rabble had gathered to tell the Senate, ‘Stop what you’re doing! Perhaps this gladiator fellow has a point!’”

“It’s not quite the same thing,” said Titus cautiously.

“Isn’t it? The law is the law, and these people are here to spit on the law – for the sake of slaves! Nero should summon his Praetorians and drive them all into the Tiber.”

“I think there might be too many of them to do that,” said Titus. Truly, outside the Circus Maximus, he had never seen such a large gathering.

Was he imagining it, or had the crowd grown more unruly in the last few moments? He gathered the folds of his toga and hurried up the steps.

He was just in time to join his fellow senators on the crowded porch for the taking of the auspices. They were favourable, though Titus thought the augur was being rather generous in his interpretation of a crow’s flight. Then the senators filed inside, pausing to light a bit of incense and say a prayer at the Altar of Victory before filling the tiers of seats that faced each other across the long chamber. There was a large turnout. Titus thought there must be more than 200 senators present.

Once all the senators were seated, Nero arrived. Followed by Seneca and a retinue of scribes and secretaries, he strode up the length of the hall to take his chair on the dais at the far end. To Titus, it seemed that the young emperor did not walk with his usual self-confident swagger; had the sight of the gathering outside unnerved him as much as it had the senators? Titus also took note of the emperor’s appearance. Nero had grown a beard, or at least a partial beard, something no emperor had worn before him; the hair was trimmed to leave only the growth beneath his jaw, while his cheeks and chin were clean-shaven. The effect was to provide a golden frame for his square face.

Even more striking was the emperor’s costume. Since the death of Agrippina, Nero’s mode of dress had grown more eccentric. On this occasion he was outfitted in his customary purple and gold, but his garment was not a toga but a gown of the sort either a man or woman might wear at home in the evening, and on his feet were what looked like slippers rather than proper shoes.

The garment left much of Nero’s arms bare. Gone, Titus noticed, was the golden arm bracelet encasing the lucky snakeskin that Nero had long worn to honour his mother. After Agrippina’s death, Nero had declared that he could no longer stand the touch of the bracelet on his skin, indeed could not stand even to look at it, and had thrown it into the sea from the terrace of his villa at Baiae. The emperor no longer has his amulet, thought Titus, and nor do I, wishing as he often did that he still possessed the fascinum of his ancestors. He could have used a bit of luck on this day.

The preliminary business of the Senate was dispensed with quickly so that the members could deal at once with the pressing issue of the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus and the punishment of his household slaves. The facts of the case were read aloud by a scribe. The man’s delivery, even when reading the most salacious details, was completely without emotion, but at various points some of the senators made rude, mocking noises. To be killed by a slave was shocking but also shameful, and to have it happen under such circumstances – a rivalry over yet another slave – was the stuff of scandal. If Pedanius had escaped death, he would have been a laughing stock. Instead, he was a victim of the most frightening crime imaginable, a deliberate act of violence perpetrated in his own house by one of his own possessions.

The texts of the relevant laws were then read aloud. The statutes were just as Titus had remembered and recited to his brother the day before. If a slave should murder his master, all the slaves in the household must be interrogated under torture and punished with death, without exception. The 400 slaves had already been interrogated. Now they were confined under guard in the house of Pedanius to await the judgement of the Senate. Meanwhile, in preparation for immediate executions, crucifixes were being prepared along the Appian Way outside the city.

Nero, on his dais, said nothing and merely observed the proceedings, as he often did when the Senate was carrying out its routine business.

The members were invited to rise and address the question at hand: on this occasion, was the law to be carried out fully and faithfully, without amendment or mitigation?

Without waiting to be called on, many of the senators simply shouted their opinions, and a general clamour filled the hall. Titus heard cries of “Kill them now, at once!” and “The law is the law!” But he also heard a substantial number of voices shouting, “Too harsh!” and “Mercy!” and “There should be exceptions!”

Nero covered his ears, as if the cacophony caused him pain. He gestured to Seneca, who stepped forward and called for order. “Will anyone speak formally in favour of rescinding or mitigating the penalty?” said Seneca.

There was a hubbub in the hall and a great many heads turned, but no one stood. Seneca was opening his mouth to speak again when Titus loudly cleared his throat and rose to his feet.

Seneca looked at him in surprise. “Do you wish to speak, Senator Pinarius?”

“I do.”

All eyes turned to Titus. His face grew hot. He felt light-headed. His palms were suddenly sweaty. If he wasn’t careful, the wax tablet containing his notes would slip right out of his hands -

He realized that his hands were empty. The tablet! Where was it? Titus looked around and saw it nowhere. Had he been holding it earlier, during the taking of the auspices? He couldn’t remember. Could he have left it in the hired sedan? Titus felt completely at a loss. Meanwhile, the eyes of the entire Senate were boring into him. The room was utterly silent.