dull grief for that impossible brother.  But she was glad to be assured that his friend, Rufus Caelius, would come.  If Terentia and Tullia had tried to poison the mind of Cicero’s protege against her, obviously they had not succeeded.  He was worth cultivating.  His years in Asia Minor had made a man of the world out of a charming Veronese boy and he was already becoming known for brilliant work at the bar.  The house he had just bought faced the southern end of her own garden and gave evidence alike of his money and his taste.

And yet, in spite of Caelius’s connections, he was still too young to wield social power, and it was with intense chagrin that Clodia realised that his was the most distinguished name upon her dinner list.  Indifferent to the opinion of the world as long as she could keep her shapely foot upon its neck, she dreaded more than anything else a loss of the social prestige which enabled her to seek pleasure where she chose.  Was this fear at last overtaking her swiftest pace?  Her secretary, watching her, prepared himself for one of the violent storms with which all her servants were familiar.  But at this moment a house slave came in to ask if she would see Lucretius.  “Him and no one else,” she answered curtly, and the Greekling slipped thankfully out as the curtains were drawn aside to admit a man, about thirty-five years old, whose face and bearing brought suddenly into the fretful room a consciousness of a larger world, a more difficult arena.  Clodia smiled, and her beauty emerged like the argent moon from sullen clouds.  An extraordinary friendship existed between this woman who was the bawd of every tongue in Rome, from Palatine to Subura, and this man whose very name was unknown to nine-tenths of his fellow-citizens and who could have passed unrecognised among most of the aristocrats who knew his family or of the literary men who had it from Cicero that he was at work on a magnum opus.  Cicero was Lucretius’s only close friend, and supposed he had also read every page of Clodia’s life, but not even he guessed that a chance conversation had originated a friendship which Clodia found unique because it was sexless, and Lucretius because, within its barriers, he dared display some of his vacillations of purpose.  The woman who was a prey of moods seemed to understand that when he chose science as his mistress he had strangled a passion for poetry; and that when he had determined to withdraw from the life of his day and generation and to pursue, for humanity’s sake, that Truth which alone is immortal beyond the waxing and waning of nations, he had violated a craving to consecrate his time to the immediate service of Rome.  And he, in his turn, who could penetrate beyond the flaming ramparts of the world in his search for causes, had somehow discovered beyond this woman’s deadly fires a cold retreat of thought, where all things were stripped naked of pretence.