The Chariots of Calyx

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In the opulent town mansion of Caius Monnius Loveinius, one of the wealthiest officials in Londinium, everyone was asleep. Or almost everyone.

It had been a Roman holiday — the birthday of one of the deified imperial dead (or perhaps not dead, since emperors were now officially immortal) — and Caius Monnius, like everyone else of importance, had marked the occasion with a feast.

But the remains of last night’s banquet had now been cleared away: scores of slaves, for whom a Roman holiday was no holiday at all, had worked for hours by oil-light moving the last platters from the tables and sweeping scraps of roast peacock from the mosaic floors, but now even they had finished. The fine pottery eating bowls had been scrubbed clean with sand and ashes, the oil-lamps replenished for the night, and the elaborate food libation to the gods — fragments of gilded swan and of delicate honeycake — had been duly shared, as custom permitted, and the weary servants had gone gratefully to their sleeping spaces.

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