The Triumph Of Caesar

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"I heard that you were dead."

Such a brusque comment from Caesar's wife might have offended me had I not heard it already from so many others since I returned from Egypt to Rome, where everyone had apparently given me up for dead.

Having sent a slave to summon me, Calpurnia had received me in an elegant but sparsely furnished room in her house not far from mine on the Palatine Hill. There was only one chair. She sat. I stood and tried not to fidget while the most powerful woman in Rome looked me up and down.

"Yes, I'm sure one of my agents told me you drowned in the Nile," she said, gazing at me shrewdly. "Yet here you stand before me, Gordianus, as alive as ever-unless those Egyptians have learned to bring the dead back to life, not just mummify them." She fixed her chilly gaze on my face. "How old are you, Finder?"

"Sixty-four."

"No! Have the Egyptians found a way to restore a man's youth? You look very fit for a man your age. You're ten years older than my husband, yet I daresay you look ten years younger."

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