Roma Eterna

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and with special thanks to Gardner Dozois for his encouragement of this project across many years

The traditional date assigned by Roman historians to the founding of the city of Rome was 753 B.C., and the Romans reckoned time from that date, designating the year as such-and-such ab urbe condita, or A.U.C.—“from the founding of the city.” Thus A.D. 1 was A.U.C. 754, A.D. 1000 was A.U.C. 1753, A.D. 1492 was A.U.C. 2245, and so forth. All dates used within the text of this book are A.U.C. and should not be confused with dates of the system used in the Christian world.

The historian Lentulus Aufidius, whose goal it was to write the definitive biography of the great Emperor Titus Gallius, was now in his third year of research in the Imperial archives at the Palatine Library. Every morning, six days a week, Aufidius would trudge up the hill from his lodgings near the Forum, present his identification card to the Keeper of the Archives, and set about his daily exploration of the great cabinets in which the scrolls pertaining to the reign of Titus Gallius were stored.

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