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Prologue

29 BCE

“The fact that most of the flesh and blood of Livy’s narrative is fictitious should not lead one to doubt the bare bones.”

—Robert Ogilvie, introduction to Ab Urbe Condita

Titus stood on a terraced roof on Palatine Hill, watching the sun grow red in the west. A great flock of starlings swooped together, becoming an airborne, undulating eel that twisted around the Temple of Apollo and then spiraled back into the sky.

From here, he could appreciate the size of things. A sea of terra-cotta roofs, cut by streets like thin, twisting currents. People passed through them, hundreds, thousands at any given juncture, on any given day. A million people lived here. A million. A person could live their whole life in Rome, from the day of their birth to the day of their death, and only see a fraction of it. There was no end to the city, no horizon line. Here and there, a circus, like the gods had laid great oval thumbprints all over the land, green for now, until the chariots ripped the ground with their wheels.

The racing season was nearly here. Titus was looking forward to it. There was an arena close to his villa, but he would only bother with the best races, at the Circus Maximus. From here it was barely visible; the forum that stretched below Titus sloped into the stands, its center obelisk jutting into the sky, a distant, knife-like omen.

A dull pain began in his chest; it felt like he was trying to breathe around a hunk of metal, stuffed somewhere between his lungs.

He was relieved when Gaius finally swept onto the terrace, trailed by slaves like they were petals to be shaken from a tree. Titus eyed one of them, a strong-shouldered woman. She looked like—but no, it was not her. Just his mind doing silly things. He couldn’t help, even as the catch in his lungs once again asserted itself, hoping he might turn his head and . . . But she would not have changed her mind.

Instead of a formal greeting, Gaius clasped Titus’s forearm.

“Emperor Gaius Octavius Augustus,” Titus greeted him. “My old friend.”

“Livy,” Gaius greeted in return. His eyes betrayed his good humor. “My greatest historian. How does it go?”

“Decently,” Titus said. He was intoxicated, briefly, with the thrill of his blood running alongside Gaius, their skin pressed together like they were equals. “You received my letter, I assume, about my . . . research.”

“Come, sit, have a glass of wine, and then we’ll speak about it.”

“Falernian?” Titus asked, brightening.

“What else?” Gaius dismissed his retinue with a flick of his fingers. “I’m not going to serve you sour wine.”

The emperor and the historian had become friends under unusual circumstances. In the early years after his uncle’s death, when his new reign was at its shakiest, Gaius was prone to throwing dinner parties. Titus Livius, being neither a senator nor holding any sort of military office, was nonetheless rich and famous enough for his histories to be invited. They’d entered into a heated debate on one such night that had ended in Gaius accusing Titus of wanting to fuck a political rival’s ass and Titus storming out without having been dismissed.

At the next party, Gaius had laid a hand on Titus’s shoulder and told him, “You’re the only person who dares to tell me the truth. I won’t command you what to write—praise who you may.”

“Thank you,” Titus had said, and he meant it. “You are worth five of Pompey. But I don’t deal in the present—we’ll have to wait for a better historian than me to say it.”

“There will never be better,” Gaius had answered. And Titus had almost believed it.

On the terrace, Titus allowed himself to be settled by the slaves bustling around, arranging dining sofas and a game of Latrones between them. Gaius had always believed in him. When he’d left to research his latest book, it was partly because the sentiment had begun to feel like a curse, like a noose around his neck. Gaius refused to consider that Titus might disappoint him, because who would do something so fucking stupid?

A good historian told time how to behave. A good historian was the only person who could step into the muddle of the past and straighten it out on the page. Why is this taking so long? Gaius had wondered aloud to Titus on more than one occasion, a threatening resonance in his tone. You’ve written a hundred histories of Rome. Why should it be so hard to write its prologue?

Gaius waited to address it this time until the wine was half-drunk and all but his steward had been banished to the shadows to pretend they didn’t have ears. “Now,” he said in a low voice, looking at the game board between them. “Tell me again. Where you disappeared to.”

Where Titus had disappeared to. It was a fair question. He could say he’d been immersed in his work—his research. The latest of his books was the trickiest to handle. It would tell the furthest reaches of Rome’s history, and he didn’t want it to feel like a narrowed point, far in the distance. He wanted it to feel like a mountain that loomed over all that came after.

It hadn’t felt like either, though, once he got close. And because of this, he confessed it to Gaius. The story from end to end.

“I warned you,” Gaius said when he finished. “What did I say? You’ve acted like a servant to the past, instead of its master. Now look at you.”

“Perhaps you were right,” Titus murmured. The lump in his chest had grown as he spoke, and he felt like coughing. A metallic tang lapped his throat. Both men fell silent as a slave stepped forward to light the terrace lanterns. Could Gaius sense the missing details from his story? Titus had only left out a few things. A few characters. People who would mean nothing to an emperor, anyway. If he talked about them—about her—he might have to talk about how narrowly it all came together in the end. How close he’d been to stepping away and letting the story fall as it would, instead of writing it himself, controlling it to the very end.

Gaius moved one of his soldiers on the Latrones game board. Titus could see he was being tested—would he let the emperor win today, or take the opportunity to corner his lynchpin? A game within the game.

As if he didn’t care one way or another, Gaius reclined backward, watching the last starlings murmurate while Titus thought. “I’ve decided to reorganize the Italic region,” he said. “Do you think it might appease the remaining Samnites if I named a district after them?”

“I don’t know if that’s wise,” Titus said. His hand twitched to the piece that would secure his endgame. “The last Samnites were conquered only—fifty, sixty years ago? They keep their gods, their ver sacrums and whatnot, gripped between their teeth like dogs. I would think you’d want them to feel more Roman, not less.”