band. A fringed purple headband was tied tight at the top of his head. His face was rouged, but exertion had caused the paint to run. His matching robe was barely tied, beneath which his lean body was naked. Mercurius sat behind a rosewood table tucked diagonally up against the far corner of the room. He wrote furiously, his pen dipping in and out of the well, his eyes flicking from one piece of parchment to the next. Several players stood idly against the wall, fingering their instruments. Marcus Antonius sat on the edge of the long table. Draped over the back of his uniform, its paws tied beneath his neck, was a lion’s skin. The head, I am pleased to say, was not in evidence, but I am certain Antonius knew its whereabouts.
With a dozen bewildered legionaries behind us, we had entered the grand gallery of the Regia, unwilling players upon a bizarre and foreign stage. Crassus was dressed in all his polished military finery save for his helmet, which was tucked under his arm. The hall was magnificent. Columns painted green and black were spaced every twenty feet and rose almost that high to the beamed ceiling. Birdsong vanquished the echoes of our footsteps on the polished tiles as we drew to a halt. The entire length of the gallery was open—through the columns we could see a covered portico and from there a quadrangle planted with rows of trees whose white, starry flowers perfumed the air. Green, misshapen globes, some having turned bright yellow, hung so large and plentiful they made of their branches two-color rainbows. Later I learned the thick-skinned, tart fruit was called citron, what the Hebrews call an etrog, and the Persians know as a limun.
“You must forgive my appearance,” said Aulus Gabinius, Roman statesman, general, tribune of the plebs, propraetor and proconsul.
“Why must I?” asked Crassus.
Gabinius tilted his head to the side. The gold in his ringlets made a pretty sound. “I should think professional courtesy.” Marcus Antonius hopped off the desk and offered his pelt to Gabinius. As this would have been useful only had he donned the garment backwards, the ex-governor declined.
“Professional courtesy would be the last thing to raise between us, I should think,” dominus said pointedly. He looked around him. “What has been going on here?”
“When I could not access my rooms, I took my exercise.” Crassus waited, uncomprehending. “I dance. To music.”
“You are the same Aulus Gabinius who suppressed the recent revolt in Judea?”
“Who welcomes you to Antioch.”
“Our welcome, Gabinius, was notable only due to your absence. I trust you’re packed?”
“With your permission,” he said, bowing deeply, “I shall leave for Rome directly after the games. You and I have much to discuss. About Syria. About Parthia?”
“I will not deny the people their games, but you will be gone and on your way back to Rome before the last team has been unharnessed, bandaged and brushed.”
•••
People had been streaming across all five bridges onto the Regia’s island since sunrise. The racing track had been completed thirteen years earlier, built so that the governor and his guests could take a short stroll through his gardens, under guard of course, and enter the broad red and black arch of the Proconsul’s Gate into the arena. Every one of the 80,000 seats in the hippodrome was occupied, though defended might be a more appropriate word. The Circus Maximus may have taken twice as many Romans to its bosom, but these clumps of blue and green flag-waving Antiochenes expressed an even greater joy to be held there. The track itself was an oblong almost 1,500 feet long by 220 feet wide. Down its center ran an 850 foot long by 24 foot wide spina only a few feet tall around which the chariots ran. Bronze statues of rearing horses reared thirty feet in the air at both ends, and in the center a red granite obelisk, forty feet tall and just delivered from Alexandria lay on its side waiting to be erected. I cocked my head, but the gold-painted hieroglyphics engraved up and down its spine made as much sense to me either way. Feeling for a moment like a schoolboy, I half-wished that the Egyptians had covered their gift with execrations and scatological humor at the Romans’ expense.
We had just taken our seats in the governor’s box; the noise became so loud at our arrival it precluded conversation. I took note that at our approach the volume of cheers increased in