the midst of frenzied activity. I was used to the idea that nothing could affect me adversely.
“I’d grown up an illegimate son in a rich Roman household—loved, pampered, and allowed to do what I wanted. My legitimate brothers had to worry about marriage, politics, and war. By the age of twenty, I’d become the scholar and the chronicler, the one who raised his voice at drunken banquets to settle historical and military arguments.
“When I traveled I had plenty of money, and documents that opened doors everywhere. And to say life had been good to me would be an understatement. I was an extraordinarily happy individual. But the really important point here is that life had never bored me or defeated me.
“I carried within me a sense of invincibility, a sense of wonder. And this was as important to me later on as your anger and strength have been to you, as important as despair or cruelty can be in the spirits of others.
“But to continue . . . If there was anything I’d missed in my rather eventful life—and I didn’t think of this too much—it was the love and knowledge of my Keltic mother. She’d died when I was born, and all I knew of her was that she’d been a slave, daughter of the warlike Gauls who fought Julius Caesar. I was blond and blue-eyed as she was. And her people had been giants it seemed. At a very young age, I towered over my father and my brothers.
“But I had little or no curiosity about my Gallic ancestors. I’d come to Gaul as an educated Roman, through and through, and I carried with me no awareness of my barbarian blood, but rather the common beliefs of my time—that Caesar Augustus was a great ruler, and that in this blessed age of the Pax Romana, old superstition was being replaced by law and by reason throughout the Empire. There was no place too wretched for the Roman roads, and for the soldiers, the scholars, and the traders who followed them.
“On this night I was writing like a madman, scribbling down descriptions of the men who came and went in the tavern, children of all races it seemed, speakers of a dozen different languages.
“And for no apparent reason, I was possessed of a strange idea about life, a strange concern that amounted almost to a pleasant obsession. I remember that it came on me this night because it seemed somehow related to what happened after. But it wasn’t related. I had had the idea before. That it came to me in these last free hours as a Roman citizen was no more than coincidence.
“The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously. There was an awareness somewhere of all things I had seen in my travels, an awareness of what it had been like in Massilia six centuries ago when the first Greek traders came, an awareness of what it had been like in Egypt when Cheops built the pyramids. Somebody knew what the light had been like in the late afternoon on the day that Troy fell to the Greeks, and someone or something knew what the peasants said to each other in their little farmhouse outside Athens right before the Spartans brought down the walls.
“My idea of who or what it was, was vague. But I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual—and knowing was spiritual—was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing . . .
“And as I drank a little more wine, and thought about it, and wrote about it, I realized it wasn’t so much a belief of mine as it was a prejudice. I just felt that there was a continual awareness.
“And the history that I was writing was an imitation of it. I tried to unite all things I had seen in my history, linking my observations of lands and people with all the written observations that had come down to me from the Greeks—from Xenophon and Herodotus, and Poseidonius—to make one continuous awareness of the world in my lifetime. It was a pale thing, a limited thing, compared to the true awareness. Yet I felt good as I continued writing.
“But around midnight, I