The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor Page B

Dolabella—"
    "Is finally over," he said. "And Tullia is well rid of the beast. He caused her nothing but heartbreak. He shall come to a bad end."
    Under normal circumstances, a respectable public figure like Cicero would hardly boast that his daughter was about to give birth out of wedlock. But circumstances were no longer normal—not in a world where Calpurnia consulted a soothsayer and Cicero was married to a vapid teenager.
    In such a world turned utterly askew, could the vacillating, timorous, stay-at-home Cicero pose a genuine threat to Caesar? It occurred to me that his new marriage might be both symptom and cause of a major shift in Cicero's behavior. Might the old goat be thinking like a young goat—stamping the ground and getting ready to take a reckless run at Caesar with horns lowered? With a new bride—and a grandchild—to impress, did the husband of Publilia feel sufficiently virile to take a stand as savior of the republic?
    And if that were the case, could Cicero have been behind the killing of Hieronymus? When I spoke of the murder, his response had seemed entirely innocent. But Cicero was an orator—Rome's greatest—and what was an orator but an actor? I had heard him boast of throwing dust in a jury's eyes. Was he throwing dust in my eyes even now?
    If I could stay a bit longer, conversing and drawing him out, he might yet let something slip. I nodded to Rupa, who reached into the shoulder bag he carried and pulled out some documents.
    "I was wondering, Cicero, if you might take a look at something I found among Hieronymus's private papers."
    "A literary work?" Cicero raised an eyebrow. "Was our friend secretly composing a tragedy? An epic poem?"
    "No, this is something more in a scientific vein, I think, though I'm not really sure. That's why I want to show it to you. With your vast knowledge, drawn from your wide reading, perhaps you can make sense of it."
    Cicero smiled broadly. Did Publilia find it this easy to lead him by flattery?
    I handed him the documents. He pursed his lips, squinted, clucked his tongue, and hummed as he perused them. He was stalling, I thought; he could no more decipher the arcane symbols and calculations than could I.
    But at last he nodded and slapped the documents with the back of his hand, as if to indicate he had cracked the code. "Well, I can't make it all out—I'm hardly an astronomical expert—but clearly this has something to do with the calendar."
    "The Roman calendar?"
    "The Roman, yes, but also the calendars of the Greeks and the Egyptians and perhaps of others as well. There are many calendars, Gordianus. Every civilization has come up with its own way of reckoning the passage of time, dividing years into seasons, seasons into months, months into days. It was King Numa who devised the Roman calendar and established the priesthoods to maintain it. Numa was both a holy man and a king. The whole point of his calendar was to make sure that religious rites were remembered and performed on time.
    "But as you must know, no one has yet devised a perfect calendar—that is to say, a reckoning of days that works equally well for every year. Irregularities inevitably creep into the process, and no one quite knows why. You'd think the movements of the stars in the heavens would be as precise and predictable as the measurements of a water clock, but it's more complicated than that. Which is why Numa's calendar has become such a mess. For most of my lifetime and yours, it's been at least slightly out of step with the seasons, and nowadays it's worse than ever."
    "But aren't there priests who fix the calendar as we go along?" I said. "Every year they decide whether to introduce an extra month, and the month is as long as they wish—they add however many days they deem necessary to bring the calendar back into alignment with the planets."
    "That's correct, Gordianus," said Cicero in a patronizing tone, as if he were surprised that a fellow like myself could grasp such an