PROLOGUE

ROME, NOVEMBER AD 63

THE CHILD DID live no more than a hundred days; now she was being immortalised in the heavens. Born in January to great rejoicing throughout the Empire, Claudia Augusta, the daughter of the Emperor Nero and his Empress, Poppaea Sabina, had succumbed to a childhood ailment soon aft er the spring equinox. Divine honours for the late infant had been voted by the Senate to help ease the pain of the mourning father who was as immoderate in his grief at his daughter’s death as he had been in his joy at her birth. And it was with tears streaming down his pale-fleshed cheeks and catching in the golden beard growing beneath his chin that Nero, resplendent in a gold-edged purple toga, took a taper and plunged it into the flame brought from the Temple of Vesta by her six priestesses.

With folds of their togas draped over their heads, in deference to the latest deity to join Rome’s Pantheon, the assembled senior senators – all former praetors or consuls – watched, with an air of suitable solemnity, as the Emperor touched the burning taper to the kindling piled upon the altar. The fire caught; wisps of smoke spiralled to the roof of the new temple, next to that of Apollo, on the Palatine Hill. Constructed by slaves working day and night in the seven months since the child’s death, and with no expense spared, Nero had personally overseen every lavish detail of the building, devoting most of his time to the project whilst completely neglecting the business of Rome.

In the front row of the congregation Titus Flavius Sabinus struggled to suppress a fast-rising urge to laugh at the ludicrousness of the ceremony unfolding before him. He had witnessed deifications before and had always found it rather unsettling to think that with a form of words and a fire kindled from Rome’s Sacred Flame, housed in the Temple of Vesta, a dead human being could be resurrected as a god. That was not how gods were made, Sabinus knew: they were born of rock in a cave, as was his Lord Mithras. The idea that a babe who had done little more than suck on its wet-nurse’s teats could be a divine inspiration and required worship was beyond belief and, as the sacrificial ram, bedecked in ribbons, was led forward to the altar to the sonorous imprecations of the two priests of the new cult, Sabinus almost lost the battle with his mirth. ‘The next thing, I suppose, is we’ll have a public holiday in the Divine Claudia Augusta’s honour,’ he whispered under the prayers to his neighbours, Lucius Caesennius Paetus, his son-in-law, and his uncle, Gaius Vespasius Pollo, a magnificently portly man in his seventies with many chins and bellies.

‘Hmm? What, dear boy?’ Gaius said, his expression a mask of religious awe.

Sabinus repeated his assertion.

‘In which case I’ll be seated in the most prom