Cato shook his head in disgust. “It’s like casting your net for a whole school of fish and drawing back only one, and that one not the biggest of them.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “you just have to catch them one at a time.”
ALL THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. OF course, the Marcelli held onto the consulship and, as everyone knows, Caesar became dictator and Octavia’s brother, Octavius, became his heir; he is now our First Citizen. Ironically, Marcellus, the son of Caius Marcellus and Octavia, turned out to be the First Citizen’s favorite nephew and would have been his heir had he not died tragically young. Fulvia eventually married Antonius, but then, so did Octavia, although she lost him to Cleopatra. When you consider how it all turned out, it’s a little hard to understand what they were all fighting and clawing at one another for during those dying days of the Republic. But it all somehow seemed terribly important at the time.
THESE WERE THE EVENTS OF FIVE days in the year 703 of the City of Rome, the consulship of Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Marcus Claudius Marcellus.