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of Rome, his eyes ranging over the faces of the other senators of the house, their attention focused on the potent, almost hypnotic words of the speaker, Lucius Manlius Vulso Longus. Outside, the afternoon sun was suspended in the western sky; the shadows and shapes it created across the marble floor of the inner chamber transfixed in the still air.
    Duilius looked upon friend and foe alike, on the undecidedand the resolute in each group, his mind calculating odds and testing scenarios. As he watched, many of the senators nodded with a practiced look of sagacity at the words Longus was speaking and Duilius smiled inwardly, awaiting the applause he knew would follow, approbation for the keynote of the speech that he had written for Longus. The senators applauded on cue and once again Duilius used the opportunity to search beyond the outward displays of approval and agreement on the senators’ faces to try to divine their true intentions.
    The elections were less than three days away and although Duilius was confident of victory, he was acutely aware of the limits to his knowledge, conscious that although his accession to the senior consulship was assured, the size of his majority in the secret ballot was yet unknown as were the true strength and numbers of his adversaries. As the victor of Mylae, Duilius was still exploiting the residual gratitude of the people of Rome and the Senate and he had used his influence to engineer Longus’s nomination to the junior consulship, his speech a carefully crafted manifesto that Duilius hoped would win favour with the undeclared majority of the house.
    As Duilius’s gaze reached the far end of the forum, he swept his gaze around again, this time in search of Longus’s main rivals. They were scattered sporadically amongst the 300 strong senate, each one an ear of wheat amidst the chaff, some rising higher than the others, but all members of the ancient conservative Patrician class against whom Duilius had battled during his entire career in the Senate. That contest had reached its zenith the previous year when Duilius had been junior consul to Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, the patriarch of their pompous faction. The open rivalry had brought to the surface the supporters of each man, and by extension each philosophy, conservative verses progressive, and the house had divided along those lines with the centre occupied by a fickle majoritywhose votes were bought and extorted by the opposing forces. Now however, with Scipio discredited and in absentia, his supporters had dispersed and were once more hidden amongst the confusion of the malleable centre, their concealment reducing Duilius’s ability to judge the outcome of each vote.
    As Longus finished his speech, many in the house stood to applaud the young senator and he smiled boldly at his supporters. Duilius stood also as an overt sign of his endorsement, moving his clapping hands from left to right as if to display this approval to the entire house. He caught the young senator’s gaze for a brief instant and Longus nodded his thanks, his fawning devotion evident to even the most obtuse observer and Duilius looked away quickly, hoping to wipe the sycophantic smile from Longus’s face, the expression unwise given that the majority of senators believed in the tradition that each consul, both junior and senior, should be their own man, each one, at least overtly, acting as a check against the power of the other.
    Longus stepped down from the podium and made his way to his seat as a rival took to the centre of the floor to make his own case for election. Duilius turned in his seat, away from the speaker but also from Longus, conscious that the young senator was probably staring across at him, hoping once again to catch his eye. The thought made Duilius uncharacteristically re-examine his decision to promote Longus as a candidate for the junior consulship. With his own victory assured, Duilius’s endorsement carried significant weight and he