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attention. But Cicero was sunning himself in the applause, his eyes half closed, like a prisoner released from a dungeon into the light, and in the noise and tumult of the crowd he did not see her.

That Cicero did not recognise his only daughter was less peculiar than it may seem. She had changed greatly in the time we had been away. Her face and arms, once plump and girlish, were thin and pale; her fair hair was covered by the dark headdress of mourning. The day of our arrival was her twentieth birthday, although I am ashamed to say that I had forgotten it and so had failed to remind Cicero.
    His first act on stepping down from the gangplank was to kneel and kiss the soil. Only after this patriotic act had been loudly cheered did he look up and notice his daughter watching him in her widow’s weeds. He stared at her and burst into tears, for he truly loved her, and he had loved her husband too, and now he saw by the colour and style of her dress that he was dead.
    He enfolded her in his arms, to the crowd’s delight, and after a long embrace took a step back to examine her. “My dearest child, you cannot imagine how much I have yearned for this moment.” Still holding her hands, he switched his gaze to the faces behind her and scanned them eagerly. “Is you mother here, and Marcus?”
    “No, Papa, they’re in Rome.”
    This was hardly surprising—in those days it was an arduous journey, especially for a woman, of two or three weeks from Rome to Brundisium, with a serious risk of robbery in the remoter stretches; if anything, the surprise was that Tullia had come, and come alone at that. But Cicero’s disappointment was obvious although he tried to hide it.
    “Well, it’s no matter—no matter at all. I have you, and that’s the main thing.”

    “And I have you—and on my birthday.”
    “It’s your birthday?” He gave me a reproachful look. “I almost forgot. Of course it is. We shall celebrate tonight!” And he took her by the arm and led her away from the harbour.
    Because we did not yet know for certain that his exile had been repealed, it was decided that we should not set off for Rome until we had official confirmation, and once again Laenius Flaccus volunteered to put us up at his estate outside Brundisium. Armed men were stationed around the perimeter for Cicero’s protection, and he spent much of the next few days with Tullia, strolling through the gardens and along the beach, learning at first hand how difficult her life had been during his exile—how, for example, her husband, Frugi, had been set upon by Clodius’s henchmen when he was trying to speak on Cicero’s behalf, stripped naked and pelted with filth and driven from the Forum, and how his heart had ceased to beat properly afterwards until, a few months later, he died in her arms; how, because she was childless, she had been left with nothing except a few pieces of jewellery and her returned dowry, which she had given to Terentia to help pay off the family’s debts; how Terentia had been obliged to sell a large part of her own property, and had even steeled herself to plead with Clodius’s sister to intercede with her brother to grant her and her children some mercy, and how Clodia had mocked her and boasted that Cicero had tried to have an affair with her; how families they had always thought of as friends had closed their doors on them in fear; and so on and so forth.
    Cicero told me all this sadly one night after Tullia had gone to bed. “Little wonder Terentia isn’t here. It seems she avoids going out in public as much as she can and prefers to stay cooped up in my brother’s house. As for Tullia, we need to find her a new husband as soon as possible, while she’s still young enough to give a man some children safely.” He rubbed his temples, as he always did at times of stress. “I’d thought that coming back to Italy would mark the end of my troubles. Now I see it is merely the beginning.”
    It was on our sixth day as