A Song For Nero by Thomas C. Holt

Author:Thomas C. Holt [Holt, Thomas C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2009-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

You may remember a while back I told you about the time I met the world’s cleverest man, the great Seneca.We got chatting about Stoic philosophy and stuff, and I was able to fill him in on some things he didn’t know about my line of work, thieving and swindling and so on.

Well, sorry to bang on about it, like I’m name-dropping or whatever, but the truth is, that conversation must’ve made a real impression on me because I can remember pretty much all of it, even now, including all the long words. I gave you the gist of some of it earlier, but I left out the interesting bit because it wasn’t really anything to do with what I was telling you about, then. But you’re going to hear the rest of it now; partly because, as I sat in Blandinia’s garden with bugger all else to do but think about what she’d told me about Lucius Domitius, not to mention me being about to die, I went over it all in my mind and thought,Yes, well; partly because I’ve been lugging it round in my head all these years because it’s too good to waste, and it’s cracking stuff, really. Besides, you’ve put up with me chattering away all this time, you deserve a bit of quality as a reward.

Like I said just now, old Seneca and me, we’d been talking about good and evil and lies and truth and all that, and I think Seneca had pretty much forgotten I was there, or who I was - he was getting on a bit, after all.The other day I figured it out on my fingers. It was the same year he died when we had our chat, so he can’t have been a day under sixty, and even the best of us gets a bit blurry round the edges at that age.

Anyhow - I don’t know how exactly, but the conversation had somehow worked its way round to the Great Fire, which had happened the previous year. I think Seneca brought it up as an example of some point he was making, and I must’ve said something like,Yeah, what about that? or,That was really something else, wasn’t it? Doesn’t matter what I said; point is, after a while Seneca went all thoughtful, or else he had an attack of heartburn from eating crunchy snacky things out of a finger bowl, because he went dead quiet and stared past me, and then he started talking about history.

Great, I thought, getting my money’s worth here, and I hadn’t even had to pay for my seat, so I pinned my ears back and opened my mind up like a rabbit-catcher’s net, hoping that at least some of the good stuff ’d stick in it. Unfortunately my left leg chose that time to go to sleep on me, and it’s bloody difficult concentrating on the sublime and the profound when you’ve got pins and needles shooting through your toes and right up

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