“You with a hammer and chisel?” Helena laughed. “That would be a Greek tragedy. You’re dangerous enough with your pen and your comedies. You don’t like Colonius’s work?”
“I do,” he said, gazing at the woman before him and the statue of the goddess modeled after her. “Magnificent.”
She smiled. “What are you going to do when I’m fifty cubits tall and you can only gaze at my naked stone body in the temple with all the other mortal men? Will you remember you once had me in the flesh, Athanasius?”
Athanasius. His head was a jumble of images and memories. That name was not one of them.
“I’m a Greek playwright,” he told her, as if he had just remembered.
“The greatest,” she purred as she kissed him.
“I’m from Athens, like my father. But my mother was from Judea.”
Helena frowned. “I thought you were going to stop saying that. No good can come of it in Rome. Have you been drinking kykeon and smoking blue lotus leaves again? Or reading those old books? I am tired of your dreams about the fall of ancient cities like Jericho, or your nightmares of Greece conquered by Germania, or your visions of a future Rome beyond the Great Sea. Put away your psychedelics, Athanasius. Enough. You have me as your muse.”
He stood still and said nothing, only listened to the breeze and smelled the scent of citrus from a nearby bowl of fruit. It was all very quiet, until the birds rose into the sky. Then came the unmistakable roar of the crowds, carried on the wind.
“What’s that?” he asked Helena.
She shrugged and said, “That, I suppose, is the last of Flavius Clemens.”
He staggered back inside the villa and roamed its chambers until he finally emerged on a terrace and took in the spectacular view of the city. Dazzling white terraces and marble columns cascaded down the cypress-covered hills to the winding river below. The roar of the crowds came up even louder, and he gasped at the sight of the great Colosseum.
He stared at his hands. They were his hands. He looked at the city. It was his adopted city. He was Athanasius. This was Rome.
The games, he realized, had only just begun.