The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World (Novels of Ancient Rome) Read Online Free PDF

years. Eutropius is grown now, a widower with a child of his own. He inherited his father’s house, about halfway up the hill, not far from the theater. Eutropius has done rather well for himself, so I’m sure our accommodations will be quite comfortable.”
    We reached the end of the pier and arrived at the open gate, where people stood in long queues to be admitted to the city. I was unsure which queue we should get into, until one of the gatekeepers shouted, in Latin, “Roman citizens and their parties in this line! Roman citizens, queue here!”
    As we stepped into the line, I noticed that some in the crowd gave us dirty looks. The line was shorter than the others, and moved more quickly. Soon we stood before a man in a ridiculously tall hat a bit like a quail’s plume—only a bureaucrat would wear such a thing—who glanced at my iron citizen’s ring as I handed him the traveling papers my father had secured for me before I left Rome.
    Speaking Latin, the official read aloud: “‘Gordianus, citizen of Rome, born in the consulship of Spurius Postumius Albinus and Marcus Minucius Rufus—that makes you what, eighteen years old?—‘of average height with dark hair and regular features, no distinguishing marks, speaks Latin and some Greek’—and with an atrocious accent, I’ll wager.” The man eyed me with barely concealed contempt.
    “His Greek accent is actually rather good,” said Antipater. “Certainly better than your Latin accent.”
    “And who are you?”
    “I am the young man’s traveling companion, formerly his tutor—Zoticus of Zeugma. And you would not be speaking to us this way if my friend were older and wearing his toga and followed by a retinue of slaves. But Gordianus is no less a citizen than any other Roman, and you will treat him with respect—or else I shall report you to the provincial governor.”
    The official took a long look at Antipater, made a sour face, then handed my documents back to me and waved us on.
    “You certainly put that fellow in his place!” I said with a laugh.
    “Yes, well, I fear you may encounter more than a little of that sort of thing here in Ephesus, Gordianus.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Anti-Roman sentiment runs deep throughout the province of Asia—through all the Greek-speaking provinces for that matter—but especially here in Ephesus.”
    “But why?”
    “The Roman governor based at Pergamon taxes the people mercilessly. And there are a great many Romans in the city—thousands of them, all claiming special privileges, taking the best seats at the theater, rewarding each other with places of honor at the festivals, sucking up the profits from the import and export trade, even sticking their fingers into the treasury at the Temple of Artemis, which is the great bank for all of Asia and the lifeblood of Ephesus. In the forty years since the Romans established their authority here, a great deal of resentment has been stirred up. If even a petty document-checker at the gate feels he can speak to you that way, I fear to imagine how others will behave. I think it might be best if we speak no more Latin while we’re here in Ephesus, Gordianus, even among ourselves. Others may overhear and make assumptions.”
    Somewhere in the middle of this discourse, he had switched from Latin to Greek, and it took my mind a moment to catch up.
    “That may be … a challenge,” I finally said, pausing to think of the Greek word.
    Antipater sighed. “Your words may be Greek, but your accent is decidedly Roman.”
    “You told the document-checker I had a good accent!”
    “Yes, well … perhaps you should simply speak as little as possible.”
    We followed the crowd and found ourselves in a marketplace thronged with pilgrims and tourists, where vendors sold all sorts of foodstuffs and a great variety of talismans. There were miniature replicas of Artemis’s temple as well as images of the goddess herself. These images came in many sizes and were fashioned