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work happily around the villa, feeding the hens and pigs, or chopping wood for the fire, another source of friction since proximity meant that he could eat when he liked, while helping himself to the water from the well, this while the others toiled in the blazing heat with no more food or water than they could carry. And these days, given their father’s prosperity, they had to work quite a distance from the house.
    The dog was a real problem; Dabo’s own mutts were terrified of it, hiding their tails and whining submissively if it came close. Aquila had reacted angrily the first time Dabo had suggested chaining Minca up, making it plain that both he and the animal would be off up the road at the first opportunity. The boy’s blank refusal to be used asan extra farm labourer could only be altered by a sound buffet round the ears, but it would be a brave man who would do that with the dog loose. The huge black and brown animal, who would sit immobile as Dabo’s children fought Aquila, bared his teeth if the older man even came close. Nor could Dabo just kill the damn thing; if he did, he knew that it would be Aquila he would have to chain up. The boy had a spear hidden somewhere and Dabo had already learnt, on the day that Fulmina died and he had sought him out in the woods, that Aquila knew how to use it. It had thudded into a tree right by Dabo’s head, and he knew, from the look in the boy’s eye, that he had missed deliberately.
    His own children could not understand; their father constantly moaned to them about Aquila, but was curiously reluctant to do or say anything to the culprit himself. They could not know that every time the boy angered him, he conjured up a vision of Aquila running away to the nearest town, telling the tale of his life on this farm and the man who owned it, which might lead to a tax-gatherer calling at his door. That stayed the hand and whip that he so liberally used on his own offspring. As far as the Roman state was concerned, Piscius Dabo was serving with the legions in Illyricum; the fact that the person who was doing the soldiering was none other than Clodius Terentius, Aquila’s adoptivefather, was the cause of the aforesaid worry.
    They had swapped places because Clodius was on his uppers, a landless, wage-paid day labourer, which exempted him from service. Dabo was doing well, which snared him, because in the Roman State only those with property could be trusted to defend it. A man who had lost his land – Clodius had lost his own holding because of his stint in the legions – did not qualify for the Dilectus . Dabo had only held on to his own farm because his father had looked after it while he was a serving soldier. So pauper Clodius, recipient of the corn dole, had been exempt from the call-up; farmer Piscius Dabo, who could feed himself and his family, was not. Never mind his sons were too young to look after the place while he was away; never mind that the fields would go to rack because he was not there to tend them. Rome had been made great by fighting farmers; it would stay great the same way. Getting Clodius drunk, and having him review a life that was far from perfect, then recalling with a rosy tint the time they had soldiered together, Dabo had persuaded him to sign up under his name.
    Serving legionaries were exempt from the land tax, so for all the time Clodius served in Dabo’s place he had paid not a bronze ass to the local legate and because of that he had enjoyed an extra degree of prosperity. One of his neighbours, who had gone off to fight in the same legion as Clodius,had left a wife and two children to look after his holding. The eldest boy, the mainstay of the farm, had died of a flux, so the place was going to ruin. All it needed was one more thing to go wrong and the wife would be forced off the land before her husband could get home and put the place to rights. So ‘good neighbour’ Dabo had stepped in and bought her out at a knock-down price of her