EPILOGUE
Calpurnia
gave birth to a baby-boy on an undated day, possibly between that
year’s Saturnalia
and
Anna Perenna’s feast .She sent that son of hers to Gades so that he
should be brought up there, far from Antonius and Octavius’
interests. Once grown up, he returned to Rome. His wisdom, intense
eerie appeal.... and those eyes in which transparent blue could
become silvery drove him to seduce Julia, Augustus’ own daughter,
who included him among her favourite lovers. They had a daughter who,
thanks to her mother’s insistence, was fostered by would-be Emperor
Tiberius. When she became an adult woman, she unpredictably fell in
love with a common plebeian eques,
who, thanks to his privileged marriage, had the chance of becoming
the Governor of Judea. Like her grandmother almost eighty years
before, this noble matron, whose name was Claudia Procula, did not
succeed in convincing her husband, Pontius Pilatus, of the
seriousness of the prophetic dream that she had had the night before
and in which misfortune would be unlashed all over Judea and the
whole world due to an honest man who had been sentenced to death...
FINIS
Gades,
Ante Diem XIV Kalendas October MMDCCLVIII a.u.c.
