Auntie Vestina."
Know where she lives?"
Near a temple."
Portus or Ostia itself?"
Ostia."
Ostia is a very religious town, my friend; any clue to which temple?" All the slave could come up with was that water had something to do with it. Well, that should be easy in a town on a river-mouth, down at the coast. I gave him a half-denarius. He didn't know he could have just put an end to my nice little summer commission. Infamia was no longer missing; he was swanning on a sun bed while a loving relative plied him with cool drinks and home-made olive pate. All I had to do now was locate the right temple, collect Diocles from his Auntie Vestina, and bring him home again. Ah, if only it had been that easy.
I had told the slave the truth. Ostia had always been very religious. There were temples absolutely everywhere, some spanking new, some that harked back to when the town was just a cluster of salt workers" huts in a marsh. If the Ostians had space for any sort of dedicated enclosure, they whipped a wall around three sides and put up a podium in a pillared shrine. Their motto was. why build one when there is room for four? A cluster of altars was better than a solo. When they ran out of gods, they threw honours at allegorical concepts; near our apartment stood a row of four little temples, dedicated to Venus and Ceres, plus Hope and Fortune too. I for my part had no time for love, and with two very young children under my feet in a small apartment I was dead set against any further fertility. As I failed to track down Diocles, I was soon cursing my bad fortune and running out of hope. On my return, the quest for the scribe's aunt took me all over town. I reckoned I could omit the giant temples to Jupiter and to Rome and Augustus which dominated the Forum; anyone who lived there would describe their house as near the Forum. Pompous types might call it the Capitolium. Vague ones would say they lived in the middle of town. Otherwise, I had to visit the lot. I became adept at scenting out smoke from sacrificial offerings. I also became a real nymphaeum bore. The Ostians liked gracing wayside walls with water-troughs, and though some were plain drinking points for beasts of burden, many were set up as decorative shrines to water gods. Helena had to listen to me counting up each day's haul as temples became my obsessive collecting fad, worse than the time I tried to explore all the Seven Hills of Rome when I was only eight years old and not supposed to leave the Aventine by myself. Now I would be death at a party. I kept note tablets jotted with details of temples I had spotted, like some ghastly tourist's diary. At the slightest encouragement I showed people my sketch map with shrines marked in red. My mother, who was staying with Maia, became very excited when she thought Helena had begun sacrifices to the Good Goddess. [I was absolved from taking part; men are too Bad] Bona Dea was for a while our favoured divinity in the conundrum, as her neat sea-view temple lay outside the Marine Gate. We did wonder if Diocles had chosen lodgings in an area he knew, though if his auntie was in that vicinity we could not explain why he went into lodgings… We failed to track down Vestina near the Bona Dea, so my search moved back to the centre of town. Top deity here was Vulcan. A straightforward anvil god with a fetching limp. Helena and I spent a pleasant day at his ancient complex; we took Albia and the children, making it an excuse for a picnic, which was just as well because as a work exercise our trip was pointless. We could only associate Vulcan with water via a long winded link involving the vigiles dousing fires. Tenuous. For reasons nobody knew any more, the fire god's high priest was the most important man in Ostia, lording it over the cult's own praetors and aediles; it was a lifetime appointment of ancient derivation which carried, as far as I could see, no advantage nowadays except being grovelled to by sycophantic town councillors, all hoping that the current pontifex of Vulcan would quickly drop dead so they could jostle for his post. That night Helena Justina sat up suddenly in bed with a shriek of
