“You want a guide?” he suggested. “I tell you all about the Colosseum. This is where they had the circus. Lions and Christians.”
“I know all about it,” said the Saint. “In a previous incarnation, I was Nero’s favorite clown. My name was Emmetus Kellius. Everybody used to laugh themselves sick when the lions bit me. So did I. I was smeared all over with hot mustard. Unfortunately, though, I was color-blind. One day, just for a laugh, Poppaea changed the mustard in my make-up pot for ketchup. Everyone said I gave the funniest performance of my life. It even killed me. However—”
The would-be guide stared at him disgustedly and went away.
The girl tried to stop giggling.
“Do you really know anything about it?” she asked. “It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to Latin when I was in school. But I never got much beyond Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.”
“ ‘De Gaulle is divided in three parties,’ ” he translated brightly. “I wonder if our State Department knows about that.”
She shot him a sudden sharp glance which he did not understand at the time. It made him think that he was overdoing the flippancy, and he didn’t want to spoil such a Heaven-sent beginning.
He said, gazing across the arena, “I don’t care about knowing a lot of dull statistics about it. I just try to imagine it as it was before it began to fall apart. Those tiers with nothing but seats like rows of steps, right up to the top. The bleachers, full of excited bloodthirsty people. The arena baking in the same sun that’s on it now.”
“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be.”
“It’s bigger than it looks. You could put a football field in the middle and have plenty of room to run around.”