ODE TO A BANKER

A short hop from the end of the Clivus Argentarius and across the front of the Curia brought me to the magnificent Porticus Aemilius, one of the finest public buildings of the Augustan Age. It was fronted by and joined to the Porticus of Gaius and Lucius, a two-storey colonnade of shops which was where my own frowsty banker lurked nowadays. His gorgeous squat was probably illegal in fact, but the aediles for some reason don't move bankers on. His chained deposit chests stood in the main aisle of the Porticus on massive slabs of marble in various shades: Numidian yellow, Carystian green, Lucullan black and red, Chian pink and grey – and the purple variegated Phrygian from which the table supports at the Chrysippus house were made, and which I had seen yesterday stained with the dead man's blood. My banker's chests, along with a folding stool and an unmanned changetable, were on the lower level of the Porticus, overlooked by a frieze showing scenes from Roman history, and shaded by a larger than lifesized statue of a barbarian. Apt, if you believed money had played its sinister part in our noble past and would affect the future of the untamed areas of the world. (I was raving internally. My encounter with the Aurelian Bank's changer had left me overwrought.) The billet was also incongruous, if you believed bankers were merely men with dirty hands from shuffling coinage – that is, if you had failed to notice just how many elegant artworks most bankers own in their private homes.

I went upstairs to see Nothokleptes. If he was not in sight at his business location, he was to be found at his barber's between a couple of delicate acanthus-scrolled pillars in the upper colonnade. More beauteous decor. And the elevation gave him a good view of who was approaching.

He was seedy and suspicious, just about convincing as a Roman citizen yet by birth probably Alexandrian and originally tutored in money matters by Ptolemaic tax-collectors. A heavy man, with jowls that were designed for pegging a napkin under his chin. He spent a lot of time at his barber's, where you could find him at ease as if the shaving chair were an extension of his business premises. Since his premises downstairs were so public, and usually guarded by a very unpleasant Pisidian thug, the barber's had an advantage. While you begged to overdraw on your already empty bankbox, you could send for a cold drink and have your fingernails manicured by a sweet girl with a lisp. Although often overcommitted, as it happened I had never tried my banker for a large formal loan. That would obviously involve – as a courtesy to his associates – investment in a pumice scrape and full hair trim; the peculiar Egyptian way Nothokleptes himself was coiffed, had always put me off.

Nothokleptes was not his real name; it was given him by Petronius Longus when we two first shared a bankbox for a year after we came home from the army. Once he acquired a job in the vigiles, Petro made sure he kept his salary and his prissy wife's dowry locked out of my grasp, but the name he had stuck on our first banker had lasted, to the point that the public now used it, believing it real. Civilised bilinguists will recognise that it means approximately thieving bastard although, despite the strong whiff of slander, long usage would probably now bar the man from suing us.

`Nothokleptes!' I always enjoyed calling him by name.

He looked at me curiously, as he always did. I could never decide if this was because he suspected my part in renaming him, or whether he was simply amazed that anyone could survive on my income. My half-year working on the Census had eventually brought a huge upsurge in my savings, but when Vespasian allowed my name to go forward to the equestrian list, the qualification rule immediately forced me to invest cash in land. The money had flowed straight out of my box, and Nothokleptes now seemed to feel doubtful that he ever really saw it. I felt the same myself.

`Marcus Didius Falco.' His manner was quaintly formal. He knew how to make a debtor feel like a man of substance just long enough to feel safe accepting yet another loan.

I had spent years trying to avoid this character when my funds were low. We had held many conversations about whether it was even worth my while to pay the hire-fee for the bankbox that contained nothing. On these difficult occasions, Nothokleptes had impressed me with both his common sense and his ferociously unyielding attitude. Fate had always saved me with some income at the last moment. For those who were less lucky, loans might be called in with cruel detachment. Like many men who wield power over unfortunates, he looked like a soft slob who would never find the energy to come down on them. How wrong that was.

`How are you this fine day, Marcus Didius??