urn to their beautiful
town house at the foot of the Capitoline hill until late in October.
While Fabia was busy with the household readjustments entailed by
the presence of the children with their attendants and tutors, and
before social engagements should become too numerous, Ovid spent
several hours each day over his _Metamorphoses_, to which he was
giving the final polish. Patient work of this kind was always
distasteful to him and he welcomed any chance to escape from it. At
the end of November Fabia's cousin, Fabius Maximus, went to the
island of Elba to look after some family mines, and Ovid made his
wife's business interests a pretext for a short trip up the Tuscan
coast in his company. He was to be back for a dinner at Macer's, his
fellow poet's, on the Ides of December, to meet some friends of both
from Athens.

On the morning of the eighth day before the Ides a message came to
Fabia from the Palace asking where Ovid was. The inquiry seemed
flattering and Fabia wondered what pleasant attention was in store
for her husband. As it happened, she saw no one outside of her own
household either that day or the next, being kept indoors by the
necessity of installing new servants sent down from the estate at
Sulmo. She was, therefore, entirely unprepared for the appalling
public news which her uncle, Rufus, brought to her in the early
evening of the seventh day before the Ides. There was something
almost terrifying in the wrenching of her mind from the placid
details of linen chests and store-rooms to the disasters in Caesar's
household. Augustus, without warning, at the opening of what
promised to be a brilliant social season, had risen in terrible
wrath; and Julia, his granddaughter, her lover, Decimus Junius
Silanus, and, it was rumoured, several other prominent men had been
given the choice of accepting banishment or submitting to a public
prosecution. There was really no choice for them. The courts would
condemn relentlessly, and the only way to save even life was to leave
Rome.

"But the brutal suddenness of it!" Fabia exclaimed. "It seems more
tragic, somehow, than her mother's punishment. Isn't everybody
aghast? And do you think she has deserved it?" Rufus looked grave
and troubled. "It is not easy to know what one does think," he said.
"There has been a great deal of boasting about our prosperity, our
victories abroad and our lustre at home. But some of us who have been
watching closely have wondered how