The first light is grey upon the canals of Bruges. In the upper storey of a timber-framed house near the Jan van Eyckplein, a man from Lübeck named Hildebrand Veckinchusen has already risen. He washes his hands in cold water, dresses in a woollen robe dyed dark, and descends to the counting house where ledgers lie open from the previous evening.

The emperor sits by lamplight in a leather tent somewhere on the middle Danube, perhaps near the legionary fortress of Carnuntum or the temporary camp at Vindobona. Outside, the March wind carries the smell of wet earth and woodsmoke from the cooking fires of the Twelfth Legion. Inside, on a portable writing-table of polished maple, he scratches Greek letters onto papyrus with a reed pen, dipping into an inkpot of soot and gum. He is Marcus Aurelius, ruler of the Roman world, and he writes only for himself.