The houses on Astura and at Tusculum were only two of some twenty properties that Cicero owned in Italy in 45 BCE. Some were elegant residential mansions. In Rome he had a large house on the lower slopes of the Palatine Hill, a couple of minutes’ walk from the Forum, where many of the top-most drawer of the Roman elite, Clodia included, were his neighbours; his other houses were dotted throughout the peninsula, from Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, where he entertained Caesar to that rather crowded dinner party, to Formiae further north, where he had another seaside villa. Some were small rest
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