Operative, you are asked by Sextus to find the House of Caecilius. You start from Sextus’ house, known today as the House of Menander. Once you reach the House of Caecilius, you should try to win his favor. Use what you know of Pompeian geography to engage him in small-talk, and you may find it useful to speak of his son, Tiberius, in light of this great TED video:

Who Caecilius was. Lucius Caecilius Iucundus was a real Pompeian, and one we know more about than almost any other ordinary resident of the town. He was a banker, an argentārius, which in Pompeii meant something broader than a modern banker: he ran auctions, advanced loans to buyers, collected debts, and took a commission (a mercēs) on the deals he brokered. He was, in effect, the man who stood between buyer and seller and made the money move.

How we know. When his house was excavated in 1875, archaeologists found a wooden chest holding more than 150 wax tablets (tabulae): his business archive, carbonized but still partly legible. Each tablet was a small triptych of wooden leaves coated in wax, written on with a metal stylus that bit through the wax into the wood beneath (which is why we can still read many of them). They record auctions, loans, and payments of civic taxes between roughly 27 and 62 CE. This is one of only a handful of private archives to survive from the entire Roman world, and it is the reason a single Pompeian banker is famous two thousand years later.

Why the tablets matter. Beyond the money, the tablets list the witnesses to each transaction, and Iucundus had them sign in order of social rank. So the archive is not just an account book; it is a map of who outranked whom in Pompeii, a rare direct glimpse of the town’s social ladder. The records also show how credit and trust worked in a Roman town: deals secured not by a bank as an institution but by named, ranked human witnesses.

Writing on the walls. The house preserves more than its archive. Among the graffiti scratched on its walls is a small verse on love: may those who love flourish, may anyone who cannot love perish, and may whoever would forbid love perish twice over. Another, probably scratched after Iucundus’ own lifetime, declares his son Quintus’ support for a candidate named Ceius Secundus, who was standing for the office of duumvir (one of the two senior annual magistrates of the town). Graffiti like these are worth pausing over: they are the unguarded voice of the people who actually lived in the house and the street, recording love, politics, and daily life in a way the formal record never does.

The man himself. The last tablets date to just before the great earthquake of 62 CE, and Iucundus seems not to appear in any record afterward; many think he died in or around that disaster, well before Vesuvius buried the town in 79. We are not certain. In your immersion it is 79 CE, and the Caecilius who opens his door to you is alive and well: the TSTT exercises its license to keep him in the story, as other tellings of Pompeii have done. Hold both the history and the immersion in mind, operative; learning to weigh one against the other is itself part of the work.

For information about the remains of this house, follow this link.

The Demiurge advises that all operatives obtain extra LP by using the cultural knowledge and skills they discover to contribute both as lead operatives and as team-members.

For the second half of this episode, operatives are instructed to learn what they can about Roman eating by research in the following directions:

On Roman cuisine, see this link. Food and dining changed slightly during the Roman Empire.

For images and other information about the Roman triclinium see this link. There is also some great summarized information about the Roman Cena here.

Your informational text Cēna Rōmāna walks you through the meal in Latin: the gustātiō (the opening course, with eggs, olives, vegetables, dormice, mulsum, and bread), the prīma mēnsa (the main course, built around meat), and the secunda mēnsa (the closing course of cheese, fruit, and nuts, sometimes a sweet crustulum). Notice the shape of it: a Roman dinner was structured in named courses, eaten reclining (reclīnat in lectīs, not sitting in chairs), often before guests and clients of the household, and timed not for the evening but a little after midday (paulō post merīdiē). Reading that text closely is the fastest way to prepare to dine convincingly inside the TSTT.

Lastly, feel free to watch this informative video about the whole cēna, start to finish:

Greetings operatives! Lusy here; I decided to swoop in and give you a bit of assistance for when it comes time to construct your response. Feel free to use any of the words (or phrases) here when telling the story of your Recentius or Recentia dining like a Roman in the villa of Caecilius! Remember, you've also read many stories from which you are able to draw inspiration and remix the language to become your own.