Friends, Romans and Enemies

A robbery at the local museum appears to be connected with the death of a local forger, and that is enough to pull Lovejoy in. The trail leads to a hoard of Roman coins and, inconveniently, to the Isle of Man. Two Americans are after the coins as well, so the hunt has company before it has really begun.

The first clues surface while Lovejoy is going through articles from the estate sale of an eccentric engineer, and they take him down into an ancient Roman grave. There is something quietly pleasing about a series in which a dead engineer's leftovers point the way to a hoard that has sat underground for centuries. The forger's death hangs over all of it, which keeps the chase from feeling like a school outing. It went out on 31 January 1986, less than a month after the series began, and the title borrows from Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar. The episode earns the classical reference the same way it earns everything else: by planting its treasure in an actual Roman grave.

Ian La Frenais and Jonathan Gash wrote it, with Ken Hannam directing. Ian McShane is Lovejoy, and Phyllis Logan is Lady Jane Felsham. Dudley Sutton's Tinker Dill, Malcolm Tierney's Charlie Gimbert and Chris Jury's Eric Catchpole keep the local end of things ticking over. Catherine Strauss plays Nicole, Burnell Tucker is Edward, Cassie Stuart is Amanda, Jo Ross is Helen, and Geoffrey Bateman is Dandy Jack.

It is a grand sort of episode, moving from a provincial museum to the Isle of Man without ever losing the sense that this is small-town England with something valuable buried underneath it. Roman coins, modern thieves, and one forger who knew too much. Lovejoy gets his hoard, the Americans get the runaround, and the grave keeps its best secrets until the very end.