appening beneath the walls of the capital.

All regard for the dignity of law, for family ties, for difference of
position, had ceased. Gladiators drunk with wine seized in the Emporium,
gathered in crowds and ran with wild shouts through the neighboring
squares, trampling, scattering, and robbing the people. A multitude of
barbarian slaves, exposed for sale in the city, escaped from the booths.
For them the burning and ruin of Rome were at once the end of slavery
and the hour of revenge; so that when the permanent inhabitants, who had
lost all they owned in the fire, stretched their hands to the gods in
despair, calling for rescue, these slaves with howls of delight
scattered the crowds, dragged clothing from people's backs, and bore
away the younger women. They were joined by other slaves serving in the
city from of old, wretches who had nothing on their bodies save woollen
girdles around their hips, dreadful figures from the alleys, who were
hardly ever seen on the streets in the daytime, and whose existence in
Rome it was difficult to suspect.

Men of this wild and unrestrained crowd--Asiatics, Africans, Greeks,
Thracians, Germans, Britons--howling in every language of the earth,
raged, thinking that the hour had come in which they were free to reward
themselves for years of misery and suffering. In the midst of that
surging throng of humanity, in the glitter of day and of fire, shone the
helmets of praetorians, under whose protection the more peaceable
population had taken refuge, and who in hand-to-hand battle had to meet
the raging multitude in many places. Vinicius had seen captured cities,
but never had his eyes beheld a spectacle in which despair, tears, pain,
groans, wild delight, madness, rage, and license were mingled together
in such immeasurable chaos. Above this heaving, mad human multitude
roared the fire, surging up to the hill-tops of the greatest city on
earth, sending into the whirling throng its fiery breath, and covering
it with smoke, through which it was impossible to see the blue sky.

The young tribune with supreme effort, and exposing his life every
moment, forced his way at last to the Appian Gate; but there he saw that
he could not reach the city through the division of the Porta Capena,
not merely because of the throng, but also because of the terrible heat
from which the whole atmosphere was quivering inside the gate. Besides,
the bridge at the Porta Trigenia, opposite the temple of the