which had lasted
three days. Everything had been sold, from the bed with the gilt legs on
which the body of the censor had been laid after his death, to the last
vase of murra that adorned his walls and the cups of crystal from which
his guests had drunk. His pet monkeys were sold and his tame magpies,
the pots of flowers out of the hothouses and the bunches of melons and
winter grapes ripening under glass.

After that it was the turn of the slaves. There were, so I understand,
over seven thousand of these: scribes and carpenters, litter-bearers and
sculptors, cooks and musicians; there were a quantity of young children,
and some half-witted dolts and misshapen dwarfs, kept for the amusement
of guests during the intervals of supper.

The bulk of them had been sent to the markets of Delos and Phaselis, but
the imperator had had the most valuable items amongst the human goods
set aside for himself, and not a few choice pieces had found their way
into the households of the aediles in charge of the sales: the State too
had appropriated some hundreds of useful scribes, sculptors and
mechanics, but there were still a thousand or so who--in compliance with
the original imperial edict--would have to be sold by public auction in
Rome for the benefit of the late censor's defrauded victims.

And thus, on this ninth day of September, a human load panting under the
heat of this late summer's sun, huddled one against the other, pushed
and jostled by the crowd, was exposed to the public gaze in the Forum
over against the rostrum Augustini, so that all who had a mind, and a
purse withal, might suit their fancy and buy.

A bundle of humanity--not over-wretched, for the condition of the slaves
in the household of Arminius Quirinius had not been an unhappy one--they
all seemed astonished, some even highly pleased, at thus finding
themselves the centre of attraction in the Forum, they who had spent
their lives in getting humbly out of other people's way.

Fair and dark, ivory skin and ebony, male and female, or almost sexless
in the excess of deformity, there were some to suit all tastes. Each
wore a tablet hung round the neck by a green cord: on this were writ the
chief merits of the wearer, and also a list of his or her defects, so
that intending purchasers might know what to expect.

There were the Phrygians with fair curly hair and delicate hands skilled
in the limner's art; the Numidians with skins of ebony and keen black
eyes t