hat shone like dusky rubies; they were agile at the chase, could
capture a lion or trap the wild beasts that are so useful in
gladiatorial games. There were Greeks here, pale of face and gentle of
manner who could strike the chords of a lyre and sing to its
accompaniment, and there were swarthy Spaniards who fashioned
breast-plates of steel and fine chain mail to resist the assassin's
dagger: there were Gauls with long lithe limbs and brown hair tied in a
knot high above the forehead, and Allemanni from the Rhine with
two-coloured hair heavy and crisp like a lion's mane. There was a
musician from Memphis whose touch upon the sistrum would call a dying
spirit back to the land of the living, and a cook from Judaea who could
stew a peacock's tongue so that it melted like nectar in the mouth:
there was a white-skinned Iceni from Britain, versed in the art of
healing, and a negress from Numidia who had killed a raging lion by one
hit on the jaw from her powerful fist.

Then there were those freshly brought to Rome from overseas, whose
merits or demerits had not yet been appraised--they wore no tablet round
the neck, but their feet were whitened all over with chalk; and there
were those whose heads were surmounted by an ugly felt hat in token that
the State treasury tendered no guarantee for them. Their period of
servitude had been so short that nothing was known about them, about
their health, their skill, or their condition.

Above them towered the gigantic rostrum with tier upon tier of massive
blocks of marble, and in the centre, up aloft, the bronze figure of the
wolf--the foster-mother of the great city--with metal jaws distended and
polished teeth that gleamed like emeralds in the sun.

And all around the stately temples of the Forum, with their rich
carvings and colonnades and walls in tones of delicate creamy white,
scarce less brilliant than the clouds which a gentle morning breeze was
chasing westwards to the sea. And under the arcades of the temples cool
shadows, dense and blue, trenchant against the white marble like an
irregular mosaic of lapis lazuli, with figures gliding along between the
tall columns, priests in white robes, furtive of gait, slaves of the
pontificate, shoeless and silent and as if detached from the noise and
bustle of the Forum, like ghosts that haunt the precincts of graves.

Throughout all this the gorgeous colouring that a summer's mid-morning
throws over imperial Rome. Above, that ca