d Marius too watched,
as he took his hasty mid-day refreshment, a mess of chestnut-meal and
cheese, while the swelling surface of a great copper water-vessel grew
flowered all over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towards
dusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried out the words of
some philter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, as
the travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil.

But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents of
the way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marks
of the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had been
many enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The ergastula+
were abolished. But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. A
whole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom and
circumstance of misery, still hung [163] around, or sheltered
themselves within, the vast walls of their old, half-ruined
task-houses. And for the most part they had been variously stricken by
the pestilence. For once, the heroic level had been reached in rags,
squints, scars--every caricature of the human type--ravaged beyond what
could have been thought possible if it were to survive at all.
Meantime, the farms were less carefully tended than of old: here and
there they were lapsing into their natural wildness: some villas also
were partly fallen into ruin. The picturesque, romantic Italy of a
later time--the Italy of Claude and Salvator Rosa--was already forming,
for the delight of the modern romantic traveller.

And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on crossing the
Tiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth, the
Tiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under the
richer sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to the
conditions around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to be
a less burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily the
women were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steep
streets with the great water-pots resting on their heads, like women of
Caryae, set free from slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh,
primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed--all the details of
the threshing-floor and the vineyard; [164] the common farm-life even;
the great bakers' fires aglow upon the road in the evening. In the
presence of all this