e has cash to spare and much influence. Tanno has even more of both.
Agathemer is hopeful of running down the real murderers, as they are
loaded with their booty. If they are caught we can clear you.

"Keep up a brave heart."

I tried to, but it was impossible. I ate little and slept hardly at all.

The next day, the Kalends of July, saw me haled again to the Basilica
Sempronia.

There I beheld a scene almost a duplicate of my first trial; a similar
throng of spectators, very similar bevies of expectant witnesses,
advocates and prosecutors; the same batch of my former fellow-slaves,
surrounded by the same guards; the very same charcoal-brazier tended by
the same slave squatting on the same folded blanket; similar knots of
notables in the apse, about and behind the magistrate's tribunal; the same
carved arm-chair; in it not Corbulo, but Cassius Ravillanus, lean, dry,
tanned, leathery, smooth-shaven, bald and stern.

He glared at me when my guards halted me four yards or so in front of him;
then he beckoned to one of his apparitors and spoke to him in an
undertone. The fellow went off as if on an errand.

Ravillanus then gave, even more positively than Corbulo, a demonstration
of the great latitude permitted such a magistrate in procedure, of how
completely it lies within his discretion what to do and how to do it.

"Fellow!" he ranted, "you have plotted to rob and murder your master, you
have done both and you have, by favor and influence and perhaps even by
bribery, arranged for your easy acquittal. I am charged by the Prince of
the Republic to see to it, that the majesty of the law, the sacredness of
the lives of Roman noblemen, and the security of their property be
publicly vindicated: I am here to undo all that Lollius Corbulo supinely
allowed to be done. You shall perceive that I am wholly unlike any such
trifler. Of one feature only of his procedure do I approve. I highly
acclaim his notions as to the right kind of torture. Slaves like you,
however pampered, are property, like horses or cattle. Their value lies in
their usefulness. Any slave, after torture, should be as useful to his
owners as before. If a slave is placed upon the horse and weights hung to
his feet, his legs are often made helpless, he cannot ever walk again, he
is a cripple. Still oftener does the rack leave a slave utterly useless.
Our courts have always desired some form of torture by which the
recalcitrant could be made to suffer acute pa