hers in the Baths of
Titus, the only man, certainly, with a brand mark on his shoulder and
scourge-scars on his back who ever habitually frequented that most
magnificent of our fashionable pleasure-resorts. My brand-marks and
scourge-scars have not diminished my enjoyment of life except that they
frequently give bores a pretext for insisting on my narrating my
adventures.

Of course, as in my city mansion, so also at Villa Andivia, I have had
constructed and consecrated a handsome private chapel to Mercury.

NOTES TO ANDIVIUS HEDULIO

A. THE ROMAN ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

From the expulsion of the Kings, the people of Rome, assembled in their
voting-field outside their city, each year elected the magistrates for the
year: others, and especially quaestors, answering to our army-paymaster
and custom-house collectors; praetors (judges, generals and governors of
provinces), and two consuls, acting as chief-magistrates and generals-in-
chief. A man was generally first quaestor, later praetor and finally
consul, often holding other intermediary offices.

Ex-officials, who had held the more important offices of the Republic,
became by immemorial custom life-members of the Senate, which was never an
elective, always a selective body, without legal authority but with great
influence. As the Republic's Empire spread the Senate was less and less
able to control provincial governors, until such self-confident geniuses
as Sulla, Caesar and Augustus became able to control it. The Roman
Republic was never abolished, and did not die till the Turks captured
Constantinople in 1453. It conquered a great Empire and when its Senate
could no longer control the magistrates who managed that Empire, its
solders who, by conquering and holding provinces to pay taxes maintained
the Empire and the Republic, wearied of the incompetence of the Senate's
appointees, of the squabbles and strife of their leaders, chose by
acclamation one commander whom they loved and trusted. The Senate, at his
mercy, legalized his sovereignty by conferring on him for life the powers
of a Tribune, an official who could initiate nothing, but had the legal
power to forbid anything and everything.

The Senate continued to administer those provinces reckoned safe from
invasion or insurrection; always two governed by ex-consuls and about ten
governed each by an ex-praetor. It continued to dispose of the funds
derived from their taxes and to recruit itself from ex-