ve orders for their horses to be brought round.

"By the way, Caius," Tanno asked, "how are you going to travel?"

"On horseback," I replied.

"Why not in your carriage?" he queried. "I was hoping to ride with you to
the Via Salaria, at least, unless your roads jolt a carriage as badly as
bearers on them jolt a litter. What's wrong with the superperfect
travelling carriage of your late Uncle?"

"I have lent it," I explained, "to Marcus Martius, to travel to Rome in
with his bride. I wrote you of his wedding. He has just married my uncle's
freedwoman Marcia. I wrote you about it."

"Pooh!" cried Tanno, "how should I remember the marriage of a freedwoman I
never saw with a bumpkin I never heard of?"

"No bumpkin," cut in Lisius Naepor. "Not any more of a bumpkin than I or
any of the rest of us here. You are too high and mighty, Opsitius. It is
true that in our countryside the only senators are Aemilius, Vedius and
Satronius, and that in our immediate vicinity Hirnio and Hedulio are the
only proprietors of equestrian rank but we commoners here are no bumpkins
or clodhoppers."

"I apologize," Tanno spoke conciliatingly. "You are right to call me down.
We Romans of Rome really know the worth of farmers and provincials and the
like. But we are so used, among ourselves, to thinking of Rome as the
whole world, that our speech belies our esteem for our equals. I should
not have spoken so. Who is Marcus Martius, Caius, and who is Marcia?"

"Marcus Martius," I said, "is a local landowner like the rest of us. He
would have been here to-night but for his recent marriage and approaching
journey to Rome. I have always asked him to my dinners."

"Then how, in the name of Ops Consiva," cried Tanno, "did he come to marry
your uncle's freedwoman?"

"This time I agree with you, Opsitius," said Naepor. "Your tone of scorn
is wholly justified. Marrying freedwomen is getting far too common. If
things go on this way there will be no Roman nobility nor gentry nor even
any Roman commonality; just a wish-wash of counterfeit Romans, nine-tenths
foreign in ancestry, with just enough of a dash of Roman blood to bequeath
them our weaknesses and vices."

"On the other hand," said Juventius Muso, "while agreeing with Naepor as
to the propriety of the tone, I object to the question. Instead of asking
how Martius came to marry Marcia, had you been acquainted with the recent
past history of this neighborhood, Opsitius, you would have asked how