k. The next day was consumed in
covering the thirty-five miles to Dertona. From there on we travelled, in
general down hill, and so quicker, but not much quicker, so that a third
day entire was needed for making the fifty-one miles to Placentia.

Placentia, a second time, was unlucky for us. It might have been worse,
for we did not again encounter Gratillus, or anyone else who might have
recognized me. But I made a fool of myself. I am not going to tell what
happened; Agathemer never reproached me for my folly, not even in our
bitterest misery; but I reproached myself daily for nearly three years; I
am still ashamed of myself and I do not want to set down my idiotic
behavior.

Let it suffice, that, through no fault of Agathemer's, but wholly through
my fault, we were suspected, interrogated, arrested, stripped, our brand-
marks and scourge-scars observed and ourselves haled before a magistrate.
To him Agathemer told the same tale he had told to Tarrutenus Spinellus.
It might have served had we been dealing with a man of like temper, for
travellers from Aneona for Aquileia regularly passed through Placentia
turning there from northwest along the road from Aneona to northeast along
the road to Aquileia.

But Stabilius Norbanus was a very different kind of man.

"Your story may be true," he said, "but it impresses me as an ingenious
lie. If I believed it I'd not send men like you, with their records
written in welts on their backs, with any convoy, no matter how strict, on
the long journey to Aquileia, on which you'd have countless opportunities
of escape. I do not believe your tale. Yet I'll pay this much attention to
it: I'll write to Vedius Aquileiensis and ask him if he owned two slaves
answering your descriptions and lost them through unexplained
disappearance or known crimping by Dalmatian pirates at about the time you
indicate.

"Meantime I'll commit you to an _ergastulum_ [Footnote: See Note H.] where
you'll be herded with your kind, all safely chained, so that no escape is
possible, and all doing some good to the state by some sort of productive
labor. A winter at the flour-mills will do you two good."

Our winter at the mills may have benefited us, but it was certainly, with
its successor at similar mills, one of the two most wretched winters of my
life. And Agathemer, I think, suffered every bit as acutely as I. We were
not chained, except for a few days and about twice as many more nights; as
soon as the