two heavy quilts, all the food he
could eat and two helpers; the helpers to have similar indulgences. On
this second round, in our cellar, a Lydian, nearer to being fat than any
prisoner in the _ergastulum_, admitted that he could make and bake bread,
but vowed that he could not do anything else connected with cooking.
Spurred on by his confession and tempted by the offers of better clothing
and bedding and more food, also by the memories of Agathemer's cookery the
winter before, I blurted out that Agathemer could not make bread, but
could do everything else needed in cookery. Agathemer, after one
reproachful glance at me, admitted that he was a cook of a sort, but
declared that he was almost as bad a cook as the wretch just murdered. The
overseer bade him go to the kitchen and told him he might select a helper;
the baker would have been the other helper. As helper Agathemer,
naturally, selected me.

After that we suffered less. The slaves acclaimed Agathemer's cooking;
for, if their rations were still scanty by order of the watchful manager,
at least their food was edible. Far from being ultimately killed, like our
predecessors, and continually threatened and reviled, we were blessed by
our fellow-slaves. We slept better, in spite of the vermin, on our grass-
stuffed mattresses, under our foul quilts, we shivered less in our thicker
tunics. We were not too tired to discuss, at times, the oddities of our
vicissitudes, to congratulate each other on being, at least, alive, on my
not being suspected of being what I actually was, and, above all, on the
safety of our old, blackened, greasy, worthless-looking, amulet-bags, with
their precious contents. To be reduced to carrying food to three hundred
of the vilest rascals alive was a horrible fate for a man who had, two
years before, been a wealthy nobleman, but it was far better than death as
a suspected conspirator. And Agathemer was hopeful of our future, of
survival, of escape, of comfort somewhere after he had sold another
emerald, ruby, or opal. Nothing could, for any length of time, dim or
cloud the light of Agathemer's buoyancy of disposition.

BOOK III

DIVERSITIES

CHAPTER XXII

THE MUTINEERS

Our promotion from the mills to the kitchen took place early in March of
the year when Manius Acilius Glabrio, after an interval of thirty-four
years since his first consulship, was consul for the second time and had
as nominal associate Commodus, preening