tulum_ quailed before the
truculence of the frontier sergeants.

In the outer court, at the suggestion of one of those same centurions,
every man of us drank his fill at the well-curb, pairs of the legionaries
taking turns at hauling up the buckets and watering us, much as if we had
been thirsty workhorses. After they had made sure that none had missed a
chance to quench his thirst, they roughly marshalled us into some
semblance of order and out into the street we trooped, where we found
ourselves between two detachments of frontier soldiers, one filling the
street ahead of us from house-wall to house-wall, the other similarly
blocking the street behind us. Between them we were marched to the market-
square, where we had plenty of room, for we had it all to ourselves, the
soldiery having cleared it and a squad of them blocking the entrance of
each street leading into it, so that the townsfolk were kept out and we
herded among the frontier soldiery.

Their centurions, to the number of eighteen, stood together on the stone
platform from which orators were accustomed to address or harangue such
crowds as might assemble in the market-square. Before it we packed
ourselves as closely as we could, eager to hear. About us idled the
soldiery not occupied in guarding the approach to the square.

One of the sergeants made a speech to us, explaining our liberation and
their presence in Placentia. He called us "comrades" and began his
harangue with a long and virulent denunciation of Perennis, the Prefect of
the Palace. Perennis, he declared, had been a slave of the vilest origin
and had won his freedom and the favor of the Palace authorities and of the
Emperor not by merit but by rank favoritism. He maintained that Perennis,
as Prefect of the Palace, had gained such an ascendancy over Commodus that
besides his proper duties as guardian of the Emperor's personal safety,
surely a charge sufficiently heavy to burden any one man and sufficiently
honorable to satisfy any reasonable man, his master had been enticed into
entrusting to Perennis the management of the entire Empire, so that he
alone controlled promotions in and appointments to the navy, army and
treasury services. In this capacity, as sole minister and representative
of the sovereign, Perennis had enriched himself by taking bribes from all
from whom he could extort bribes. By his venality he had gone far towards
ruining the navy and army, which were by now more than half of