self hugely. Besides local peculiarities and the humors of the
tacit league to thwart the constabulary and foster the interests of the
outlaws, I derived much entertainment from the traffic on the Flaminian
Highway. Of course, there were Imperial couriers, travellers of all sorts,
and convoys of every kind of goods, long strings of wagons, carts or pack-
mules laden with wheat, other grains, wine, oil, flax, charcoal, firewood,
ingots of bronze, lead or iron, and countless other commodities on their
way to Rome; or convoys of clothing, hangings, furniture, utensils and the
like, going northwards from the City.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE OUTLAWS

From early spring, however, all this normal traffic was interfered with,
delayed, hindered and even totally blockaded by column after column of
wains and wagons passing southwards, huge wagons, drawn by six or eight or
even ten horses or mules or by as many big long-horned white oxen, every
wagon laden with a cage or two or more cages containing beasts being
conveyed to the Colosseum in Rome. This amazing procession roused my
interest as soon as it began to pass; filling, clogging, blocking the
highway and continuing without intermission day after day, ceasing its
movement, indeed, each night, but making the roadside almost a continuous
camp of teamsters and caretakers, barely half of them sleeping, the moiety
busy about their draft-cattle or the cages of their charges.

The endless stream of caravans amazed me. I had seen beast-fights without
number in the Colosseum, but had never thought of the enormous labor and
expense incident on the preparations for even one morning's exhibition of,
say, a hundred lions and other beasts in proportion. Now I meditated over
the thousands of trappers and other hunters who must scour the forests of
Dacia, Moesia, Thrace, Illyricum, Pannonia, Noricum, Rhaetia and Germany
to gather such a supply of beasts for exhibition. I saw wolves, bears and
boars by the thousand, and hundreds of lynxes, elk and wild bulls, both
the strange forest-bisons, unlike our cattle, with low rumps and high
shoulders and their horns turned downwards and forwards, parallel to each
other, and the huger and even fiercer bulls, much like farm bulls, but
larger, taller and leaner and with horns incredibly long, so that their
tips were often two yards and more apart. I had no idea of the vast
numbers of such beasts which were yearly poured into Rome from all the
mountains