during the
last years of Nero's reign, and vastly enriched during the confusion of
the civil wars, marrying a young and wealthy widow after Vespasian was
firmly established at Rome by the crushing of the insurrection of Claudius
Civilis.

Probably the general consonance of my answer with the facts made my
utterance of it more convincing. Certainly it appealed to Falco.

"Just about what I conjectured," he said, smiling. "And will you tell me
in what part of Italy and on what estate you were born and how you came by
your air of aristocratic culture and by your marvellous dilettantism?"

"I know what I know and am what I am," I replied, "because I was, from
childhood, treated just as if a son instead of a slave; pampered, indulged
and made much of. That lasted till I was more than full-grown.

"The misfortunes of the family to which I belonged came so suddenly that I
was not manumitted, as I should have been had my master had so much as a
day's warning of his downfall. I was sold to a fool and a brute, as you
have probably inferred from my back. The marks of his barbarity which I
bear, and my lasting grief for the calamity of the household in which I
was born, make me unwilling to tell you anything of my past previous to my
purchase from Olynthides by Nonius Libo."

"Well," he said, "your feeling is natural and I shall not urge my
curiosity on you. I mean to indulge you and even pamper you; mean to
endeavor to indulge you and pamper you so you will feel more indulged and
pampered than ever in your life, I'll make a new will, at once, leaving
you your freedom and a handsome property. I expect to live out a long
life, all my kin have been healthy and long-lived. But one can never be
certain of living and I mean to run no risks of your having any more
troubles. You deserve ease and comfort. And you shall have them if I can
arrange it. I love you like a born brother and mean to treat you as well
as if you were my twin."

The year in which Commodus killed the two lions, each with one blow of his
trifling-looking little palm-wood club, in which year I was sold out of
the Choragium, and purchased by Nonius, in which I crossed the sea, was
wrecked and saved and resold to Falco, was the nine hundred and forty-
first year of the City [Footnote: 188 A.D.] and the ninth of the reign of
Commodus, the year in which the consuls were Allius Fuscianus and Duillius
Silanus, each for the second time. In Africa, with Falco, I spent tha