y armor, moved slowly to and fro, to watch that order was
maintained. Later--when the shadows deepened, and the air grew
cooler--the avenues and prominent positions along the established route
of the ovation beginning to fill with that great concourse of varied
nationalities and conditions which only the imperial city could display.
In the open streets a disorderly rabble of slaves and bondmen--pouring
in steady streams from their kennels behind the palaces and from the
unhealthy purlieus of such quarters as had been spared from the
architectural encroachments of the wealthy, and allowed to fester in
their own neglected corruption. Gathered together in close fraternity,
the Briton, the Goth, the African, and the Jew--each bearing his badge
of life-long servitude, some even wearing marks of recent chastisement,
but almost all awaiting the approaching spectacle with pleased and
animated countenances, and in seeming forgetfulness that so many of
their own number had graced former displays, and, by their degradation,
had afforded amusement to other equally unsympathetic concourses. Among
them, the lesser Romans--citizens in name, indeed, but, from their
poverty and the overbearing exactions of the patricians, almost as much
in slavery as those around them--disdainfully asserting their free
birth, and in turn contemned by the slaves themselves, as men to whom
liberty was but another title for slow starvation, and who would not
dare to resent the vilest insults heaped upon them by noble-owned and
protected menials--and now equally with the common herd obliged to
submit to the strong argument of sword and lance, as, every little
while, the soldiers along the line drove the whole writhing crowd,
without distinction, into smaller and more confined compass. Here and
there, knights and soldiers of high rank--riding up on horseback, and
pushing through the struggling mass of slaves to the front, or more
leisurely, but to equal purpose, waiting until their own menials had
gone before, and, with mingled threats and blows, had cleared out a
vacant space for them. Other crowds, standing in favorable positions
upon housetops and upon hastily constructed stagings; and more
especially upon the great amphitheatre, whose arches were blackened with
clusters of spectators, and whose summit, in place of the last few
layers of stone, so soon to be adjusted, had its deep human fringe. Upon
palace balconies, patricians and noble ladies, displaying