trace to a source. It is only a few minutes, since my
freedman, Atius, told me how the slaves report that our neighbour
Marcus Sabrius rode in last night through the Ratumenian Gate; and when
I sent to his house to inquire, the doorkeeper feigned ignorance. That
is only one of a hundred tales. Note the crowd thickening around us as
we approach the Forum, and how all are pressing in the same direction.
Study their faces, and doubt what I say if you can."

"But is it victory or defeat?"

"Answer me your own question, Caius. Is 'victory' or 'defeat' the word
that men do not dare to utter?"

The face of Caius became grave. Then suddenly he burst out with:--

"You are right. I see it all now, even as you speak; and what hope had
we from the first? Who was the demagogue Flaminius that he should
command our army, going forth without the auspices--a consul that was
no consul at all in the sight of the gods! Then, too, there were the
warnings that poured in from all the country: the ships in the sky, the
crow alighting on the couch in the Temple of Juno, the stones rained in
Picinum--"

"Foolish stories, my Caius; the dreams of ignorant rustics," replied
Lucius, smiling faintly. "Besides, you remember they were all
expiated--"

"And who knows that they were expiated truly!" croaked an old woman
from a booth by the road. "Who does not know that, as Varro says, your
patrician magistrates would rather lose a battle than that a plebeian
consul should triumph! Varbo, the butcher, dreamed last night that his
son's blood was drenching his bed, and when he awoke, it was water from
the roof; and Arates, the Greek soothsayer, says that Varbo's son has
been slain in the water, and his blood--"

But the young patricians, who had halted a moment at the interruption,
now hurried on with an expression of contempt on their faces.

"That is what Flaminius stands for," resumed Lucius after a moment of
silence. "How can we look for success when such men are raised to the
command, merely because they _are_ such men; and when a Fabius and a
Claudius are set aside because their fathers' fathers led the armies of
the Republic to victory in the days when this rabble were the slaves
they should still be."

The friends had turned into the Sacred Way. A moment later they
arrived at the Forum lined with its rows of booths nestled away beneath
massive porticoes of peperino, and with its columned temples standing
like divine sentinels