t from the guards' decurion, a half-breed Dacian-Italian,
black-bearded and taciturn, who dictated it to the slave in curt,
staccato sentences, grudging the very gesture that he made toward the
wounded men. The tribune glanced at the report, signed it, turned his
horse and rode into the city, disregarding the decurion's salute, his
military cloak a splash of very bright red, seen against the limestone
and above the predominant brown of the camels and coats of their owners.
He cantered his horse when he passed through the gate, and there went up
a clamor of newsy excitement behind him as group after group loosed
tongues in competition of exaggeration.

Being bad, the news spread swiftly. The quadruple lines of columns all
along the Corso, as the four-mile-long main thoroughfare was called,
began to look like pier-piles in a flowing tide of men. Yellow, blue,
red, striped and parti-colored costumes, restless as the flotsam on a
mill-race, swirled into patterns, and broke, and reblended. The long
portico of Caesar's baths resounded to the hollow hum of voices.
Streaming lines of slaves in the midst of the street were delayed by the
crowd, and abused for obstructing it. Gossip went up like the voice of
the sea to the cliffs and startled clouds of spray-white pigeons,
faintly edged with pink against an azure sky; then ceased as suddenly.
The news was known. Whatever Antioch knew, bored it. Nine days'
wonders were departed long ago into the limbo of the days of Xerxes.
Nine hours had come to be the limit of men's interest--nine minutes the
crucial phase of excitement, during which the balance of emotion hovered
between rioting or laughter.

Antioch grew quiet, conscious of the sunny weather and the springtime
lassitude that is a luxury to masters but that slaves must overcome.
The gangs went forth to clear the watercourses in advance of floods,
whips cracking to inspire zeal. Wagon-loads of flowers, lowing milk-
white oxen, white goats--even a white horse, a white ass--oil and wine
in painted cards, whose solid wooden wheels screamed on their axles like
demons in agony-threaded the streets to the temples, lest the gods
forget convenience and send the floods too soon.

The Forum--gilt-edged marble, tinted statuary, a mosaic pavement like a
rich-hued carpet from the looms of Babylon--began to overflow with
leisured men of business. Their slaves did all the worrying. The
money-changers' clerks sat by the bags of co