taste of olives or cheese or possibly
an egg. Schoolboys seem to have often eaten a sort of suet dumpling.
In the strength of this meat our friend will go till mid-day.

As he has no very early call to the imperial court upon the Palatine,
he will now proceed to hold his own reception of morning callers. For
this purpose he will come out to the spacious hall, which has been
already described as the most essential part of a Roman house, and
will there establish himself in the opening of the recess or bay which
has also been described as a kind of reception-room or parlour. Before
he arrives, the hall has been swept and polished by the brooms and
sponges of the slaves, under the direction of a foreman. The number of
Silius' household slaves is very great. Very many Romans of course
owned no slave at all; many had but one or two; but it was considered
that a person of anything like respectable means could hardly do with
less than ten. Silius will probably employ several times that number.
We have mentioned the valet, the barber, the wardrobe-keeper, and the
amanuensis. We must add to these the cooks, the pastry-makers, the
waiters, the room-servants, the doorkeeper, the footmen, messengers,
litter-carriers, the butler and pantrymen. Some of the superior slaves
have drudges of their own. The librarian, accountant, and steward are
all slaves. Even the family physician or architect may be a slave.
Many of these men may be persons of education and talent. Their one
deficiency is that they are not free. Many of them are in colour and
feature indistinguishable from the people outside; most, however, show
their origin in their foreign physique. They are Phrygians,
Cappadocians, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Numidians,
Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, Thracians, and Greeks. Their master either
inherited them from his father or friends, or he bought them in the
slave-market. For whatever reason they became slaves--whether as
prisoners of war, by birth, through debt, through condemnation for
some offence, by kidnapping like that practised by the Corsairs or the
modern Arabs, or through being sold by their own parents--they had
become the Property of slave-dealers, who picked them up in the depots
on the Black Sea or at Delos or Alexandria, and brought them to Rome.
There they were stripped and exposed for sale, the choicer specimens
in a select part of a fashionable shop, the more ordinary types in the
auction mart, where they we