g the head
through a hole. To-day Silius puts on the coloured mantle, and gets
himself carried across the Forum, through the gap between the
Capitoline and Quirinal Hills, and into the Campus Martius, somewhere
about the modern Piazza Venezia and the entrance to the Corso. Here he
may descend from his litter, and purchase a statuette, or a vessel of
Corinthian bronze or silver, or an attractive table with the true
peacock markings, or a handsome slave. While doing so, he may find
amusement in observing a pretender who "shops" but does not buy,
wearying the dealers by pricing and disparaging the costliest tables
and most artistic vessels, and ending with the purchase of a penny pot
which he carries home himself. He may then stroll along under the
pictured and statued colonnades, perhaps offering the cold shoulder to
various impecunious toadies who are there on the look-out for an
invitation to dinner, perhaps succumbing to their blandishments. His
lackeys are of course in attendance, and clients are still about him.
In passing he is greeted by some person who is hanging officiously
round a litter containing an elderly lady or gentleman, and whom he
recognises as what was called an "angler"--that is to say, one whose
business is to wheedle gifts or a legacy out of childless people of
wealth. This was a regular profession and extremely lucrative when
well managed.

A little further, and he stops to look at the young men curvetting and
wheeling on horseback over the riding-ground. Away in the distance
others are swimming backwards and forwards across the Tiber. Or he
steps into an enclosure, commonly connected with the baths, where not
only young men, but their seniors, even of high rank, are engaged in
various exercises. Some of them are stripped and are playing a game
with a small hard ball, which is struck or thrown, and smartly caught
or struck onward by right or left hand equally, from the three corners
of a triangle. Some are playing with a larger and lighter article,
something like a football stuffed with feathers, which seems to have
been punched about by the fist in a way calling for considerable
judgment and practice. Others are jumping with dumb-bells in each
hand, or they are running races, or hurling a disk of stone, or
wrestling. Yet others are practising all manner of sword strokes with
a heavy wooden weapon against a dummy post, merely to exercise
themselves keep down their flesh.

[Illustration: FIG. 65.