cum; people
from the Euphrates and from the Indus, with beards dyed brick color;
Syrians from the banks of the Orontes, with black and mild eyes;
dwellers in the deserts of Arabia, dried up as a bone; Jews, with their
flat breasts; Egyptians, with the eternal, indifferent smile on their
faces; Numidians and Africans; Greeks from Hellas, who equally with the
Romans commanded the city, but commanded through science, art, wisdom,
and deceit; Greeks from the islands, from Asia Minor, from Egypt, from
Italy, from Narbonic Gaul. In the throng of slaves, with pierced ears,
were not lacking also freemen,--an idle population, which Caesar amused,
supported, even clothed,--and free visitors, whom the ease of life and
the prospects of fortune enticed to the gigantic city; there was no lack
of venal persons. There were priests of Serapis, with palm branches in
their hands; priests of Isis, to whose altar more offerings were brought
than to the temple of the Capitoline Jove; priests of Cybele, bearing
in their hands golden ears of rice; and priests of nomad divinities; and
dancers of the East with bright head-dresses, and dealers in amulets,
and snake-tamers, and Chaldean seers; and, finally, people without any
occupation whatever, who applied for grain every week at the storehouses
on the Tiber, who fought for lottery-tickets to the Circus, who spent
their nights in rickety houses of districts beyond the Tiber, and sunny
and warm days under covered porticos, and in foul eating-houses of the
Subura, on the Milvian bridge, or before the "insulae" of the great,
where from time to time remnants from the tables of slaves were thrown
out to them.

Petronius was well known to those crowds. Vinicius's ears were
struck continually by "Hic est!" (Here he is). They loved him for his
munificence; and his peculiar popularity increased from the time when
they learned that he had spoken before Caesar in opposition to the
sentence of death issued against the whole "familia," that is, against
all the slaves of the prefect Pedanius Secundus, without distinction of
sex or age, because one of them had killed that monster in a moment of
despair. Petronius repeated in public, it is true, that it was all one
to him, and that he had spoken to Caesar only privately, as the arbiter
elegantiarum whose aesthetic taste was offended by a barbarous slaughter
befitting Scythians and not Romans. Nevertheless, people who were
indignant because of the slaughter love