a refuge within
during night-hours. In the cemeteries the larger monuments were seized,
and battles fought in defence of them, which were carried to bloodshed.
Ustrinum with its disorder gave barely a slight foretaste of that which
was happening beneath the walls of the capital. All regard for the
dignity of law, for family ties, for difference of position, had ceased.
Gladiators drunk with wine seized in the Emporium gathered in crowds,
ran with wild shouts through the neighboring squares, scattering,
trampling, and robbing the people. A multitude of barbarians, exposed
for sale in the city, escaped from the booths. For them the burning and
ruin of Rome was at once the end of slavery and the hour of revenge; so
that when the permanent inhabitants, who had lost all they owned in the
fire, stretched their hands to the gods in despair, calling for rescue,
these slaves with howls of delight scattered the crowds, dragged
clothing from people's backs, and bore away the younger women. They
were joined by slaves serving in the city from of old, wretches who had
nothing on their bodies save woollen girdles around their hips, dreadful
figures from the alleys, who were hardly ever seen on the streets in the
daytime, and whose existence in Rome it was difficult to suspect. Men of
this wild and unrestrained crowd, Asiatics, Africans, Greeks, Thracians,
Germans, Britons, howling in every language of the earth, raged,
thinking that the hour had come in which they were free to reward
themselves for years of misery and suffering. In the midst of that
surging throng of humanity, in the glitter of day and of fire, shone
the helmets of pretorians, under whose protection the more peaceable
population had taken refuge, and who in hand-to-hand battle had to meet
the raging multitude in many places. Vinicius had seen captured cities,
but never had his eyes beheld a spectacle in which despair, tears, pain,
groans, wild delight, madness, rage, and license were mingled together
in such immeasurable chaos. Above this heaving, mad human multitude
roared the fire, surging up to the hill-tops of the greatest city on
earth, sending into the whirling throng its fiery breath, and covering
it with smoke, through which it was impossible to see the blue sky. The
young tribune with supreme effort, and exposing his life every moment,
forced his way at last to the Appian Gate; but there he saw that he
could not reach the city through the division of the Porta