an inheritance.
Enthroned on her Seven Hills, Rome had subjugated and pillaged the
nations of the earth until she had grown drunk with power, and although
life on the Palatine and the Quirinal was one outflowing exercise of
brute force and one long feast and revel on the spoils thereof, yet was
the Empire rushing as headlong to the destruction predestined at the
hand of her own corruption, as was Tiberius Caesar rushing to his
earthly end by debauchery unbridled. And although neither the Latin
world nor its vassals had will or vision to foresee it, Time, in its
inscrutable womb was fashioning that which was to bring about conflict
ages-long, between Pagan autocracy and the spiritual essence of Liberty
for all humankind.

On an evening when the purple and blue, the glistening white and golden
glow and shining green of an Italian spring, speaking through sea and
sky, through billowing clouds and the verdure of the earth, was rivaled
by the purple and gold of Rome's pageantry and the gleaming whiteness
of her pillared palaces, a sojourner in the Imperial City, who had but
that day sailed up the River Tiber, stood waiting beneath the shadow of
the She-Wolf. The stranger, a Phoenician who had at one time done
stone cutting at Tyre and Sidon, had not long to wait. The man who met
him wore the dull brown tunic of the working man. A scarlet cord bound
his waist and he carried a covered bundle. Speaking in Latin, he
addressed a few words to the Phoenician and then said, "Follow me."

For a time the working man, whose present occupation was that of
torch-lighter, led the visitor through the streets of the city, the
surrounding scenes changing until from the marble palaces of the
Palatine their way led them past the slave pens at the lower end of Via
Sacra, and shortly after they found themselves traveling a roadway on
the Campagna. Here they often found it necessary to step aside to make
passageway for carts loaded with Pozzolana sand. It was toward the
pits from which this sand came the two were making their way and it was
not until they had turned into deserted pitroad that they entered into
free conversation.

"Shortly," said the guide, "we will enter into the way which leadeth to
the burial place of slaves, some of which are thrown in dead, and some
not yet dead but only worthless. From its corruption ariseth a stench
that ceaseth not day nor night."

"Do we go that way?"

"Nay. Yet were it well for a _kurios_