precinct that was rebuilt after all that part of Rome burned under
Nero's fascinated gaze. The street was crescent-shaped, not often
crowded, though a score of passages like wheel-spokes led to it; and to
the rear of Galen's house was a veritable maze of alleys. There were
two gates to the house: one wide, with decorated posts, that faced the
crescent street, where Galen's oldest slave sat on a stool and blinked
at passers-by; the other narrow, leading from a little high-walled
courtyard at the rear into an alley between stables in which milch-asses
were kept. That alley led into another where a dozen midwives had their
names and claims to excellency painted on the doors--an alley carefully
to be avoided, because women of that trade, like barbers, vied for
custom by disseminating gossip.

So Sextus used a passage running parallel to that one, leading between
workshops where the burial-urn makers' slaves engraved untruthful
epitaphs in baked clay or inlaid them on the marble tomb-slabs--to be
gilded presently with gold-leaf (since a gilded lie, though costlier, is
no worse than the same lie unadorned.)

He drummed a signal with his knuckles on the panel of a narrow door of
olive-wood, set deep into the wall under a projecting arch. An
overleaning tree increased the shadow, and a visitor could wait without
attracting notice. A slave nearly as old as Galen presently admitted
him into a paved yard in which a fish-pond had been built around an
ancient well. A few old fruit-trees grew against the wall, and there
were potted shrubs, but little evidence of gardening, most of Galen's
slaves being too old for that kind of work. There were a dozen of them
loafing in the yard; some were so fat that they wheezed, and some so
thin with age that they resembled skeletons. There was a rumor that the
fatness and the thinness were accounted for by Galen's fondness for