Nine hours had come to be the limit of men's interest--nine minutes the
crucial phase of excitement, during which the balance of emotion hovered
between rioting or laughter.

Antioch grew quiet, conscious of the sunny weather and the springtime
lassitude that is a luxury to masters but that slaves must overcome.
The gangs went forth to clear the watercourses in advance of floods,
whips cracking to inspire zeal. Wagon-loads of flowers, lowing milk-
white oxen, white goats--even a white horse, a white ass--oil and wine
in painted cards, whose solid wooden wheels screamed on their axles like
demons in agony-threaded the streets to the temples, lest the gods
forget convenience and send the floods too soon.

The Forum--gilt-edged marble, tinted statuary, a mosaic pavement like a
rich-hued carpet from the looms of Babylon--began to overflow with
leisured men of business. Their slaves did all the worrying. The
money-changers' clerks sat by the bags of coin, with scales and shovel
and the tables of exchange. The chaffering began in corn-shops, where
the lawless agreements for delivery of unsown harvests changed hands ten
times in the hour, and bills on Rome, scrawled over with endorsements,
outsped currency as well as outwitted the revenue men. No tax-farmer's
slave could keep track of the flow of intangible wealth when the bills
for a million sesterces passed to and fro like cards in an Egyptian
game. Men richer than the fabled Croesus carried all their wealth in
leather wallets in the form of mortgages on gangs of slaves,
certificates of ownership of cargoes, promises to pay and contracts for
delivery of merchandise.

Nine-tenths of all the clamor was the voice of slaves, each one of them
an expert in his master's business and often richer than the owners of