standards of ethical righteousness were outraged by the round of life
which he was compelled daily to witness. The worthy man would long
before have ceased from a vassalage so disgraceful, had he possessed
any other means of support. Once he meditated suicide, but was scared
out of it by the thought that his bones would moulder in those huge
pits on the Esquiline--far from friend or native land--where artisans,
slaves, and cattle, creatures alike without means of decent burial,
were left under circumstances unspeakably revolting to moulder away to
dust.

[66] See Plato's "Theætetus," 174.

The day of Agias's misfortune, Pisander sat in his corner of the
boudoir, after Valeria had left it, in a very unphilosophical rage,
gnawing his beard and cursing inwardly his mistress, Pratinas, and the
world in general.

Arsinoë with a pale, strained face was moving about, replacing the
bottles of cosmetics and perfumery in cabinets and caskets. Pisander
had been kind to Arsinoë, and had taught her to read; and there was a
fairly firm friendship between the slave and the luckless man, who
felt himself degraded by an equal bondage.

"Poor Agias," muttered Pisander.

"Poor Agias," repeated Arsinoë, mournfully; then in some scorn, "Come,
Master Pisander, now is the time to console yourself with your
philosophy. Call out everything,--your Zeno, or Parmenides, or
Heraclitus, or others of the thousand nobodies I've heard you praise
to Valeria,--and make thereby my heart a jot the less sore, or Agias's