their faces; Numidians and Africans; Greeks from Hellas, who equally
with the Romans commanded the city, but commanded through science, art,
wisdom, and deceit; Greeks from the islands, from Asia Minor, from
Egypt, from Italy, from Narbonic Gaul. In the throng of slaves, with
pierced ears, were not lacking also freemen,--an idle population, which
Cæsar amused, supported, even clothed,--and free visitors, whom the ease
of life and the prospects of fortune enticed to the gigantic city; there
was no lack of venal persons. There were priests of Serapis, with palm
branches in their hands; priests of Isis, to whose altar more offerings
were brought than to the temple of the Capitoline Jove; priests of
Cybele, bearing in their hands golden ears of rice; and priests of nomad
divinities; and dancers of the East with bright head-dresses, and
dealers in amulets, and snake-tamers, and Chaldean seers; and, finally,
people without any occupation whatever, who applied for grain every week
at the storehouses on the Tiber, who fought for lottery-tickets to the
Circus, who spent their nights in rickety houses of districts beyond the
Tiber, and sunny and warm days under covered porticos, and in foul
eating-houses of the Subura, on the Milvian bridge, or before the
"insulæ" of the great, where from time to time remnants from the tables
of slaves were thrown out to them.

Petronius was well known to those crowds. Vinicius's ears were struck
continually by "Hic est!" (Here he is). They loved him for his
munificence; and his peculiar popularity increased from the time when
they learned that he had spoken before Cæsar in opposition to the
sentence of death issued against the whole "familia," that is, against
all the slaves of the prefect Pedanius Secundus, without distinction of
sex or age, because one of them had killed that monster in a moment of
despair. Petronius repeated in public, it is true, that it was all one
to him, and that he had spoken to Cæsar only privately, as the arbiter