luxurious headquarters in the most congested business districts
of the capital. They had offices adjacent to each of the circuses,
they possessed huge congeries of buildings utilized as stables
for their crack racers and barracks for their charioteers, and
provided with spacious courtyards for training their teams.
Outside of Rome they had similar offices and training-stables
in every city and in most towns of any size or wealth. Besides
they owned countless stud-farms, estates and ranches in
every province of the Empire and maintained an army of
herdsmen, ostlers and drovers to convoy their horses by land
and whole fleets of ships to transport them by sea.

They were joint-stock companies, and while many smaller
ones existed in various parts of the Empire and a few even
at Rome, the small concerns were insignificant and generally
ignored. When one spoke of the racing-companies one meant
the six great companies whose central organizations were
domiciled at Rome and whose ramifications penetrated every
district of the Empire. These were known, after the racing-colors
of their jockeys, as the Greens, the Blues, the Reds, the Whites,
the Crimsons and the Golds. The Reds and the Whites were the
oldest companies, the Crimsons and the Golds were companies
established in the heyday of the Empire by coteries of millionaires,
the Blues and the Greens were the largest, the wealthiest and
the most popular, especially the Greens. In the Greens, somewhere,
Brinnaria expected to find Almo, as he had been enthusiastic
about the Greens from boyhood. He had been wearing their leek-green
colors the day she had sat in his lap in her father's courtyard. He
had haunted their training-stables during his brief sojourn at Rome
before Aurelius sent him to Africa, he had inherited a big block of