“They call any one a highwayman who is a fugitive from what our ’Roman Hercules’ calls justice,” Norbanus answered with a gesture of irritation.  His own trick of finishing people’s sentences did not annoy Sextus nearly as much as Sextus’s trick of pounding on inaccuracies irritated him.  He pressed his horse into a canter and for a while they rode beside the stream called the “Donkey-drowner” without further conversation, each man striving to subdue the ill-temper that was on the verge of outbreak.

Romans of the old school valued inner calm as highly as they did the outer semblances of dignity; even the more modern Romans imitated that distinctive attitude, pretending to Augustan calmness that had actually ceased to be a part of public life.  But with Sextus and Norbanus the inner struggle to be self-controlled was genuine; they bridled irritation in the same way that they forced their horses to obey them—­ captains of their own souls, as it were, and scornful of changefulness.

Sextus, being the only son of a great landowner, and raised in the traditions of a secluded valley fifty leagues away from Rome, was almost half a priest by privilege of ancestry.  He had been educated in the local priestly college, had himself performed the daily sacrifices that tradition imposed on the heads of families and, in his father’s frequent absence, had attended to all the details and responsibilities of managing a large estate.  The gods of wood and stream and dale were very real to him.  The daily offering, from each meal, to the manes of his ancestors, whose images in wax and wood and marble were preserved in the little chapel attached to the old brick homestead, had inspired in him a feeling that the past was forever present and a man’s thoughts were as important as his deeds.

Norbanus, on the other hand, a younger son of a man less amply dowered with wealth and traditional authority, had other reasons for adopting, rather than inheriting, an attitude toward life not dissimilar from that of Sextus.  Gods of wood and stream to him meant very little, and he had not family estates to hold him to the ancient views.  To him the future was more real than the past, which he regarded as a state of ignorance from which the world was tediously struggling.  But inherently he loved life’s decencies, although he mocked their sentimental imitations; and he followed Sextus—­squandered hours with him, neglecting his own interests (which after all were nothing too important and were well enough looked after by a Syracusan slave), simply because Sextus was a manly sort of fellow whose friendship stirred in him emotions that he felt were satisfying.  He was a born follower.  His ugly face and rather mirth-provoking blue eyes, the loose, beautifully balanced seat on horseback and the cavalry-like carriage of his shoulders, served their notice to the world at large that he would stick to friends of his own choosing and for purely personal reasons, in spite of, and in the teeth of anything.