and purchase a statuette, or a vessel of Corinthian bronze or silver, or an attractive table with the true peacock markings, or a handsome slave.  While doing so, he may find amusement in observing a pretender who “shops” but does not buy, wearying the dealers by pricing and disparaging the costliest tables and most artistic vessels, and ending with the purchase of a penny pot which he carries home himself.  He may then stroll along under the pictured and statued colonnades, perhaps offering the cold shoulder to various impecunious toadies who are there on the look-out for an invitation to dinner, perhaps succumbing to their blandishments.  His lackeys are of course in attendance, and clients are still about him.  In passing he is greeted by some person who is hanging officiously round a litter containing an elderly lady or gentleman, and whom he recognises as what was called an “angler”—­that is to say, one whose business is to wheedle gifts or a legacy out of childless people of wealth.  This was a regular profession and extremely lucrative when well managed.

A little further, and he stops to look at the young men curvetting and wheeling on horseback over the riding-ground.  Away in the distance others are swimming backwards and forwards across the Tiber.  Or he steps into an enclosure, commonly connected with the baths, where not only young men, but their seniors, even of high rank, are engaged in various exercises.  Some of them are stripped and are playing a game with a small hard ball, which is struck or thrown, and smartly caught or struck onward by right or left hand equally, from the three corners of a triangle.  Some are playing with a larger and lighter article, something like a football stuffed with feathers, which seems to have been punched about by the fist in a way calling for considerable judgment and practice.  Others are jumping with dumb-bells in each hand, or they are running races, or hurling a disk of stone, or wrestling.  Yet others are practising all manner of sword strokes with a heavy wooden weapon against a dummy post, merely to exercise themselves keep down their flesh.

[Illustration:  FIG. 65.—­DISCUS-THROWER.]

[Illustration FIG 66.—­STABIAN BATHS. (Pompeii.)]

Probably Silius will himself take a hand in the three-cornered game, unless he possesses a private court at home and is intending to take his bath there instead of in one of the larger public or semi-public establishments.  Whether he bathes in the baths of Agrippa at the back of the Pantheon, or in those of Nero, or in his own, the process will be much the same.  The arrangements are practically uniform however great may be the differences of sumptuousness and spaciousness.  We have not indeed yet reached the times of those huge and amazing constructions of Caracalla and Diocletian, but there is no reason to doubt that the existing public baths were already of much magnificence.  Regularly we should first find a dressing-room with painted