He asked for Giddenem, the governor of the slaved, and that personage appeared, his rank being displayed in the richness of his dress.  His tunic, which was slit up the sides, was of fine purple; his ears were weighted with heavy rings; and the strips of cloth enfolding his legs were joined together with a lacing of gold which extended from his ankles to his hips, like a serpent winding about a tree.  In his fingers, which were laden with rings, he held a necklace of jet beads, so as to recognise the men who were subject to the sacred disease.

Hamilcar signed to him to unfasten the muzzles.  Then with the cries of famished animals they all rushed upon the flour, burying their faces in the heaps of it and devouring it.

“You are weakening them!” said the Suffet.

Giddenem replied that such treatment was necessary in order to subdue them.

“It was scarcely worth while sending you to the slaves’ school at Syracuse.  Fetch the others!”

And the cooks, butlers, grooms, runners, and litter-carriers, the men belonging to the vapour-baths, and the women with their children, all ranged themselves in a single line in the garden from the mercantile house to the deer park.  They held their breath.  An immense silence prevailed in Megara.  The sun was lengthening across the lagoon at the foot of the catacombs.  The peacocks were screeching.  Hamilcar walked along step by step.

“What am I to do with these old creatures?” he said.  “Sell them!  There are too many Gauls:  they are drunkards! and too many Cretans:  they are liars!  Buy me some Cappadocians, Asiatics, and Negroes.”

He was astonished that the children were so few.  “The house ought to have births every year, Giddenem.  You will leave the huts open every night to let them mingle freely.”

He then had the thieves, the lazy, and the mutinous shown to him.  He distributed punishments, with reproaches to Giddenem; and Giddenem, ox-like, bent his low forehead, with its two broad intersecting eyebrows.

“See, Eye of Baal,” he said, pointing out a sturdy Libyan, “here is one who was caught with the rope round his neck.”

“Ah! you wish to die?” said the Suffet scornfully.

“Yes!” replied the slave in an intrepid tone.

Then, without heeding the precedent or the pecuniary loss, Hamilcar said to the serving-men: 

“Away with him!”

Perhaps in his thoughts he intended a sacrifice.  It was a misfortune which he inflicted upon himself in order to avert more terrible ones.

Giddenem had hidden those who were mutilated behind the others.  Hamilcar perceived them.

“Who cut off your arm?”

“The soldiers, Eye of Baal.”

Then to a Samnite who was staggering like a wounded heron: 

“And you, who did that to you?”

It was the governor, who had broken his leg with an iron bar.

This silly atrocity made the Suffet indignant; he snatched the jet necklace out of Giddenem’s hands.