Probably of the various personages mentioned in the course of our story none was more thoroughly enjoying life about this time than Agias.  Drusus had left him in the city when he started for Ravenna, with general instructions to keep an eye on Lucius Ahenobarbus and Pratinas, and also to gather all he could of the political drift among the lower classes.  Agias was free now.  He let his hair grow long in token of his newly gained liberty; paraded a many-folded toga; and used part of the donatives which Drusus and Fabia had lavished upon him, in buying one or two slave-boys of his own, whom, so far from treating gently on account of his own lately servile position, he cuffed and abused with grim satisfaction at being able to do what had so often been done to him.

Agias had been given lodgings by Drusus in a tenement house, owned by the latter, in the Subura.

The rooms were over a bakery, and at the sides were a doctor’s and surgeon’s office and a barber’s shop—­a rendezvous which gave the young Greek an admirable chance to pick up the current gossip.  Every street-pedler, every forum-idler, had his political convictions and pet theories.  The partisans who arrogated to themselves the modest epithet of “The Company of All Good Men,” clamoured noisily that “Liberty and Ancient Freedom” were in danger, if Caesar set foot in Rome save as an impeached traitor.  And the Populares—­the supporters of the proconsul—­raged equally fiercely against the greed of the Senate party that wished to perpetuate itself forever in office.  Agias could only see that neither faction really understood the causes for and against which they fought; and observed in silence, trusting that his patron knew more of the issues than he.

But the newly manumitted freedman was thoroughly enjoying himself.  The windy speeches in the Senate, the crowded and excited meetings in the Forum, the action and reaction of the tides of popular prejudice and fancy, the eloquence of Antonius, and the threatenings and ravings of Marcellus the consul—­all these were interesting but not disturbing.  Agias was catching glimpses of a little Olympus of his own—­an Olympus in which he was at once Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo; Sesostris—­so he declared—­the lame cup-bearer Hephaestus; and in place of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, were the smiles and laughter of Artemisia.  Agias was head over ears in love with this pretty little cage-bird shut up in Pratinas’s gloomy suite of rooms.  Her “uncle” took her out now and then to the theatre or to the circus; but she had had little enough companionship save such as Sesostris could give; and to her, Agias was a wonderful hero, the master of every art, the victor over a hundred monsters.  He had told her of his adventure with Phaon—­not calling names, lest disagreeable consequences ensue—­and Artemisia dreamed of him as the cleverest creature on the earth, able to outwit Hermes in subtlety.  Agias had found out when Pratinas was likely to be away from home—­and