“Mamercus found them refractory,” replied the guard, “and ordered them to be kept in the underground prison,[11] and to work in the chain gang.”

  [11] Ergastulum.

The young man made a motion of disgust.

“Bah!” he remarked, “the whole familia[12] will be in fetters if Mamercus has his way much longer.  Knock off those chains.  Tell the wretches they are to remain unshackled only so long as they behave.  Give them three skins to-night from which to drink their master’s health.  Drive on, Cappadox!”

  [12] Slave household.

And before the fettered slaves could comprehend their release from confinement, and break out into a chorus of barbarous and uncouth thanksgivings and blessings, the carriage had vanished from sight down the turn of the road.

II

Who was Quintus Livius Drusus?  Doubtless he would have felt highly insulted if his family history had not been fairly well known to every respectable person around Praeneste and to a very large and select circle at Rome.  When a man could take Livius[13] for his gentile name, and Drusus for his cognomen, he had a right to hold his head high, and regard himself as one of the noblest and best of the imperial city.  But of course the Drusian house had a number of branches, and the history of Quintus’s direct family was this.  He was the grandson of that Marcus Livius Drusus[14] who, though an aristocrat of the aristocrats, had dared to believe that the oligarchs were too strong, the Roman Commons without character, and that the Italian freemen were suffering from wrongs inflicted by both of the parties at the capital.  For his efforts to right the abuses, he had met with a reward very common to statesmen of his day, a dagger-thrust from the hand of an undiscovered assassin.  He had left a son, Sextus, a man of culture and talent, who remembered his father’s fate, and walked for a time warily in politics.  Sextus had married twice.  Once to a very noble lady of the Fabian gens, the mother of his son Quintus.  Then some years after her death he took in marriage a reigning beauty, a certain Valeria, who soon developed such extravagance and frivolity, that, soon after she bore him a daughter, he was forced “to send her a messenger”; in other words, to divorce her.  The daughter had been put under the guardianship of Sextus’s sister-in-law Fabia, one of the Vestal virgins at Rome.  Sextus himself had accepted an appointment to a tribuneship in a legion of Caesar in Gaul.  When he departed for the wars he took with him as fellow officer a life-long friend, Caius Cornelius Lentulus; and ere leaving for the campaign the two had formed a compact quite in keeping with the stern Roman spirit that made the child the slave of the father:  Young Quintus Drusus should marry Cornelia, Lentulus’s only child, as soon as the two came to a proper age.  And so the friends went away to win glory in Gaul; to perish side by side, when Sabinus’s ill-fated legion was cut off by the Eburones.[15]