Rome had long since outgrown her walls and ceased to contemplate them except as landmarks and conventionalities, useless but as significant as Cæsar's paludamentum. Inns and mile-stones along the viæ proved them once to have been things distinctly suburban, but the city crying for room had passed the walls and built its own characteristics--temples, tombs, villas, circuses, fora and arches as far as Tusculum along the roads.
Lovelier beyond comparison than Rome's loveliest spots, it was small wonder that to fill their Augustan lungs with the freshness of the Campagna, the idle were borne out of the contained airs of the city, which were of such seasonal peculiarities that temples in propitiation of Mephitis and the goddess Febris had been erected.
So daily groups of patricians collected at the Hippodrome of Tusculum, with laughter and badinage, the flashing of jewels and the glittering of cars, the flutter of lustrous silks and the tossing of feathers, to spend the bright hours of the day watching the races that proceeded in the arena below.
The races had not begun, the crowds had not assembled. The gilded lectica was borne through the tunnel-like entrance up the stairs, not to the amphitheater but to the arena. Slaves with blanketed horses and clusters of betting patricians were here and there over the sanded ellipse within. The bustle of preparation slackened at the approach of the august visitor.
The eyes of the emperor opened and closed dully. Nothing was here to interest a man worn out with seventy years of change and excitement. Nothing new could have aroused him, for his attention rebelled against the call.
Presently, during one of the intervals that his eyes were open, he saw, within touch of his hand, Agrippa and Caligula side by side, talking to a gladiator. The emperor scowled and looked away. The bearers plodded on, rounded the upper end of the ellipse and, passing down the side, neared the mouth of the cunicula.
Agrippa and Caligula had moved from their position and were there, with a notary taking down the terms of a wager.
Apart from them stood a small but important man, frowning over a waxen tablet which a slave had cringingly handed him.
Tiberius looked at him, then at Agrippa. His brows lowered more, this time with irritation. It seemed that action had been formulated by circumstance and that the emperor was not to avoid a tiresome prosecution.