CHAPTER XXX
FESTUS
Domiciled in the Choragium and busy there and in the Colosseum I spent
almost a year. Until the approach of winter put a stop to spectacles in
the arena and after the outset of spring permitted their resumption, I was
not only continuously busy, but entirely contented. Of the dreary and
tedious winter between, which was intensely dispiriting and appeared
interminable, the less I say the better. I do not want to remind myself of
it.
I was of course free from the bodily miseries which had made my winters at
Placentia and Nuceria so terrible: I did not suffer from cold, hunger,
vermin, sleeplessness, overwork, exhaustion, weakness, blows and abuse. I
was, on the contrary, comfortably lodged and clothed, well attended,
lavishly and excellently fed and humored by the procurator.
But at Placentia and Nuceria I had solaced myself amid the horror of my
situation by reminding myself that I was, at least, alive, and, as long as
I was in an _ergastulum_, entirely safe from any danger of being
recognized and executed. Here, in Rome, often in the arena, under the eyes
of sixty thousand Romans, thousands of whom had known me in my prosperity
and hundreds of whom had known me familiarly from my childhood, I was,
every instant, in peril of recognition and of betrayal to the secret
service.
Pages:
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655