Thus passed my fourth winter since my disaster.
I might have been spared much of my anxiety during the winter if I had
learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the
procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even
more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously
pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, who,
for more than thirty years, was accorded by the Choragium a home of his.
own, a retinue of servants and the fulfillment of every whim, of which the
chief was his determination to have as little as possible to do with any
human being except his wife and their three children, for he was not a
slave, but a freeman. In his way Mercablis was as celebrated as Felix
Bulla the brigand or Agyllius Septentrio the actor of mimes, and the
memory of his fame yet lingers in the recollections of the aged and in the
talk of their children and grandchildren. For it was Mercablis who, for
half a life-time, invented, rehearsed, and kept secret till the moment of
its display the noon-hour sensational surprise for each day of games in
the Colosseum.
I have, in my later years, met many persons who congratulated me on my
luck in having personally known and frequently talked with Mercablis, just
as many have similarly envied me my encounters with Felix Bulla.
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