The next day, the Kalends of July, saw me haled again to the Basilica
Sempronia.
There I beheld a scene almost a duplicate of my first trial; a similar
throng of spectators, very similar bevies of expectant witnesses,
advocates and prosecutors; the same batch of my former fellow-slaves,
surrounded by the same guards; the very same charcoal-brazier tended by
the same slave squatting on the same folded blanket; similar knots of
notables in the apse, about and behind the magistrate's tribunal; the same
carved arm-chair; in it not Corbulo, but Cassius Ravillanus, lean, dry,
tanned, leathery, smooth-shaven, bald and stern.
He glared at me when my guards halted me four yards or so in front of him;
then he beckoned to one of his apparitors and spoke to him in an
undertone. The fellow went off as if on an errand.
Ravillanus then gave, even more positively than Corbulo, a demonstration
of the great latitude permitted such a magistrate in procedure, of how
completely it lies within his discretion what to do and how to do it.
"Fellow!" he ranted, "you have plotted to rob and murder your master, you
have done both and you have, by favor and influence and perhaps even by
bribery, arranged for your easy acquittal.
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