In the open streets a disorderly rabble of slaves and bondmen--pouring
in steady streams from their kennels behind the palaces and from the
unhealthy purlieus of such quarters as had been spared from the
architectural encroachments of the wealthy, and allowed to fester in
their own neglected corruption. Gathered together in close fraternity,
the Briton, the Goth, the African, and the Jew--each bearing his badge
of life-long servitude, some even wearing marks of recent chastisement,
but almost all awaiting the approaching spectacle with pleased and
animated countenances, and in seeming forgetfulness that so many of
their own number had graced former displays, and, by their degradation,
had afforded amusement to other equally unsympathetic concourses. Among
them, the lesser Romans--citizens in name, indeed, but, from their
poverty and the overbearing exactions of the patricians, almost as much
in slavery as those around them--disdainfully asserting their free
birth, and in turn contemned by the slaves themselves, as men to whom
liberty was but another title for slow starvation, and who would not
dare to resent the vilest insults heaped upon them by noble-owned and
protected menials--and now equally with the common herd obliged to
submit to the strong argument of sword and lance, as, every little
while, the soldiers along the line drove the whole writhing crowd,
without distinction, into smaller and more confined compass.
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