You will divide your time between overlooking the few slaves whom I leave at the palace in my absence, and the husbandman and his labourers whom I have installed at the farm; and you will answer to me for the due performance of your own duties and the duties of those under you--being assured that by well filling this office you will serve your own interests in these, and in all things besides.' The letter concluded by directing the freedman to return to Rome on a certain day, and to go to the farm-house at an appointed hour, there to meet his master, who had further directions to give him, and who would visit the newly acquired property before he proceeded on his journey to Naples.
Nothing could exceed the perplexity of Carrio as he read the passage in his patron's letter which we have quoted above.

Remembering the incidents attending Vetranio's early connection with Antonina and her father, the mere circumstances of a farm having been purchased to flatter what was doubtless some accidental caprice on the part of the girl, would have little perplexed him.

But that this act should be followed by the senator's immediate separation of himself from the society of Numerian's daughter; that she was to gain nothing after all from these lands which had evidently been bought at her instigation, but the authority over a little strip of garden; and yet, the inviolability of this valueless privilege should be insisted on in such serious terms, and with such an imperative tone of command as the senator had never been known to use before--these were inconsistencies which all Carrio's ingenuity failed to reconcile.

The man had been born and reared in vice; vice had fed him, clothed him, freed him, given him character, reputation, power in his own small way--he lived in it as in the atmosphere that he breathed; to show him an action, referable only to a principle of pure integrity, was to set him a problem which it was hopeless to solve.

And yet it is impossible, in one point of view, to pronounce him utterly worthless.