Towards dusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried out the words of some philter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, as the travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil.
But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents of the way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marks of the great plague.

Under Hadrian and his successors, there had been many enactments to improve the condition of the slave.

The ergastula+ were abolished.

But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded.

A whole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom and circumstance of misery, still hung [163] around, or sheltered themselves within, the vast walls of their old, half-ruined task-houses.