CHAPTER XIX.
The Hospitality of Demetrius I While grave senators were contending, tribunes haranguing, imperators girding on the sword, legions marching, cohorts clashing,--while all this history was being made in the outside world, Cornelia, very desolate, very lonely, was enduring her imprisonment at Baiae.
If she had had manacles on her wrists and fetters on her feet, she would not have been the more a prisoner.

Lentulus Crus had determined, with the same grim tenacity of purpose which led him to plunge a world into war, that his niece should comply with his will and marry Lucius Ahenobarbus.

He sent down to Baiae, Phaon,--the evil-eyed freedman of Ahenobarbus,--and gave to that worthy full power to do anything he wished to break the will of his prospective patroness.

Cassandra had been taken away from Cornelia--she could not learn so much as whether the woman had been scourged to death for arranging the interview with Drusus, or no.

Two ill-favoured slatternly Gallic maids, the scourings of the Puteoli slave-market, had been forced upon Cornelia as her attendants--creatures who stood in abject fear of the whip of Phaon, and who obeyed his mandates to the letter.