"You have your character written on your back! How could Falco trust a fellow so branded and scarred! Easy-going masters like Falco not only bring on their own deaths, but sap the foundations of safety for all slave-owners. Your back, in advance, advertises you guilty. Better own up."
I pass over the details. But I must confess that I was far from heroic. Perhaps it is true, and not an invention, that Marcus Scaevola voluntarily thrust his hand into the altar-fire and stood mute and smiling, and watched it burn and char. If any man ever did that he had more self- control than I ever had. I could repress every indication of my agonies. I fainted so many times that I lost count. The afternoon was drawing on towards evening before Ravillanus began to lose patience.
Tanno and Galen had been from the first among those about the tribunal. Now, in a pause, while I was being brought back to consciousness to be again tortured, Galen succeeded in gaining the attention of Ravillanus enough to induce him, though grudgingly, to permit the celebrated advocate, Memmius Tuditanus, whom they had brought with them, to speak in my behalf. I had regained consciousness before he began to speak and heard most of what he said. He spoke well.
His chief point was that a gem-expert and art-amateur like me, knowing that he was to inherit one of the finest and most carefully chosen collections of gems and art objects in all the world, would be the last man on earth to allow it to be disturbed, let alone to plot its ransacking, the pillage of its cases and the dispersal of their precious contents. No man could better have exposed the absurdity of the whole flimsy and preposterous fabrication that I had had two confederates, who had, in my interest and at my suggestion, robbed first the triclinium and then the gem-collection, after which last I had myself murdered Falco.
But his logic, his lucidity and his eloquence fell on deaf ears. Ravillanus was unmoved. He permitted Lustralis to make a rambling and incoherent harangue, setting forth his ridiculous contentions.
Then he passed judgment:
"I hold you all innocent save Phorbas alone. Dromo is manifestly devoted to Phorbas and has lied in his behalf. But Dromo, apparently, was no accomplice in the plot or in the murder. I acquit him with the rest. Phorbas, who vilely plotted against his master, who foully murdered him, I adjudge guilty of his death and I hereby condemn him to be kept chained in the slaves' prison until the next day of beast-fighting in the Colosseum, then, in the arena, to be exposed to the ferocity of the famished wild beasts of the desert, wilderness and forest, by them to be lacerated and torn to pieces, as he richly deserves."
Tanno and Galen could indicate their grief and sympathy only by looks and gestures, for they dared not attempt to approach me.
Then Ravillanus called:
"Where is that barber?"