The Unwilling Vestal

by Edward Lucas White

“‘Cash sale,’ says he; ‘no papers except a bare sale certificate.’

“‘Done,’ says I.

“He counted out the cash from his servant’s bag and I gave him the customary certificate, with a description of Almo and the statement:

“‘Sold on this day and date for cash’ and my signature and seal. That was all there was to it.”

When Vocco was persistent, Olynthides averred that he had “heard” that the purchaser’s name was Jegius and that he came from Cadiz. Vocco could not discover anyone in Hippo who had ever heard of a slave-dealer named Jegius.

When Vocco returned to Rome with his report Brinnaria set in motion all the forces of her world which could be utilized under the circumstances. Aurelius was on the Rhine frontier, but Brinnaria had, by this time, a close acquaintance with all important court officers and was on terms of the utmost cordiality with the officials who governed Rome in the Emperor’s absence. They sympathized with her and put at her disposal all the machinery of the government secret service. They agreed with her that the matter must be kept quiet, there must be no proclamations, posters, no rewards offered by crier or placard, no publishing of descriptions. With emphatic injunctions of secrecy they sent warnings to every provincial governor, to every local magistrate, to the aldermen of every free city, to institute unobtrusive investigations and to keep unostentatious watch. Brinnaria insisted that these mandates should be sent all over the Empire, pointing out that no one could conjecture what port of the Mediterranean or of the Black Sea might be the destination of any nameless trading ship. But, with special care, full orders were distributed throughout Spain.

Towards Spain, likewise, Brinnaria directed the energies of those organizations of the ancient world which were analogous to our modern private detective bureaus, and upon Spain she focussed the energies of the managers of the racing companies.

These great corporations were among the most important money-making enterprises of the Roman world. They maintained luxurious headquarters in the most congested business districts of the capital. They had offices adjacent to each of the circuses, they possessed huge congeries of buildings utilized as stables for their crack racers and barracks for their charioteers, and provided with spacious courtyards for training their teams. Outside of Rome they had similar offices and training-stables in every city and in most towns of any size or wealth. Besides they owned countless stud-farms, estates and ranches in every province of the Empire and maintained an army of herdsmen, ostlers and drovers to convoy their horses by land and whole fleets of ships to transport them by sea.

They were joint-stock companies, and while many smaller ones existed in various parts of the Empire and a few even at Rome, the small concerns were insignificant and generally ignored. When one spoke of the racing-companies one meant the six great companies whose central organizations were domiciled at Rome and whose ramifications penetrated every district of the Empire. These were known, after the racing-colors of their jockeys, as the Greens, the Blues, the Reds, the Whites, the Crimsons and the Golds. The Reds and the Whites were the oldest companies, the Crimsons and the Golds were companies established in the heyday of the Empire by coteries of millionaires, the Blues and the Greens were the largest, the wealthiest and the most popular, especially the Greens. In the Greens, somewhere, Brinnaria expected to find Almo, as he had been enthusiastic about the Greens from boyhood. He had been wearing their leek-green colors the day she had sat in his lap in her father’s courtyard. He had haunted their training-stables during his brief sojourn at Rome before Aurelius sent him to Africa, he had inherited a big block of stock in the Greens. In the Greens, likewise, Brinnaria owned stock; and, having entered into inheritances from more than seventy different wealthy relatives who had died during the pestilence, she happened to own stock in every one of the six great companies. She had personal friends among the directors of each of the six. Therefore it was especially easy for her to enlist their help in her efforts to find Almo. It would have been easy, anyhow, since to be able to oblige a Vestal was a refreshing novelty for almost anyone at Rome and to find a Vestal seeking one’s influence and one’s help, equally novel and refreshing; generally the shoe was on the other foot—most persons in public life in Rome were used to attempting to enlist the help and the interests of the Vestals for their purposes and were generally utterly at a loss for any means of requital, if the interest of a Vestal was enlisted and her help obtained.

Consequently all that the racing-companies could do to find Almo was done as well as all that could be done by the private detective agencies and by government officials.