“Oh, mother dear, how did you escape?”
“My child! it was as bad as that bit of storm we had getting out of the Gulf of Corinth, tossed about in my palanquin I hardly knew whether I were thinking with my head or with my toes. But after a while they got me through. Never, never again will I go gadding after the Gods to their Lectisternia. As the Gods love me! this is a topsy-turvy time indeed. At the Saturnalia no strife is permissible, not a lawsuit, all quarrels are supposed to cease, not even a malefactor may be executed, and there are those precious Immortals with their glass eyes, and extended hands snuffing up the fumes of their dinner, and they allow fighting to go on before them, under their immortal noses, and never interfere! But I don’t wonder. There was Summanus, God of the night thunders—and will you believe it, his own head was struck off by the heavenly bolt. Ye Gods! if ye cannot mind your own heads ye are not to be trusted with ours.”
The lady was in a condition of towering indignation. She was affronted—she, highborn, with a drop of Julian blood in her, somewhere,—she had been tossed about among the heads and over the shoulders of a dirty, garlic-smelling asafœtida chewing rabble—had been exposed to danger from the swords of the Vigiles on one side, of the Palatine guard on the other. And when finally, she reached home ruffled in garments, her hair in disorder, and her heart beating fast, she found the house in disorder, the slaves in possession keeping high holiday, and disregarding her shrilly uttered, imperiously expressed orders.
“I shall go to bed,” said the lady, “I’d lie in bed all these horrible seven days, but that I know no one will bring me my meals. Never mind—when the Saturnalia are over, I shall remember which were insolent and disobliging, and they shall get whippings.”
But in the house, on the morrow the condition of affairs was not quite so bad. The servants were alive to the fact that they had liberty for seven days only, and that their mistress had a faculty of remembering and punishing disobedience; not indeed during the holiday period, nor ostensibly because of faults then committed, but by administering double chastisement for light offences committed later.
Some of the slaves, moreover, made no attempt to use their liberty so as to cause inconvenience to their mistress.
But if some sort of order was established within the palace, none reigned without. There civil war raged, at the same time that the citizens observed the festival, and so long as they kept out of the way of the soldiery, it did not much concern them whether the city force or the palace garrison prevailed. Primus, at the head of the Illyrian legions was rapidly advancing on Rome. News had arrived that Spain and Gaul had declared for Vespasian. Britain had renounced allegiance to Vitellius, only Africa still remained faithful.
Next tidings arrived that the army of Vitellius that was at Narnia had surrendered. Thereupon the gross, aged Emperor dressed in black, surrounded by his servants, and carrying his son, still a child, came howling and sobbing from the Palatine through the Forum, to surrender the insignia of Empire into the hands of the Consul, in the Temple of Concord. But the Consul refused to receive them, and then the German guard, having wind of his intention, became clamorous, and cried out for the head of Flavius Sabinus. Vitellius, unable to resign, and incapable of reigning, wandered from one residence to another, asking advice of all his friends as to what he ought to do, but taking none.
Meanwhile the fighting in the streets of Rome had recommenced. Titus Flavius Sabinus, for security escaped into the Capitol, and took with him his sons and daughter, and his nephew Domitian. There he was formally besieged by the Imperial guard; and Sabinus, doubting his ability to hold out long, sent off a despatch to Primus to bid him hasten to his assistance.
“Madam!” exclaimed Eboracus rushing in, “I pray you come on the roof of the house.”