“What remains? Ah! the Fish!”
“Yes, mistress dear, when all else is lost, remember the Fish.”
CHAPTER III.
IN THE “INSULA.”
“Now, for a while I am as one who has cast off a nightmare,” said Domitia to herself. “He is away—why he has attended Titus to the Sabine land I know not, unless the Emperor could not trust him in Rome—or may be, in his goodness he has done it to relieve me of his presence. I will go see my mother.”
Domitia ordered her litter and bearers. She had no trinkets to put on, save the fish of cornelian. Her mother liked to see her tricked out, and usually when Domitia paid her a visit she adorned herself to please the old lady,—now she could not assume jewelry as she had lost all her articles of precious stones and metal. So she hung the cornelian amulet about her neck.
When a Roman lady went forth in palanquin, it was in some state. Before her went two heralds in livery, to clear the way and announce her coming at the houses where she purposed calling, then she had six bearers, and attendants of her own sex, carrying her scent bottles, kerchiefs, fans, and whatever she might think it possible she would require.
Domitia was impatient of display, but it had been imposed on her by the Emperor. “The Flavians,” said he smiling, “must make a show in public.”
A Roman lady was at this period expected to wear yellow hair, if she would be in the fashion. Under the Flavians, it was a compliment to the reigning princes to affect this color. It was true that the word flavus meant anything in color, from mud upwards to what might be termed yellow by courtesy. It was employed as descriptive of the Tiber, that was of the dingiest of drabs, and of the Campagna when every particle of vegetation was burnt up on it, and the tone was that of the dust-heaps. But now that the parsnip-haired Flavians were divine and all-powerful, the adjective was employed to describe the harvest field and gold. Ladies talked of their hair as “flavan” when it had been dyed with saffron and dusted with gold. Not to have yellow hair was expressive of disaffection to the dynasty—so every lady who would be in the fashion, and every husband who wanted office, first bleached and then dyed their hair, and as hair was occasionally thin, they employed vast masses of padding and borrowed coils from German “fraus” to make the utmost show of their loyalty to the august house of the divine Flavii.