“There is no need. I will take Blanda.”
“I will go. A girl, a young girl shames me. I run away from death, and she offers herself to the sword. Marcianus said I was a renegade. I will [pg 255]not be thought to have denied my Master—to have fled from martyrdom.”
“Then,” said Perpetua, “I pray thee this—first give freedom unto Pedo.”
Baudillas administered a slight stroke on the cheek to his slave, and said:
“Go; thou art discharged from bondage.”
CHAPTER XXII
THE ARENA
The games that were to be given in the amphitheater of Nemausus on the nones of March were due to a bequest of Domitius Afer, the celebrated, or rather infamous, informer and rhetorician, who had brought so many citizens of Rome to death during the principate of Tiberius. He had run great risk himself under Caligula, but had escaped by a piece of adroit flattery. In dying he bequeathed a large sum out of his ill-gotten gains—the plunder of those whom he had destroyed, and whose families he had ruined—to be expended in games in the amphitheater on the nones of March, for the delectation of the citizens, and to keep his memory green in his native city.
The games were to last two days. On the first there would be contests with beasts, and on the second a water combat, when the arena would be flooded and converted into a lake.