Caligula would probably have crossed, beyond range of harm, the line of this acknowledgment which the brute was making to him, in return for his ejaculatory compliments, only for the very precaution which Lygdus had taken, and which actually furnished the animal with a projectile, and transmitted to a further distance, by means of the door-leaf, nearly the full force of the blow. As the door was swinging home, the powerful hoofs met it, and, shivering it from top to bottom, dashed it open again, and sent the outer edge of it and a large detached splinter against the middle of Caligula's forehead and face, from the hair down along the whole line of the nose; for, as we have remarked, his face happened to be turned sideways to receive the blow just when it was delivered. He fell insensible; but having been already in motion, the united effect of the two forces was to cast him beyond the reach of any further usage on the part of the Sejan steed. Lygdus immediately lifted him up, and he, with Herod Agrippa, carried Caligula into the open air. Paulus and Philip followed; but ascertaining that the injury was superficial, they returned to the stable, where they were now left alone.
"I heard him tell you, my master," said Philip to Paulus, "that he would fasten his eyes upon you, when you mounted yonder brute; now, he will not open those eyes for a week, and whatever happens to you, he is not going to see it. He is not seriously hurt; he'll be as well as ever in ten days; but for the present his beauty is spoilt, and he's as blind as the dead."
Paulus now in a low tone related to the freedman, whose services would be necessary in the matter, the visit of Charicles, and the gift to him by that learned man of an unguent which, if rubbed into the horse's nostrils, would render him sleepy, and, therefore, quiet. The old servant expressed great wonder and admiration at such a device, and Paulus felt with his hand for the little porcelain pot where he remembered to have placed it. Needless to say, it was gone.
"Well," said the youth, after a few questions and answers had been exchanged, "I must even take my chance without it. Charicles, I hear, has just been summoned to Rome, so that I cannot get any more of the compound. Farewell; I must now return to Crispus's inn."
CHAPTER III.
The day when the singular struggle was to occur, the expectation of which had excited such curiosity, arose bright, breezeless, and sultry, and so continued till long past noon; but the sun was now sinking toward the Tyrrhenian Sea, and a cool, soft air had begun to blow as the hour approached when the nephew of the triumvir was to mount the horse Sejanus, in the presence of such a multitude as the fields of Formiæ had never before beheld, whether in times of peace or times of war.
At the distance of a few miles on every side, the fair vales and slopes of Italy presented the appearance of a deserted land, over which no sound was heard save the drowsy hum of insects, the occasional sough of the rising breeze in the tops of the woods, and, predominant over all, far and near, the piercing ring of the cicala, with its musical rise and fall and its measured intervals. The fire of the wayside forge lay under its ashes; all its anger taking rest, its hoarse roar asleep, till the breath of the bellows should once more awaken it to resistance and torment it into fury. All the labors of tillage were suspended; the plough wearied no team of oxen; little girls were watching the flocks and herds. Their fathers and mothers and brothers had all gone away since early morning, and would not return till night-fall. A lonely traveller from the south, whose horse had cast a shoe and fallen lame, had no alternative but to take off bridle and housings, leave them under a tree in charge of a little damsel five or six years old, turn his steed loose in a soft field of clover, and continue his own journey on foot along the silent highway, amid the silent land.
The seats of the temporary amphitheatre were all filled; while within and beneath them, standing, but standing on three several elevations, contrived by means of planks, (the rearmost being the highest,) were six ranks of soldiers from the camp; the two inner ranks consisting exclusively of Ælius Sejanus's prætorians. Immediately behind the centre of the amphitheatre, where Augustus with his court sat upon a strongly-built, lofty, and somewhat projecting wooden platform, canopied from the glare, a grove of tall and shady trees offered in their branches an accommodation of which the fullest advantage had been taken by a vast miscellaneous multitude, chiefly youths and boys; but among them soldiers who had received a holiday, and had found no room for themselves in the amphitheatre, were also numerous, their costumes rendering them easily distinguishable. On each side of the large canopied platform of the emperor and the Cæsars, with their court, were several seats of honor lined with purple and scarlet cloths, and connected with the estrade in question by continuous pavilion roofs, but having their own benches. Here many ladies and some boys and girls sat. It is in one of these we are ourselves going to take post, invisible but watchful, unheard but hearing.
On the seat immediately in front of ours, and of course a little below it, is a group of three persons, attended by a slave. With these persons, and even with their slave, we have already made more or less acquaintance. One of them the doctors had forbidden to go forth; but he had come. He is a mere child; his pretty face is shockingly disfigured; both his eyes are closed and blacked; all the flesh round them is a discolored and contused mass, his head is bandaged, and every nerve in his countenance is twitching with the furious eagerness and curiosity of one whose organs of sight, if he could only see with them, would ravenously devour the spectacle which all the rest of that mighty multitude were to enjoy, and from which he alone was to be debarred. Amid the immense murmur of so many human voices, we have to listen with attention, in order to catch distinctly what the child says in his shrill treble tones.
"Now mark you, good Cneius Piso, and you, Herod Agrippa, I am as blind as a stone; and I have brought you here in no other character than as my eyes, my left and my right eye. If a single iota of what passes escapes me, may all the gods destroy you both, worse than any Roman or Jew was ever destroyed before! Has that beast of a horse (if it was mine, I'd tether it by all four legs to the ground, and make a squadron of cavalry back their horses against it, and kick it into shreds and little bits)—has that beast of a horse come forth yet?"