Once Artemisia safe on her way to the trireme, which was a little off shore, Agias ran back to the villa; the pirates were ransacking it thoroughly. Everything that could be of the slightest value was ruthlessly seized upon, everything else recklessly destroyed. The pirates had not confined their attack to the Lentulan residence alone. Rushing down upon the no less elaborate neighbouring villas, they forced in the gates, overcame what slight opposition the trembling slaves might make, and gave full sway to their passion for plunder and rapine. The noble ladies and fine gentlemen who had dared the political situation and lingered late in the season to enjoy the pleasures of Baiæ, now found themselves roughly dragged away into captivity to enrich the freebooters by their ransoms. From pillage the pirates turned to arson, Demetrius in fact making no effort to control his men. First a fragile wooden summer-house caught the blaze of a torch and flared up; then a villa itself, and another and another. The flames shot higher and higher, great glowing, wavering pyramids of heat, roaring and crackling, flinging a red circle of glowing light in toward the mainland by Cumæ, and shimmering out over the bay toward Prochyta. Overhead was the inky dome of the heavens, and below fire; fire, and men with passions unreined.
Demetrius stood on the terrace of the burning villa of the Lentuli, barely himself out of range of the raging heat. As Agias came near to him, the gilded Medusa head emblazoned on his breastplate glared out; the loose scarlet mantle he wore under his armour was red as if dipped in hot blood; he seemed the personification of Ares, the destroyer, the waster of cities. The pirate was gazing fixedly on the blazing wreck and ruin. His firm lips were set with an expression grave and hard. He took no part in the annihilating frenzy of his men.
"This is terrible destruction!" cried Agias in his ear, for the roar of the flames was deafening, he himself beginning to turn sick at the sight of the ruin.
"It is frightful," replied Demetrius, gloomily; "why did the gods ever drive me to this? My men are but children to exult as they do; as boys love to tear the thatch from the roof of a useless hovel, in sheer wantonness. I cannot restrain them."
At this instant a seaman rushed up in breathless haste.
"Eleleu! Captain, the soldiers are on us. There must have been a cohort in Cumæ."
Whereat the voice of Demetrius rang above the shouts of the plunderers and the crash and roar of the conflagration, like a trumpet:—
"Arms, men! Gather the spoil and back to the ships! Back for your lives!"
Already the cohort of Pompeian troops, that had not yet evacuated Cumæ, was coming up on the double-quick, easily guided by the burning buildings which made the vicinity bright as day. The pirates ran like cats out of the blazing villas, bounded over terraces and walls, and gathered near the landing-place by the Lentulan villa. The soldiers were already on them. For a moment it seemed as though the cohort was about to drive the whole swarm of the marauders over the sea-wall, and make them pay dear for their night's diversion. But the masterly energy of Demetrius turned the scale. With barely a score of men behind him, he charged the nearest century so impetuously that it broke like water before him; and when sheer numbers had swept his little group back, the other pirates had rallied on the very brink of tie sea-wall, and returned to the charge.
Never was battle waged more desperately. The pirates knew that to be driven back meant to fall over a high embankment into water so shallow as to give little safety in a dive; capture implied crucifixion. Their only hope was to hold their own while their boats took them off to the ships in small detachments. The conflagration made the narrow battle-field as bright as day. The soldiers were brave, and for new recruits moderately disciplined. The pirates could hardly bear up under the crushing discharge of darts, and the steady onset of the maniples. Up and down the contest raged, swaying to and fro like the waves of the sea. Again and again the pirates were driven so near to the brink of the seawall that one or two would fall, dashed to instant death on the submerged rocks below. Demetrius was everywhere at once, as it were, precisely when he was most needed, always exposing himself, always aggressive. Even while he himself fought for dear life, Agias admired as never before the intelligently ordered puissance of his cousin.