Fundinus’s lictors lower their fasces; his litter is set down hastily. As the trains meet the great man hastens to the side of the greater _matrona_. Faustina is evidently in a gracious mood. She is seen to flip the praetor’s face daintily with her fan. The magistrate climbs back to his own litter smilingly--perhaps he has been bidden to an ultra-select house party at Tusculum. The two trains of attendants elbow past each other, and the street resumes its plebeian bustle. =20. Public Salutations: the Kissing Habit.=--As the crowds thin a little, so that the types and faces are more easily seen, several things become noticeable. First the salutations--there are surely advantages in being borne high in a litter. No person in good clothes can proceed far without being incessantly beset with greetings. Everybody seems to know everybody else. It is polite to cry _Ave!_ (“Hail”) or _Salve!_ (“I hope you’re well”) to persons of the scantiest acquaintance, and then, when they return your salute, if there is nothing more to add, _Vale!_ (“Good luck”). More serious, however, is the incessant kissing. A sedate old gentleman with a narrow purple stripe on his tunic (the token of the “equestrian” rank) appears followed by two spruce slave boys. A nondescript fellow immediately pushes up to him, seizes his hand, then smacks him roundly on the cheek. Doubtless the rascal’s lips are foul and his breath charged with garlic; it is nevertheless most discourteous for the older man to resent it. There is no escaping the incessant attacks, unless you can have a litter, and the poet Martial has vainly complained of acquaintances who insisted on kissing him in December “when round his nose hangs a veritable icicle.” Even the Emperor has to submit to the usage, although the privilege is confined to that envied and exalted circle known as “Cæsar’s friends.” =21. The Swarms of Idlers and Parasites.=--Another thing becomes obvious after a short scrutiny--_the vast number of idlers_. People are incessantly lounging up and down the street manifestly with nothing important to do. Hard work and common trade are, as later explained (see p. 146), by no means genteel; and many a Roman who possesses merely a threadbare toga and has his name on the list for corn doles prefers living by his wits in busy idleness, fawning on the great, and hunting dinner invitations to doing a stroke of honest labor.