After that we suffered less. The slaves acclaimed Agathemer's cooking; for, if their rations were still scanty by order of the watchful manager, at least their food was edible. Far from being ultimately killed, like our predecessors, and continually threatened and reviled, we were blessed by our fellow-slaves. We slept better, in spite of the vermin, on our grass- stuffed mattresses, under our foul quilts, we shivered less in our thicker tunics. We were not too tired to discuss, at times, the oddities of our vicissitudes, to congratulate each other on being, at least, alive, on my not being suspected of being what I actually was, and, above all, on the safety of our old, blackened, greasy, worthless-looking, amulet-bags, with their precious contents. To be reduced to carrying food to three hundred of the vilest rascals alive was a horrible fate for a man who had, two years before, been a wealthy nobleman, but it was far better than death as a suspected conspirator. And Agathemer was hopeful of our future, of survival, of escape, of comfort somewhere after he had sold another emerald, ruby, or opal. Nothing could, for any length of time, dim or cloud the light of Agathemer's buoyancy of disposition. BOOK III DIVERSITIES CHAPTER XXII THE MUTINEERS Our promotion from the mills to the kitchen took place early in March of the year when Manius Acilius Glabrio, after an interval of thirty-four years since his first consulship, was consul for the second time and had as nominal associate Commodus, preening himself, for the fifth time, on the highest office in the Republic, which he had done little to deserve, and while he held it, did less to justify himself in possessing, since he left most of the duties of the consulship to Glabrio, as he left most of the Principate to Perennis, his Prefect of the Praetorium. All of this, of course, we learnt later in the year; for, inside our prison, we knew nothing of what went on in Placentia, let alone of what went on in Italy and in Rome itself. We had been cooking for more than three months, when, about the middle of June, our attention in the cellars was distracted from doling out food, as that of the wretches we served was distracted from eating their scanty rations, by an unusual uproar in the street outside of our windows. We could descry, in the morning sunlight, military trappings, tattered cloaks, ragged tunics, dingy kilt-straps, sheenless helmets, unkempt beards, and brawny arms in the crowds which packed the narrow streets. The mob seemed made up of rough frontier soldiery, and we marvelled at the presence of such men in Italy.