"Why not in your carriage?" he queried. "I was hoping to ride with you to the Via Salaria, at least, unless your roads jolt a carriage as badly as bearers on them jolt a litter. What's wrong with the superperfect travelling carriage of your late Uncle?" "I have lent it," I explained, "to Marcus Martius, to travel to Rome in with his bride. I wrote you of his wedding. He has just married my uncle's freedwoman Marcia. I wrote you about it." "Pooh!" cried Tanno, "how should I remember the marriage of a freedwoman I never saw with a bumpkin I never heard of?" "No bumpkin," cut in Lisius Naepor. "Not any more of a bumpkin than I or any of the rest of us here. You are too high and mighty, Opsitius. It is true that in our countryside the only senators are Aemilius, Vedius and Satronius, and that in our immediate vicinity Hirnio and Hedulio are the only proprietors of equestrian rank but we commoners here are no bumpkins or clodhoppers." "I apologize," Tanno spoke conciliatingly. "You are right to call me down. We Romans of Rome really know the worth of farmers and provincials and the like. But we are so used, among ourselves, to thinking of Rome as the whole world, that our speech belies our esteem for our equals. I should not have spoken so. Who is Marcus Martius, Caius, and who is Marcia?" "Marcus Martius," I said, "is a local landowner like the rest of us. He would have been here to-night but for his recent marriage and approaching journey to Rome. I have always asked him to my dinners." "Then how, in the name of Ops Consiva," cried Tanno, "did he come to marry your uncle's freedwoman?" "This time I agree with you, Opsitius," said Naepor. "Your tone of scorn is wholly justified. Marrying freedwomen is getting far too common. If things go on this way there will be no Roman nobility nor gentry nor even any Roman commonality; just a wish-wash of counterfeit Romans, nine-tenths foreign in ancestry, with just enough of a dash of Roman blood to bequeath them our weaknesses and vices." "On the other hand," said Juventius Muso, "while agreeing with Naepor as to the propriety of the tone, I object to the question. Instead of asking how Martius came to marry Marcia, had you been acquainted with the recent past history of this neighborhood, Opsitius, you would have asked how most of the rest of us managed to escape marrying her." "A freedwoman!" cried Tanno. "A most unusual freedwoman," Hirnio asserted, "as she was almost a portent as a slave-girl. Haven't you ever heard of her, Opsitius?" "We Romans," Tanno bantered, "are lamentably ignorant on the life- histories of brood-sows, slave-girls, prize-heifers and such-like notabilities of Sabinum." "She is no Sabine," Hirnio retorted, "but, as far as the locality of her birth and upbringing goes, is as Roman as you are. Did you never hear of Ummidius Quadratus?"