Oaths, and curses, and the lowest abysses of vileness in human conduct, and that blackness of darkness which follows the extinction of the last spark of humanity in the soul of man, and the clanking of fetters all day long, and the shrieks of the tortured, and the yelling of the scourged, and jests more horrible than weeping, and the manifold leprosies of all moral and physical disease--all this Onesimus had to witness, and had to endure, in the slave-jail at Antium. We have read what prisons were before the days of Howard; what penal settlements and convict ships were forty years ago; but men trained in the most rudimentary principles of Christianity could not, under the worst circumstances, sink quite so low, or be so wholly beyond the sphere of pity, as the offscourings of pagan slavery, the scum of the misery of all nations, huddled into these abodes of death. It was soon whispered among the wretches there that the handsome Phrygian youth had been high in place among the attendants of Octavia, and had been favoured and promoted by Acte. In their baseness they exulted at his humiliation, and the extent to which his soul revolted from their malice happily helped to preserve him from the contamination which would have been involved in their friendliness. He lived from day to day in the sullen silence of an indomitable purpose. He did not know how long he would be kept there. He waited a month, sustained by fierce resolve, and then determined that, at the cost of life itself--even if it should end in feeding the crows upon a cross--he would attempt his escape. He knew that he had many foes among the struggling envies of Cæsar’s palace, and he suspected that Nero’s _dispensator_ purposely intended to forget him, and to leave him there to rot. After a few days he was left comparatively unmolested by his companions in misfortune, for there was no amusement to be got out of his savage taciturnity. Once, when one of the ruder denizens had tried to molest him, Onesimus struck him so furious a blow with his fettered hands that he was looked upon as dangerous. As he glanced round at the degraded ugliness of the majority of the prisoners, whose faces only varied in degrees of villany, he had less than no desire to join their society. He saw but one on whom he could look with any pleasure, or from whom he could hope for any sympathy. This was a young man of honest and pleasant countenance, whose name, he learnt, was Hermas, and who bore himself under his misfortunes with sweetness and dignity. Like Onesimus, he seemed to find his only relief in the strenuous performance of the tasks allotted to him by the _ergastularius_, and as Onesimus watched him he felt convinced that he was there for no crime, and also that he was a Christian.