Before he joined his base troupe of companions he looked back for a moment. There, in the blinding sunlight of the Italian noon, stood the cross, accursed of God and man, the gibbet of the malefactor, the infamy of the slave, confronting the eye of heaven with a sight which, no less than that of the Thyestean banquet, might have made the sun itself turn dark; and there, upon it, a mass of living agony, conscious, and burning with thirst, and blinded with glare, and unpitied, and burdened with an awful load of guilt, hung the human victim who had once played an innocent child beside his mother’s knee. The soul of Onesimus was harrowed as he gazed on that awful insult to humanity. The existence of crucifixion showed how far the shadow had advanced on the dial-plate of Rome’s history. That form of punishment--so cynical, so ruthless, so abhorrent, which less than three centuries later was to be abolished by the indignation of mankind--had been not indigenous in the Western world. It had only been borrowed by Rome, in the days of her commencing corruption, from the dark and cruel East. That such a spectacle should be permitted to the gaze of women and little children; that it should indurate still further the callosity of hardened hearts, was in itself a token of degeneracy. The heart of Onesimus was full even to bursting as he saw that fearful instrument of inhuman vengeance standing there by the roadside among the darting lizards and chirping cicalas and murmuring bees; and the goats stared at it with glassy eyes as they cropped the luxuriant grass at the very feet of the victim in whom the majestic ideal of manhood was thus horribly laughed to scorn. Onesimus, as he finally turned away, felt it more degrading than ever to continue his present life. Its plenty and coarse comfort, accompanied as it was by the necessity of spending his days with these sexless and lying vagabonds, filled him with a sense of nameless humiliation. Yet what could he do? What other choice had he save to starve or to commit suicide? For then he remembered with a start that he was twice a thief, twice a fugitive, almost a murderer; that he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by Acte; that by his mad drunkenness he had insulted the majesty of Nero. In every sense even his fellow-slaves would have called him _furcifer_. And if he were once detected, in spite of the dye with which he had stained his face, and the blond wig by which the Galli had tried at once to conceal his identity and to enhance his beauty, what awaited him? Was he, too, destined to feed the wild birds upon the cross?