"I thank you, neighbor. It is not prudent to travel alone when the country is swarming with adventurers whom we take as hirelings for the wars with the Turdetani, and all the people who fled from the city after the last revolt. Day before yesterday, as you know, the dead body of Acteio, the barber of the Forum, was found in the road. He was assassinated and robbed as he was returning from his little country-house at night-fall." "They say that we shall live more tranquilly now since the Roman intervention. The legates from Rome have ordered a few heads cut off; and they affirm that after this we shall have peace." The two men stopped a moment and turned their heads to look at the Roman liburna, which could barely be distinguished near the tower in the port, wrapped in the shadows of evening. Then they walked slowly onward, as if in deep thought. "You know," continued one of them, "that I am only a shoemaker who has his shop near the Forum and has been able to save a sack of silver victoriati in order to live at ease in his old age, and to spend the afternoons at the port, rod in hand. I do not know as much as those rhetoricians who stroll up and down outside the city wall disputing and shouting like Furies, nor do I worry my brain as do the philosophers who gather on the porticos of the Forum to quarrel amid the jests of the merchants as to whether this or that one of the men who occupy themselves there in Athens with such matters is in the right. But, with all my ignorance, I ask myself, neighbor, why this strife between us men who live in the same city who should deal with one another like good brothers? Why?" The shoemaker's comrade replied with vigorous nods of assent. "I understand," continued the artisan, "that from time to time we shall be at war with our neighbors the Turdetani. Sometimes on account of a question of irrigation, again on account of pasture-grounds, but mainly because of boundary lines, and to keep them from enjoying this beautiful port, I understand that the citizens take up arms and seek battle, going out to destroy their fields and burn their huts. But those people are not of our race, and that is how a great city makes itself respected. Besides, war yields slaves, which often are scarce, and what would we men, we citizens, do without slaves?" "I am poorer than you, neighbor," said the other fisherman. "I do not earn as much making saddles as you do making shoes; but in spite of my poverty I can afford to have a Turdetan slave, who helps me very much, and I desire war, because it brings in considerably more work."