A boy appeared at her elbow; one of the little shy fauns of Von Gloëden’s photographs. He pulled a cactus leaf out of one pocket, a penknife out of another, and trimming off the cactus prickles tossed the leaf out into space in such deft way that in graceful curves and birdlike swoops it whirled slowly down to the far bottom of the cliff. Jane leaned over the gratefully substantial stone parapet and watched, fascinated, as he proceeded to send yet another and another after it in more elaborate curves each time. The boy’s shyness melted under her admiration of his trick and the coppers it was expressed in; he showed white teeth in much merriment when she too attempted to toss the green discs only to have them drop persistently without any whirling. He began to chatter. “Yes, it was very high that cliff, and of much interest to pitch things over and watch them fall. In the old days they had pitched men over it—yes indeed, prigionieri; many hundreds of them.” “Oh Peripatetica! black dramas even here! what can he mean?” “The insurgent slaves of the Servile War, perhaps. Their whole garrison was hurled alive over some cliff here—native tradition may have it this one.” Jane remembered. Eight hundred men thus treated by Publius Rupilius, Roman Consul in 132 B.C. The dark flood of old cruelty surged back to her. Sicily was a country of great landowners holding estates of eighty miles round and more; working them by slave labour; owning slaves in thousands. Twenty thousand slaves was not an exaggerated number for a 111great noble to own, two hundred a fair allowance for an ordinary citizen. Two-thirds of Sicily’s population were then slaves. Of course the human live-stock possessed in such indistinguishable hordes, like cattle, had to be branded with the owner’s mark. They did their work in irons, to be safely under their overseer’s power; were lodged in holes under ground; their daily rations but one pound of barley or wheat, and a little salt and oil. Against atrocious cruelties they revolt at last. All over Sicily they rise, two hundred thousand men soon finding arms and power to mete to masters the same cruelties that had been shown them. For six years all the might of Rome cannot crush them, but eventually her iron claw closes in upon them—only impregnable Enna and Taormina still remain in the hands of the slave army. It is a struggle to test all Rome’s mettle. These slaves too are of the eagle’s blood. Men free-born and bred, most of them; Greeks and Franks from the mainland, prisoners of war or of debt. Fiercely, indomitably, they cling to their rocky eyries. But in Taormina starvation fights direfully against them. There was not one grain, one blade of grass even, left. Still the garrison clings and strikes back at the Romans. They devour their own children, next the women, then at last eat one another—but still hold out.