"It is well," said Sejanus, after a moment's reflection. "This is not the sort of lad who will break his word. Carthaginians, and rubbish like them, knew long ago how to believe a Roman knight and patrician, and this lad seems to be of the Regulus breed. Does the Cæsar himself, however, know of this?" "I had no orders to tell him," answered the centurion; "and if I had had, it would have been difficult; he passed at full gallop a quarter of an hour ago, his head down, not so much as looking aside." Sejanus then put the following question with a sneer, "Has a god, or a stranger, with two attendants on horseback, passed this way?" "No god, unless he be a god, and he had no attendants," said the astonished centurion. "You have not seen three figures on horseback, nor a flash of bluish light?" "I certainly thought I saw three figures on horseback, but I could not be sure. It was on the farther side of the way, general, which is broad," continued the man apologetically, "and there was no sound of hoofs; my impression, too, was gone in a moment. As to a flash of bluish light, there are several flashes of red and white light inside the inn kitchen, and they make the road outside all the darker; but there has been no flash in the road." "Good! now follow me." And Sejanus rode on in the direction of Formiæ, the centurion and the soldier behind him. CHAPTER VI. The inn, it is well ascertained, never became a common institution in classic antiquity. It was utterly unknown in any thing like its modern shape among the Greeks; one cause being that the literary Greeks gave less care to their roads and communications than the administrating, fighting, conquering, and colonizing Romans always did. Even among the Romans the army trusted to its city-like encampments from stage to stage. Centuries passed away, during which the private traveller found few indeed, and far between, any better public resting-houses along the magnificent and stupendous highways, whose remains we still behold indestructible, from England to Asia Minor, than the half-day relay-posts, or _mutationes_. At these the wayfarer, by producing[28] his _diploma_ from the proper authorities, obtained a change of horses.