The afternoon passed; evening approached. All the gladiators then in Rome assembled in the Claudian Grove, around tables creaking under their loads of food and wine. Women, too, were there in profusion; women for the taking and yearning to be taken; and the tide of revelry ran open, wide, and high. Although all ate and apparently drank with abandon, most of the wine was in fact wasted. And as the sky darkened, most of the gladiators, one by one, began to get rid of their female companions upon one pretext or another and to drift toward the road which separated the festivities from the cloaked and curious throng of lookers-on. At full dark, a red glare flared into the sky from Caesar's garden and the gladiators, deployed now along the highway, dashed across it and seemed to wrestle briefly with cloaked figures. Then armed, more-or-less-armored men ran back to the scene of their reveling. Swords, daggers, and gladii thrust, stabbed, and cut. Tables and benches ran red; ground and grass grew slippery with blood. The conspirators turned then and rushed toward the Emperor's brilliantly torch-lit garden. Patroclus, however, was not in the van. He had had trouble in finding a cuirass big enough for him to get into. He had been delayed further by the fact that he had had to kill three strange lanistae before he could get at his owner, the man he really wanted to slay. He was therefore some little distance behind the other gladiators when Petronius rushed up to him and seized him by the arm. White and trembling, the noble was not now the exquisite Arbiter Elegantiae; nor the imperturbable Augustian. "Patroclus! In the name of Bacchus, Patroclus, why do the men go there now? No signal was given--I could not get to Nero!" "What?" the Thracian blazed. "Vulcan and his fiends! It _was_ given--I heard it myself! What went wrong?" "Everything." Petronius licked his lips. "I was standing right beside him. No one else was near enough to interfere. It was--should have been--easy. But after I got my knife out I couldn't move. It was his _eyes_, Patroclus--I swear it, by the white breasts of Venus! He has the evil eye--I couldn't move a muscle, I tell you! Then, although I didn't want to, I turned and ran!" "How did you find _me_ so quick?" "I--I--I--don't know," the frantic Arbiter stuttered. "I ran and ran, and there you were. But what are we--you--going to do?" Patroclus' mind raced. He believed implicitly that Jupiter guarded him personally. He believed in the other gods and goddesses of Rome. He more than half believed in the multitudinous deities of Greece, of Egypt, and even of Babylon. The other world was real and close; the evil eye only one of the many inexplicable facts of every-day life. Nevertheless, in spite of his credulity--or perhaps in part because of it--he also believed firmly in himself; in his own powers. Wherefore he soon came to a decision. "Jupiter, ward from me Ahenobarbus' evil eye!" he called aloud, and turned.