Euodus folded his arms and waited; the patricians, approaching in chairs of their own, alighted, bowed, passed out of the path and went around, remounted their chairs and disappeared. The birds in the trees about, hushed by the talk below them, twittered and flew again. Euodus, casting a sidelong glance at the emperor, nodded at the nearest bearer. "To the palace," he said. The slaves turned back up the slanting street and the motion of the lectica aroused Tiberius. "Whither?" he demanded irritably. "To the palace, Caesar," Euodus answered. "Did I command thee? To the Hippodrome, slaves!" The bearers turned once more and began the ticklish descent of the paved roadway to the valley below, where the Circus of Tusculum was built. The huge elliptical structure stood out in the plain, alone and solid except for the low, heavy arch of the vomitoria which broke the round of masonry. The trees about it were dwarfed in contrast, the columns shrunken, the viae, approaching it from all directions straight as arrows fly, curbed and paved with stone, were as mere taut ribbons. But in the great slope of the Campagna, under the immense and sparkling blue of the Italian sky, it was only a detail in rock. Rome had long since outgrown her walls and ceased to contemplate them except as landmarks and conventionalities, useless but as significant as Caesar's paludamentum. Inns and mile-stones along the viae proved them once to have been things distinctly suburban, but the city crying for room had passed the walls and built its own characteristics--temples, tombs, villas, circuses, fora and arches as far as Tusculum along the roads. Lovelier beyond comparison than Rome's loveliest spots, it was small wonder that to fill their Augustan lungs with the freshness of the Campagna, the idle were borne out of the contained airs of the city, which were of such seasonal peculiarities that temples in propitiation of Mephitis and the goddess Febris had been erected. So daily groups of patricians collected at the Hippodrome of Tusculum, with laughter and badinage, the flashing of jewels and the glittering of cars, the flutter of lustrous silks and the tossing of feathers, to spend the bright hours of the day watching the races that proceeded in the arena below. The races had not begun, the crowds had not assembled. The gilded lectica was borne through the tunnel-like entrance up the stairs, not to the amphitheater but to the arena. Slaves with blanketed horses and clusters of betting patricians were here and there over the sanded ellipse within. The bustle of preparation slackened at the approach of the august visitor. The eyes of the emperor opened and closed dully. Nothing was here to interest a man worn out with seventy years of change and excitement. Nothing new could have aroused him, for his attention rebelled against the call.