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Updated: May 24, 2025
The portals and outer buildings of Vetranio's palace, as she passed them, presented a striking and ominous spectacle. Within the lofty steel railings, which protected the building, the famine-wasted slaves of the senator appeared reeling and tottering beneath full vases of wine which they were feebly endeavouring to carry into the interior apartments.
'Have you no compunction at leaving me to the dulness of this horrible palace, to satisfy your idle fancy for going to Rome, said she, pouting her pretty lip, and playing with a lock of the dark brown hair that clustered over Vetranio's brow.
Whether as he looked on Vetranio's disturbed countenance, and marked his unsteady gait, the heart of Ulpius, for the first time since his introduction to the senator, misgave him when he thought of their monstrous engagement; or whether the near approach of the moment that was henceforth, as he wildly imagined, to fix Vetranio as his assistant and ally, so powerfully affected his mind that it instinctively sought to vent its agitation through the natural medium of words, it is useless to inquire.
The chief magistrate of Rome was no longer the pompous and portly personage whose intrusion on Vetranio's privacy during the commencement of the siege has been described previously.
He would have been self-possessed in the presence of the Emperor himself, but he was uneasy in theirs. So he retired to the more congenial scene of the public festival which was in the immediate neighbourhood of the farm-house, to await the hour of his patron's arrival, and to perplex himself afresh by a re-perusal of Vetranio's letter.
For such a hiding-place, nothing can be more admirably adapted than your Arician villa. Do you now that you know for what use it is intended repent of your generous disposal of it in aid of my design? 'I am delighted to have had it to bestow on you, replied the liberal Julia, pressing Vetranio's hand. 'Your adventure is indeed uncommon I burn with impatience to hear how it will end.
This assembly of persons stopped opposite Vetranio's palace; and then such members of the mob who watched them as were not yet entirely abandoned by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the Spaniard, Basilius, a governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief of the Imperial notaries appointed ambassadors to conclude a treaty with the Goths.
Steadily, almost guiltily, averting his face from his master's countenance, he stood by Vetranio's couch, a frail and fallen being, a mournful spectacle of perverted docility and degraded youth. Still true, however, to the duties of his vocation, he ran his thin, trembling fingers over the lyre, and mechanically preluded the commencement of the ode.
As for the usual accompaniments of Vetranio's luxurious privacy, they were nowhere to be seen. Poems, pictures, trinkets, lutes, all were absent. Even the 'inestimable kitten of the breed most worshipped by the ancient Egyptians' appeared no more.
I am a citizen of Rome I demand help from the Senate! Food! food! In tones declining lower and lower he continued to cry thus from the window, but no voice answered him either in sympathy or derision. Of all the people now increased in numbers collected in the street before Vetranio's palace, no one turned even to look on him.
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