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The whole movement was made in silence, without a cheer or yell, for, like the porter and the Scythians, the most unconscionable villains in our ergastulum quailed before the truculence of the frontier sergeants.
As he bent his steps towards the purple factories he passed before the ergastulum, which was a long house of black stone built in a square pit with a small pathway all round it and four staircases at the corners. Iddibal was doubtless waiting until the night to finish his signal. "There is no hurry yet," thought Hamilcar; and he went down into the prison.
The slide by which the grain was lowered into the ergastulum, the other slide by which the flour, coarse siftings and bran were hauled up, were similarly guarded. Escape was made so difficult by these precautions that, while I was there, no one escaped out of the three hundred wretches confined in the ergastulum.
There I passed a miserable winter. Our prison was not unlike the ergastulum at Placentia; ill-designed, damp, cold, filthy, swarming with vermin and crowded with wretches like myself.
If some whim prompted any one of the eighteen to take the lead in emptying an ergastulum or breaking in a town gate, or sacking a shop, not one of his fellow-sergeants demurred or expostulated or opposed him; they all concurred in any suggestion of any one of them. And the soldiers followed their centurions with, apparently, implicit confidence in them, or a blind instinct of deference.
I do not wish to dwell on my wretchedness, after we were parted. Alone among riffraff, I was very miserable. I mourned for the faithful fellow and knew he mourned for me. I longed for him as keenly as if he had been my twin-brother. I and my fellows were marched on under close convoy, up the Flaminian Highway and the batch among which I was, was cast into the ergastulum at Nuceria.
"Oh no!" replied the slave. "You released me from the ergastulum. I am yours! you are my master! command me!" Matho walked round the terrace brushing against the walls. He strained his ears at every step, glancing down into the silent apartments through the spaces between the gilded reeds. At last he stopped with a look of despair. "Listen!" said the slave to him.
But at Placentia and Nuceria I had solaced myself amid the horror of my situation by reminding myself that I was, at least, alive, and, as long as I was in an ergastulum, entirely safe from any danger of being recognized and executed.
I found conditions in the Umbrian mountains as amazing, as incredible as in the ergastulum at Nuceria. There the two vital facts were the negligence and impotence of the warders and the secret system for cheating and thwarting them.
Many daggers and knives were smuggled into the ergastulum, not a few files. The senators had a small arsenal of old swords, regular infantry swords, rusty but dangerous. Gradually I heard whispers of a plot.
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