Pratinas Meets Ill-Fortune I Probably of the various personages mentioned in the course of our story none was more thoroughly enjoying life about this time than Agias.

Drusus had left him in the city when he started for Ravenna, with general instructions to keep an eye on Lucius Ahenobarbus and Pratinas, and also to gather all he could of the political drift among the lower classes.

Agias was free now.

He let his hair grow long in token of his newly gained liberty; paraded a many-folded toga; and used part of the donatives which Drusus and Fabia had lavished upon him, in buying one or two slave-boys of his own, whom, so far from treating gently on account of his own lately servile position, he cuffed and abused with grim satisfaction at being able to do what had so often been done to him.
Agias had been given lodgings by Drusus in a tenement house, owned by the latter, in the Subura.
The rooms were over a bakery, and at the sides were a doctor's and surgeon's office and a barber's shop--a rendezvous which gave the young Greek an admirable chance to pick up the current gossip.

Every street-pedler, every forum-idler, had his political convictions and pet theories.