In the midst of still populous Rome, within sight of those surrounding
plains where the creative sun ripened hour by hour the vegetation of the
teeming earth, where field and granary displayed profusely their
abundant stores, the father and daughter now looked on each other, as
helpless to replace their exhausted provision of food as if they had
been abandoned on the raft of the shipwrecked in an unexplored sea, or
banished to a lonely island whose inland products were withered by
infected winds, and around whose arid shores ran such destroying waters
as seethe over the 'Cities of the Plain'.
The silence which had long prevailed in the room, the bitter reflections
which still held the despairing father and the patient daughter
speechless alike, were at length interrupted by a hollow and melancholy
voice from the street, pronouncing, in the form of a public notice,
these words:--
'I, Publius Dalmatius, messenger of the Roman Senate, proclaim, that in
order to clear the streets from the dead, three thousand sestertii will
be given by the Prefect for every ten bodies that are cast over the
walls.
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