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186 DARKNESS AND DAWN
'
Acte. If so, I do not doubt that I can get you a place by
mentioning your name to the steward of the Empress.'
For the slave of a poor soldier the offer involved immense
promotion and still larger possibilities. The thought of Junia
checked Onesimus for a moment, but Acte told him that, if
he rose in the house of Caesar, there lay before him the far
nearer chances of emancipation and riches, so that he would
be more likely in due time to make Junia his own. She did
not conceal from him that, in such a community as the sixteen
hundred imperial slaves, the temptations to every form of
wrong-doing were far deadlier than in a humble and more
modest familia ; but she longed to have near her one whom
she could trust as a brother and a friend. Onesimus had
acquired at Thyatira a good knowledge of all that concerned
the purchase and the preservation of purple. It would not be
difficult for Acte, without her name appearing in the matter,
to secure him a place as the purple-keeper in the household
of Octavia. She knew that Parrnenio, the servus a purpura,
had died recently, and that the qualifications for the post were
a little less common than those which sufficed for the majority
of slaves.
Onesimus, therefore, grasped at the dazzling bait of better
pay and loftier position. That evening he spoke to JSTereus.
who, after consulting Pudens, told him that there would be
no difficulty, whether by exchange or otherwise, in permitting
his acceptance of the offer which had been made to him.
The great men who visited Caesar looked down upon the hundreds
of slaves who thronged the Palace as beings separated
from themselves by an immeasurable abyss of inferiority but to
;
the mass of paupers who formed the chief part of the population
servitude to the Emperor seemed a condition of enviable brilliance.
We are told that when Felicio was promoted to the post
of Ccesar's cobbler, he at once became a personage of importance,
and was flattered on every side. Onesimus had much the same
experience. Among those who knew him he found that he
had risen indefinitely by the exchange which transferred him
to the office of servus a purpura in the household of Octavia.
He was received into the slaves' quarters with the showers of
sweetmeats and the other humble festivities which welcomed
the advent of a new slave ;
and on the evening of his admission
Acte sent for him.