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372 DARKNESS AND DAWN
'
triumphal ornaments,' a flowered tunic, over which flowed a
purple robe, embroidered with palm branches in gold and
silver thread. He was not half at ease in this splendid apparel,
and told his wife Caeuis that he was an old fool for his
pains. The entertainment was sufficient, though Otho would
have thought
it
hardly good enough for his freedmen. The
board was graced with old Sabiue and Etruscan ware of great
antiquity and curious workmanship, as well as with objects of
interest which Vespasian had bought when he was an officer
in Thrace, Crete, and Cyrene.
But Vespasian himself, who was sturdily indifferent to
fashion, and took pleasure in showing how little he regarded
the criticisms of Roman dandyism, drank out of a little silver
cup which had belonged to his grandmother, and which he
would not have exchanged for the loveliest crystal on the
table of Petronius. And Caradoc, as he sat there in his
simple dress and golden torque, was far more happy at that
modest entertainment than he would have been at the house
of any other of the Roman nobles.
The party was, so to speak, a British party, for most of them
were familiar with the storm-swept Northern island, which was
regarded as the Ultima Thule of civilisation. That day Pudens
had received an appointment to go to Britain and support as
well as he could the wavering fortunes of Suetonius Paulinus.
Caradoc was permitted to return with him and take up his
abode at Noviomagus, the town of the Regni. They were to
sail as early as possible from Ostia. More than this, Aulus
Plautius, to whose powerful influence these appointments had
been due, had secured for his young friend Titus the excellent
position of a tribune of the soldiers to the army in Britain.
It was a graceful recognition of the services which Vespasian
had rendered to him twenty years before, when, as his legate
of the legion, he had fought thirty battles, captured more than
twenty towns, and reduced the Isle of Wight to subjection.
It was in Britain, as Tacitus says, that Vespasian had first
been ' shown to the Fates' The whole party were in the highest
spirits.
The old king rejoiced to think that he should rest at
last in the land of his fathers. Claudia longed to escape from
the suffocating atmosphere of Roman luxury. Pudeus knew
that in Rome his Christian convictions might speedily bring
him into peril,
and that in far-off Britain he could breathe