As Vinicius approached the walls, he found it easier to reach Rome than
penetrate to the middle of the city. It was difficult to push along the Appian Way,
because of the throng of people. Houses, fields, cemeteries, gardens, and
temples, lying on both sides of it, were turned into camping places. In the temple
of Mars, which stood near the Porta Appia, the crowd had thrown down the
doors, so as to find a refuge within during night-hours. In the cemeteries the
larger monuments were seized, and battles fought in defence of them, which
were carried to bloodshed. Ustrinum with its disorder gave barely a slight
foretaste of that which was happening beneath the walls of the capital. All regard
for the dignity of law, for family ties, for difference of position, had ceased.
Gladiators drunk with wine seized in the Emporium gathered in crowds, ran with
wild shouts through the neighboring squares, scattering, trampling, and robbing
the people. A multitude of barbarians, exposed for sale in the city, escaped from
the booths. For them the burning and ruin, of Rome was at once the end of
slavery and the hour of revenge; so that when the permanent inhabitants, who
had lost all they owned in the fire, stretched their hands to the gods in despair,
calling for rescue, these slaves with howls of delight scattered the crowds,
dragged clothing from people's backs, and bore away the younger women. They
were joined by slaves serving in the city from of old, wretches who had nothing
on their bodies save woollen girdles around their hips, dreadful figures from the
alleys, who were hardly ever seen on the streets in the daytime, and whose
existence in Rome it was difficult to suspect. Men of this wild and unrestrained
crowd, Asiatics, Africans, Greeks, Thracians, Germans, Britons, howling in every
language of the earth, raged, thinking that the hour had come in which they were
free to reward themselves for years of misery and suffering. In the midst of that
surging throng of humanity, in the glitter of day and of fire, shone the helmets of
pretorians, under whose protection the more peaceable population had taken
refuge, and who in hand-to-hand battle had to meet the raging multitude in many
places. Vinicius had seen captured cities, but never had his eyes beheld a
spectacle in which despair, tears, pain, groans, wild delight, madness, rage, and
license were mingled together in such immeasurable chaos. Above this heaving,
mad human multitude roared the fire, surging up to the hill-tops of the greatest
city on earth, sending into the whirling throng its fiery breath, and covering it with
smoke, through which it was impossible to see the blue sky. The young tribune
with supreme effort, and exposing his life every moment, forced his way at last to
the Appian Gate; but there he saw that he could not reach the city through the
division of the Porta Capena, not merely because of the throng, but also because
of the terrible heat from which the whole atmosphere was quivering inside the
gate. Besides, the bridge at the Porta Trigenia, opposite the temple of the Bona
Dea, did not exist yet, hence whoso wished to go beyond the Tiber had to push
through to the Pons Sublicius, that is, to pass around the Aventine through a part
of the city covered now with one sea of flame. That was an impossibility. Vinicius
understood that he must return toward Ustrinum, turn from the Appian Way,
