“You will be free. I promise it.”
And free he was not entirely to his surprise to meet her chair the next afternoon, according to a note brought to him that morning by a slave from the imperial household. Fausta was quite as lovely and entrancing in the daylight as she had been the night before and, even in a typically narrow Roman street, the people gave way to the sedan chair bearing the emblem of Maximian Augustus.
In order to reach the better shops of the city, they had to traverse an area of what was called the subura, where many of the lower classes of Rome lived. Constantine had never seen houses like those, often with as many as seven stories, that jammed the narrow streets on every side. There were taverns everywhere, too, with people going in and out constantly, as well as all kind of shops those for the sale of food, barbershops, crowded bazaars in which discarded clothing and almost anything else one might wish to buy was for sale, small sidewalk booths where fortune tellers, soothsayers, money changers, street peddlers, and others held forth. And beggars, of course, were everywhere.
At the Septa Julia inside the Via Lata, Fausta stopped the chair and took Constantine’s arm, while they strolled through the shaded arcades where the finest shops of Rome were located. Exquisite crystal from Alexandria reminded him of the sorry state in which he had last seen that once lovely city, so he moved on to where Fausta was exclaiming over necklaces, earrings, jeweled combs and silvermounted mirrors eagerly offered for her inspection by the merchants, along with rich embroideries from Babylon, emeralds from Egypt and silk from China.
Nubian lands
Another stall displayed carved trinkets of ivory from the Nubian lands far to the south in Africa, delicate colored tile inlays from Syria and the Phoenician cities, as well as fabrics of all hues and colors. Everything the heart of a woman could want for these shops catered to feminine taste was on display, while in another area, booksellers offered scrolls in every tongue known to man, maps of faroff lands and the detailed descriptions of the geographer Strabo, whose works encompassed the entire world.
Fausta soon tired of shopping and, when they resumed their chair, ordered the slaves to carry them to the pleasure park given the people of Rome by the statesman Agrippa in honor of the Pax Romana. Here the chair was stopped again, while its mistress and her escort walked along paths that wound between rose arbors, finely trimmed hedges and beneath the shade of towering trees. In the portico of Europa, they paused before a large map of the world which Agrippa had ordered chiseled from marble, so that all Romans might see the extent of the Empire.
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