“That is just what I dread,” said Pachymius.  “Little by little, one might positively come to like it!  We should resist the beginnings of evil.”

All this time the crowd of his supporters had been pressing upon the anchorite, and had imperceptibly forced him nearer the edge of the vessel, purposing at a convenient season to throw him in.  He was now near enough to catch a glimpse of the limpid element.  Recoiling in horror, he collected all his energies, and with head depressed towards his chest, and hands thrust forth as if to ward off pollution—­butting, kicking, biting the air—­he rushed forwards, and with a preternatural force deserving to be enumerated among his miracles, fairly overthrew the enormous vase, the contents streaming on the crowd in front of the stage.

“Take me to my hermitage!” he screamed.  “I renounce the bishopric.  Take me to my hermitage!”

“Amen,” responded the demon, and, assuming his proper shape, he took Pachymius upon his back and flew away with him amid the cheers of the multitude.

Pachymius was speedily deposited at the mouth of his cavern, where he received the visits of the neighbouring anchorites, who came to congratulate him on the constancy with which he had sustained his fiery, or rather watery trial.  He spent most of his remaining days in the society of the devil, on which account he was canonised at his death.

“O Phoebus,” said Nonnus, when they were alone, “impose upon me any penance thou wilt, so I may but regain thy favour and that of the Muses.  But before all things let me destroy my paraphrase.”

“Thou shalt not destroy it,” said Phoebus, “Thou shalt publish it.  That shall be thy penance.”

And so it is that the epic on the exploits of Bacchus and the paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel have alike come down to us as the work of Nonnus, whose authorship of both learned men have never been able to deny, having regard to the similarity of style, but never could explain until the facts above narrated came to light in one of the Fayoum papyri recently acquired by the Archduke Rainer.

THE PURPLE HEAD

  Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
  That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.

I

In the heyday of the Emperor Aurelian’s greatness, when his strong right arm propped Rome up, and hewed Palmyra down, when he surrounded his capital with walls fifty miles in circuit, and led Tetricus and Zenobia in triumph through its streets, and distributed elephants among the senators, and laid Etruria out in vineyards, and contemplated in leisure moments the suppression of Christianity as a subordinate detail of administration, a mere ripple on the broad ocean of his policy—­at this period Bahram the First, King of Persia, naturally became disquieted in his mind.