“You ought to know,” said Pertinax.  “You tutored Commodus.  Whoever could take a murderer at the age of twelve and keep him from breaking the heart of a Marcus Aurelius knows more about men and boys than I do.”

“Ah, but I failed,” said Galen.  “The young Commodus was like a nibbling fish; you thought you had him, but he always took the bait and left the hook.  The wisdom I fed to him fattened his wickedness.  If I had known then what I have learned from teaching Commodus and others, not even Marcus Aurelius could have persuaded me to undertake the task—­medical problem though it was, and promotion though it was, and answer though it was to all the doctors who denounced me as a charlatan.  I bought my fashionable practise at the cost of knowing it was I who taught young Commodus the technique of wickedness by revealing to him all its sinuosities and how, and why, it floods a man’s mind.”

“He was a beast in any case,” said Pertinax.

“Yes, but a baffled, blind beast.  I removed the bandage from his eyes.”

“He would have pulled it off himself.”

“I did it.  I turned a mere golden-haired savage into a criminal who knows what he is doing.”

“Well, drink and forget it!” said Pertinax.  “I, too, have done things that are best forgotten.  We attain success by learning from defeat, and we forget defeat in triumph.  I know of no triumph that did not blot out scores of worse things than defeat.  When I was in Britain I subdued rebellion and restored the discipline of mutinying legions.  How?  I am not such a fool as to tell you all that happened!  When I was in Africa men called me a great proconsul.  So I was.  They would welcome me back there, if all I hear about the present man is true.  But do you suppose I did not fail in certain instances?  They praise me for the aqueducts I built, and for the peace I left along the border.  But I also left dry bones, and sons of dead men who will teach their grandsons how to hate the name of Rome!  I sent a hundred thousand slaves from Africa.  Sometimes, when I have dined unwisely and there is no Galen near to freshen up my belly juices, I have nightmares, in which men and women cry to me for water that I took from them to pour into the cities.  I have learned this, Galen:  Do one thing wisely and you will commit ten follies.  You are lucky if you have but ten failures to detract from one success—­as lucky as a man who has but ten mistresses to interfere with his enjoyment of his wife!”

He spoke of mistresses because the girls were coming down the temple steps to take part in the sunset ceremony.  The torches they carried were unlighted yet; their figures, draped in linen, looked almost super-humanly lovely in the deepening twilight, and as they laid their garlands on the marble altar near the temple steps and grouped themselves again on either side of it their movements suggested a phantasmagoria fading away into infinite distance, as if all the universe were filled with women without age or blemish.  There began to be a scent of incense in the air.