Sextus, son of Maximus, rode not alone.  Norbanus rode beside him, and behind them Scylax on the famous Arab mare that Sextus had won from Artaxes the Persian in a wager on the recent chariot races.  Scylax was a slave but no less, for that reason, Sextus’ friend.

Norbanus rode a skewbald Cappadocian that kicked out sidewise at pedestrians; so there was opportunity for private conversation, even on the road to Daphne of an afternoon in spring, when nearly all of fashionable Antioch was beginning to flow in that direction.  Horses, litters and chariots, followed by crowds of slaves on foot with the provisions for moonlight banquets, poured toward the northern gate, some overtaking and passing the three but riding wide of the skewbald Cappadocian stallion’s heels.

“If Pertinax should really come,” said Sextus.

“He will have a girl with him,” Norbanus interrupted.  He had an annoying way of finishing the sentences that other folk began.

“True.  When he is not campaigning Pertinax finds a woman irresistible.”

“And naturally, also, none resists a general in the field!” Norbanus added.  “So our handsome Pertinax performs his vows to Aphrodite with a constancy that the goddess rewards by forever putting lovely women in his way!  Whereas Stoics like you, Sextus, and unfortunates like me, who don’t know how to amuse a woman, are made notorious by one least lapse from our austerity.  The handsome, dissolute ones have all the luck.  The roisterers at Daphne will invent such scandalous tales of us tonight as will pursue us for a lustrum, and yet there isn’t a chance in a thousand that we shall even enjoy ourselves!”

“Yes.  I wish now we had chosen any other meeting place than Daphne,” Sextus answered gloomily.  “What odds?  Had we gone into the desert Pertinax would have brought his own last desperate adorer, and a couple more to bore us while he makes himself ridiculous.  Strange—­that a man so firm in war and wise in government should lose his head the moment a woman smiles at him.”

“He doesn’t lose his head—­much,” Sextus answered.  “But his father was a firewood seller in a village in Liguria.  That is why he so loves money and the latest fashions.  Poverty and rags—­austerity inflicted on him in his youth—­great Jupiter!  If you and I had risen from the charcoal-burning to be consul twice and a grammarian and the friend of Marcus Aurelius; if you and I were as handsome as he is, and had experienced a triumph after restoring discipline in Britain and conducting two or three successful wars; and if either of us had such a wife as Flavia Titiana, I believe we could besmirch ourselves more constantly than Pertinax does!  It is not that he delights in women so much as that he thinks debauch is aristocratic.  Flavia Titiana is unfaithful to him.  She is also a patrician and unusually clever.  He has never understood her, but she is witty, so he thinks her wonderful and tries to imitate her immorality.  But the only woman who really sways him is the proudish Cornificia, who is almost as incapable of treachery as Pertinax himself.  He is the best governor the City of Rome has had in our generation.  Can you imagine what Rome would be like without him?  Call to mind what it was like when Fuscianus was the governor!”