which Pompeius aided to have enacted.  But now Crassus the third triumvir is dead; Julia, Caesar’s daughter and Pompeius’s wife, whom both dearly loved, is dead.  And Pompeius has been persuaded by your uncle and his friends to break with Caesar and repudiate his promise.  Caesar and Pompeius have long been so powerful together that none could shake their authority; but if one falls away and combines with the common enemy, what but trouble is to be expected?”

  [72] Without the imperium—­so long as a Roman official held this
  he was above prosecution.

“The enemy! the enemy!” repeated Cornelia, looking down, and sighing.  “Quintus, these feuds are a dreadful thing.  Can’t you,” and here she threw a bit of pathetic entreaty into her voice, “join with my uncle’s party, and be his friend?  I hate to think of having my husband at variance with the man who stands in place of my father.”

Drusus took her face between his hands, and looked straight at her.  They were standing within the colonnade of the villa of the Lentuli, and the sunlight streaming between the pillars fell directly upon Cornelia’s troubled face, and made a sort of halo around her.

“My dearest, delectissima,” said Quintus, earnestly, “I could not honourably take your hand in marriage, if I had not done that which my conscience, if not my reason, tells me is the only right thing to do.  It grieves me to hurt you; but we are not fickle Greeks, nor servile Easterns; but Romans born to rule, and because born to rule, born to count nothing dear that will tend to advance the strength and prosperity not of self, but of the state.  You would not love me if I said I cared more for keeping a pang from your dear heart, than for the performance of that which our ancestors counted the one end of life—­duty to the commonwealth.”

Cornelia threw her arms around him.

“You are the noblest man on the whole earth!” she cried with bright enthusiasm.  “Of course I would not love you if you did what you believed to be wrong!  My uncle may scold, may storm.  I shan’t care for all his anger, for you must be right.”

“Ah! delectissima,” cried Drusus, feeling at the moment as if he were capable of refuting senates and confounding kings, “we will not look at too gloomy a side of the picture.  Pompeius and Caesar will be reconciled.  Your uncle’s party will see that it is best to allow the proconsul an election as promised.  We will have wise laws and moderate reforms.  All will come out aright.  And we—­we two—­will go along through life as softly and as merrily as now we stroll up and down in the cool shade of these columns; and I will turn philosopher and evolve a new system that will forever send Plato and Zeno, Epicurus and Timon, to the most remote and spider-spun cupboard of the most old-fashioned library, and you shall be a poetess, a Sappho, an Erinna, who shall tinkle in Latin metres sweeter than they ever sing in Aiolic.  And so we will fleet the time as though we were Zeus and Hera on Olympus.”