The reader’s indifference to what confronted his eyes, added to his dull regard for the verbal accuracy of ancient verses, shrivelled the modern poet’s ardent humour.  Was this an example of the intellectual enlightenment awaiting him, he had so fondly hoped, in Athens?  With apprehension he remembered what his father’s friend, a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written him when he sent him the letter of introduction: 

“You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot to kindle the fires of pleasure.  I hear that he has called his book, a particoloured digest of information, Attic Nights, because he has spent his nights in Athens writing it—­nights, mark you, when even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings of youth.  It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off the end of my stylus when I think of Athens.  He and Gellius are scarcely the ‘like pleasing like’ of the proverb!  Lucian, in fact, disposed of Gellius once by calling him an ’Infant Ignorance on the arm of Fashion.’  This was after he had watched a peasant making holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus.  The blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond his understanding.  But in fairness I must add that when this was repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted:  ’Better a child than an iconoclast in the presence of beauty.  I should call Gellius an honest errand boy in Athena’s temple.’  So there you have two ways of looking at your future host.  If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.

“On Gellius’s return next year he is to be made a judge.  He will study law painstakingly and apply it exactly.  And Rome will never for him be one whit juster.  However, your father will be delighted to have you make such a friend—­a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life of Athens.  Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him.  As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man he is naively sincere and candid and with all the strength of his Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement.  He may bore you, but, if I do not misread you, the pleasures that are within his gift will have a finer edge for you than those of the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.”