He had landed a week ago.  To-day’s excursion, offering a pleasant comradeship with those of his own race in a strange land, came almost opportunely, he fancied, to break an exalted mood.  He had found himself roused to the uttermost by his first impressions of Athens.  Put to flight by the seduction of river and desert, it was the influence of the landscape rather than of art and history to which he was here first made sensitive.  Sea, mountains and plain were informed with a beauty which purged his memory of the evil loveliness of Egypt and restored gravity and dignity to his conception of human life.  He was struck by what Plato would have called the Doric strain in the harmonies of outline and colour.  Idyllic scenes he had already run across in his walks out from the city, scenes formed and reformed by the lovely occupations of farm and vineyard and pasture.  But the lyric note so familiar to him in Italy seemed always overborne by a deeper.  Whether it was because of the noble modelling of the fleshless mountains or because of an inner restraint in the minor elements of the landscape, the mood generated by the beauty of the Attic plain was always a grave one, delight swelling into reverence.

Now also, as his thoughts ceased whirling and he became conscious again of what lay around him, his irritation died.  All that was trifling must be discarded when his eye could travel beyond wild hyacinth and myrtle, past pines and olive groves and cypresses, past the rosy soil of upturned fields, to the long, firm lines of Parnes’s purple ridge and to the snowy summit, a midday beacon, high-uplifted, of distant Helicon.

To his relief, Paulus found that Gellius’s monologue had given way to general conversation.  As he listened his heart grew hot within him.  These young men, of whom only Gellius and Servilianus had passed out of their twenties, had lived in Athens for a year or longer, and now, conscious of their approaching departure, they had fallen to talking of the past months.  A strange power Athens seemed to have of exacting from aliens the intimate loyalty of sons.  Here, Paulus felt, was no miserly counting up of gains, but an inner concern with art and history.  Not as gluttonous travellers, but as those facing a long exile, they talked of a city richer than Rome or Alexandria or Antioch, richer than all the cities of the Empire taken together, in masterpieces of architect and sculptor and painter; of a country-side alive with memories of poets and thinkers and soldiers.  Taking with a catholic enthusiasm the hot winds and driving white dust of summer, the deforming rains of winter, and the bright splendour of sky and earth at the advent of spring, they had tramped hither and yon, light-hearted in the vigour of youth, reverent in the impulse of pilgrimage.  Mountain fastnesses where the clarion winds still trumpeted the victory of freedom and of Thrasybulus; upland caves where Plato had been taken as a child to worship Pan; long,