and all ways of life mental refinement took precedence of crass display.  Here, he felt, he could live and work, unknown to fame indeed, but with all that was best in him dedicated in freedom and integrity to the life of the spirit.  The memory of Egypt, where all effort lost itself in the mockery of the desert, and the thought of Rome, where in these later years all fruitful effort was military, political, commercial, became almost equally abhorrent to him.  Greece, set within her stainless seas, was like a holy temple set apart, a place of refuge from shams and error and confusion.

This worshipful attitude towards Athens was crystallized in the young poet at the time of the Panathenaic festival, in July.  The festival was still a brilliant one, a brief radiance falling upon city and citizens.  Unlike a holiday season at Rome, here were no shows of gladiators or beasts, no procession of captors and captives, no array of Arabian gold or Chinese silk or Indian embroideries.  The Athenians, seeking novelty, found it in their own renewed appreciation of the physical skill of athletes, of music and drama, of observances still hallowed by religion and patriotism.  On the Acropolis Paulus watched the arrival of the procession bringing this year’s peplos to Athena.  After centuries of shame in the political life of her city the gold-ivory statue of the Guardian Goddess shone undefiled in a temple whose beauty was a denial of time.  The pageant also, once more paying tribute to Wisdom, was noble and beautiful as in the days of Phidias.  The gifts of Greece were beyond the reach of conqueror or destroyer.  Paulus entered the inner shrine and looked up at the winged Victory borne upon the hand of the goddess.  To dwell in Athens seemed a sacred purpose.  Involuntarily, in self-dedication, he found himself using the familiar prayer of the theatre: 

  O majestical Victory, shelter my life
  Neath thy covert of wings,
    Aye, cease not to grant me thy crowning.

III

The answer to this prayer, the grant of victory, came, as it happened, in strange guise.  The sensitive Roman youth, still in the potter’s hands, had reckoned without the final Greek experience which lay ahead of him, the issue of one night in the early autumn.  During the season of the full moon in September all lectures were suspended and most of the Roman students joined the crowd of travellers to Elis to see the Olympic games.  Paulus had had a touch of malaria and his physician had urged him not to expose himself to the dangers of outdoor camping in a low country.  He consented lightly, thinking to himself that since he was to live in Greece he could afford to postpone for a few years the arduous pleasures of the great festival.  Herodes Atticus had gone this year, and upon his return brought with him for a visit a group of very distinguished men, including Lucian and Apuleius and the Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy.  Paulus was astonished and proud to receive, with Gellius, an invitation to a dinner in their honour given at Cephisia.