On the right side of the stage were three purple-covered couches.  On one of them sat Titianus, the prefect, who, like the artists, used his pencil; with him was his wife Julia.  On another reclined Verus, at full length, and as usual, crowned with roses; the third was for Plutarch, but was unoccupied.  The praetor did not hesitate to interrupt any speaker, as though he were the host of the entertainment, and many of his remarks were followed by loud applause, or approving laughter.

The face and figure of the wealthy Plutarch, which could never be forgotten, were not altogether strange to Arsinoe, for, a few days previously he had shown himself for the first time in many years in his papyrus factory, with an architect to settle with him how the courts and rooms could best be cleaned and decorated for the reception of the Emperor; and on this occasion he had gone into the room where she worked and had pinched her cheek with a few roguish and flattering words.

There he was, walking across the stage.  He was an old man, said to be about seventy years of age, his legs were half-paralyzed, and they nevertheless moved with a series of incessant and rapid but unvoluntary jerks under his heavy bowed body, and he was supported on either hand by a tall young fellow.  His nobly-formed head, must have been in his youth, of extraordinary beauty.  Now his head was covered by a wig of long brown hair, his eyebrows and lashes were darkly dyed, his cheeks daubed with red and white paint, which gave his countenance a fixed expression, as if he had been stricken in the very act of smiling.  On his curls he wore a wreath of rare flowers in long racemes.  An abundance of red and white roses stuck out from the front folds of his ample toga, and were held in their place by gold brooches, sparkling with precious stones of large size.  The hems of his mantle were all edged with rose-buds, and each was fastened in with an emerald that shone like some bright insect.  The young men who supported him seemed like a portion of himself; he took no more heed of them than if they had been crutches, and they needed not command to tell them where he wished to go, where to stand still, and where to rest.

At a distance his face was like that of a youth, but seen close it looked like a painted plaster mask, with regular features and large movable eyes.

Favorinus, the sophist, had said of him that one might cry over his handsome locomotive corpse, if one were not obliged to laugh at it, and it was said that he had himself declared that he would force his faithless youth to remain with him.  The Alexandrians called him the Adonis with six legs, on account of the lads who supported him, and without whom no one ever saw him and who always accompanied him when he went out.  The first time he heard this nickname he remarked:  “They had better have called me sixhanded;” and in fact he had a thoroughly good heart, he was liberal and benevolent, took fatherly care of his work-people, treated his slaves well, enriched those whom he set free, and from time to time distributed large sums among the people in money and in grain.