The aspect of the palace at Lochias was entirely changed.  In the place of the gay little gate-house stood a large tent of gorgeous purple stuff, in which the Emperor’s body-guard was quartered, and opposite to it another was pitched for lictors and messengers.  The stables were full of horses.  Hadrian’s own horse, Borysthenes, which had had too long a rest, pawed and stamped impatiently in a separate stall, and close at hand the Emperor’s retrievers, boar-hounds and harriers were housed in hastily-contrived yards and kennels.

In the wide space of the first court soldiers were encamped, and close under the walls squatted men and women—­Egyptians, Greeks and Hebrews—­ who desired to offer petitions to the sovereign.  Chariots drove in and out, litters came and went, chamberlains and other officials hurried hither and thither.  The anterooms were crowded with men of the upper classes of the citizens who hoped to be granted audience by the Emperor at the proper hour.  Slaves, who offered refreshments to those who waited or stood idly looking on, were to be seen in every room, and official persons, with rolls of manuscript under their arms, bustled into the inner rooms or out of the palace to carry into effect the orders of their superior.

The hall of the Muses had been turned into a grand banqueting-hall.  Papias, who was now on his way to Italy by the Emperor’s command, had restored the damaged shoulder of the Urania.  Couches and divans stood between the statues, and under a canopy at the upper end of the vast room stood a throne on which Hadrian sat when he held audience.  On these occasions he always appeared in the purple, but in his writing-room, which he had not changed for another, he laid aside the imperial mantle and was no more splendid in his garb than the architect Claudius Venator had been.

In the rooms that had belonged to the deceased Keraunus now dwelt an Egyptian without wife or children—­a stern and prudent man who had done good service as house-steward to the prefect Titianus, and the living-room of the evicted family now looked dreary and uninhabited.  The mosaic pavement which had indirectly caused the death of Keraunus, was now on its way to Rome, and the new steward had not thought it worth while to fill up the empty, dusty, broken-up place which had been left in the floor of his room by the removal of the work of art, nor even to cover it over with mats.  Not a single cheerful note was audible in the abandoned dwelling but the twitter of the birds which still came morning and evening to perch on the balcony, for Arsinoe and the children had never neglected to strew the parapet with crumbs for them at the end of each meal.

All that was gracious, all that was attractive in the old palace had vanished at Sabina’s visit, and even Hadrian himself was a different man to what he had been a few days previously.  The dignity with which he appeared in public was truly imperial and unapproachable, and even when he sat with his intimates in his favorite room he was grave, gloomy and taciturn.  The oracle, the stars, and other signs announced some terrible catastrophe for the coming year with a certainty that he could not evade; and the few careless days that he had been permitted to enjoy at Lochias had ended with unsatisfactory occurrences.