“The only person here who has a right to desire is myself,” cried the Emperor, “and I desire that you shall never enter this palace again, nor ever come within sight of me so long as I remain here.  What to do with your kith and kin I will consider.  Not another word!  Away with you, I say, and thank the gods that I judge the misdeed of a miserable boy more mercifully than you dared to do in judging the work of a greater man than yourself, though you knew that he had done it in an idle hour with a few hasty touches.  Be off, fellow; my slaves will finish destroying your image there, for it deserves no better fate, and because—­what was it you said just now?  I remember—­and because it enrages me.”

A bitter laugh rang after the lad as he quitted the hall.  At the entrance, which was perfectly dark, he found his master, Papias, who had not missed a word of what had passed between him and the Emperor.  As Pollux went into his mother’s house he cried out: 

“Oh mother, mother, what a morning, and what an evening.  Happiness is only the threshold to misery.”

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THE EMPEROR

By Georg Ebers

Volume 7.

CHAPTER V.

While Pollux and his mother, who was much grieved, waited for Euphorion’s return, and while Papias was ingratiating himself with the Emperor by pretending still to believe that Hadrian was nothing more than Claudius Venator, the architect, Aurelius Verus, nicknamed by the Alexandrians, “the sham Eros” had lived through strange experiences.

In the afternoon he had visited the Empress, in the hope of persuading her to look on at the gay doings of the people, even if incognito; but Sabina was out of spirits, declared herself unwell, and was quite sure that the noise of the rabble would be the death of her.  Having, as she said, so vivacious a reporter as Verus, she might spare herself from exposing her own person to the dust and smell of the town, and the uproar of men.  As soon as Lucilla begged her husband to remember his rank and not to mingle with the excited multitude, at any rate after dark, the Empress strictly enjoined him to see with his own eyes everything that could be worth notice in the festival, and more particularly to give attention to everything that was peculiar to Alexandria and not to be seen in Rome.

After sunset Verus had first gone to visit the veterans of the Twelfth Legion who had been in the field with him against the Numidians, and to whom he gave a dinner at an eating-house, as being his old fellow-soldiers.  For above an hour he sat drinking with the brave old fellows; then, quitting them, he went to look at the Canopic way by night, as it was but a few paces thither from the scene of his hospitality.  It was brilliantly lighted with tapers, torches, and lamps, and the large houses behind the colonnades were gaudy with rich hangings; only the handsomest and stateliest of them all had no kind of decoration.  This was the abode of the Jew Apollodorus.