“With him, at any rate,” said the old man, “one gets something for the money.  His horses cost a great deal but he knows how to win with them; his entertainments swallow up a pretty sum, but they gain him respect wherever he goes.  He brought me a letter from the Senator Justinus, and the worthy man tells me what a leading part he plays among the gilded youth of the Capital.  All this is not to be had for nothing, and it will be cheap in the end.  What need we care about a hundred talents more or less!  And there is something magnanimous in the lad that has given him the spirit to feel that.”

And it was not a hale old grey-beard who spoke thus, but a broken man, whose only joy it was to lavish on his son the riches which he had long been incapable of enjoying.  The high-spirited and gifted youth, scarcely more than a boy in years, whom he had sent to the Capital with no small misgivings, must have led a far less lawless life than might have been expected; of this the ruddy tinge in his sunburnt cheeks was ample guarantee, the vigorous solidity of his muscles, and the thick waves of his hair, which was artificially curled and fell in a fringe, as was then the fashion, over his high brow, giving him a certain resemblance to the portraits of Antinous, the handsomest youth in the time of the Emperor Hadrian.  Even his mother owned that he looked like health itself, and no member of the Imperial family could be more richly, carefully and fashionably dressed than her darling.  But even in the humblest garb he would have been a handsome—­a splendid youth, and his mother’s pride!  When he left home there was still a smack of the provincial about him; but now every kind of awkwardness had vanished, and wherever he might go —­even in the Capital, he was certain to be one of the first to attract observation and approval.

And what had he not known in his city experience?  The events of half a century had followed each other with intoxicating rapidity in the course of the thirty months he had spent there.  The greater the excitement, the greater the pleasure was the watchword of his time; and though he had rioted and revelled on the shores of the Bosphorus if ever man did, still the pleasures of feasting and of love, or of racing with his own victorious horses—­all of which he had enjoyed there to the full—­were as child’s play compared with the nervous tension to which he had been strung by the appalling events he had witnessed on all sides.  How petty was the excitement of an Alexandrian horse-race!  Whether Timon or Ptolemy or he himself should win—­what did it matter?  It was a fine thing no doubt to carry off the crown in the circus at Byzantium, but there were other and soul-stirring crises there beyond those which were bound up with horses or chariots.  There a throne was the prize, and might cost the blood and life of thousands!—­What did a man bring home from the churches in the Nile valley?  But if he crossed the threshold of St. Sophia’s in Constantinople he often might have his blood curdled, or bring home—­what matter?—­bleeding wounds, or even be carried home —­a corpse.