The old man disliked writing anything but Egyptian, using Greek unwillingly and clumsily, so he entrusted to his young friend the task of rendering his explanations into that language.  Thus the two men—­so different in age and character, but so closely allied in intellectual aims—­led a joint existence which was both pleasant and helpful to both, in spite of the various eccentricities, the harshness and severity of the elder.

Horapollo lived after the manner of the early Egyptian priests, subjecting himself to much ablution and shaving; eating little but bread, vegetables, and poultry, and abstaining from pulse and the flesh of all beasts—­not merely of the prohibited animal, swine; wearing nothing but pure linen clothing, and setting apart certain hours for the recitation of those heathen forms of prayer whose magic power was to compel the gods to grant the desires of those who thus appealed to them.

And if the old man had given his full confidence to Philippus, the leech, on his part, had no secrets from him; or, if he withheld anything, Horapollo, with wonderful acumen, was at once aware of it.  Philippus had often spoken of Paula to his parental friend, describing her charms with all the fervor of a lover, but the old man was already prejudiced against her, if only as the daughter of a patrician and a prefect.  All who bore these titles were to him objects of hatred, for a patrician and a prefect had been guilty of the blood of those he had held most dear.  The Governor of Antioch, to be sure, had acted only under the orders of the bishop; but old Horapollo, and his father before him, from the first had chosen to throw all the blame on the prefect, for it afforded some satisfaction to the descendant of an ancestral race of priests to be able to vent all his wrathful spite on any one rather than on the minister of a god—­be that god who or what he might.

So when Philippus praised Paula’s dignified grandeur, her superior elegance, the height of her stature or the loftiness of her mind, the old man would bound up exclaiming:  “Of course—­of course!—­Beware boy, beware!  You are disguising haughtiness, conceit, and arrogance under noble names.  The word ‘patrician’ includes everything we can conceive of as most insolent and inhuman; and those apes in purple who disgrace the Imperial throne pick out the worst of them, the most cold-hearted and covetous, to make prefects of them.  And as they are, so are their children!  Everything which they in their vainglory regard as ’beneath them’ they tread into the dust—­and we—­you and I, all who labor with their hands in the service of the state—­we, in their dull eyes, are beneath them.  Mark me, boy!  To-day the governor’s daughter, the patrician maiden, can smile at you because she needs you; tomorrow she will cast you aside as I push away the old panther-skin which keeps my feet warm in winter, as soon as the March days come!”