Besides all this, the prefect’s honesty was well known, and it was strongly suspected that he, as steward of all the taxes of this wealthy province, had been bold enough to reject a proposal made by Theocritus to embezzle the whole freight of a fleet loaded with corn for Rome, and charge it to the account of army munitions.  It was a fact that this base proposal had been made and rejected only the evening before, and the scene of which Philip became the witness was the result of this refusal.

Theocritus, to whom an audience was always indispensable, carefully left the curtains apart which divided the prefect’s sick-room from the antechamber, and thus Philip was witness of the proceedings he now described to his sister.

Titianus received his visitor, lying down, and yet his demeanor revealed the self-possessed dignity of a high-born Roman, and the calm of a Stoic philosopher.  He listened unmoved to the courtier, who, after the usual formal greetings, took upon himself to overwhelm the older man with the bitterest accusations and reproaches.  People allowed themselves to take strange liberties with Caesar in this town, Theocritus burst out; insolent jests passed from lip to lip.  An epigram against his sacred person had found its way into the Serapeum, his present residence—­an insult worthy of any punishment, even of death and crucifixion.

When the prefect, with evident annoyance, but still quite calmly, desired to know what this extraordinary insult might be, Theocritus showed that even in his high position he had preserved the accurate memory of the mime, and, half angry, but yet anxious to give full effect to the lines by voice and gesture, he explained that “some wretch had fastened a rope to one of the doors of the sanctuary, and had written below it the blasphemous words: 

    ’Hail!  For so welcome a guest never came to the sovereign of Hades. 
     Who ever peopled his realm, Caesar, more freely than thou? 
     Laurels refuse to grow green in the darksome abode of Serapis;
     Take, then, this rope for a gift, never more richly deserved.’”

“It is disgraceful!” exclaimed the prefect.

“Your indignation is well founded.  But the biting tongue of the frivolous mixed races dwelling in this city is well known.  They have tried it on me; and if, in this instance, any one is to blame, it is not I, the imprisoned prefect, but the chief and captain of the night-watch, whose business it is to guard Caesar’s residence more strictly.”

At this Theocritus was furious, and poured out a flood of words, expatiating on the duties of a prefect as Caesar’s representative in the provinces.  “His eye must be as omniscient as that of the all-seeing Deity.  The better he knew the uproarious rabble over whom he ruled, the more evidently was it his duty to watch over Caesar’s person as anxiously as a mother over her child, as a miser over his treasure.”