Caracalla nodded his consent, and Alexander hurried away; the despot heaping abuse on Zminis, and demanding why he had not at once had the images removed.  The Egyptian now confessed that he had only heard of the caricature from a friend, and declared that if he had seen it he should have destroyed it on the spot.  Macrinus here tried to excuse the spy, by remarking that this zealous official had only tried to set his services in a favorable light.  The falsehood could not be approved, but was excusable.  But he had scarcely finished speaking, when his opponent, the praetor, Lucius Priscillianus, observed, with a gravity he but rarely displayed: 

“I should have thought that it was the first duty of the man who ought to be Caesar’s mainstay and representative here, to let his sovereign hear nothing but the undistorted truth.  Nothing, it seems to me, can be less excusable than a lie told to divine Caesar’s face!”

A few courtiers, who were out of the prefect’s favor, as well as the high-priest of Serapis, agreed with the speaker.  Caracalla, however, paid no heed to them, but sat with his eyes fixed on the door, deeply wounded in his vanity by the mere existence of such a caricature.

He had not long to wait.  But when the wrapper was taken off the clay figures, he uttered a low snarl, and his flushed face turned pale.  Sounds of indignation broke from the bystanders; the blood rose to his cheeks again, and, shaking his fist, he muttered unintelligible threats, while his eyes wandered again and again to the caricatures.  They attracted his attention more than all else, and as in an April day the sky is alternately dark and bright, so red and white alternated in his face.  Then, while Alexander replied to a few questions, and assured him that the host of the “Elephant” had been very angry, and had gladly handed them over to him to be destroyed, Caracalla seemed to become accustomed to them, for he gazed at them more calmly, and tried to affect indifference.  He inquired of Philostratus, as though he wished to be informed, whether he did not think that the artist who had modeled these figures must be a very clever follow; and when the philosopher assented conditionally, he declared that he saw some resemblance to himself—­in the features of the apple-dealer.  And then he pointed to his own straight legs, only slightly disfigured by an injury to the ankle, to show how shamefully unfair it was to compare them with the lower limbs of a misshapen dwarf.  Finally, the figure of the apple-dealer—­a hideous pygmy form, with the head of an old man, like enough to his own—­roused his curiosity.  What was the point of this image?  What peculiarity was it intended to satirize?  The basket which hung about the neck of the figure was full of fruit, and the object he held in his hand might be an apple, or might be anything else.

With eager and constrained cheerfulness, he inquired the opinion of his “friends,” treating as sheer flattery a suggestion from his favorite, Theocritus, that this was not an apple-dealer, but a human figure, who, though but a dwarf in comparison with the gods, nevertheless endowed the world with the gifts of the immortals.