The command was so positive, that Alexander drew out the little diptych, with the remark that painters wrote badly, and that what he had noted down was only intended to aid his memory.  The idea that Caesar should hear a few home-truths through him had struck him as pleasant, but now the greatness of the risk was clear to him.  He glanced at the scrawled characters, and it occurred to him that he had intended to change the word dwarf in one line to Caesar, and to keep the third and most trenchant epigram from the emperor.  The fourth and last was very innocent, and he had meant to read it last, to mollify him.  So he did not wish to show the tablets.  But, as he was about to take them back, Caracalla snatched them from his hand and read with some difficulty: 

                   “Fraternal love was once esteemed
                    A virtue even in the great,

And Philadelphos then was deemed
A name to grace a potentate. 
But now the dwarf upon the throne,
By murder of his mother’s son,
As Misadelphos must be known.”

“Indeed!” murmured Caesar, with a pale face, and then he went on in a low, sullen tone:  “Always the same story—­my brother, and my small stature.  In this town they follow the example of the barbarians, it would seem, who choose the tallest and broadest of their race to be king.  If the third epigram has nothing else in it, the shallow wit of your fellow-citizens is simply tedious.—­Now, what have we next?  Trochaics!  Hardly anything new, I fear!—­There is the water-jar.  I will drink; fill the cup.”  But Alexander did not immediately obey the command so hastily given; assuring Caesar that he could not possibly read the writing, he was about to take up the tablets.  But Caesar laid his hand on them, and said, imperiously:  “Drink!  Give me the cup.”

He fixed his eyes on the wax, and with difficulty deciphered the clumsy scrawl in which Alexander had noted down the following lines, which he had heard at the “Elephant”

              “Since on earth our days are numbered,
               Ask me not what deeds of horror
               Stain the hands of fell Tarautas. 
               Ask me of his noble actions,
               And with one short word I answer,
               ’None!’-replying to your question
               With no waste of precious hours.”

Alexander meanwhile had done Caracalla’s bidding, and when he had replaced the jar on its stand and returned to Caesar, he was horrified; for the emperor’s head and arms were shaking and struggling to and fro, and at his feet lay the two halves of the wax tablets which he had torn apart when the convulsion came on.  He foamed at the mouth, with low moans, and, before Alexander could prevent him, racked with pain and seeking for some support, he had set his teeth in the arm of the seat off which he was slipping.  Greatly shocked, and full of sincere pity, Alexander tried to raise him; but the lion, who perhaps suspected the artist of having been the cause of this sudden attack, rose on his feet with a roar, and the young man would have had no chance of his life if the beast had not happily been chained down after his meal.  With much presence of mind, Alexander sprang behind the chair and dragged it, with the unconscious man who served him as a shield, away from the angry brute.