This attack was so rapid and so unexpected to the somewhat dull-witted centurion, that he failed at first to grasp its full significance.  He only understood that he was to be banished again from the loved ones he had so long been deprived of.  But when he recovered sufficiently to excuse himself by declaring that it was his own wife and children who had visited him, Caesar cut him short by commanding him to report his change of service at once to the tribune of the legion.

The centurion bowed in silence and obeyed.  Caracalla then went up to the prisoner, and dragging him, weakly resisting, from the dark back ground of the room to the window, he asked with a sneer: 

“And what are assassins like in Alexandria?  Ah, ha! this is not the face of a hired cut-throat!  Only thus do they look whose sharp wit I will answer with still sharper steel.”

“For that answer at least you are not wont to be at a loss,” came contemptuously from the lips of the prisoner.

The emperor winced as if he had been struck, and then exclaimed

“You may thank your bound hands that I do not instantly return you the answer you seem to expect of me.”

Then turning to his courtiers, he asked if any of them could give him information as to the name and history of the assassin; but no one appeared to know him.  Even Timotheus, the priest of Serapis, who as head of the Museum had so often delighted in the piercing intellect of this youth, and had prophesied a great future for him, was silent, and looked at him with troubled gaze.

It was the prisoner himself who satisfied Caesar’s curiosity.  Glancing round the circle of courtiers, and casting a grateful look at his priestly patron, he said: 

“It would be asking too much of your Roman table-companions that they should know a philosopher.  You may spare yourself the question, Caesar.  I came here that you might make my acquaintance.  My name is Philippus, and I am son to Heron, the gem-cutter.”

“Her brother!” screamed Caracalla, as he rushed at him, and thrusting his hand into the neck of the sick youth’s chiton—­who already could scarcely stand upon his feet—­he shook him violently, crying, with a scoffing look at the high-priest: 

“And is this the ornament of the Museum, the free-thinker, the profound skeptic Philippus?”

He stopped suddenly, and his eyes flashed as if a new light had burst upon him; he dropped his hand from the prisoner’s robe, and bending his head close to the other, he whispered in his ear, “You have come from Melissa?”

“Not from her,” the other answered quickly, the flush deepening on his face, “but in the name of that most unhappy, most pitiable maiden, and as the representative of her noble Macedonian house, which you would defile with shame and infamy; in the name of the inhabitants of this city, whom you despoil and tread under foot; in the interests of the whole world, which you disgrace!”