He was here interrupted by the arrival of Aristides, who entered in great haste and apparently pleased excitement.  His spies had seized a malefactor who had affixed an epigram of malignant purport to the statue of Julia Domna in the Caesareum.  The writer was a pupil of the Museum, and had been taken in the stadium, where he was boasting of his exploit.  A spy, mingling with the crowd, had laid hands on him, and the captain of the watch had forthwith hurried to the Serapeum to boast of a success which might confirm him in his yet uncertain position.  The rough sketch of the lines had been found on the culprit, and Aristides held the tablets on which they were written while Caracalla listened to his report.  Aristides was breathless with eagerness, and Caesar, snatching the tablets impatiently from his hand, read the following lines: 

“Wanton, I say, is this dam of irreconcilable brothers!”
“Mean you Jocasta?”
“Nay, worse—­Julia, the wife of Severus.”

“The worst of all—­but the last!” Caracalla snarled, as, turning pale, he laid the tablets down.  But he almost instantly took them up again, and handing the malignant and lying effusion to the high-priest, he exclaimed, with a laugh: 

“This seals the warrant!  Here is my mother slandered, too!  Now, the man who sues for mercy condemns himself to death!” And, clinching his fist, he muttered, “And this, too, is from the Museum.”

Timotheus, meanwhile, had also read the lines.  Even paler than Caracalla, and fully aware that any further counsel would be thrown away and only turn the emperor’s wrath against himself, he expressed his anger at this calumny directed against the noblest of women, and by a boy hardly free from school!

But Caracalla furiously broke in: 

“And woe to you if your god refuses me the only thing I crave in return for so many sacrifices—­revenge, complete and sanguinary; atonement from great and small alike!” But he interrupted himself with the exclamation:  “He grants it!  Now for the tool I need.”

The tool was ready—­Zminis, the Egyptian, answering in every particular to the image which Caracalla had had in his mind of the instrument who might execute his most bloodthirsty purpose.

With hair in disorder and a blue-black stubble of beard on his haggard yellow cheeks, in a dirty gray prison shirt, barefoot, and treading as silently as Fate when it creeps on a victim, the rascal approached his sovereign.  He stood before Caracalla exactly as the prefect, in a swift chariot, had brought him out of prison.  The white of his long, narrow eyes, which had so terrified Melissa, had turned yellow, and his glance was as restless and shifting as that of a hyena.  His small head on its long neck was never for a moment still; the ruthless wretch had sat waiting day after day in expectation of death, and it was by a miracle that he found himself once more at the height of his ambition.  But when at last he inquired of Caracalla, in the husky voice which had gained an added hoarseness from the damp dungeon whence he had been brought, what his commands were, looking up at him like a starving dog which hopes for a titbit from his master’s hand, even the fratricide, who himself held the sword sharpened to kill, shuddered at the sight and sound.