The centurion had a faithful heart.  He was as much attached to the two noble brothers as to his wife and children, for indeed he owed them much; and if the service had allowed it he would long since have made his way to the house of Seleukus to learn how the wounded tribune was faring.  But he had not time even to see his own family, for his younger and richer comrades, who wanted to enjoy the pleasures of the city, had put upon him no small share of their own duties.  Only this morning a young soldier of high birth, who had begun his career at the same time as Martialis, had promised him some tickets of admission to the evening’s performance in the Circus if he would take his duty on guard outside the amphitheatre.  And this offer had been very welcome to the centurion, for he thus found it possible to give those he loved best, his wife and his mother, the greatest treat which could be offered to any Alexandrian.  And now, when anything noteworthy was to be seen outside, he only regretted that he had already some time since conducted them to their seats in one of the upper rows.  He would have liked that they, too, should have seen the horses and the chariots and the “Blue” charioteer’s turquoises and sapphires; although a decurion observed, as he saw them, that a Roman patrician would scorn to dress out his person with such barbaric splendor, and an Alexandrian of the praetorian guard declared that his fellow-citizens of Greek extraction thought more of a graceful fold than of whole strings of precious stones.

“But why, then, was this ‘Blue’ so vehemently hailed by the mob!” asked a Pannonian in the guard.

“The mob!” retorted the Alexandrian, scornfully.  “Only the Syrians and other Asiatics.  Look at the Greeks.  The great merchant Seleukus is the richest of them all, but splendid as his horses, his chariots, and his slaves are, he himself wears only the simple Macedonian mantle.  Though it is of costly material, who would suspect it?  If you see a man swaggering in such a blaze of gems you may wager your house—­if you have one—­that his birthplace lies not very far from Syria.”

“Now, that one, in a mother-of-pearl shell on two wheels, is the Jew Poseidonius,” the Pannonian put in.  “I am quartered on his father.  But he is dressed like a Greek.”

At this the centurion, in his delight at knowing something, opened his mouth with a broad grin:  “I am a native here,” said he, “and I can tell you the Jew would make you answer for it if you took him for anything but a Greek.”

“And quite right,” added another soldier, from Antioch.  “The Jews here are many, but they have little in common with those in Palestine.  They wish to pass for Greeks; they speak Greek, assume Greek names, and even cease to believe in the great God their father; they study Greek philosophy, and I know one who worships in the Temple of Serapis.”

“Many do the same in Rome,” said a man of Ostia.  “I know an epigram which ridicules them for it.”