Then he suddenly sprang up, and, beside himself with rage, he interrupted the terrified Egyptian and railed at him furiously: 

“My Tarautas, who had so narrowly escaped death!  The bravest hero of his kind basely murdered on his sick-bed, by a barbarian, a beardless boy!  And you, you loathsome jackal, could allow it?  This deed—­and you know it, villain—­will be set down to my score.  It will be brought up against me to the end of my days in Rome, in the provinces, everywhere.  I shall be cursed for your crime wherever there is a human heart to throb and feel, and a human tongue to speak.  And I—­when did I ever order you to slake your thirst for blood in that of the sick and suffering?  Never!  I could never have done such a thing!  I even told you to spare the women and helpless slaves.  You are all witnesses, But you all hear me—­I will punish the murderer of the wretched sick!  I will avenge you, foully murdered, brave, noble Tarautas!—­Here, lictors!  Bind him—­away with him to the Circus with the criminals thrown to the wild beasts!  He allowed the girl whose life I bade him spare to be burned to death before his eyes, and the hapless sick were slain at his command by a beardless boy!—­And Tarautas!  I valued him as I do all who are superior to their kind; I cared for him.  He was wounded for our entertainment, my friends.  Poor fellow—­poor, brave Tarautas!”

He here broke into loud sobs, and it was so unheard-of, so incomprehensible a thing that this man should weep who, even at his father’s death had not shed a tear, that Julius Paulinus himself held his mocking tongue.

The rest of the spectators also kept anxious and uneasy silence while the lictors bound Zminis’s hands, and, in spite of his attempts to raise his voice once more in self-defense, dragged him away and thrust him out across the threshold of the dining-hall.  The door closed behind him, and no applause followed, though every one approved of the Egyptian’s condemnation, for Caracalla was still weeping.

Was it possible that these tears could be shed for sick people whom he did not know, and for the coarse gladiator, the butcher of men and beasts, who had had nothing to give Caesar but a few hours of excitement at the intoxicating performances in the arena?  So it must be; for from time to time Caracalla moaned softly, “Those unhappy sick!” or “Poor Tarautas!”

And, indeed, at this moment Caracalla himself could not have said whom he was lamenting.  He had in the Circus staked his life on that of Tarautas, and when he shed tears over his memory it was certainly less for the gladiator’s sake than over the approaching end of his own existence, to which he looked forward in consequence of Tarautas’s death.  But he had often been near the gates of Hades in the battle-field with calm indifference; and now, while he thus bewailed the sick and Tarautas with bitter lamentations, in his mind he saw no sick-bed, nor, indeed, the stunted form of the braggart hero of the arena, but the slender, graceful figure of a sweet girl, and a blackened, charred arm on which glittered a golden armlet.