CHAPTER XXXV.

A week later Caracalla quitted Alexandria to make war on the Parthians.  What finally drove the unhappy man to hurry from the hated place was the torturing fear of sharing his lion’s fate, and of being sent after the murdered Tarautas by the friends who had heard his appeal to fate.

Quite mad he was not, for the illusions which haunted him were often absent for several hours, when he spoke with perfect lucidity, received reports, and gave orders.  It was with peculiar terror that his soul avoided every recollection of his mother, of Theokritus, and all those whose opinion he had formerly valued and whose judgment was not indifferent to him.

In constant terror of the dagger of an avenger—­a dread which, with many other peculiarities, the leech could hardly ascribe to the diseased phenomena of his mental state—­he only showed himself to his soldiers, and he might often be seen making a meal off a pottage he himself had cooked to escape the poison which had been fatal to his lion.  He was never for an instant free from the horrible sense of being hated, shunned, and persecuted by the whole world.

Sometimes he would remember that once a fair girl had prayed for him; but when he tried to recall her features he could only see the charred arm with the golden snake held up before him as he had pictured it that night after the most hideous of his massacres; and every time, at the sight of it, that word came back to him which still tortured his soul above all else—­“The deed.”  But his attendants, who heard him repeating it day and night, never knew what he meant by it.

When Zminis met his end by the wild beasts in the arena, it was before half-empty seats, though several legions had been ordered into the amphitheatre to fill them.  The larger number of the citizens were slain, and the remainder were in mourning for relatives more or less near; and they also kept away from the scene to avoid the hated despot.

Macrinus now governed the empire almost as a sovereign, for Caesar, formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business.  Even before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that Serapion’s prophecy was fulfilling itself.  He remained in close intimacy with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar’s departure, could the magian be induced to raise the spirits of the dead, for his clever accomplice, Castor, had fallen a victim in the massacre because, prompted by the high price set on Alexander’s head, and his own fierce hatred of the young painter, he would go out to discover where he and his sister had concealed themselves.