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THE EMPEROR, Part 2.
By Georg Ebers
While Pollux and his mother, who was much grieved, waited for Euphorion'sreturn, and while Papias was ingratiating himself with the Emperor bypretending still to believe that Hadrian was nothing more than ClaudiusVenator, the architect, Aurelius Verus, nicknamed by the Alexandrians,"the sham Eros" had lived through strange experiences.
In the afternoon he had visited the Empress, in the hope of persuadingher to look on at the gay doings of the people, even if incognito; butSabina was out of spirits, declared herself unwell, and was quite surethat the noise of the rabble would be the death of her. Having, as shesaid, so vivacious a reporter as Verus, she might spare herself fromexposing her own person to the dust and smell of the town, and the uproarof men. As soon as Lucilla begged her husband to remember his rank andnot to mingle with the excited multitude, at any rate after dark, theEmpress strictly enjoined him to see with his own eyes everything thatcould be worth notice in the festival, and more particularly to giveattention to everything that was peculiar to Alexandria and not to beseen in Rome.
After sunset Verus had first gone to visit the veterans of the TwelfthLegion who had been in the field with him against the Numidians, and towhom he gave a dinner at an eating-house, as being his old fellow-soldiers. For above an hour he sat drinking with the brave old fellows;then, quitting them, he went to look at the Canopic way by night, as itwas but a few paces thither from the scene of his hospitality. It wasbrilliantly lighted with tapers, torches, and lamps, and the large housesbehind the colonnades were gaudy with rich hangings; only the handsomestand stateliest of them all had no kind of decoration. This was the abodeof the Jew Apollodorus.
In former years the finest hangings had decorated his windows, which hadbeen as gay with flowers and lamps as those of the other Israelites whodwelt in the Canopic way, and who were wont to keep the festival incommon with their heathen fellow-citizens as jovially as though they wereno less zealous to do homage to Dionysus. Apollodorus had his ownreasons for keeping aloof on this occasion from all that was connectedwith the holiday doings of the heathen. Without dreaming that hiswithdrawal could involve him in any danger, he was quietly sitting in hishouse, which was so splendidly furnished as to seem fitted for someprincely Greek rather than for a Hebrew. This was especially the casewith the men's living-room, in which Apollodorus sat, for the pictures onthe walls and pavement of this beautiful hall—of which the roof, whichwas half open, was supported on columns of the finest porphyry—represented the loves of Eros and Psyche; while between the pillars stoodbusts of the greatest heathen philosophers, and in the background a finestatue of Plato was conspicuous. Among all the Greeks and Romans therewas the portrait of only one Jew, and this was that of Philo, whoseintellectual and delicate features greatly resembled those of the mostillustrious of his Greek companions.
In this splendid room, lighted by silver lamps, there was no lack of easycouches, and on one of these Apollodorus was reclining; a fine-lookingman of fifty, with his mild but shrewd eyes fixed on a tall and agedf