What reason can you have?
A mounted messenger brought me a letter to-day in which the Emperor tells me that he proposes to inhabit the old palace at Lochias, and not the Caesareum.
At these words Sabinas forehead clouded, her gaze, dark and blank, was fixed on her lap, and biting her under-lip, she muttered:
Because I am here.
Titianus made as though he had not heard these words, and continued in an easy tone:
There he has a wide outlook into the distance, which is what he has loved from his youth up. But the old building is much dilapidated, and though I have already begun to exert all the forces at my command, with the assistance of our admirable architect, Pontius, to restore a portion of it at any rate, and make it a habitable and not too uncomfortable residence, the time is too short to do anything thoroughly worthy
I wish to see my husband here, and the sooner the better, interrupted the Empress with decision. Then she turned towards the row of pillars which stood by the right-hand wall of the hall, and which were at some distance from her couch, calling out Verus. But her voice was so weak that it did not reach the person addressed, so turning to the prefect, she said: I beg of you to call Verus to me, the praetor Lucius Aurelius Verus. Titianus immediately obeyed.
As he entered the hall he had already exchanged friendly greetings with the man to whom the Empress wished to speak. He now did not succeed in attracting his attention till he stood close at his elbow, for he formed the centre of a small group of men and women who were hanging on his words. What he was saying in a subdued voice must have been extraordinarily diverting, for it could be seen that his hearers were making the greatest efforts to keep their suppressed laughter from breaking out into a shout that would shake the very hall, a noise the Empress detested. When the prefect came up to Verus, a young girl, whose pretty head was crowned by a perfect thicket of little ringlets, was just laying her hand on his arm and saying:
Nay-that is too much; if you go on like this, for the future whenever you speak I shall stop my ears with my hands, as sure as my name is Balbilla.
And as sure as you are descended from King Antiochus, added Verus bowing.
Always the same, laughed the prefect, nodding to the audacious jester.
Sabina wants to speak to you.
Directly, directly, said Verus. My story is a true one, and you all ought to be grateful to me for having released you from that tedious philologer who has now button-holed my witty friend Favorinus. I like your Alexandria, Titianus; still it is not a great capital like Rome. The people have not yet learned not to be astonished; they are perpetually in amazement. When I go out driving
Your runners ought to fly before you with roses in their hair and wings on their shoulders like Cupids.
In honor of the Alexandrian ladies?
As if the Roman ladies in Rome, and the fair Greeks at Athens, interrupted Balbilla.
The praetors runners go faster than Parthian horses, cried the Empresss chamberlain. He has named them after the winds.
As they deserve, added Verus Come, Titianus. He laid his hand in a confidential manner on the arm of the prefect, to whom he was related; and as they went towards Sabina he whispered in his ear:
I can keep her waiting as if I were the Emperor.
Favorinus who had been engaged in talk with Ptolemaeus, the astronomer, Apollonius, and the philosopher and poet Pancrates in another part of the hall, looked after the two men and said:
A handsome couple. One the personification of imperial and dignified Rome; the other with his Hermes-like figure.
The otherinterrupted the philologist with stern displeasure, the other is the very incarnation of the haughtiness, the luxury pushed to insanity, and the infamous depravity of the metropolis. That dissipated ladies-man.
I will not defend his character, said Favorinus in his pleasant voice, and with an elegance in his pronunciation of Greek which delighted even the grammarian. His ways and doings are disgraceful; still you must allow that his manners are tinged with the charm of Hellenic beauty, that the Charites kissed him at his birth, and though, by the stern laws of virtue we must condemn him, he deserves to be crowned with praise and garlands from the point of view of the feeling for beauty.
Oh! for the artist who wants a model he is a choice morsel.
The Athenian judges acquitted Phryne because she was beautiful.
They did wrong.
Hardly in the eyes of the gods, whose fairest works must deserve our respect.
Still poison may be kept in the most beautiful vessels.
And yet body and soul always to a certain extent correspond.
And can you dare to call the handsome Verus the admirable Verus?
No, but the reckless Lucius Aurelius Verus is at the same time the gayest and pleasantest of all the Romans, free alike from spite or carefulness, he troubles himself with no doctrines of virtue, and as when a thing pleases him, he desires to possess it, he endeavors to give pleasure to every one else.
He has wasted his pains so far as I am concerned.
I do as he wishes.
The last words both of the philologer and the sophist were spoken somewhat louder than was usual in the presence of the Empress. Sabina, who had just told the praetor which residence her husband had decided on inhabiting, drew up her shoulders and pinched her lips as if in pain, while Verus turned a face of indignationa face which was manly in spite of all the delicacy and regularity of the featureson the two speakers, and his fine bright eyes caught the hostile glance of Apollonius.
An intimation of aversion to his person was one of the things which to him were past endurance; he hastily passed his hand through his blue-black hair, which was only slightly grizzled at the temples and flowed uncurled, but in soft waving locks round his head, and said, not heeding Sabinas question as to his opinion of her husbands latest instructions:
He is a repulsive fellow, that wrangling logician; he has an evil eye that threatens mischief to us all, and his trumpet voice cannot hurt you more than it does me. Must we endure him at table with us every day?
So Hadrian desires.
Then I shall start for Rome, said Verus decidedly. My wife wants to be back with her children, and as praetor, it is more fitting that I should stay by the Tiber than by the Nile.
The words were spoken as lightly as though they were nothing more than a proposition to go to supper, but they seemed to agitate the Empress deeply, for her head, which had seemed almost a fixture during her conversation with Titianus, now shook so violently that the pearls and jewels rattled in the erection of curls. There she sat for some seconds staring into her lap.
Verus stooped to pick up a gem that had fallen from her hair, and as he did so she said hastily:
You are right. Apollonius is intolerable. Let us send him to meet my husband.
Then I will remain, answered Verus, as pleased as a wilful boy who has got his own way.
Fickle as the wind, murmured Sabina, threatening him with her finger. Show me the stoneit is one of the largest and finest; you may keep it.
When an hour later, Verus quitted the hall with the prefect, Titianus said:
You have done me a service cousin, without knowing it. Now can you contrive that Ptolemaeus and Favorinus shall go with Apollonius to meet the Emperor at Pelusium?
Nothing easier was the answer.