ntius--to vex Pontius--and at the same time to appear in his
eyes as brilliant as she could. She belauded Antinous, but she wrote for
Pontius, and for every flower she gave the lad she had sent a thought to
the architect, though with a curl on her lips of scornful defiance.

But a young girl cannot be always praising the beauty of a youth in new
and varied forms with complete impunity, and thus there were hours when
Balbilla was inclined to believe that she really loved Antinous. Then she
would call herself his Sappho, and he seemed destined to be her Phaon.
During his long absences with the Emperor she would long to see him--nay,
even with tears; but, as soon as he was by her side again, and she could
look at his inanimate beauty and into his weary eyes, when she heard the
torpid "Yes" or "No" with which he replied to her questions, the spell
was entirely broken and she honestly confessed to herself that she would
as soon see him before her hewn in marble as clothed in flesh and blood.

In such moments as these her memory of the architect was particularly
fresh, and once, when their ship was sailing through a mass of lotos
leaves, above which one splendid full-blown flower raised its head, her
apt imagination, which rapidly seized on everything noteworthy and gave
it poetic form, entwined the incident in a set of verses, in which she
designated Antinous as the lotos-flower which fulfils its destiny simply
by being beautiful, and comparing Pontius to the ship which, well
constructed and well guided, invited the traveller to new voyages in
distant lands.

The Nile voyage came to an end at Thebes of the hundred gates, and here
nothing that could attract the Roman travellers remained unvisited. The
tombs of the Pharaohs extending into the very heart of the rocky hills,
and the grand temples that stood to the west of the city of the dead,
shorn though they were of their ancient glory, filled the Emperor with
admiration. The Imperial travellers and their companions listened to the
famous colossus of Memnon, of which the upper portion had been overthrown
by an earthquake, and three times in the dawn they heard it sound.

Balbilla described the incident in several long poems which Sabina caused
to be engraved on the stone of the colossus. The poetess imagined herself
as hearing the voice of Memnon singing to his mother Eos while her tears,
the fresh morning dew, fell upon the image of her son, fallen before the
walls of Troy