me, and breathe some more ethereal air. 'Tis this that
makes them seem to covet martyrdom, as they call it, instead of, like
all sane men, shunning death."

"But do not your own poets," chimed in the soft voice of Valeria, "speak
of the Elysian fields and the asphodel meadows where the spirits of
heroes walk, and of the bark of Charon, who ferries them across the
fatal Styx?"

"True, your most august Highness," replied the pedant with grimace
intended to be polite, "but those fables are intended for the vulgar,
and not for the cultured classes, to which your Imperial Highness
belongs. Even the priests themselves do not believe in the existence of
the gods at whose altars they minister; so that Cicero, you will
remember, said that 'he wondered how one augur could look in the face of
another without laughing.'"

"I quite admit," remarked Adauctus, "that the priests are often
impostors, deceiving the people; but our wisest philosophers--the
thoughtful Pliny, the profound Tacitus, the sage Seneca, and even the
eloquent Cicero whom you have quoted--teach the probability if not the
certainty of a future state, where virtue shall be rewarded and
wickedness punished."

"What do they know about it any more than any of us?" interrupted the
truculent Naso, to whom ethical themes were by no means familiar or
welcome. "My creed is embodied in the words of that clever fellow,
Juvenal, that I used to learn at school--

'Esse aliquid manes, et subterranea regna,
Nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum [ae]re lavantur.'"[14]

"What's the use of all this talk?" lisped a languid-looking epicurean
fop, who, sated with dissipation, at twenty-five found life as empty as
a sucked orange. "We cannot alter fate. Life is short; let us make the
most of it. I'd like to press its nectar into a single draught and have
done with it for ever. As the easy-going Horace says, 'The same thing
happens to us all. When our name, sooner or later, has issued from the
fatal urn, we leave our woods, our villa, our pleasant homes, and enter
the bark which is to bear us into eternal exile!'"[15]

Here the Emperor made an impatient gesture, to indicate that he was
weary of this philosophic discourse. At the signal the ladies rose and
retired. Adauctus also made his official duties an excuse for leaving
the table, where Diocletian and his other guests lingered for hours in
a drunken symposium.

Thus we find that the very questions which engage the agnos