tics and
skeptics and pessimists of the present age--the Mallocks, and Cliffords,
and Harrisons and their tribe--have agitated the world from the very
dawn of philosophy. Did space permit, we might cite the theories of
Lucretius as a strange anticipation of the development hypothesis.
Indeed the writings of Pyrrho, Porphyry and Celsus show us that the
universal tendency of human philosophy, unaided by divine inspiration,
is to utter skepticism.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[10] On a single supper for his friends, Lucullus, who is said to have
fed his lampreys with the bodies of his slaves, is recorded to have
expended 50,000 denarii--about $8,500.

[11] His name and office are recorded even by so skeptical a critic as
Gibbon, and his epitaph has been found in the Catacombs. See Withrow's
Catacombs, p. 46.

[12] Strauss and Renan and their rationalizing school rival this pagan
sophist in eliminating the miraculous from the sacred record.

[13] Yet these stories, too incredible for this old pagan, were gravely
related to the present writer, on the scene of the alleged miracles, by
the credulous Romans of to-day.

[14] _Sat._ ii. 49. "That the manes are anything, or the nether world
anything, not even boys believe, unless those still in the nursery."

[15] See that saddest but most beautiful of the ode of Horace, To
Delius, II. 3:

... Et nos in [ae]ternum
Exilium impositura cymb[ae].

CHAPTER V.

"THE CHRISTIANS TO THE LIONS."

The progress of our story transports us, on the day after the banquet
described in our last chapter, to the palace of the Prefect Naso, on the
Aventine. It was a large and pompous-looking building, with a
many-columned portico and spacious gardens, both crowded with statuary,
the spoil of foreign cities, or the product of degenerate Greek art--as
offensive in design as skilful in execution. The whole bore evidence of
the ostentation of vulgar wealth rather than of judicious taste. A crowd
of "clients" and satellites of the great man were hanging round the
doors, eager to present some petition, proffer some service, or to swell
his idle retinue, like jackals around a lion, hoping to pick up a living
as hangers-on of such a powerful and unscrupulous dispenser of
patronage. In the degenerate days of the Empire, the civic officials
especially had always a swarm of needy dependents seeking to fatten on
the spoils of office. They were supposed, in some way, to add to th