what they did not. He knew his own position perfectly
well, and, though the words "belief" or "knowledge" did not come into his
religious vocabulary, he could at once, without hesitation, state what he
professed and maintained. He stood upon the established order of things,
on the traditions of Rome, and the laws of the empire; but as to Greek
sophists and declaimers, he thought very much as old Cato did about them.
The Greeks were a very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let
them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the
brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much
of their _calamus_ or _stylus_, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but
subvert received principles without substituting any others? And then they
were so likely to take some odd turn themselves; you never could be sure
of them. Socrates, their patriarch, what was he after all but a culprit, a
convict, who had been obliged to drink hemlock, dying under the hands of
justice? Was this a reputable end, a respectable commencement of the
philosophic family? It was very well for Plato or Xenophon to throw a veil
of romance over the transaction, but this was the plain matter of fact.
Then Anaxagoras had been driven out of Athens for his revolutionary
notions; and Diogenes had been accused, like the Christians, of atheism.
The case had been the same in more recent times. There had been that
madman, Apollonius, roaming about the world; Apuleius, too, their
neighbour, fifty years before, a man of respectable station, a gentleman,
but a follower of the Greek philosophy, a dabbler in magic, and a
pretender to miracles. And so, in fact, of letters generally; as in their
own country Minucius, a contemporary of Apuleius, became a Christian.
Such, too, had been his friend Octavius; such Caecilius, who even became
one of the priests of the sect, and seduced others from the religion he
had left. One of them had been the public talk for several years, and he
too originally a rhetorician, Thascius Cyprianus of Carthage. It was the
one thing which gave him some misgiving about that little Callista, that
she was a Greek.

As he passed the temple, the metal plate was sounding as a signal for the
termination of the school, and on looking towards the portico with an
ill-natured curiosity, he saw a young acquaintance of his, a youth of
about twenty, coming out of it, leading a boy of about half that age, with
his sa