after the latter's lecture. Polemo was no fool, though steeped in
affectation and self-conceit, and Aristo fancied that his sister might be
more moved by a philosophical compatriot than any one else. Polemo's
astonishment, however, when the matter was proposed to him surpassed
words, and it showed how utterly Aristo was absorbed in his own misery,
that the possibility of such a reception should not have occurred to him.
What, he, the friend of Plotinus, of Rogatian, and the other noble men and
women who were his fellow-disciples at Rome; he, a member of the
intellectual aristocracy of the metropolis of the world; what, he to visit
a felon in prison! and when he found the felon was a Christian, he fully
thought that Aristo had come to insult him, and was on the point of
bidding him leave him to himself. Aristo, however, persisted; and his
evident anguish, and some particulars which came out, softened him.
Callista was a Greek; a literate, or blue stocking. She had never indeed
worn the philosophic pallium (as some Christian martyrs afterwards, if not
before, have done--St. Catherine and St. Euphemia), but there was no reason
why she should not do so. Polemo recollected having heard of her at the
Capitol, and in the triclinium of one of the Decurions, as a lady of
singular genius and attainments; and he lately had made an attempt to form
a female class of hearers, and it would be a feather in his cap to make a
convert of her. So, not many days after, one evening, accompanied by
Aristo, he set out in his litter to the lodging where she was in custody;
not, however, without much misgiving when it came to the point, some
shame, and a consequent visible awkwardness and stiffness in his manner.
All the perfumes he had about him could not hinder the disgust of such a
visit rising up into his nostrils.

Callista's room was very well for a prison; it was on the ground-floor of
a house of many stories, close to the _Officium_ of the Triumvirate.
Though not any longer under their strict jurisdiction, she was allowed to
remain where she had first been lodged. She was in one of the rooms
belonging to an apparitor of that _Officium_, and, as he had a wife, or at
least a partner, to take care of her, she might consider herself very well
off. However, the reader must recollect that we are in Africa, in the
month of July, and our young Greek was little used to heats, which made
the whole city nothing less than one vast oven through the g