ly."

"If you cannot discover where the Barbarians are hiding, what will you
do?"

"Seek them until I do find them and bring them to a halt."

"But then," cried Herculanus, "let there be no treaties, no mercy,
nothing save extermination. How often these faithless people have
broken the peace! Our legions are full of fury against the Barbarians
who, year after year, compel them to march through these horrible
marshy forests. Only the extirpation of the last German will give peace
to the Roman Empire." He clenched his fist threateningly.

"You have perhaps uttered words of prophecy," said Saturninus
thoughtfully, "but in a different sense from what you intended."

"He has uttered abominable words!" cried Ausonius, filling his goblet.
"And they are utterly groundless. Ay, more than a century ago it looked
as if the Persians and Germans under Gallienus would flood the Eastern
and the Western Empire. But since that time Eternal Rome has grown
young once more. Your brave countrymen, my Saturninus, the heroic
Illyrian emperors, have curbed the barbarians on the Euphrates, the
Rhine, and the Ister. Diocletian has remodelled the internal affairs of
the Empire; and so I might adapt to Rome's mastery of the world the
proud words of my colleague Horace: 'He did not lack talent, but he
possessed little learning.'"

"Do they belong to poetry?" asked Saturninus doubtfully.

But the eager speaker, without hearing his words, continued: "What he
said concerning the permanence and spread of his own renown I will
apply to the glory of Rome: it will increase and grow, so long as the
priest ascends the hill to the Capitol with the silent Virgin. The
Vestal," he added in explanation.

"H'm," observed the Illyrian, "only it's a pity that the hypothesis is
no longer apt."

"What? How so?"

"The pious Constantine, of murderous memory (I hear they want to
canonize the assassin of his mother and his wife) prohibited or
restricted the offering of sacrifices at the Capitol, and your pupil
and patron, Gratianus, recently abolished the Vestals."

CHAPTER XIII.

"Oh, that must not be taken so literally," Ausonius remarked.

"I am not superstitious. I rely possibly too much upon my sword and too
little upon heaven; and I care nothing about the Vestal virgins. But I
do not like the second step your pupil took last year in Rome."

"What do you mean?"

"He removed from the council-hall of the Senate the a