ons among the masters of the world. How different was their
discipleship from the imitative methods of modern literati! While
it was the fashion to boast of refinement and learning, while
libraries jostled each other and rhetoricians and philosophers
swarmed in the city, Paulus was chiefly conscious that in the place
of creative imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the
vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance
of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In
the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians
gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's
satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If
one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park,
he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday at
Ostia he could not escape discussions between Stoics and
Peripatetics. With all this activity, philosophy and literature grew
only more anaemic.

Paulus, too limited to be himself a formative influence, was also
too truth-loving to be satisfied in Rome with the only life he was
fitted to lead. Indifferent to the persuasions of Aphrodite, he yet
harboured in his temperament a certain warmth which made him eager
to live with passion and abandon, to scorch his hands in the fires
of the world rather than drearily to warm them at burnt out ashes.
Hopeless in Rome, he determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. An
intellectual life real enough to claim his spendthrift allegiance,
this, concretely, was the prize for which he had set sail from
Brindisi two months before.

The act gave him an outward resemblance to the horde of young bloods
who were always swinging out on the high seas in search of sport and
adventure. The most restless made for Britain and the shores of the
Euxine or the Baltic, or for the interior of Syria and Persia. The
larger number followed the beaten and luxurious paths to Egypt, where
they plunged into the gaieties of Alexandria and, cursorily enough,
saw the sights of Memphis and Thebes. Paulus also went to Egypt. But
in spite of his introductions and his opportunities to experiment
with modern life under the absolving witchery of Oriental conditions,
he gave himself over to the subtler influences of the past. Pilgrim
rather than tourist, he visited eagerly the pyramids and the Sphinx,
the temples of Karnak and Thebes, the tombs of the Theban kings, the
colossi of