lage banquets? Ptolemy, you know Menander shared
your regard for--

these majestic sights--the common sun,
Water and clouds, the stars and fire.

Let him take you off now among our country folk out here near Parnes.
We still have the human comedy, played out under sun and stars. Love
and deceit, troubles and rewards are as ageless as the heavens.
Gentlemen, this distinguished company has consented to give us
to-night a presentation of _The Arbitrants_ equal to the famous one
of the last Dionysia."

Apuleius's handsome face lit up with gaiety and good will. "I thank
you, O wise host," he called out.

To-day's my joy and sorrow,
Who knows what comes to-morrow?

Let us spend the moment we have in the merry company of a wise poet."

The play began. Moods of tragedy were forgotten. Only Paulus found
himself unable to listen. His host's appeal, made apparently with
such ready emotion, and so easily forgotten by the other men--he was
the youngest of the company--had shaken his soul as a young tree on
a mountain is shaken by the night wind. The comedy went on, punctuated
by applause. In his mind met and struggled high desires. When Atticus
had talked of Athens and of Rome he had remembered Virgil's great
defence of his own people, the weapon of all patriots after him:

Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer
form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead
with greater eloquence, and heaven's paths map out with rod in hand
and tell the rising of the stars. Upon the tablets of thy memory,
O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway. These are thy
arts and shall be: To impose the ways of peace; to spare the
vanquished and subject the proud.

Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's
incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the _pax
romana_, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the
continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and
held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it
possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this
could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for
truth? Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a passion
for ideas and a passion for deeds dwell together until side by side
men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory
of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just