use! You--to be sure,
what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when
he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things
which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred.
Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist
lay by his pillow and was his companion wherever he went."

"He admired the heathen poets, but he was a Christian all the same,"
replied Marcus.

"Neither more nor less than Porphyrius, our uncle, or myself," retorted
his brother. "Since the day when our grandfather Philippus was baptized,
wealth and happiness have deserted this house. He gave up the old gods
solely that he might not lose the right of supplying the city and the
Emperor with corn, and became a Christian and made his sons Christians.
But he had us educated by his heathen friends, and though we passed for
Christians we were not so in fact. When it was absolutely necessary he
showed himself in church with us; but our daily life, our pleasures, our
pastimes were heathen, and when life began for us in earnest we offered
a bleeding sacrifice to the gods. It was impossible to retract honestly,
since a renegade Christian returning to the worship of the old gods is
incapacitated by law from making a will. You know this; and when you ask
me why I am content to live alone, without either wife or child--and I
love children, even those of other people--a solitary man dragging
out my days and nights joylessly enough--I tell you: I am openly and
honestly a worshipper of our old gods, and I will not go to church
because I scorn a lie. What should I do with children who, in
consequence of my retractation, must forfeit all I might leave them? It
was this question of inheritance only that induced my father to have us
baptized and to make a pretense of Christianity. He set out for Petra
with his Lucretius in his satchel--I packed it with my own hands into
his money-bag--to put in a claim to supply grain to the 'Rock city.'
He was slain on his way home; most likely by his servant Anubis, who
certainly knew what money he had with him, and who vanished and left no
trace. Because--about the same time--a band of Saracens had fallen on
some Christian anchorites and travellers, in the district between Petra
and Aila, your mother chose to assume a right to call our father a
martyr! But she knew his opinions full well, I tell you, and shed many a
tear over them, too.--Now she has expende