g part he plays among the gilded
youth of the Capital. All this is not to be had for nothing, and it will
be cheap in the end. What need we care about a hundred talents more or
less! And there is something magnanimous in the lad that has given him
the spirit to feel that."

And it was not a hale old grey-beard who spoke thus, but a broken man,
whose only joy it was to lavish on his son the riches which he had long
been incapable of enjoying. The high-spirited and gifted youth, scarcely
more than a boy in years, whom he had sent to the Capital with no small
misgivings, must have led a far less lawless life than might have been
expected; of this the ruddy tinge in his sunburnt cheeks was ample
guarantee, the vigorous solidity of his muscles, and the thick waves
of his hair, which was artificially curled and fell in a fringe, as was
then the fashion, over his high brow, giving him a certain resemblance
to the portraits of Antinous, the handsomest youth in the time of
the Emperor Hadrian. Even his mother owned that he looked like health
itself, and no member of the Imperial family could be more richly,
carefully and fashionably dressed than her darling. But even in the
humblest garb he would have been a handsome--a splendid youth, and
his mother's pride! When he left home there was still a smack of the
provincial about him; but now every kind of awkwardness had vanished,
and wherever he might go--even in the Capital, he was certain to be one
of the first to attract observation and approval.

And what had he not known in his city experience? The events of half a
century had followed each other with intoxicating rapidity in the course
of the thirty months he had spent there. The greater the excitement, the
greater the pleasure was the watchword of his time; and though he had
rioted and revelled on the shores of the Bosphorus if ever man did,
still the pleasures of feasting and of love, or of racing with his own
victorious horses--all of which he had enjoyed there to the full--were
as child's play compared with the nervous tension to which he had been
strung by the appalling events he had witnessed on all sides. How
petty was the excitement of an Alexandrian horse-race! Whether Timon
or Ptolemy or he himself should win--what did it matter? It was a fine
thing no doubt to carry off the crown in the circus at Byzantium, but
there were other and soul-stirring crises there beyond those which were
bound up with horses or chariots.