purple border; beneath it was a tunic of yellow silk. Between the railing
of the tribune in which he sat one foot was visible, shod with badger's
skin, dyed blood-red. He was superb, but his eyelids drooped. He had a
straight nose and a retreating forehead, a physiognomy that was at once
weak and vicious. He looked melancholy; it may be that he was bored. At
the salutation, however, he affected a smile, and motioned that the games
should continue. And as the signals, the dolphins and the seven balls,
appeared again, his thoughts, forsaking the circus, went back to Rome.

Insecure in the hearts of his people, uncertain even of the continued
favor of the volatile monster who was lounging then in his Caprian
retreat, it was with the idea of pleasing the one, of flattering the
other, that he had instituted the games. For here in his brand-new
Tiberias, a city which he had built in a minute, whose colonnades and
porticoes he had bought ready-made in Rome, and had erected by means of
that magic which only the Romans possessed--in this capital of a parvenu
was a mongrel rabble of Greeks, Cypriotes, Egyptians, Cappadocians,
Syrians, and Jews, whose temper was uncertain, and whose rebellion to be
feared.

_Annona et spectaculis_ indeed! Antipas knew the dictum well; and with an
uprising in the yonderland, and a sedition under his feet, what more could
he do than quell the first with his mercenaries, and disarm the second
with his games? Tiberius, whom he emulated, never deigned to appear at the
hippodrome; it was a way he had of showing his contempt for a nation.
Antipas might have imitated his sovereign in that, only he was not sure
that Tiberius would take the compliment as it was meant. He might view
such abstention as the airs of a trumpery tetrarch, and depose him there
and then. He was irascible, and when displeased there were dungeons at his
command which reopened with difficulty, and where existence was not
secure. Ah, that sausage of blood and mud, how he feared and envied him!
An emperor now, a god hereafter, truly the dominion of this world and a
part of the next was a matter concerning which fear and envy well might
be.

And as Antipas' vagabond fancy roamed in and out through the possibilities
of the Caesar's sway, unconsciously he thought of another monster, the son
of a priest of Ascalon, who had defied the Sanhedrim, won Cleopatra,
murdered the woman he loved the most, conquered Judaea and found it too
small fo