Page:The White Stone.djvu/99

Rh praetorium, deafening to the ears of the Greek and the three Romans.

"By Pollux!" exclaimed Lollius, "the suitors whose case our friend Gallio is trying are shouting like dockers, and it seems to me that together with their growls a stench of sweat and onions reaches us."

"Nothing is more true," quoth Apollodorus. "But, were Posocharis a philosopher instead of the dog he is, far from sacrificing to the Venus of the cross-roads, he would flee from the whole breed of women, and attach himself solely to some youth, whose eternal comeliness he would contemplate merely as the expression of an inner beauty more noble and more precious."

"Love," resumed Mela, "is an abject passion. It disturbs the reason, destroys noble impulses, and diverts the most elevated ideas to the vilest cares. It has no place in a sensible mind. As the poet Euripides teaches us ..."

Mela did not finish his sentence. Preceded by lictors, who pushed the crowd aside, the proconsul came out of the basilica, and went up to his friends.

"I have not been away from you long," he said. "The case which I was summoned to try was as meagre as could be, and ridiculous in the extreme. On entering the praetorium, I found it invaded by a motley crowd of the Jews who, in their sordid shops along the wharves of the harbour of Cenchreae, sell