"_Socrates_: By Pallas! here's a wonderful nook; it must be sacred to the nymphs and to the god Acheloüs--to judge by these little statues. Doesn't it seem to you as if here the breeze were softer and of sweeter odour? Here, even in the hum of the crickets there's something of the sweetness of summer. But what I love best of all is this deep grass!"
Julian turned from the book with a smile. All was as it had been eight centuries before. Even the crickets set up their song.
"Socrates actually touched this ground with his feet!" he thought, and burying his head among the reeds he kissed the spot with adoration.
"Good-day, Julian! you've chosen a lovely corner there to read in. May I sit down near you?"
"Sit, sit; I shall be delighted. Poets never violate a solitude."
Julian looked up at a meagre personage, draped in an enormously long cloak (it was the poet Publius Porphyrius), thinking to himself--
"He's so small and frail that I believe he'll soon turn into a grasshopper, as Plato fancied the poets do."
Publius, like the grasshoppers, could almost live upon air, but the gods had not granted him complete immunity from appetite; and his shaven cadaverous face and discoloured lips were stamped with insatiable hunger.
"Why are you wearing such a long cloak, Publius?" Julian asked.
"It isn't mine," answered the other philosophically. "I share a room with a young man, Hephæstion, who has come to Athens to learn eloquence. He will be a famous lawyer one day. Meanwhile he's as poor as I am, poor as a lyric poet--I need say no more! Why, we've pledged our clothes, our furniture, even the inkstand; but we still have a cloak between us. In the morning I go out, and Hephæstion studies Demosthenes; in the evening he puts on the chlamys, and I write verses. Unfortunately we're not the same height--but what does that matter? I take my walks along the streets 'long-robed,' like the ancient Trojan ladies."
Publius laughed heartily; the cadaverous face took on the expression of a mourner who has incautiously cheered up.
"You see, Julian," continued the poet, "I'm counting on the death of the widow of a very rich Roman landowner. The happy heirs will order an epitaph from me, and are going to pay for it generously. Unfortunately the widow, in spite of everything that doctors and heirs can do, persists in not giving up the ghost. But for that, my boy, I should have bought myself a cloak long ago. Listen, Julian, get up and come with me at once!"