He signed to the messenger to follow, and passing out of the house and down the long banks of marble steps which led up to Agrippa's magnificent eyrie on the brink of the Quirinal, entered a lectica that awaited him in the streets.
Years are not time enough to weary one of Rome.
Marsyas had come into the capital with a spirit benumbed by a great shock, so that the first day he walked the imperial streets he was less conscious of their wonders than he was at this hour.
He was borne through narrow lanes that were like clefts between heights of marble, under arches, chronicling the solemn consummation of triumph, along crowding pillars that arose out of the ravines between the seven hills, and, catching the sunlight on their white capitals, cast it down in the gloom of the depressions. Glories clambered up the bosom of the Esquiline; templed sanctity crowned the Aventine, and might in marble and gold sat on the Palatine. Between were splendor and squalor, confused, for only beauty stood up above the miseries and defilement that made Rome hateful in its unsunned ways.
The feebleness of unwieldy and disunited multitudes cumbered the Carinæ, along which he passed. Starvation and the excess of plenty, power and abject subjection, unspeakable depravity and innocence met and passed. The slaves preceding the young man's litter made way for it with staff and pilum, or again it made way for slaves bearing fasces and maces. He did not proceed unnoticed. Albucilla, widow of Satrius Secundus, in a litter with Cneius Domitius, turned from the languid senator at her side to cast a bewitching smile at the young Essene; Ennia, wife of Macro, the prætorian prefect, leaned from her litter to cry him an invitation.
"Many thanks: yet I would the invitation came to-morrow!"
"It shall," she said in answer and was borne on. Running slaves pushed by him to overtake her chair, and Marsyas knew without looking that the lectica they bore contained Caligula, Cæsar's grand-nephew. Agrippina, a young matron in a chair, with a month-old babe in her arms, cast a sidelong glance out of her black eyes at the young man as he approached. Stupid old Claudius, clad in a purple-edged toga and stumbling as he walked, acknowledged the precedence Marsyas gave him with a smile and a greeting. As the young Jew was borne on he did not realize that he had made room for three coming Cæsars in the Carinæ. After them streamed a great number of patricians in chairs, all proceeding to the races at Tusculum, but Marsyas' bearers turned off the Carinæ and began to mount the Esquiline. In a few minutes he was set down before a small, newly-erected house as classic as a Greek temple, as compact as a fortification.