"What malady?"
And he would say—
"What you call my spirit of irony and what seems to me melancholy madness."
His finely cut delicate features expressed extreme fatigue. Sometimes he would awake as from a sleep, undertake a wild excursion with fishermen in a hurricane in the open sea, or set off to hunt wild boar and bear, or contemplate hatching a plot against the life of Cæsar, or seek initiation into the terrible mysteries of Mithra and Adonis. On such occasions he was capable of astonishing by his rashness and audacity even those persons who were ignorant of his ordinary way of living.
But the excitement once evaporated he would return to listlessness and lassitude, still more sleepy, still more cynical and sad.
"Nothing can be done with you, Anatolius," Arsinoë used to say to him; "you are so soft that people might think you had no bones."
But she felt a kind of Hellenic grace in this last of the Epicureans; liked to read in his weary eyes their melancholy mockery of himself and everything else. He would say—
"The sage can extract enjoyment from the blackest melancholy, as bees of Hymettus make their best honey with the juice of bitterest plants!" and his gossip soothed Arsinoë, who smilingly used to call Anatolius her physician.
In reality she became stronger, but never returned to her studio. The sight of chips of marble filled her with painful memories.
Meanwhile, at the time of which we are speaking Hortensius was preparing wonderful public games in the Flavian Theatre, in honour of his arrival in Rome. He was continually travelling, and busy receiving horses, lions, bears, Scots wolf-dogs, crocodiles from the tropics, and with these, flocks of intrepid hunters, skilled riders, comedians, and gladiators.