The same evening, as Julian Cæsar stood on the hill, enveloped by the rays of the setting sun, King Chlodomir, who had been made prisoner on the bank of the river, was led before him. He was breathing with difficulty, his face livid and sweating, his enormous hands bound behind his back. He knelt down before his conqueror, and the young Cæsar of twenty-two laid his slight hand upon the shaggy head.
XIX
It was the time of vintage; all day songs had been echoing along the hill-sides around the pleasant Gulf of Naples.
In the favourite country of the Romans, at Baiæ, famous for its sulphur-baths, Baiæ of which the Augustan poets used to say,
Nullus in orbe sinus Baiis prælucet amœnis,—
idle folk were delighting in the country and Nature; there fairer and more voluptuous than man.
It was an inviolate corner of that charming country, where the imaginations of Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus lingered yet. Not a single shadow of the monkish age had yet dulled that sunny littoral between Vesuvius and Cape Misenum. Christianity it is true was not denied there; but it was smilingly put by. Feminine sinners there were not yet repentant. On the contrary honest women grew shy of virtue as old-fashioned. When news of the Sibyl's prophecies arrived, menacing the decrepit world with earthquake, or when came news of fresh crimes and bigotries of Constantius, or of Persians invading the East, or barbarians threatening the North, the lucky inhabitants of Baiæ, closing their eyes, inhaled their delicious breeze full of the odour of Falernian half-crushed in the wine-press, and consoled themselves with an epigram. To forget the misfortunes of Rome and soothsay about the end of the world, all that they needed was to send each other gifts of pretty verses—
Calet unda, friget æthra,
Simul innatat choreis