"Ah! Julian, the Olympians conquered the Titans, but now the Olympians in their turn will be beaten by barbaric gods. These temples will become tombs...."
Antoninus was a handsome youth, straight-limbed as one of the old statues, but his health had been broken for years by an incurable malady, and his face had become yellow, lean, and melancholy.
"I pray the gods," went on Antoninus, "I entreat the gods not to suffer me to see that night—that I may die before it comes. Rhetoricians, sophists, poets, sages, artists, none of us are wanted any more. We are born in too late a day.... All is over for us!"
"And suppose you are mistaken?" hazarded Julian.
"No, all's over! We are not as our forefathers! We are sick, strength fails us."
Julian's face seemed as worn and haggard as that of Antoninus. The projecting lower lip gave him an expression of taciturn arrogance. The thick eyebrows were knitted in bitter obstinacy; precocious wrinkles already furrowed his cheeks. The long nose had grown longer than ever; and his always strange eyes were now burning with a dry, feverish, disagreeable fire. He still wore the monkish habit. During the day he still attended church, as hitherto; worshipped relics; read the gospels in public, and was preparing to take orders. Sometimes all this hypocrisy seemed to him worse than useless. He foresaw that Gallus would not escape a premature death, and knew that he himself might expect it at any moment.
But his nights Julian was wont to pass in the great library of Pergamos, where he was studying the works of the great foe of Christianity, Libanius. He attended the lectures of the Greek sophists, Ædesius of Pergamos, Chrisantius of Sardinia, Priscius of Thesephros, Eusebius of Minos, Prœres, and Nymphidian. These taught him much about what he had already heard from Iamblicus, of the triad of the Neo-Platonists, and of the "divine ecstasy." He said to himself—
"All that is not what I am seeking; they are hiding something from me!"
Priscius, imitating Pythagoras, had passed five years in silence, keeping to a vegetarian diet, and using neither raiment of wool nor sandal of leather. He wore a cloak of pure white linen and sandals of palm leaves stitched together.
"In our age," he used to say, "the thing of moment is to be able to hold one's tongue, and to meditate on dying worthily."