She came in and deigned a smile to everyone.
She was the same disk-thrower whom a month before Julian had seen in the abandoned wrestling-ground. The poet Publius, knowing everybody and everything in Athens, had sought the acquaintance of Hortensius and Arsinoë, and had introduced Julian to the house.
Arsinoë's father, an old Roman senator, Helvidius Priscus, had died during the last years of Constantine the Great, bequeathing Arsinoë and Myrrha, his two daughters by a Goth woman-prisoner, to Hortensius, whom he respected on account of his love for antique Rome and hatred for Christianity. A distant relative of Arsinoë, owner of factories of purple at Sidon, had left his incalculable wealth to the young girl.
To Arsinoë, Christian virtues and the patriarchal customs of Rome seemed equally contemptible. The figures of independent women, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Sappho, alone captivated her girlish imagination. Had she not declared naïvely one day, to the horror of Hortensius, that she would rather become a beautiful and free courtesan, than be transformed into the mother of a family, slave of a husband, "like everybody else"? Those three words, "like everybody else," filled her with melancholy disgust. At one time Arsinoë was attracted by natural science, and had worked with illustrious men of science at the museum in Alexandria. Then the atomic theories of Epicurus, Democrates, and Lucretius had enthralled her. She loved a study which should deliver her soul from the "terror of the gods."
With the same almost morbid intensity, she had afterwards applied herself to sculpture, and had come to Athens in order to study the best works, the masterpieces of Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles.
"You are still discussing grammar?" asked the daughter of Helvidius Priscus of the guests, as she came into the dining-hall. She continued ironically: "Don't trouble yourselves; go on. I won't argue or complain, because I'm too hungry after my day's work. Slave, some wine!..."
"My friends," continued Arsinoë when seated, "you'll ruin your minds with quotations from Demosthenes and your rules from Quintilian!... Take care! Rhetoric will ruin you.... I want to see a man who doesn't care a fig for Homer or for Cicero, who speaks without thinking of the aspirates, of syntax, or of the conjunction of letters. Julian, let us go down to the beach after supper; I am disinclined for discussions on dactyls and anapæsts."
"Precisely my own mood, Arsinoë," stammered Garguillus, who had eaten too much foie gras and who almost always, at the end of dinner, felt an aversion for literature proportionate to the weight upon his stomach.
"Litterarum intemperantia laboramus," as Seneca used to say. "We are suffering from literary indigestion. We are simply poisoning ourselves!" and he thoughtfully took a tooth-pick from a pocket. His large face expressed weariness and disgust.