CHAPTER XX
THE FEAST OF FLORA
Marsyas had assumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so, identified with the revelers, he safely entered the city.
Of the first he met on the brilliantly lighted wharves, he inquired, as a stranger, where he should find the night's celebration. The citizens he addressed, intoxicated with revel, smote him with palm-leaves or thyrsi and haled him with them, as their fellow, seeking Flora.
They skirted the Regio Judæorum toward the northwest and swept him along toward the Serapeum. Ever the streets opened up, more brilliantly lighted, more thickly crowded, more boisterously noisy; ever the nucleus of the crowd that had encompassed him increased and thickened and spread, until he was in the heart of a hurrying multitude. Ever they shouted their indefinite anticipations, boasts of their favor with Flora, hopes that the run would be diverting, threats that were half-jocular, half in earnest. And some of them, drunk with anarchy, made hysterical, inarticulate, yelping cries, like dogs on a heated trail. And so, with their silent fellow among them, they went, started into an easy trot, and unhindered, like waters turning over a fall.
The strange, half-mad revelry did not make for reassurance in Marsyas. His unexplained fears swept over him from time to time like a chill, and an unspeakable hatred for the unwieldy host about him, as well as the protest of his caution against the quick pace they had set, moved him to separate himself from them as soon as he might.
Flora was to begin her flight from the Serapeum, but because the grove was most beautiful and the Temple most rich, the aristocrats of the city had repaired thither to separate themselves from hoi polloi, and had builded for themselves the City of Love.
Marsyas knew that superior advantages were always for the rich man, and he, who had to be in the forefront of Flora's van, had to gather unto himself the most propitious opportunities. So while the riot of plebeians into which he had been absorbed streamed contentedly on to its own lowly place, Marsyas worked his way out of the crowd and approached the City of Love.
The glow of its lights, breaking through low-hanging branches and pillared avenues of tree-trunks, reached Marsyas with its music, its shouts and its tumult, but its inhabitants were shut away behind foliage, that their doings might be screened from the unqualified.