He disappeared in the direction of his cubiculum.
In a time longer than he had consumed in his old Essenic days to prepare himself for the streets he came again into Agrippa's atrium.
It was hard to recognize in him the picturesque Jewish ascetic that had bent over the scroll in the great college of Jerusalem. He had permitted the blade to come at his hair and beard; the kerchief had been replaced by the fillet; the cloak and gown by the scarlet tunic and mantle, the daylight had been let in on his fine limbs, and there was the fugitive glitter of jewels on his fingers and arms. He had assumed perfumes and polishes, had laid aside all his oriental habit and had become not only a Roman but an exquisite. The change was not all in his dress; the indefinable something that marks the man of experience was upon him and the ascetic blankness was gone from his brow.
He signed to the messenger to follow, and passing out of the house and down the long banks of marble steps which led up to Agrippa's magnificent eyrie on the brink of the Quirinal, entered a lectica that awaited him in the streets.
Years are not time enough to weary one of Rome.
Marsyas had come into the capital with a spirit benumbed by a great shock, so that the first day he walked the imperial streets he was less conscious of their wonders than he was at this hour.
He was borne through narrow lanes that were like clefts between heights of marble, under arches, chronicling the solemn consummation of triumph, along crowding pillars that arose out of the ravines between the seven hills, and, catching the sunlight on their white capitals, cast it down in the gloom of the depressions. Glories clambered up the bosom of the Esquiline; templed sanctity crowned the Aventine, and might in marble and gold sat on the Palatine. Between were splendor and squalor, confused, for only beauty stood up above the miseries and defilement that made Rome hateful in its unsunned ways.
The feebleness of unwieldy and disunited multitudes cumbered the Carinæ, along which he passed. Starvation and the excess of plenty, power and abject subjection, unspeakable depravity and innocence met and passed. The slaves preceding the young man's litter made way for it with staff and pilum, or again it made way for slaves bearing fasces and maces. He did not proceed unnoticed. Albucilla, widow of Satrius Secundus, in a litter with Cneius Domitius, turned from the languid senator at her side to cast a bewitching smile at the young Essene; Ennia, wife of Macro, the prætorian prefect, leaned from her litter to cry him an invitation.
"To Tusculum! Come with us!"
"Many thanks: yet I would the invitation came to-morrow!"