The plan unfolded itself so readily and so helpfully, that the proconsul's face grew radiant with anticipated triumph.
In an hour, a slave returned with Justin Classicus.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE STRANGE WOMAN
Cæsar left Capri and roved along the Italian coast in his splendid barges, or approached by land close to Rome, even to spend the night just without her walls, or in Tusculum, Ostia, Antium or Baiæ. He dragged his court with him, by this time deserted of all upright men, and circling, slinking, making sorties and retiring, he brought up at last in the villa of Lucullus on Misenum with all his unclean party.
Macro in attendance upon Cæsar had left a tribune in Rome as a post of despatch from which necessary information could be communicated to the prefect in Misenum. The tribune, a sour old prætorian, with more integrity than graciousness, charged to protect Agrippa's interests for Macro's sake, now that Caligula was prince imperial, was empowered with not a little of the prefect's authority, which he administered with a kind of slavish awe of it.
So, when a young Alexandrian Jew, giving the name of Justin Classicus, bearing a letter of introduction from the Proconsul of Egypt, applied for a tessera which would give him admission to Misenum, the tribune refused, declaring that the visitor must be indorsed by a Roman of rank and in good odor with the emperor. Classicus took his departure, assuring the tribune that he would go to Baiæ where young Tiberius lived in his father's villa, and get the indorsement of the lad, to whom Flaccus was notedly a partizan.
As soon as Classicus had departed, the tribune rushed a messenger to Marsyas, with Macro's signet which would command horses at posts between Rome and Misenum, and informed the young man what menaced the Herod.
Marsyas did not tarry for preparation. He knew that Classicus would go by the common route, by sea from Ostia, and that the overland route was only, by the luckiest of circumstances, the speedier.