“Nigrinus was the grandfather of those children,” cried the Roman mother with flashing eyes.
“That is to say that you harbor in your soul the wish to avenge your father’s death on Caesar.”
“I am the daughter of the butchered man.”
“But you do not know the murderer, and the purple must outweigh the life of one man, for it is often bought with many thousand lives. And then, Lucilla, as you know, I love happy faces, and Revenge has a sinister brow. Let us be happy, oh wife of Caesar! Tomorrow I shall have much to tell you, now I must go to a splendid banquet which the son of Plutarch is giving in my honor. I cannot stay with you—truly I cannot, I have been expected long since. And when we are in Rome never let me find you telling the children those old dismal stories—I will not have it.”
As Verus, preceded by his slaves bearing torches, made his way through the garden of the Caesareum he saw a light in the rooms of Balbilla, the poetess, and he called up merrily:
“Good-night, fair Muse!”
“Good-night, sham Eros!” she retorted.
“You are decking yourself in borrowed feathers, Poetess,” replied he, laughing. “It is not you but the ill-mannered Alexandrians who invented that name!”
“Oh! and other and better ones,” cried she. “What I have heard and seen to-day passes all belief!”
“And you will celebrate it in your poems?”