[CHAPTER II]
IN CÆSAR'S PALACE.
Passing beneath the even then grim and hoary archway of the Porta Capena, or Capuan Gate, with the dripping aqueduct above it, the centurion and his secretary traversed rapidly the crowded streets of a fashionable suburb—now mere mouldering mounds of desolation—to the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill. This eminence, which is now a mass of crumbling ruins, honey-combed with galleries and subterranean corridors through what was once the stately apartments of the Lords of the World, where wandering tourists peer and explore and artists sketch the falling arch or fading fresco of the banquet halls and chambers of a long line of emperors, was then the scene of life and activity, of pomp and splendour. Marble courts and columned porticos stretched on in almost endless vistas, covering many acres of ground. Flashing fountains leaping sunward sparkled in the beams of noonday, diffusing a coolness through the air, which was fragrant with blossoms of the orange and magnolia trees growing in the open courts. Snowy statuary gleamed amid the vivid foliage, and beneath the shadow of the frescoed corridors.
Having dismounted at the outer court and given their horses to obsequious grooms, Sertorius and the Greek repaired each to a marble bath to remove the stains of travel before entering the presence of the Emperor. Having made their toilet they advanced to the inner court. The guards who stood in burnished mail at the portal of the palace respectfully made way for the well-known imperial officer, but were about to obstruct the passage of the Greek secretary, when with a gesture of authority Sertorius bade the soldier to permit the man to pass.
"Quite right, Max, as a rule: but wrong this time. He accompanies me on business of state, before the Emperor."
Two lictors in white tunics with scarlet hem, and bearing each the fasces or bundle of rods bound with filets from the top of which projected a polished silver axe, came forward and conducted the centurion into the Imperial presence chamber, the secretary remaining in an ante-room.
The lictors draw aside a heavy gold-embroidered curtain, and Sertorius stood in the presence of the Lord of the World, the man to whom divine honours had been ascribed, who held in his hand the lives of all his myriads of subjects, and the word of whose mouth uttering his despotic will might consign even the loftiest, without form or process of law, to degradation or death.
Let us note for a moment what manner of man this god on earth, this Diocletian, whose name is remembered with abhorrence and execration, the degenerate usurper of the august name of the Cæsars, may be. He sits in an ivory, purple-cushioned chair, near a table of inlaid precious woods. His short and obese figure is enswathed in the folds of an ample crimson-bordered toga, or fine linen vestment of flowing folds. His broad, coarse features are of plebeian cast, for he had been originally a Dalmatian slave, or at least the son of a slave; but the long-continued exercise of despotic authority had given an imperious haughtiness to his bearing. He was now in his fifty-eighth year, but his features, coarsened and bloated by sensuality, gave him a much older aspect. He was dictating to a secretary who sat at the table writing with a reed pen on a parchment scroll, when the lictors, lowering their fasces and holding their hands above their eyes, as if to protect their dazzled eyes from the effulgence of the noonday sun, advanced into the apartment.
"May it please your divine Majesty," said one of the servile lictors, "the centurion whom you summoned to your presence awaits your Imperial pleasure."