t occurrences in the Circus on his
carelessness, cut the frightened officer short when he proposed to take
every one prisoner whom the lictors had marked among the noisy.

"Not yet! On no account to-morrow," Caracalla ordered. "Mark each one
carefully. Keep your eyes open at the next performance. Put down the
names of the disaffected. Take care that the rope hangs about the neck
of the guilty. The time to draw it tight will come presently. When they
think themselves safe, the cowardly show their true faces. Wait till
I give the signal--certainly not in the next few days; then seize upon
them, and let none escape!"

Caesar had given these orders with smiling lips. He wanted first to make
Melissa his, and, like a shepherd, to revel with her in the sweetness
of their love. No moment of this time should be darkened for him by the
tears and prayers of his bride. When she should hear, later on, of her
husband's bloody vengeance upon his enemies, she would have to accept it
as an accomplished fact; and means, no doubt, would be found to soothe
her indignation.

Those who after the insulting occurrences in the Circus had expected
to see Caesar raging and storming, were hurried from one surprise to
another; for even after his conversation with the night-watch he looked
cheerful and contented, and exclaimed: "It is long since you have seen
me thus! My own mirror will ask itself if it has not changed owners. It
is to be hoped it may have cause to accustom itself to reflect me as
a happy man as often as I look in it. The two highest joys of life are
before me, and I know not what would be left for me to desire if only
Philostratus were here to share the coming days with me."

The grave senator Cassius Dio here stepped forward and observed that
there were advantages in their amiable friend's withdrawal from the
turmoil of court life. His Life of Apollonius, to which all the world
was looking forward, would come all the sooner to a close.

"If only that I might talk to him of the man of Tyana," cried the
emperor, "I wish his biographer were here to-day. To possess little
and require nothing is the wish of the sage; and I can well imagine
circumstances in which one who has enjoyed power and riches to satiety
should consider himself blessed as a simple countryman following out the
precept of Horace, 'procul negotiis,' plowing his fields and gathering
the fruit of his own trees. According to Apollonius, the wise man must
also be po