ld
take me for a Roman.

In these apparently natural vanities and vagaries Falco humored me,
enquiring of his friends concerning friseurs of acclaimed reputation,
buying me any gaudy fabrics he saw, also presenting me with caskets of
necklaces, amulets, bracelets, finger-rings and earrings. He rallied me on
my oriental tastes, but aided me to gratify them.

He even came to feel his interest in jewelry and gems enhanced by my fad
for them. He took to purchasing antiques in jewelry and rare and unusual
gems and his hoard grew into a notable collection.

By the end of my second winter with Falco I had come to know intimately
all his town and country palaces and all his dilettanti friends and had
enjoyed to the full the many delights of the colony, not only its climate
and fruits, its scenery and cities, its statuary and pictures, its
libraries and public-baths, but its excellent performances of tragedies
and comedies, and its spectacles creditable, not only as to chariot-racing
but also as to beast-fights and exhibitions of gladiators. I found life in
Africa extremely agreeable and looked forward to any length of it with
contentment.

I may remark that during this time Cleander came to the end of his period
of unlimited wealth, power and misrule. I was thus out of Rome at the time
of his downfall and death and while the Praetorium had a score of Prefects
in rapid succession.

In the spring of the nine hundred and forty-third year of the city,
[Footnote: A.D. 190.] and the eleventh of the reign of Commodus, the year
in which he was nominally consul for the sixth time, along with Petronius
Septimianus, Falco startled me, while we were dining alone together, as
Agathemer and I had used to dine together, by saying:

"Phorbas, you talk of Rome differently from any other man I ever heard
talk of it. I have meditated over the quality of what you say of Rome, but
I cannot analyze it or describe it accurately. Yet I may say that others
talk of Rome as holy ground, but you alone make me feel that the soil
inside the Pomoerium is holy ground: others talk of the grandeur of Rome;
you make me realize its grandeur: others prate of their love for Rome:
you, saying little, make me tingle with a subtly communicated sense of how
you love Rome: others babble of how life away from Rome is not life, but
merely existence; of how any dwelling out of Rome is exile, of how they
long for Rome; you, by some sorcery, make me not only feel how y