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Athens? With apprehension he remembered what his father's friend,
a rich dilettante, one of the best liked men in Rome, had written
him when he sent him the letter of introduction:

"You will find Gellius the best fellow in the world but not a fagot
to kindle the fires of pleasure. I hear that he has called his book,
a particoloured digest of information, _Attic Nights_, because he
has spent his nights in Athens writing it--nights, mark you, when
even in her own city Athena closes her grey eyes within her virgin
shrine and leaves Pan to guard from his cave below the roysterings
of youth. It is easy to let an allusion to my friend Lucian slip off
the end of my stylus when I think of Athens. He and Gellius are
scarcely the 'like pleasing like' of the proverb! Lucian, in fact,
disposed of Gellius once by calling him an 'Infant Ignorance on the
arm of Fashion.' This was after he had watched a peasant making
holiday among the statues and temples on the Acropolis, carrying in
his arms a three months old child who dozed in a colonnade of the
Parthenon and sucked his thumb in front of Athena Promachus. The
blinking baby, he said, made him think of Aulus, futilely carried
about by the trend of the age among ideas and achievements beyond
his understanding. But in fairness I must add that when this was
repeated to Marcus Aurelius he retorted: 'Better a child than an
iconoclast in the presence of beauty. I should call Gellius an honest
errand boy in Athena's temple.' So there you have two ways of looking
at your future host. If Lucian is the most enlightened wit of the
day, Aurelius is the most Roman of us all and likely to rule over
us when Antoninus rejoins the gods.

"On Gellius's return next year he is to be made a judge. He will study
law painstakingly and apply it exactly. And Rome will never for him
be one whit juster. However, your father will be delighted to have
you make such a friend--a man of thirty whose idea of a debauch is
to make a syllogism, who is a favourite student of great teachers
and can introduce you to Herodes Atticus and to all the best life
of Athens. Nor, indeed, do I marvel at Aurelius for trusting him.
As a scholar or a jurist he will always be negligible, but as a man
he is naively sincere and candid and with all the strength of his
Roman will he is determined that both his work and his pleasures shall
be such as befit a gentleman of honour and refinement. He may bore
you, but, if I do not misrea