at they are Christians! that they deny the
good gods! that they aim at the overthrow of the religion of the
state--that religion under whose fostering care Rome has grown up to her
giant size--that they are fire-brands of discord and quarrel in Rome and
throughout the world! Greater would my name be, could I extirpate this
accursed tribe than it would be for triumphing over both the East and
West, or though I gained the whole world.'

'Aurelian,' I replied, 'this is not the language I used to hear from
your lips. Another spirit possesses you and it is not hard to tell
whence it comes.'

'You would say--from Fronto.'

'I would. There is the rank poison, that has turned the blood in the
veins of one, whom justice and wisdom once ruled, into its own accursed
substance.'

'I and Rome, Piso,' said Aurelian, 'owe much to Fronto. I confess that
his spirit now possesses me. He has roused the latent piety into action
and life, which I received with my mother's milk, but which, the gods
forgive me! carried away by ambition, had well nigh gone quite out in my
soul. My mother--dost thou know it?--was a priestess of Apollo, and
never did god or goddess so work by unseen influence to gain a mortal's
heart, as did she to fill mine with reverence of the deities of
heaven--specially of the great god of light. I was early a wayward
child. When a soldier in the legions I now command, my life was what a
soldier's is--a life of action, hardship, peril, and blood. The deities
of Heaven soon became to me as if they were not. And so it has been for
well nigh all the years of my life. But, the gods be thanked, Fronto has
redeemed me! and since I have worn this diadem have I toiled, Rome can
testify with what zeal, to restore to her gods their lost honors--to
purge her worship of the foul corruptions that were bringing it into
contempt--and raise it higher than ever in the honor of the people, by
the magnificence of the temples I have built; by the gifts I have
lavished upon them; by the ample riches wherewith I have endowed the
priesthood. And more than once, while this work has been achieving, has
the form of my revered parent, beautiful in the dazzling robes of her
office, stood by my bedside--whether in dream, or in vision, or in
actual presence, I cannot tell--and blessed me for my pious
enterprise--"The gods be thanked," the lips have said, or seemed to say,
"that thy youth lasts not always but that age has come, and with it
second ch