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little, Caius. And it costs me so much to ask for it. Don’t you understand that?”

    He said, “I’m very tired, Julia, and I want to go to bed.”

    “I suppose I deserve it,” she whispered.

    “Please don’t take it that way, Julia.”

    “How shall I take it?”

    “I’m just tired—that’s all.”

    “That isn’t all, Caius. I look at you, and wonder what you are, and hate myself. You’re so handsome—and so rotten—”

    He didn’t interrupt her. Let her say it all; he would be rid of her so much more quickly.

    She went on, “No—no more rotten than anyone else, I suppose. Only with you, I bring it out. But we’re all rotten, we’re all sick, diseased, full of death, bags of death—we’re in love with death. Aren’t you, Caius, and that’s why you came down the road where you could look at the tokens of punishment? Punishment! We do it because we love it—the way you do the things you do, because you love them. Do you know how beautiful you are out here in the moonlight? The young Roman, the cream of the whole world in the full flush of beauty and youth—and you have no time for an old woman. I’m as rotten as you are, Caius, but I hate you as much as I love you. I wish you were dead. I wish someone would kill you and cut your miserable little heart out!”

    There was a long moment of silence, and then Caius asked calmly, “Is that all, Julia?”

    “No—no, not all. I wish I were dead too.”

    “Both of these are desires which can be satisfied,” said Caius.

    “You contemptible—”

    “Good night, Julia,” Caius said sharply, and then left the terrace. His determination not to be annoyed had been broken, and he was provoked at the senseless outburst of his aunt. If she had any sense of proportion, she would have seen how ridiculous she was making herself with her cheap sentimental whining. But Julia never had that kind of sense, and it was no wonder that Antonius found her trying.

    Caius went straight to his room. A lamp was burning and there were two slaves in attendance, young Egyptians whom Antonius favored as house servants. Caius dismissed them. Then he stripped off his clothes, flushed and trembling. He rubbed himself all over with a mild perfume, powdered parts of his body, slipped on a linen robe, blew out the lamp and lay down on his bed. When his eyes got used to the dark, he was able to see fairly well, for a broad shaft of moonlight came in through the open window. The room was pleasantly cool, full of the fragrance of perfume and the spring shrubs in the garden.

    It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes that Caius lay there waiting, but it seemed like hours to him. Then there was a very light knock on the door.

    “Come in,” Caius said.

    Crassus entered, closing the door behind him. The great general had never looked more manly than now, as he stood there smiling at the young man who awaited him.
     

XIII
     
    The beam of moonlight had changed its position, and Caius was tired and satiated and sensual as a stretching cat—which was the image he evoked of himself for himself as he said, apropos of nothing at all,

    “I hate Cicero.”

    Crassus was fatherly and pleased with himself and mellow, and he asked, “Why do you hate Cicero—the just Cicero? Cicero the just. Yes? Why do you hate him?”

    “I don’t know why I hate him. Must I know why I hate people? Some, I love and some, I hate.”

    “Did you know that it was Cicero’s notion—not his alone, but a good deal his—to make the tokens of punishment, the six thousand crucifixes along the Appian Way? Is that why you hate him?”

    “No.”

    “How did you feel when you saw the crucifixes?” asked the general.

    “Sometimes it excited me but mostly it didn’t. It excited the girls more.”

    “Yes?”

    “But tomorrow I’ll feel different,” Caius smiled.

    “Why?”

    “Because you put them there.”

    “Not really—Cicero, others. I didn’t care, one way or