evening hymn."

The torches suddenly were lighted by attendant slaves. The stirring,
shaken sistra wrought a miracle of sound that set the nerves all
tingling as the high priest, followed by his boys with swinging censers
and the members of the priestly college, four by four, came chanting
down the temple steps. To an accompanying pleading, sobbing note of
flutes the high priest laid an offering of fruit, milk, wine and honey
in the midst of the heaped-up garlands (for Apollo was the god of all
fertility as well as of healing and war and flocks and oracles). Then
came the grand Homeric hymn to Glorious Apollo, men's and boys' and
women's voices blending in a surging paean like an ocean's music.

The last notes died away in distant echoes. There was silence for a
hundred breaths; then music of flute and lyre and sistra as the priests
retreated up the temple steps followed by fanfare on a dozen trumpets as
the door swung to behind the priests. Instantly, then, shouts of
laughter--torchlight scattering the shadows amid gloom--green cypresses
--fire--color splurging on the bosom of the water--babel of hundreds of
voices as the gay Antiochenes swarmed out from behind the trees--and a
cheer, as the girls by the altar threw their garments off and scampered
naked along the river-bank toward a bridge that joined the temple island
to the sloping lawns, where the crowd ran to await them.

"Apollo having healed the world of sin, we now do what we like!" said
Sextus. "Pertinax, I pledge you continence for this one night! Good
Galen, may Apollo's wisdom ooze from you like sweat; for all our sakes,
be you the arbiter of what we drink, lest drunkenness deprive us of our
reason! Comites, let us eat like warriors--one course, and then
discussion of tomorrow's plan."