Drawing a comrade from the crowded streets, Glaucus the Greek, newly
returned to Pompeii after a journey to Naples, bent his steps towards a
solitary part of the beach; and the two, seated on a small crag which
rose amidst the smooth pebbles, inhaled the voluptuous and cooling
breeze which, dancing over the waters, kept music with its invisible
feet. There was something in the scene which invited them to silence and
reverie.

Clodius, the aedile, who sought the wherewithal for his pleasures at the
gaming table, shaded his eyes from the burning sky, and calculated the
gains of the past week. He was one of the many who found it easy to
enrich themselves at the expense of his companion. The Greek, leaning
upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun, his nation's tutelary
deity, with whose fluent light of poesy and joy and love his own veins
were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every
wind that bent its pinions toward the shores of Greece.

Glaucus obeyed no more vicious dictates when he wandered into the
dissipations of his time that the exhilarating voices of youth and
health. His heart never was corrupted. Of far more penetration than
Clodius and others of his gay companions deemed, he saw their design to
prey upon his riches and his youth; but he despised wealth save as the
means of enjoyment, and youth was the great sympathy that united him to
them. To him the world was one vast prison to which the sovereign of
Rome was the imperial gaoler, and the very virtues which, in the free
days of Athens, would have made him ambitious, in the slavery of earth
made him inactive and supine.

"Tell me, Clodius," said the Athenian at last, "hast thou ever been in
love?"