not to mingle with the excited multitude, at any rate after dark, the
Empress strictly enjoined him to see with his own eyes everything that
could be worth notice in the festival, and more particularly to give
attention to everything that was peculiar to Alexandria and not to be
seen in Rome.

After sunset Verus had first gone to visit the veterans of the Twelfth
Legion who had been in the field with him against the Numidians, and to
whom he gave a dinner at an eating-house, as being his old fellow-
soldiers. For above an hour he sat drinking with the brave old fellows;
then, quitting them, he went to look at the Canopic way by night, as it
was but a few paces thither from the scene of his hospitality. It was
brilliantly lighted with tapers, torches, and lamps, and the large houses
behind the colonnades were gaudy with rich hangings; only the handsomest
and stateliest of them all had no kind of decoration. This was the abode
of the Jew Apollodorus.

In former years the finest hangings had decorated his windows, which had
been as gay with flowers and lamps as those of the other Israelites who
dwelt in the Canopic way, and who were wont to keep the festival in
common with their heathen fellow-citizens as jovially as though they were
no less zealous to do homage to Dionysus. Apollodorus had his own
reasons for keeping aloof on this occasion from all that was connected
with the holiday doings of the heathen. Without dreaming that his
withdrawal could involve him in any danger, he was quietly sitting in his
house, which was so splendidly furnished as to seem fitted for some
princely Greek rather than for a Hebrew. This was especially the case
with the men's living-room, in which Apollodorus sat, for the pictures on
the walls and pavement of this beautiful hall--of which the roof, which
was half open, was supported on columns of the finest porphyry--