In the wide space of the first court soldiers were encamped, and close
under the walls squatted men and women--Egyptians, Greeks and Hebrews--
who desired to offer petitions to the sovereign. Chariots drove in and
out, litters came and went, chamberlains and other officials hurried
hither and thither. The anterooms were crowded with men of the upper
classes of the citizens who hoped to be granted audience by the Emperor
at the proper hour. Slaves, who offered refreshments to those who waited
or stood idly looking on, were to be seen in every room, and official
persons, with rolls of manuscript under their arms, bustled into the
inner rooms or out of the palace to carry into effect the orders of their
superior.

The hall of the Muses had been turned into a grand banqueting-hall.
Papias, who was now on his way to Italy by the Emperor's command, had
restored the damaged shoulder of the Urania. Couches and divans stood
between the statues, and under a canopy at the upper end of the vast room
stood a throne on which Hadrian sat when he held audience. On these
occasions he always appeared in the purple, but in his writing-room,
which he had not changed for another, he laid aside the imperial mantle
and was no more splendid in his garb than the architect Claudius Venator
had been.

In the rooms that had belonged to the deceased Keraunus now dwelt an
Egyptian without wife or children--a stern and prudent man who had done
good service as house-steward to the prefect Titianus, and the living-
room of the evicted family now looked dreary and uninhabited. The mosaic
pavement which had indirectly caused the death of Keraunus, was now on
its way to Rome, and the new steward had not thought it worth while to
fill up the empty, dusty, broken-up place which had been left in the
floor of his room by the removal of the work of art, nor even to cover it