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The Battle of Histories was taken up with spirit by the Jews, and it was round the history of the Israelites in Egypt that the conflict chiefly raged. In reply to the offensive picture of a Manetho and the diatribes of some "starveling Greekling," there appeared the eulogistic picture of an Aristeas, the improved Exodus of an Artapanus.
A thorough soldier and yet the inaugurator of a peace policy, a 'Greekling' as his Roman subjects called him, and saturated with Hellenic ideas, and yet a lover of Roman antiquity; a poet and an artist, but with a passion for business and finance; a voluptuary determined to drain the cup of human experience and, at the same time, a ruler who labored strenuously for the well-being of his subjects; such were a few of the diverse parts which Hadrian played."
The Greekling as Juvenal has it in want of a dinner, would climb somehow to heaven itself, at the bidding of his Roman master. Ah what a fall! And what was the inherent weakness which caused that fall? I say at once want of honesty. The Greek was not to be depended on; if it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and think it no sin. He was the sharpest of men.
These facts are surely sufficient to refute at any rate those gross charges against the private character of Seneca, venomously retailed by a jealous Greekling like Dio Cassius, which do not rest on a tittle of evidence, and seem to be due to a mere spirit of envy and calumny. I shall not again allude to these scandals because I utterly disbelieve them.
But at this moment a house slave came in to ask if she would see Lucretius. "Him and no one else," she answered curtly, and the Greekling slipped thankfully out as the curtains were drawn aside to admit a man, about thirty-five years old, whose face and bearing brought suddenly into the fretful room a consciousness of a larger world, a more difficult arena.
I ask if Lysiades, when summoned as a judge, should not answer to his name, and should have an excuse alleged for him that he is an Areopagite, and that he is not bound to act as a judge at both Rome and Athens at the same time, will the man who presides over the investigation admit the excuse of this Greekling judge, at one time a Greek, and at another a Roman?
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