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No one knew Sophronia; but my father's presence in Rome has already attracted attention, and although he makes no public search, people are beginning to suspect that the dead girl was his daughter. You will both be summoned before Carinus to-morrow; he will ask if you can recognise a dead woman who was found murdered in the Christians' prison, and Sophronia will be shown to you.
Woe betide ye, Roman people! Woe betide thee, Imperator of Rome!" The woman came out into the portico and, as she fixed her cold, expressionless eyes upon the throng, Carinus, seized with horror, grasped the hand of Manlius, who stood by his side. "That is Glyceria." Manlius also shrank back in terror. The madwoman, with the face of a prophetess, stood upon the steps of the temple.
"Augustus Carinus, I have come to bring a charge, or, if it pleases you better, to beseech a favour. I had an only daughter " "You have another," interrupted Ævius. "I say I had an only daughter. She was the joy of my life, the prop of my old age. Allured by a new religion, this girl and her companions were captured at the meeting place of the Christians.
Part III. The vacancy of the throne was not productive of any disturbance. The ambition of the aspiring generals was checked by their natural fears, and young Numerian, with his absent brother Carinus, were unanimously acknowledged as Roman emperors.
In the midst of this glittering pageantry, the emperor Carinus, secure of his fortune, enjoyed the acclamations of the people, the flattery of his courtiers, and the songs of the poets, who, for want of a more essential merit, were reduced to celebrate the divine graces of his person.
In vain were they murdered. The blood of the slain merely sealed the doctrines which they attested; and whoever creates martyrs only gains implacable foes. But the Imperator Carinus invented a new species of martyrdom. The proselytes shrank neither from death nor from torture.
During a single evening Carinus gave the now universally envied favourite a hundred thousand sestertiæ, and, when he learned from him that the Teutonic women, by means of a special kind of soap, dyed their hair amber-yellow, he promised Manlius to appoint him Governor of Gallia that he might send him some of this soap which turned the hair yellow at that period a hue ridiculously fashionable in the aristocratic society of Rome.
But the elevation of Constantius was for a while deferred; and as soon as the father's death had released Carinus from the control of fear or decency, he displayed to the Romans the extravagancies of Elagabalus, aggravated by the cruelty of Domitian.
Here the best of every season of the year is represented: the warmth of summer, which is conducted hither by invisible pipes, the ice of winter, the flowers of spring, and the fruit of autumn. Carinus never knows whether it is dawn or twilight, whether it rains or snows with him pleasure is eternal.
Singing and dancing were going on around him, and Ævius, paying no heed to either, was declaiming before him. His iambics extolled with shameless flattery all the qualities which Carinus did not possess, his roseate complexion, his bold, fearless soul. He described the games with the utmost detail, and spared neither Jupiter nor Apollo, that he might laud Carinus above them.
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