Imperial Purple

ant, devising in the crypts of a palace infamies so

ifestly a dreamer; one whose eyes must have been almost feline in their abstraction, and in the corners of wh

y but for sacrilege. It is for Augustus to punish, said Tiberius. The senate wanted to name a month after him. Tiberius declined. "Supposing I were the thirteenth Caesar, what would you do?" For years he reigned, popular and acclaimed, caring the while nothing for popularity and less for pomp. Sagacious, witty even, believing perhaps in little else than fate and mathematics, yet maintaining th

he law must be observed. Originally instituted in prevention of offences against the public good, it was found to change into a crime, a word, a gesture or a look. It was a crime to undress before a statue of Augustus, to mention his name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image into a lupanar. The punishment was death. Of the property of the accused, a third went to the informer, the rest to the state. Then abruptly terror stalked abroad. No one was safe exce

suddenly base, it is rare for a man of seventy to become abruptly vile. "Whoso," Sakya Muni announced-"whoso discovers that grief comes from affection, will retire into the jungles and there remain." Tiberius had made the discovery. The jungles he selected were the gardens by the sea. And in those gardens, gossip represented him devising new forms of old vice. On the subj

e. Cicero, who has given it to history that the best women counted the years not numerically, but

nheriting or of serving the state. To this law, one of Augustus' stupidities which presently fell into disuse, only a technical observance was paid. Men married just enough to gain a position or inherit a legacy; next day they got a divorce. At the moment

itude of man. Presently it was decided that he had lived long enough. He was suffocated-beneath a mattress at that. Caesar had dreamed of a universal monarchy of which he should be king; he was murdered. That dr

figure on the walls, there was a door on which was a sign, imitated from one that overhu

also were the pathetic adventures of Odatis and Zariadres, which Chares of Mitylene had given to the world; the astonishing tales of that early Cinderella, Rhodopis; and with them those romances of Ionian nights by Arist

hemselves from sheer ennui. Theopompus disclosed to him a stranger vista-a continent beyond the ocean-one where there were immense cities, and where two rivers flowed-the River of Pleasure and the River of Pain. With Iambulus he discovered the Fortunate Isles, where there were men with elastic bones, bifurcated tongues; men who never married, who worshipped the sun, whose life was an uninterrupted delight, and who, when overtaken by age, lay on a

a Justice, je

f ancient kings, who, to the astonishment of the tourist, were found to be none other than the gods whom the universe

and white hair; in Sarmatia another that ate only on alternate days. Agatharcides took him to Libya, and there introduced him to the Psyllians, in whose bodies was a poison deadly to serpents, and who, to test the fidelity of their wives, placed their children in the presence of snakes; if the snakes fled they knew their wives were pure. Callias t

ical eyes; the Albanians danced with elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the Psyllians, luring the serpents to death; the column of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the