Carinus drew the Phrygian down beside him and laid his head in her lap. Singing and dancing were going on around him, and Aevius, 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. "Alas, something oppresses and disturbs me. I don't know what it is," whined Carinus. Instantly two or three slaves were at his side, straightening his cushions, arranging his hair, loosening his garments. "Oh, it oppresses and disturbs me still." "Perhaps Aevius's iambics trouble you," said Marcius, the Imperator's barber. "Perhaps so. Stop, Aevius." The poet bowed with an humble look, though secretly bursting with rage. The barber had interrupted his finest verses. "What is it that disturbs me still?" groaned Carinus wrathfully. "Guess! Must I think instead of you? Something irritates, something vexes me! I should like to be angry." "I have guessed it," said the barber. "These few hairs of your beard which disfigure your glorious face and insolently tickle your majestic nose and lips are annoying you. O Carinus, have them removed! Your face is so feminine in its beauty, and would be fairer still were it not injured by these ugly signs of manhood!" "You may be right, Marcius," replied the youth, and allowed the hairs to be plucked out, which operation was performed by the barber with such skill that, at its close, the Caesar appointed him prefect. At the same moment a noise was heard outside the door. Several recognized the voice of old Mesembrius, who was trying to force his way into the imperial apartments. Galga, the gigantic Thracian doorkeeper, held the old man back, and told him to come the next day. Carinus was asleep. "This is the tenth time I have come here!" shouted the old man. "Once you said he was sleeping, again he was eating, the third time he was bathing, and the fourth he was not at leisure. But I _will_ speak to him." It cost Galga a hard struggle before he could force the aged Senator out of the atrium, and then it needed two or three slaves to push him through the door. Carinus was much pleased with Galga. "Since you know how to guard my door so well, you deserve to be made Chancellor of Rome." "And I? Do I deserve nothing, my lord?" asked Aevius in alarm. "To you, Aevius, I will have a temple erected, in which every poet shall lay his verses upon your altar." "I thank you, O Augustus, for the temple and the verses of beginners; but my Tusculum?" "Surely you know on what condition I promised it." "If by the power of my eloquence, the honey of my tongue, and the magic of my poetry, I induced that earthly goddess, Glyceria, to render you happy by her favor. Did I not bring her to you?"