He was hurried by his friends into a place of safety; but the Greeks seized the head of the Jewish Synagogue--a fellow named Sosthenes--and administered to him a sound beating underneath my very tribunal.’ ‘Did you not interfere?’ asked Seneca. ‘Not I,’ said Gallio. ‘On the contrary, I nearly died with laughing. What did it matter to a Roman and a philosopher like me whether a rabble of idle Greeks, most of them the scum of the Forum, beat any number of Jews black and blue? It is what we shall have to do to the whole race before long. But, somehow, the face of that Paulus haunted me. They tell me that he was educated at Tarsus, and he was evidently a man of culture. I wanted to get at him, and have a talk with him. I heard that he had been lodging in a squalid lane of the city with a Jewish tent-maker named Aquila, who was driven from Rome by the futile edict of Claudius. But my lictor either could not or would not find out the obscure haunt where he hid himself. The Christians were chary of information, and perhaps, after all, it was as well not to demean myself by talking to a ringleader of a sect whom all men detest for their enormities. If report says true, the old Bacchanalians, whose gang was broken up two hundred years ago, were nothing to them.’[6] ‘I have heard their name,’ said Seneca. ‘Our slaves probably know a good deal more about the matter than we do, if one took the trouble to ask them. But unless they stir up a riot at Rome I shall not trouble the Emperor by mentioning them.’ At this point of the conversation a slave announced that Seneca’s other brother, the knight Marcus Annæus Mela, and his son Lucan, were waiting in the atrium. ‘Admit them,’ said Seneca. ‘Ah, brother, and you, my Lucan, perhaps it would have been a better thing for us all if we had never left our sunny Cordova.’ ‘I don’t know that,’ said Mela. ‘I prefer to be at Rome, a senator in rank, though I choose the station of a knight. To be procurator of the imperial demesnes is more lucrative, as well as more interesting, than looking after our father’s estates in Spain.’ ‘What does the poet say?’ asked Gallio, turning to the young Spaniard, a splendid youth of seventeen, whose earlier poems had already been received with unbounded applause, and whose dark eyes glowed with the light of genius and passion. ‘Is he content to stand only second as a poet--if second--to Silius Italicus, and Cæsius Bassus, and young Persius?’ ‘Well,’ said Lucan, ‘perhaps a man might equal Silius without any superhuman merit. Persius, like myself, is still young, but I would give up any skill of mine for his delightful character. And, as for Rome, if to be a constant guest at Nero’s table and to hear him read by the hour his own bad poetry be a thing worth living for, then I am better off at Rome than at Cordova.’ ‘His poetry is not so very bad,’ said Seneca. ‘Oh! it is magnificent,’ answered Lucan, and, with mock rapture, he repeated some of Nero’s lines:--