The men stood a moment listening to an orator who, with well-oiled locks and classically arranged toga, was addressing a small group within a portico. He was just saying: "Hear then the words of the divine Plato, 'When a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful body, and the two are cast into the same mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him that has an eye to contemplate the vision.' Truly the soul is made fair by the fairness of the body. Thought glows when the eye sparkles. Heroism is bred of conscious strength of muscle. Love burns within the arms of beauty, and with the kisses scented with the sweet breath of health. Think you that the gods would dwell within the statues if the sculptors did not shape the marble and ivory to exquisite proportions? "Behold, then, the stupidity of these Jews whose foul nests we are destroying. They read their Rolls, but they gain no wisdom. They pray, yet remain impious. It is because they know not the first of maxims, namely, that the body is the matrix of the mind." "The fool!" was Dion's comment. "There are better declaimers in any Greek village. And"--more to himself than to his comrade, as a band of Jews, among them even some renegade priests, stripped naked, ran by them on their way to the racing stadium--"yet see, there are bigger fools!" When the two men passed into the gymnasium proper, the crowd on the benches raised the cry of "Dion! Dion!" until the crossbeam shook down its dust of applause. The Captain gracefully acknowledged the compliment by taking from his brow the chaplet, now well withered, and flinging it from him into the crowd with the exclamation: "I will win it again before I wear it." The magnanimous challenge brought the champion another ovation. The chief gymnasiarch approached, and read from his tablets the names of the day's victors in the various contests that had already taken place. He bade Dion select an antagonist from the list. "I will throw the discus," said the Captain. "Then your competitor will be Yusef, the Lebanon giant," read the gymnasiarch. He shouted: "Hear ye! Yusef of Damascus is challenged by Dion of Philippi." Divesting himself of his garment the Greek now stood naked among his compeers. "Adonis has descended," shouted one, in a tone that might have been taken for either admiration or contempt. An alipta came and rubbed Dion's arms and back with oil mingled with dust. "Better rub him against the Jew. He'll get both grease and dirt at a touch," sneered some one. Dion turned, and, fronting the group whence the insult came, scanned the faces one by one; but there was no response to his mute challenge. As he moved away one ventured to say, loud enough to be heard by a few about him: "The Jewish renegade is protected by special order of the King, or, by the club of Herakles! I would grind his face with my fists."