So his followers went on their way through the _Forum Romanum_, which was still crowded with people, while Quintus turned northwards across the _Circus Flaminius_[261] and the Field of Mars. He soon found himself in the heart of that city of marble, which Caesar Augustus had created here as if by magic. A sombre blue overarched the labyrinth of pillars and domes, of friezes and statues, of groves and glades, where by day such motley crowds were busy. No light but the pale glimmer of the stars--whose mist-veiled brightness gave warning of the autumn rains--fell on the chaos of ill-defined forms; the moon had not yet risen. Utter solitude, utter silence prevailed. The listener could almost fancy he heard the rush of the river Tiber past the piers of the Aelian Bridge[262]--or was it only the plash of water in one of the many aqueducts[263] which, at that time, were so splendid a feature of the city?--A mysterious dreamy whisper! Possessed by the sense of this stilly solitude, Quintus Claudius went on till nearly on the shore of the river. Under the avenues of trees it was blackly dark, and the air came up chill and damp from the stream; Quintus shivered slightly. Then he turned off in the direction of the _Via Lata_--the Broad Way, now the Corso. He did not know what mysterious influence had driven him out into the darkness and silence. He had felt as though he must fly from the vast mass of Rome, from its numberless market-places, its proud temples and basilicas--and now he was seized with homesickness for the familiar, beloved and hated hive of two million human souls. He shook himself. All that was most dissatisfied and contradictory in his nature rose clearly before his conscience. It was exactly in this way, that he had worked through all the systems of philosophy in turn--now flying from what at first he had eagerly run after, and now craving for what he had but just cast from him; one day an enthusiastic disciple of Epicurus, and the next a follower of the Stoics. But in neither of these views of the world could he find rest and refreshment for his truth-seeking soul. Zeno’s contempt for all the joys of life seemed artificial to his ardent and poetic fancy, while the method and practice of Epicurus, ingeniously wreathing the mouth of the pit with roses to cover the depths below, stirred in him an irresistible impulse to sound those depths. That old Sphinx we call Life offered him a fresh riddle at every step, while forever denying all possibility of answering them. Thus, by degrees, he had wandered into that moral _Via Lata_--that broad way along which almost every educated Roman of that day walked, for better or for worse; that path of sceptical indifference, which made short work of every metaphysical belief, and lived so literally from day to day. Only a few men, like Titus Claudius the Flamen, clung to the old Latin religion and fulfilled its precepts in their highest sense, and