The streets were strewn thick with yellow sand, powdered with gold dust, and the whole route was lined by the populace, carrying torches and strewing flowers in the path of God. Precisely the same thing may be seen to-day following the same route and at the same time of the year. The procession of the Corpus Domini is still a popular function even in modern Rome, though its termination is no longer the occasion for temporal blessings such as Antonine’s liberality provided. Herodian mentions this liberality, and condemns it as a sort of diabolical plot for the extermination of the citizens. He says that when the festival was over, Antonine used to mount on towers especially constructed for the purpose, and distribute to the crowd vases of gold and silver, clothes and stuffs of all sorts, fat oxen and other animals, clean and unclean, except pigs, which were forbidden to him by his Phoenician (not Jewish) custom. Presumably the distribution was by tickets, exchangeable for these gifts, of which he says each was at liberty to take what he could seize. In the scramble, many citizens perished either by crushing one another, or by throwing themselves, in their eagerness, on the lances of the soldiers. The consequence was that the festival became a misfortune to many families. But surely to make Antonine responsible for the greediness of the crowd is as absurd as to record the fiction that he smothered people with flowers, or took luncheon in the circus when he was interested in the games, and then evince such harmless amusements as proofs of cruelty. As we recorded in the last chapter, it was certainly not long before Antonine discovered that he had made a vital mistake in adopting his cousin. We are led to infer that the boys had not seen much of one another for some time previously, as Mamaea had kept them apart, fearing her son’s contamination. Now that Alexander was actually in the palace and in daily contact with the Emperor, incompatibility of temper was the natural result, though in several places we are informed that Antonine loved his cousin at least up to 1st January, which interesting fact may be doubted on psychological as well as on the historical grounds already recorded. His second mistake had been in marrying his grandmother’s elderly friend Annia Faustina.